Author:
Jaime Wolf
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Date:
9/7/2019 11:10:50 AM
Subject:
RE: Sometimes, when I've just gotten out of bed
I'd guess the static in-game cutscene viewed from a camera shot perspective with cuts where two characters converse while control is taken away from the player, stemmed naturally from the prerendered CG cutscenes of previous years, and the hand drawn animated sequences before that. The first FPS I remember doing away with this completely was Half Life which swapped camera shot cutscenes with scripted sequences that had no perspective breaks. Before that, System Shock contained no control interruptions outside of the opening and closing movies (And a very short movie in the middle that wasn't present in the original floppy version), with the only dialog coming from audio logs that would play in real time and one-way radio communication with both your only human contact and the game's antagonist, dialog between characters was not necessary as every other character in the game universe was dead by the time the player takes control of the main character. There are also the classic shooty games that just didn't even bother with mid-game cutscenes at all, the obvious ones being Wolf3d/Doom, followed by the big three Build games and the first Quake.
Outside of the FPS genre I remember games doing real time dialog as far back as Brataccas, which came out in 1986.
It's arguable whether which technique is better or worse, to me it's more immersive to not take control away from the player but that almost always means that you're not gonna be able to skip them, hindering any subsequent replays with information dumps about things you already know about. It would also depend on the type of game, I won't have a problem with being interrupted in an RPG, where the idea is that the player is the puppetmaster for a main character with a previously established setting and backstory. Though in an action game (And specifically an FPS) where the player *is* the character, I would ideally want zero interruptions by way of the least amount of forced story exposition as possible. One of the games I remember that fit the bill in that regard for me was Thief: All of your in-game universe backstory either came from the initial mission briefs or by eavesdropping on two characters as they conversed, if you were interested in a bit of backstory you would stick around and listen, and if not you could simply move on.
