Depends on their quality and how much they tie in to the game. If it's something like Metal Gear Solid or Mass Effect, sure. You'd be missing out on a significant part of the game to not watch them. If it's something like a David Cage or Telltale game, they make up the majority of the game.
Introduction cutscenes that play at the launch of a game are generally pointless and add little to the experience, but I'll watch them once. It became popular to include these ever since the CD-ROM became the prevalent medium for game distribution and almost every game released in the early days of CDs had one. They seemed to be included more for the purposes of marketing than for the game itself - it wasn't unusual to see stills of FMV or clips of it included in trailers, with one of the back of the box selling points being 'Stunning FMV only possible with the new technology of CD-ROM!'.
If it's ingame cutscenes for a game that I couldn't give a rat's arse about the story and just play for the gameplay, then it usually doesn't bother me that they're there - I've played all the Diablo games for example, but I really couldn't tell you the story of any of them other than it's about a bunch of demons. Just let me skip through it quickly and I'll be happy.
I also really dislike when cutscenes just aren't integrated into the game well, like they're treated differently from the rest of the game, or it's apparent a different team produced them. Final Fantasy X for example had this constantly changing art style whenever it used FMV, changing from character designs with a more Caucasian to a more Asian appearance. Persona 5 switches from using high quality in game assets to relatively poorly animated anime cutscenes.
Another issue I have is when developers use FMV and encode it at a low resolution or bitrate. Most developers who use FMV are guilty of this. I don't really understand it - they use FMV to show things that would take a lot of power to render, yet they encode it at a bitrate that exhibits glaringly obvious compression artifacts. Personally I much prefer cutscenes to use realtime rendering using the ingame engine. The only time I think FMV really is ideal is if the whole game is based around it, something like Late Shift.
In terms of games that I most like the cutscenes in, it'd go to aforementioned games like Metal Gear Solid and Mass Effect, and various adventure games such as the David Cage and Telltale series. Generally the cutscenes are integral to the plot and gameplay, and feel part of the cohesive whole of the game. Transitions are seamless, often with choices available to the player during their runtime (not counting quicktime events, which are always horrible). The Last of Us also had some great cutscenes, well directed and produced. While some of these games did use FMV it was minimal, encoded at a high enough bitrate to minimise compression artifacts, and the transition was seamless. They still used the ingame engine assets and only used the FMV to minimise or mask loading, rather than to switch to some completely different clashing visual style.
20 Feb 2018, 6:49 pm
