Cutscenes

[Raven]

in the first kotor, the cutscenes were average, most of them using the game engine. will there be more better cutscenes in kotor2?

[Blarghagh]

I don't think there should be a heavy emphasis on cutscenes. I want the dev. team to concentrate on character development and story before taking to creating custscenes which offer no interaction.

[kefka]

I'd prefer less cutscenes. Most of them take control away from the player and I don't like that - e.g. the Selkath arresting you on Manaan, or Jolee outside the temple. Pre-rendered cutscenes are fine because those are mostly transition shots - flying towards planets, descending into the shadowlands, etc. If cutscenes allow you to choose what happens next that would be ok. Kotor rarely did, tho.

[Quiquag]

Cutscenes are fine if you can skip over them. There is nothing worse then dying and having to watch some stupid cutscene two or three times.

[Darion]

yeah, all cutscenes should be able to be skipped, unless the really important ones, and those should have great graphics

[kefka]

If cutscenes can be skipped what's the point of having them? It would be better if they didn't exist. At least give the player full control of what happens next. Kotor's cutscenes are there to make a choice for you. Whatever you reply the result is the same.

[Opus131]

If cutscenes can be skipped what's the point of having them? 

 

Make them skippable after the first time...

[Darion]

i think opus131 is right, but there should be story ctscenes with better graphics that the ones at KOTOR I

[Quiquag]

If cutscenes can be skipped what's the point of having them?

[Enoch]

The main concern I think is time and disk space. When the cutscenes are made in-engine, they can be done relatively quickly and in a pretty compressed space. When you go outside the game engine, it gets much larger and more difficult.

 

That means that you'll probably have to live with the somewhat grainy cutscene graphics. Unless you'd rather get the game 6 months later and spend a lot more time staring at load screens.

[Opus131]

The main concern I think is time and disk space. When the cutscenes are made in-engine, they can be done relatively quickly and in a pretty compressed space. When you go outside the game engine, it gets much larger and more difficult.

 

That means that you'll probably have to live with the somewhat grainy cutscene graphics. Unless you'd rather get the game 6 months later and spend a lot more time staring at load screens.

Ditto.

 

Unless you are Blizzard and can afford an extremely talented core team devoted on cinemtatics alone, there isn't a real pratical way to make cinematics interesting.

 

Lucas Arts used to make real film tibits for their games (does anybody remember Jedi Knight ?!?), if only they could retain a portion of the glory they had, they could have helped Obsidian make this a better game...

[EnderAndrew]

Mark Hamil did cut-scene acting for games, not to mention he does alot of voice-acting. Could you see him doing a Jedi video-game?

 

As far as cut scenes go, I'm content with in-engine scenes most of the time.

 

Nobody does cut-scenes like Square-Enix. I don't know why other companies bother sometime.

[SilverSun]

"Mark Hamil did cut-scene acting for games, not to mention he does alot of voice-acting. Could you see him doing a Jedi video-game?"

 

Live action? Might not work,however he does a good job with his voice. Might not be a bad thing to see him lend his voice to a SW game.

[EnderAndrew]

Mark Hamil did acting for cut-scenes in the Wing Commander series, which was a sci-fi fighter game. He also looks completely different now.

 

Still, I don't think we'll see many video cut-scenes anymore.

[Quiquag]

Didn't Mark do the voice for Luke in Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy?

[SilverSun]

"Didn't Mark do the voice for Luke in Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy? "

 

No,check the back of the book for the actor's name,someone else did his voice. Was close but wasn't exactly the same.

 

As for the live action cut scenes,pry won't see too many more of them. It's cheaper and you can do more with CG.

[jaberwocki]

hi end ff style cut scene waste to much space on a disk. I think they should just tell you what happens in the cut scene with text and use the saved room for more content.

[EnderAndrew]

I agree.

 

I was happy with KOTOR. The cut-scenes involved space-ships, things not normally rendered in the engine. Actors had their scenes rendered in engine. If you have a decent 3d engine, use it and same the time/resources wasted on CGI (unless you've got a great story and Square-Enix caliber CGI).

