If that's your definition of good story then, interestingly, you are almost alone in thinking PS:T had poor story compared to books. It would seem that the logical response is not "PS:T has crap story, like all computer games", but "I couldn't get into PS:T's story".

 

 

I don't bash PS:T anymore; those days are gone. I wish there were games like it now.

Can some of this actually be transplanted successfully to a game? I mean, cutscenes consistently fail to impress me in the sense you mention. In AvP2 (granted, old game, average cutscenes), the most tense moments aren't cutscenes, but those moments where you suspect there's something behind your back, but you have to keep advancing. Ocean House, Bloodlines, similar thing. It may have something to do with cutscenes going off at the worst possible moment (high tension) and disrupting gameplay, taking control away from the player and thus breaking immersion, so perhaps it's just a thing of bad implementation. STALKER got this right, I think - of course, in that game, cutscenes add *nothing* to the game, but anyway.

 

Movies are not books, and it stands to reason that the techniques used to affect the reader/viewer emotionally are different. Games are not movies, so actually how good are traditional cinematographical resources in this medium?

 

There are a lot of games out there with quite memorable cutscenes. My favourite example is the Thief series, although I do have a feeling everyone would not agree with me. On the other hand, those are not in- game cutscenes so let's not talk about them in this context.

 

I think my best example of how games can learn from movies is the "cinematic" conversation in NWN 2 and also in ME. For the scene when you wake up in the burrow in MotB there are lots of different options for camera angles and lighting, all which would would give adifferent impression of the scene.

 

But of course there are still purely technical limitations which restrics the possibilities of in- game cutscenes and "cinematic style" conversations. One of the major problems is engines which are bad at scaling. If what the OP envisioned is to become reality, then you must have an engine which could both display a close- up of a face or even a small bug and then switch to regular zoomed- out camera without any problems. The issue here is that games tend to stick to one scale - some game engines render vast landscapes very slowly but have a great capability for detail in smaller environments, and some have the opposite characteristics. It would be awesome with a engine that could show a face so detailed you could distinguish every straw of hair in the moustache in the foreground, and a full moving army in the background. Okay, that was a ridiculous example, but you get the point.

Yeah, but that's equally as true for a great deal of (good) books and movies; it's a story-telling technique. I rather think it's a nonsensical qualification to distinguish between 'story' and 'backstory' for Planescape: Torment, much like it would be for, say, any mystery novel.

 

The thing is that backstory is easier to control than front-story (for lack of a better word). You don't have to deal with the question of interactivity; it's set in stone.

 

Take Bioshock. Almost everything that's good about Bioshock is backstory. The front-story consists almost entirely of this guy running around killing crazies, because that's what the game engine can support.

 

Yeah, that's definitely a point, and I think it's what so many games fail to control properly.