When cutscenes started appearing in games, they looked like this:
Just immediate information. No fancy animation, no direction, no voice. Things sure have changed since then: cutscenes, which suffer from fewer constraints than real-time game play, are often used as a good occasion to show off the technical and artistic talent behind the game. Well used, cutscenes can be a powerful narration tool in complement of the gameplay proper.
- Final Fantasy VII, 1997, Playstation
- A current cutscene. More narration-oriented than a gameplay element.
Yet cutscenes are not movies in their own right: their purpose is to serve the game. As such, they must respect a certain number of principles.
Subtitles
All cutscenes must have subtitles.
Many game designers assume that all players play in an optimal audio environment, which is a big misconception. Most players cannot benefit from a full audio experience. They can be disturbed, they may have to play with no sound on or with low volume, or play in a noisy environment. On top of that, the sound resolution of game voices is not always very high, and the recording quality of localized versions is often worse than the original - that is, if the voices are translated. For all of these reasons, one shouldn’t assume that the player can understand what a character says on screen without subtitles. In fact, it is probably more important to display subtitles than to have the cutscenes dubbed.
There is some resistance from certain game developers to use subtitles on the basis that they eat up space on the screen, and that no one enjoys their movies with subtitles, which is another widespread assumption. None of these objections is particularly valid, and one shouldn’t think that better sound technology will decrease the need for subtitles, because the reasons why gamers can’t necessarily enjoy all of their sounds to the fullest are mostly not technical.
- Zelda: the wind waker, 2003, Game Cube
- Notice the use of colour to make the name of the item stand out.
Displaying subtitles is not as simple as just printing on the screen the transcription of each dialogue line. The dialogue must be split in as many chunks of subtitle as possible. In the case of an actually dubbed cutscene, the subtitles should be synchronized with the flow of words, and, like in the movies, be limited to a couple of lines rather than appear in big blocks. If no voices are being used, this constraint is lifted. Games can use different colors to make important items stand out in the text flow.
Cutscenes must be skippable
It should be possible to skip all cutscenes with the press of a button. One reason is that a player is likely to go through one given part of the game many times, and if the wow-effect of the scene greatly diminishes the second time, it can be highly frustrating the 10th time. Some games let the player skip the scene if they detect the player has already seen it. That’s not good enough. The player could have turned off their machine or lost their game, and they shouldn’t have to watch a cutscene if they don’t want to. Some other games let the player skip pre-rendered cutscenes, but not the real-time 3D ones. The reason is that various entities (characters, background...) could move during the scene and the game doesn’t want to show them repositioned without giving the player a convincing explanation. But fading effects work usually well in such contexts. There is no good reason to prevent the player from skipping scenes they don’t want to watch.
Having missed a cutscenes shouldn’t be blocking
There are ten thousand reasons why a player could be distracted during their game. In most games, cutscenes cannot be paused (the pause button usually causes the game to skip the scene, and in some games, scenes cannot be paused OR skipped), which means that if anything outside of the game happens, the player is likely to miss the scene.
Cutscenes cause the plot to evolve and provide informations on what to do next. The game maker should provide a solution for the player who missed a scene and wonders what happened or what to do next, the latter being a more crucial question than the former.
There are several solutions to address this:
the game could keep a log of all dialogues.
there could be an option stating the current "mission" (i.e. short-term objectives) in clear terms.
it could also be possible to see the cutscenes again, from within the game (i.e. the movie theater in Final Fantasy X when the player can buy the right to see such or such scene) or without (i.e. in Resident Evil 4, where it is possible to see all unlocked cutscenes from the main menu).
Going further with cutscenes
Originally, there were close to no cutscene in a game. Then appeared the intro and outtro, and slowly, cutscenes started rythming our games. With the arrival CD-Roms and the sudden increased capacity of game medias began a real cutscene invasion, as some games accumulated them to the expense of interactive gameplay. For those reasons, their use seemed to decline afterwards. Besides, because players are less and less impressed with pre-rendered scenes, scenes are increasingly rendered in real time with the game engine.
Cutscenes have one limitation: they are not interactive. During the scene, the player is supposed to sit back and enjoy. But players, as opposed to spectators, want to play, not just watch.
To improve the use of cutscenes, and to increase the commitment of players during cutscenes, game makers have explored several possibilities:
"quick time events" during cutscenes. At some point, the player must quickly press a button or else... there is no way to tell when a scene begins what will happen and if the player will be solliscited. This is a way to keep the player on their toes.
shorter, transition cutscenes: a hybrid between the usual character animation and a full-length cutscene, these short (3-5s) custom animations that are triggered with specific conditions have the advantage of traditionnal cutscenes (narrative, impressive) without the drawbacks. Often used to illustrate special attacks.
Focus on direction rather than on technique and FX. Increasingly, cutscenes benefit from real movie direction talent, and not just from computer power and a larger polygon budget. While players are less dazzled by technique, they will still be impressed by a well-storyboarded, well-directed scene.