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Speaking to Kikizo, Lionhead boss Peter Molyneux said that learning how to skip the cut-scenes in Zelda: Twilight Princess was a relief.
“The only thing I’ll say is, I do it, and I know a lot of other people who do it,” he said when asked if he had research on how many people skip cut-scenes.
“And when in Twilight Princess I discovered that skip button, I breathed a sigh of relief. What I did was – and I think this is what most people do – they become their own little editor, their finger is just hovering over that button, to skip on that.”
Molyneux went on to say that cut-scene skipping shouldn’t be ignored, and should be brought into games as part of play.
“Why not incorporate skipping into the gameplay? So you can skip a cut-scene by just walking away and ignoring someone, or using an expression to tell them to shut up, or even using just the A button to skip to the end – you know, I just want to get to the point, man,” he said.
“And I think a lot of this is because – and I include myself with this especially – I don’t think we are particularly good at writing dramatic dialogue.”
There’s tons more through there. Knock yourself out.
Viewing 29 responses
Blerk said:
I can’t quite figure out why people would want to skip the cut-scenes in any game unless they’ve already seen them once. I mean… how are you supposed to figure out what to do if you skip over the story? Would you fast-forward through the non-action bits of a movie? Or the slow/quiet bits of a song? Or skip straight to the end of your book to avoid all that tedious story-telling and just get straight to the point?
Picking up a story-based game and then skipping the story is completely missing the point of the experience. Although to be honest, the Twilight Princess story was entirely skippable. Because it was rubbish.
wz said:
Hey, that would be a cool way to determine your character, whether you’re the nervous type to skip all cutscenes, or patiently listening to it all.
Psychotext said:
I skip cutscenes quite regularly in games. Story should through through the gameplay, not through in game videos. I don’t mind them, but they need to be short and well done.
…and if I hadn’t skipped the MGS cutscenes I might have gone quite mad.
Blerk said:
Well, yes – it should be done through the gameplay. But if it isn’t, whatareyougonnado? Aside from ignore huge chunks of the world, you Philistine!
Psychotext said:
I either play other games or I skip the rambling shite.
Blerk said:
You see, I see this as part of the problem. Hardly anybody savours their games or fully enjoys the game worlds any more. It’s the whole “got to finish this as quickly as possible so I can move onto the next thing, fuck the story stuff it doesn’t matter anyway” attention deficit disorder thing.
Overblown non-interactive content is half of the problem, but goldfish-style gamers are the other half. One half is fixable, I’m not so sure about the other half.
Tiger Walts said:
I have subtitles up and will skip to the next piece of dialogue when I’ve read it. But I’ll usually do the skipping at a point that doesn’t make the conversation jarring.
I get the performance, the exposition and at a rate that allows me to progress a little faster. Quite simply, some video-game writers give their characters too much dialogue.
Blerk said:
I’d certainly agree with that.
Psychotext said:
Blerk: I fully savour games, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to sacrifice my enjoyment of a game on the altar of poorly directed cutscenes.
Blerk said:
How can you possibly not sacrifice your enjoyment by skipping huge chunks of the story? Including (in all likelihood) the reasoning behind what you’re doing and the instructions for where you should be going next?
Psychotext said:
Because games aren’t all story? The good ones let you know what you’re going to be doing / why outside of cutscenes anyway and if they aren’t good I wouldn’t be playing them anyway.
You’re making it sound like games are entirely made up of cutscenes (which I appreciate, some of them virtually are) but there’s no point if there isn’t a compelling game to go with the story.
To be honest, this is one of the reasons I’m holding off working my way through Eternal Sonata – Because I’ve heard nothing but bad things about the cutscenes.
Blerk said:
Well if you don’t think story is important then I guess you aren’t missing out. But I do wonder why people who don’t care about the story even bother to play story-based games.
