Can we talk about cut-scenes for a sec?

Cut-scenes have several problems from a game mechanics perspective, not the least of which is that while one is going on you aren’t actually playing a game (and don’t say Quick Time Events are a solution for that problem either) but I get that many games are story focused and that there is often big blocks of story that you need to feed the player that they aren’t going to have any input on. So while I say I don’t like them in general that doesn’t mean I hate every instance of them. I think they are often not only the only tool that can be used in a situation but a fantastic or the best tool for a situation even.

Putting aside their necessity that still leaves the problem of how players interact with a cut-scene (and I still don’t mean QTE, so drop it). Namely can a player pause the cut-scene? Now it might seem like a little thing to some but in reality it is not. The reason it is not is because if we are to accept that this cut-scene was necessary then it must be important and if it is important then it matters that the player be able to see it and if they can’t do things like pause there is no reason to think they won’t get interrupted and miss something. So either you stopped the gameplay for something that you don’t think was important or you didn’t consider the player’s circumstances when you wanted to give them important information.

I mean if I am watching a movie I can start or stop it as I please, how can we let a game not surmount the level interactivity of a movie?

I don’t think I have to argue hard about being able to pause cut-scenes, or even about the related issue of being able to skip them (you should totally be able to skip cut-scenes, yet another reason to not do QTE). People realize this and while I do still come across games that don’t let the player do this it isn’t the norm the way it used to be.

It still happens enough that I am scared to pause for fear it will skip the cut-scene without me meaning to though. And when that happens you are screwed, what if there was something important you missed, or something cool? There is nothing to do but to go on youtube and try and find the clip you just skipped over because they didn’t understand how to make a user interface that is actually usable.

But why? Why do you have to go outside the game to watch that cut-scene again? It is on that disk, just run it again. This is what bothers me so much about games, that all to often they take narrative control away from players in such a way that makes it harder to understand what is going on. I missed something so I want to go back 5 minutes and watch that little movie again, but I can’t. I was a away for a while and can’t remember what my characters were up to, but the game won’t tell me.

All you have to do is include a journal feature that catalogs what the player/characters have done. Or if you really want to act with the players best interest at heart why not put in a chaptering system where the players can replay chapters of your game after they have beaten a chapter. How often have you wanted to replay a specific part of a game but didn’t want to have to start all over again to get to that part?

It isn’t so much a problem in Far Cry 3 as they made the story unbearable but if they didn’t then why wouldn’t I be able to replay interesting missions (if they had any)?

This isn’t a matter of generating new content for players but a matter of letting them play the content you have already given them in the manner they please. Start, stop, go back, and rewatch or even rewind. I know a lot of games want to be movies, so why not adopt even the limited amount of interaction they take as a standard?