The Death of Cinematics
Gamasutra reports from the Austin Games Conference on the remarks of Editorial Story Design Director for Ubisoft, Alexis Nolent. Nolent reports that he hears two things consistently from many hardcore gamers: that they hate storyline being thrust upon them in games and will do anything to skip cutscenes and exposition, and secondly that the plot and writing always suck anyway.
Nolent, smart man that he is, believes the two issues to be closely related. He predicts the death of the cutscene and the rise of the game writer.
His advice to writers was to think of their job as generating lots of good ideas. They can't afford to hang on to any one idea, especially if that idea gets in the way of gameplay or other constraints of the game. A good game writer needs to be humble. When one of their ideas gets dropped or changed, they need to have a thick skin and move on, coming up with another good idea.Nolent says the ideal working situation for great narrative design is to have the writer "embedded" in the development team full-time. A writer in the trenches can keep an eye on story, defending it when necessary. With everyone creating together, problems can be solved immediately.
This is particularly relevant based on the comments I saw in the last "game writing is important" post I made, which I believe was yesterday. Someone mentioned that cutscenes were on the rise, which I believe is patently untrue. I think we can look forward to a golden age of art and execution in this generation of games, where tedium and clumsiness are viciously attacked.
The Death of Cinematics [Gamasutra]
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