I guess this comes back to the whole Resi 4 “The Mercenaries” thing. Most people who played it thought it was awesome, I thought it was crap. “It’s like full-on action Resi 4 without all the story bollocks!”, they said. “Yes,”, I replied, “and that’s precisely the problem.”
No_PUDding said:
MGS4 anyone?
/guilty of watching them
Anyway, I think he’s clever, these thigns that developers tend to miss, like us skipping cutscenes or running into walls or jumping too early… All these mistakes or human nature should be adopted into gameplay.
Blerk said:
Of course, the whole reason for Peter bringing this up is because that’s precisely how Fable 2 does it. Which he neglects to mention. The cheeky scamp.
Psychotext said:
Blerk: I don’t think you really understand. If the game is shit, or has shit cutscenes I’m unlikely to be playing it in the first place. Most of the games I’m willing to skip cutscenes on either work perfectly without them or don’t rely on having any sort of story anyway (or the story is so batshit mental I don’t care).
Whizzo said:
I rather liked how a lot of background and story information was presented to the player in GTA IV as conversations while you’re driving to locations with people. You’re playing the game and getting a lot of the narrative simultaneously.
No_PUDding said:
Why would you lie?
GTAIV is just awful.
And Blerk, what will be special is when it’s executed properly. As in not this generation. Fable 2 won’t do it, becuase as much as there can be gestures and stuff, it won’t work. We will need speech synthesizers based from variable scripts.
Fable 3 maybe.
Psychotext said:
GTA IV rocks, you shut your whore mouth!
BraveArse said:
I’ve had to stop playing MGS4 because, like Blerk, I can’t bring myself to skip a cutscene the first time round. Trouble is the frequency of them in MGS4 ( as I recall we had a “discussion” about this elsewhere
) is utterly tortuous.
Twilight Princess was a great game – but the storyline was really poor imo.
For me the best story driven game of the last year or so is still Mass Effect – and even that needed a skip cut-scene button purely because sometimes you had to go through a whole cutscene AND conversation before having another crack at the boss that just killed you. How that can still happen in a modern game is beyond me.
No_PUDding said:
@PT
You disagree with me? That’s a turn up for the books.
DrDamn said:
It would be nice if games like MGS4 had the option to see a summary version of each cut scene.
Psychotext said:
No_PUDding: Hey, it’s not my fault you’re broken on a basic level.
No_PUDding said:
Don’t worry I am not toally jaded. It’s just not like previous GTA’s as in awesome.
It lacked the freedom of previous ones, and the series became a bit arrogant if you know what I mean.
It took two step forwards and three (or four or five) steps back.
I still play it purely for Euphoria. But without the story there isn’t half as much to do.
Tiger Walts said:
“We will need speech synthesizers based from variable scripts.”
Ironically yet another technical feature that Fable was going to have at one point. Well, something similar.
No_PUDding said:
Wow… This guy promised that?
No wonder the first one got such a cold reception. Glad he’s been more safe with this one.
By the way, did anyoen else see him credited in the LBP manual in the special thanks section.
Guildford, the home of Game Development.
Blerk said:
Some of the Media Molecule team are ex-Lionhead.
No_PUDding said:
I know that. I was one of the few who played Ragdoll Kung Fu when they first [not quite] left.
Prox said:
What a hypocrite – the cutscenes in Black & White where not skippable and that was a real pain.
I guess ole’ PM just caught up with what everyone else has been doing for ages.
Hero of Canton said:
Blerk’s right on this one, as per.
Incidentally, I played Fable 2 recently, and there are about ‘eight to ten minutes’ (Molyneux’s words) of non-interactive cutscenes. The rest of the time you can move around in them or pull expressions, that sort of thing. And a lof of the other story stuff is in-game. There’s one bit where you’re joined by this big burly female character who yabbers on at you, and you can run away while she’s talking if you don’t want to listen to her.
Essentially what he’s saying is ‘my game has all this stuff and is therefore better than yours ner ner ne ner ner’.
(Lovely bloke, though.)