Goals and Storytelling

[Adrianis]

I know, hazarding a quess, i think those developers they make the cutscenes unskippable to fool the player into making the games seem longer than it is? hide the fact they are too lazy to develop more than 10 levels. games these days do seem to be getting shorter. and you cant tell me multiplayer takess up that much room on a PC dvd-9 or blu ray.

i mean, my own ip, if i ever get anyone to look at it, is very story based, and im going to run the cutscene skip system i prescribed, so i cant see why these developers insists on making us sit through three hours opf angry americans.. again... trying to hide how scandalously short the actual playable part of the game is strikes me as the only logical answer.

I think the reason they make cutscenes unskippable is because they believe that the player will not have the intended experience with the game, if they do not watch and engage with the cutscene.

Problem is, a lot of people hate cutscenes, and for good reason - you lose control of your characters actions. If you have to watch a cutscene, even once, and you don't want to, then you are not going to engage with it anyway, making the whole reason to make it unskippable pointless.

In my opinion the best way around this is to change the plot so it does not require a traditional cutscene in order to show that part of the plot.

But, if you have to have an expositional scene like that for your story, why not have a scene that is set up like a cutscene, but does not take control away from the player - that's more like how Bioshock or Half Life have done it, as well as Amnesia (flashbacks?), to great effect. Particularly for first-person games, it makes for a far more immersive experience if the events are happening to you, rather than your character.

Events/conversations happen around you but you still feel engaged with the game because it is still happening in a 'gameplay' scenario to you, where you still have, even limited, interaction with the world. If the player can at least move and look where they like, you can make it unskippable because its a seamless in-game event, and simultaneously lessen the chance that they will disengage with the narrative due to losing control of their character