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.)

I guess ole’ PM just caught up with what everyone else has been doing for ages.

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.

Ironically yet another technical feature that Fable was going to have at one point. Well, something similar.

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.

You disagree with me? That’s a turn up for the books.

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.

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.

/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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

…and if I hadn’t skipped the MGS cutscenes I might have gone quite mad.

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.