![]() In general, given an unlimited budget most game designers would probably prefer to have all of their cinematics pre-rendered or filmed, but given the cost of either approach for any remotely ambitious scene this is unlikely to be realistic. Animated cutscenes in particular come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, from fully-prerendered epic CGI pieces as seen in the Final Fantasy series to the Machinima real-time 3D cutscene, seen most spectacularly recently in Metal Gear Solid II, where the real-time cinematics are rapidly approaching and in places surpassing the quality of much pre-rendered CGI. Obviously, the medium most people would associate with the cutscene is the moving picture, whether in the form of film/video (as seen in Command and Conquer, most notably) or animation (whether 3D or 2D). While this orgy of redefinition may seem a little anal, with this definition we can look at all of the available media for the job, including some which may not immediately appear to be cutscene material at all. Perhaps the best definition of a cutscene is "any non-interactive storytelling or scene-setting element of a game". It is immediately obvious that we're casting our net a bit wide here - after all, we're now defining all storytelling within a game as a cutscene, even when (as in games like Half-Life) much of the storytelling is most definitely part of the gameplay. Hence, a better definition might be "a storytelling device in a game". However, there have been a number of cutscene techniques which do not fit this definition - some games, such as Max Payne, have used comics to tell their story, while games like the Baldur's Gate series have used pure audio and text to great effect. Of course, this is how most cutscenes - and certainly most dramatic and well-remembered cutscenes - appear. ![]() The most obvious definition of a cutscene would probably be "a film in a game". Firstly, however, we should probably decide exactly what we're talking about when we use the "c" word.
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