[Dead Skin Mask]

Cut-scenes only exsist to take your mind off the fact the graphics are average and your playing a crappy turn based Square Enix game. <_<

Personally I really enjoyed the Bioware approach to the whole cut-scene mess which was short and to the point allowing the player to get right back into the action. If I want to watch a fantasy movie I will bust out LOTR as far as games go I want to actually play through the cool action not sit and watch. :angry:

 

 

Cheers!

[SilverSun]

"If I want to watch a fantasy movie I will bust out LOTR as far as games go I want to actually play through the cool action not sit and watch. "

 

Depends on the game,not always a bad thing.

 

But the way Bio did the scenes in Knights was decent.

[Quiquag]

I agree, bioware did a great job with the cut scenes. They flowed with the game, and they didn't feel like cut scenes since they were done in engine. Also they didn't take away from the game engine graphics by showing you this beautiful cutscene then going back to the game with lower level graphics.

[Craftsman]

In the sencond Jedi knight game they had real people!

[Judge Hades]

Cutscenes are like exposition in literatre or a flashback in a movie. It might enrich the story but it doesn't aid in gameplay. Cutscenes overall should be kept to a minimem.

[Akari]

Part of the problem is the need for a consistent meaning for the word 'cutscene'.

 

In reading this thread, you're all using the same word, 'cutscene', but seem to be applying them to different things.

 

Internally, we call the movies (like the ships taking off and landing in KotOR1. Shots of Taris getting blown up, etc) 'rendered movies'. Even if they do include shots that look like they were made with the engine (like I think was done on the bridge of the Leviathan when Malak ordered Taris destroyed), they're still very time consuming to create on our end. And of course take up a sizeable amount of space, since they're basically compressed video. Anyway, for clarification, we call those 'rendered movies' internally. Blizzard makes some awesome rendered movies for their games. They also only have 3 - 4 full length ones per game.

 

'Cutscenes', as we call them internally, are pretty much every single dialog in the game. They're all created the same way, via the Dialog Editor we're working with. Some involve more moving around, action happening, etc., while others are just a simple exchange of words with the camera switching to focus on different speakers depending on who's speaking. About the only difference is how many scripts we wrap into the dialog when making it.

 

I guess one more way to describe cutscenes, in the perspective of KotOR1, would be that cutscenes are all of the in-engine sequences that took place without your character in them or where you have no control over anything (not even control over replies). I don't think that happened all -that- often in KotoR1. I have no idea how often it will be happening in KotOR2.

 

I can say with confidence that we are pushing the Dialog Engine support a lot harder than it was pushed in KotOR1. We've added tons of additional scripting functions to pull off things that could not be done before. But cutscenes will always be rendered in the same graphics as the rest of the game.

 

I noticed many mentioned the desire to be able to skip cutscenes. Unfortunately, that's a very difficult thing to support without breaking the game. Many tracking variables are set during cutscenes, many objects are made or destroyed, many doors opened or closed, or even characters or creatures created by a script that needs to be called from somewhere in the cutscene. If you just skipped over the cutscenes, all the needed scripts wouldn't get executed and any number of things would break as a result.

 

Skipping rendered movies on the other hand is harmless enough, because no scripts are being called while the movies are being played.

 

I hope I've been able to clarify a couple things.

 

-Akari

[Gorth]

If you just skipped over the cutscenes, all the needed scripts wouldn't get executed and any number of things would break as a result.

How about the ability to "jump to the end" to each individual script ?

 

It may have been my imagination, but in some cutscenes you could "fastforward" it by clicking a couple of times, by others you couldn't. It was as if you had to wait for the voice over to finish, before the script could progress. One from top of my head is the introductions to the duel arena, where some lines of text could be skipped, others you had to wait for the guy finishing his introduction lines...

 

If you could "speed up" things a bit. it wouldn't need to skip it entirely. Especially nice if reloading before long scenes or even when playing through the game for the umpteenth time.