

Lacking a better term, Uncharted 2 is one of the top examples of the setpiece action-adventure genre.
UNCHARTED 2 CUTSCENES FREE
While Uncharted has never been free of cutscenes, the best moments are all part of the gameplay. When all the awe and spectacle is limited to these moments, it can make the actual action disappointing. A lot of other ‘cinematic’ games grind to constant halts, forcing the player to drop their controller while a cutscene plays out. Early attempts such as Dragon’s Lair simply showed scenes while requiring sudden button presses to keep the scene going. Many end up leaning closer to one of these mediums than the other. When I start wondering if anything else is on TV, you should have exited a long time ago.Attempts to capture the magic of cinema in video game form have been around since almost the beginning. After the important parts - Serah saying "yes" and revealing her plans to tell her sister that she has been cursed - we suffer through another two minutes of Snow and Serah riding around in some hover vehicle thing for no reason. The scene could have been exponentially more engaging without all that needless dead time. Snow doesn't even reach Serah until about the 1:30 mark. It opens with a whopping 40 seconds of nothing but scenery and random characters, the type of establishing shot that a competent director would handle in five seconds at most. Look at the FFXIII scene embedded above, where protagonist Snow proposes to his girlfriend, Serah. They tend to violate an important Hollywood rule: Start a scene as late as possible and end it as early as possible, leaving the rest to viewers' imaginations. If you think these scenes drag on and on, you're not alone. Like its predecessors, Japanese role-playing game Final Fantasy XIII is notoriously gratuitous with cut-scenes, throwing its gorgeous, prerendered cinematics at your eyeballs every few minutes no matter how much you might object. Here are five cinematic rules that every cut-scene designer should staple to the back of his or her brain. Mantras like “less is more” could do wonders for the way cut-scenes work today. But cut-scene designers would do well to learn from the past century of film and its storytelling practices. Gamemakers abide by their own rules, packing their cinematics with wanton expositions and explosions.

This is because many cut-scenes don't follow the time-tested rules of cinema that have made Hollywood so successful. While they are almost always packed with gorgeous eye caramel, games' cut-scenes usually drop the ball when it comes to effective storytelling.

Some exceptions exist, but these control-free cinematic sequences often prove uncomfortable if not downright embarrassing to watch. Powerful narratives like Red Dead Redemption and Uncharted 2 have helped show the world that games can be just as meaningful as any other form of art.īut there's one element of interactive storytelling that designers just can't seem to get right: the cut-scene. Videogame storytelling has made some astounding leaps over the past few years.
