Pretty much every reviewer that I still watch and still like has reviewed some franchise or specific game that is either praised for pushing the medium forward for being cinematic, or is panned in spite of it. For MatthewMatosis it was BioShock: Infinite, for TheGamingBritShow it was The Order: 1886, for Joseph Anderson it was pretty much every Naughty Dog game from last generation onward. VashTheShellBullet has yet to talk about any cinematic games yet, and he's one of the very few that hasn't. Perils of Pokey did a video on cinematic games in general rather than one specific title or franchise.
Of course, none of these games were praised for any specific achievements by any of these reviewers. MatthewMatosis specifically states that BioShock Infinite may not be a bad game but definitely undeserving of its praise. TheGamingBritShow has talked about God Of War 4 and has low expectations for it based on The Order: 1886 but that isn't out yet. Joseph Anderson states that the Uncharted games mostly have their merits but that he mostly says those merits lie with the story and characters, which is entirely separate from the gaming medium as a whole, if we're talking about things exclusive to gaming. And other cinematic games will likely come in the future.
But since everybody I watch has made their opinions known, I would like to state my view on it as well, just because this blog is suffering a bit of a dearth in content and upload rate and I would like to get something new out. Well, new for me anyway.
So, now is the time for me to start beating a dead horse.
First, let's talk about why Cinematic games exist because I think a lot of AAA game developers are pursuing cinematic experiences for reasons that might be missing the point. A lot of game developers that have made cinematic experiences are doing so as a reaction to the popularity of certain titles.
While David Cage has made so far three cinematic titles and is either famous or infamous because of them, depending on how much you like any of those titles, the first of those, Indigo Prophecy, was not really all that popular when it first released and is even less so now, while the third, Beyond: Two Souls, might have been influenced by the popularity of the previous title, Heavy Rain, not all developers at every studio started out making cinematic experiences.
Before Uncharted, Naughty Dog made Jak & Daxter and, for as story-focused as the series was in comparison to Crash Bandicoot, the only cinematic aspects to it were the cutscenes. Everything else was real-time gameplay.
Before The Order: 1886, Ready At Dawn Studios made several PSP titles that, if not innovative, were at least games as far as anyone could be concerned. Not all of them were good but they at least didn't have the stain that The Order does now.
The earliest successful cinematic game that I can recall was probably Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Before I go any further, I want to specify what I mean by cinematic games, as there are games that came before that that had cinematic aspects, so I want to specify what a game needs to have to qualify as a cinematic game rather than just a game with cinematic qualities.
- Quick-Time Events. These can be optional in terms of player input and they do not always have to have prompts but they do still exist in a cinematic game. Examples of this include the Uncharted games and Ryse: Son of Rome.
- Graphics over Performance: a lot of cinematic titles will make a game perform worse than it could in order to push as GPU-punishing visuals as possible. This is not necessarily about being visually appealing or having an artistic vision that may require a lower framerate for certain reasons, more so this is about making a game run at 30 fps because, according to pretty much everyone, this is as close to running at 24 fps as possible without making the game pretty much unplayable. The Order: 1886 was infamous for this but several other titles have done this as well.
- Linearity over dynamics. Specifically what this refers to is limiting player choice to tell a story the way that the developer wants to tell it. This isn't an issue of having a story play out one way and having a fail state if you don't abide by it. Rather, this is an issue of limiting interactivity in favor of making what is essentially a movie that you can walk around in. Again, The Order was infamous for this, as are David Cage games but, if you want other games that do this as well, look at certain walking simulators, particularly Dear Esther. Dear Esther had a limited amount of dynamics in the beginning with an open area that you could explore in but it quickly funneled you down a linear path and the initial statements that were randomized quickly started being given in a very specific order. Again, not so much about how the story plays out as it is about the amount of choice a player is allowed to make within the game world.
- Walking Sections: Bearing in mind pretty much every game these days gives you the ability to walk instead of run, because analog controls have that level of diversity, there are some games that will force you into walk and talk sections in order to drive home a story point. These are usually a substitute for cutscenes so people who don't like cutscenes don't have to complain but, in some genres, these are actually worse. In games that are pretty much 100% story focused, this isn't really all that much of an issue but, for games where pace would have to be more dynamic and dependent on the player, walking sections can kill enjoyment. Even games that are nothing but walking, like The Stanley Parable, might have benefited from a run button.
- Realistic Grit over an art style: This one isn't so much a rule as it is a trend where every time we get a cinematic game, almost always, it features visuals, models, and textures that are intended to be as realistic as possible. Granted, many games that are not cinematic can still feature realistic visuals, but the only cinematic game I can think of that has any stylistic choices made would have to be Asura's Wrath.
Bearing in mind, many games that I would not consider to be cinematic can still have some of these qualities. However, to my knowledge, the only genre that seems to not have any cinematic experiences is the Versus Fighting Genre, and I don't think that's so much because of a lack of desire as it is about lack of ability.
