Get Your Cinematics out of my Video Games! Get your Video Games out of my Cinematics!

Sep 15 2009

Today in class we spent a few minutes talking about the appearance of long, developed cinematics into video games. Though the majority of the class seemed not to like the idea of weaving video sequences into video games, i think that the idea is great. A video game is more often than not a story in itself, i believe that the introduction of movie sequences will only help further that story more. Cinematics are also useful because they allow the player to see portions of the game which the gamer can't play them self. In games like "The Darkness," cinematics replace the loading screens, this helps you get to know the characters much more and also gives you something to pay attention to while the next portion of the game is loading. Getting to know the characters more intimately also, in my opinion, makes the game much more fun to play because it draws you that much more into the plot of the game as well as into the character that you are playing as or socialize with in the game.

The video game company Blizzard is notorious for making incredible cinematics. These cinematics look nothing like the game but plunge the viewer into the fantasy worlds that they have created for their games. The cinematics for games like Diablo and the World of Warcraft simply look pretty. Though they don't even come into play in the game, they set up a portion of the background story. Cinematics are just another good way of getting the player more involved in the game that they are playing. 

About The Darkness

While I absolutely LOVED The Darkness as a video-game (and I sincerely hope they make a sequel,) you have to admit that the first cut-scene where they're sitting in the car is... kind of monotonous and drawn-out. It's practically like a "loading-a-shotgun" simulator (to quote Yahtzee of The Escapist/Zero Punctuation). That's the only one I have qualms with though, the rest of the cut-scenes are pretty spectacular in that game.

Cutscenes and technical constraint

elevn15fourteen5 wrote:
In games like "The Darkness," cinematics replace the loading screens, this helps you get to know the characters much more and also gives you something to pay attention to while the next portion of the game is loading.

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with you about the aesthetic value of cut scenes outweighing their disruptive role, but I just wanted to point out that this time saving technique you mention is only possible with hardware powerful enough to play video while loading game data at the same time. Used to be, we'd have to wait forever for the cutscenes to load.

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <h2> <h3> <h4> <table> <tr> <td> <th> <img>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • You may quote other posts using [quote] tags.

More information about formatting options