Team Ninja attempted to make Dead or Alive 5 more cinematic by having cliff-edge cutscenes that deal different types of damage based on certain inputs but these are usually optional and don't really change the nature of the game that much. DOA5 also has a more realistic visual style than any of the previous games in the series but most of the characters still feature designs that would be very reminiscent of your typical anime. I mean seriously, I love Ayane but I dare you to name one real-life person who looks the way she does without any artificial body modifications. Yeah, I understand her body might be relatively realistic to achieve, depending on certain supplements and workout routines that a woman might use, and sure, red eyes are rare but can still exist. But, who exactly has Lavender hair without hair dye? Just saying.
Outside of that stuff, Fighting Games generally don't have cinematic qualities because the genre has no room for them. You could argue that the Character Action Genre might as well, but DmC: DMC and most Platinum Games titles prove that this genre isn't entirely untouchable. Going back to Team Ninja, Ninja Gaiden 3 was also very cinematic in a lot of places.
So now that I've defined what cinematic games are, I would like to ask and answer why do developers make cinematic games. Well, barring David Cage, who again, has been making cinematic games since before they were popular, and studios like Ready at Dawn and the developers of God of War 4, who, for all I know, may be responding to the success of The Last of Us, I think many developers push the cinematic angle for the awards they can achieve from doing so.
BioShock: Infinite came to critical acclaim for supposedly "Pushing the medium forward with mature story telling" when in reality it was an average FPS that followed every cinematic and FPS trend set by Call of Duty and Battle Field.
The Last of Us got a lot of that same praise, even though it has a lot of game design decisions that would not have made it past the play-testing phase in previous console generations.
Heavy Rain also received critical acclaim due to its narrative but that was from reviewers who, at the time, were exclusively part of companies that would only allow enough time for a single playthrough to get a general overview of the game rather than an in-depth analysis and, in reality, everything it was praised for only works if you don't think about it too hard.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves got 30 perfect scores and used that to market the game on its box by the time my brother and I got a hold of our copy and that's just too many reviews from too many places to actually be able to background check all of them reliably.
Of course, there are games that I do not consider cinematic that are just as popular for reasons that are just as terrible. One such game is The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Not really a cinematic title as I've described it but its game design has no depth anywhere and its sword combat, for as much hype as Nintendo put behind it initially, was the worst or at least the most lacking in depth in a series that has okay combat at best.
But Skyward Sword suffers from game design decisions that are a result of pushing hardware too hard. And by that I mean Nintendo pushed selling the hardware too hard, not that Skyward Sword was actually hardware intensive. Cinematic games have a much larger issue, one that can not be as easily combated.
Skyward Sword was made to push the Wii Motion Plus add-on for the Wii but, in theory, Skyward Sword could work on any other motion control device if it were programmed the right way. Cinematic games are pushed by developers as a means of conveying stories on par with movies, which is stupid, and Publishers push it for easy money, which is a half-truth.
In terms of the stories on par with Movies, if we're talking about just the average quality of any given game script versus the average quality of any given movie script, they've been relatively even with each other ever since the PS1. And, before anyone jumps on me, that's not saying that all PS1 games had amazing narratives, most really didn't. What I am saying is that the average quality of a movie script is a lot lower than a lot of these developers seem to think they are.
Anyone remember Michael Bay? You know the one, the Movie Director who makes a lot of Licensed Action Movies that are filled with fanservice, bad writing, explosions, and dick jokes? Well, Michael Bay is considered to be the worst of these filmmakers, however, the truth is actually different. He's not a good script writer by any means but he's not the worst, he's just average. A lot of people think he's a lot lower on the Totem Pole than he actually is because, yes, he's an average filmmaker, but he's a famous average filmmaker.
There's something I want to bring up called Sturgeon's Law. For those of you who don't watch Gigguk or read a lot of Science Fiction Comics, allow me to explain. Back in the 1980's, a lot of comic book fans were complaining that there wasn't a lot of good science fiction in comic books, or that 90% of science fiction comics are crap. Science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon then replied "90% of everything is crap." He was referring to the fact that pretty much the vast majority of any given entertainment medium is crap with only a small percentage of any of it being good relative to the whole. This is Sturgeon's Law.
A lot of game designers who want to make cinematic games are under the impression that film is this amazing medium where everything is well told, well presented, and well written when, in reality, outside of a few companies like Disney, the vast majority of Film Writers and Directors have 1-3 solid movies under their belts and the rest are garbage.
George Lucas? The Original Star Wars Trilogy. M. Night Shyamalan (Sorry if I spelled that wrong)? The 6th Sense. Dream Works? Shrek 1 and 2. Quentin Tarantino? The Kill Bill movies.
Rarely do we actually get a string of movies that are all good. Pretty much the only Studio I can think of that does have pretty much everything under their belt good is Studio Ghibli and they're primarily an Anime Film company. Even the very highly esteemed Pixar still made Toy Story 3 and the Cars movies. They can't all be winners, unless you're Hayao Miyazaki, apparently.
That's really my problem with these developers. Sure, cinematic games are terrible for the most part but that's true of anything. Sure they may want to make movies and might be in the wrong industry, but that might not be entirely their fault, since film making is a very hard industry to get into if you have no previous pedigree.
No, my major issue with these people is that they assume movies have all the best stories when in reality, the quality of an average movie script is no better than the script of an average Call of Duty campaign. But where the Call of Duty games still have a multi-player mode that can be enjoyed until you get sick of the mechanics, and other games with average scripts can still fall back on their gameplay and features as well, an average movie has nothing to fall back on if it doesn't have good enough marketing to get to the box office.
That's why Michael Bay does so many licensed movies. He has to appeal to the demographic that will see those movies based on nostalgia because, if he doesn't, he won't make money any more. Sure, when you make enough money that you're set for life no matter what you do, you can do whatever you want, like George Lucas or M. Night Shyamalan. But Michael Bay, and other average directors with no really notable works under their belts, need something else if they're going to make money and survive.
And that brings me to the publishers of these Cinematic experiences. Publishers like to push and fund cinematic experiences because it's easy money. Or so they'd like to think. In reality, a game that has high graphical fidelity and a linear script is easier to market than a game with good gameplay and lower-tier graphics that runs really well.
For developers of Niche Titles, like the Developers of the Yakuza series or the Way of the Samurai series, they can afford to not have strong marketing because a small enough amount of money was spent on them that they don't have to sell as much in order to produce more. That's why Way of the Samurai is currently on its 4th installment even though the series was at the height of its popularity on the PS2, and it's why Yakuza Zero is coming out later this year. These titles have a small but devoted fanbase that keep them alive long enough to get to the next entry and, even if Way of the Samurai doesn't fit that bill anymore, there are still plenty of other titles that do, so it doesn't destroy the point.
For other AAA game publishers though, whether due to need or simply desire, their goal is to make as much money as possible and for that, they need something that will go far above their bottom line and can be easily marketed. Cinematic Experiences have that covered, for the most part.
A game that is visually appealing, or at least graphically intensive, is easier to market than a game that doesn't achieve that standard. In fact, just for the sake of the argument, let's say you're a parent looking for a game to give their child or an average consumer, who wants to pick something up without doing any research. Bearing in mind, the actual ESRB rating is not a factor here, since parents will still buy their children M rated games when the ESRB would tell them they probably shouldn't.
With all of that set, if I presented you two games and you had no prior knowledge of either of them, which do you think would look more appealing: Devil May Cry or Uncharted 4? Of course, if you had no prior knowledge of either of these titles, you would pick Uncharted 4 because it's visually much more pleasing.
And of course, some will argue it's an unfair comparison because Devil May Cry was a PS2 title and Uncharted 4 is a PS4 title two generations later but that's kind of the point. If Devil May Cry 1 or a game like it were made today for the PS4, with the qualities that it has now after releasing on the PS2, it would have to fallback hard on gameplay trailers to sell.
The upside to that? Devil May Cry is a PS2 title and thus much less expensive to create than a PS4 title. Though budgets for video games are hard to come across, in general, an average PS2 title will have a budget of around $6 million. Devil May Cry was early PS2 so drop that figure down to $2 million. An average PS4 title will cost around $25 million. And that's the problem that Publishers don't see.
Yes, cinematic and graphically-intensive games are easy to market but developing them takes up so much money that Uncharted 4 would have to sell a hell of a lot more than Devil May Cry 1 to make a profit. And of course, it did make a profit because it's Uncharted, Sony, and Naughty Dog, but that's not the point.
"What is your point then?"
Well, my point is that, if more AAA developers and Publishers focused on making experiences that are less expensive to make, they wouldn't have to sell to basically the entire population of China and then some in order to pay their staff.
That's also why Indie Developers tend to be pretty well off even if they don't make it into the mainstream. A lot of Indie Developers either use mostly free software, have volunteers or friends helping with the game, a job to pay bills in the mean time, or some combination of the 3, so if an Indie Developer makes a game using these methods and sells 10k units across all platforms they're good. That's 10k dollars multiplied by the price of the game that they have in gross income.
When TheGamingBritShow commented on DMC4:SE that getting additional levels or bosses wouldn't have been a big deal on the PS2, he's right. He's right because back then, expansion packs and special editions were made for far lower prices than they are now, so getting a hold of extra stuff wasn't a big deal.
That covers today's rant. Next time, I'm going to be talking about Emulators and why I think they're the perfect solution to backward compatibility. See you next time.
BioShock: Infinite came to critical acclaim for supposedly "Pushing the medium forward with mature story telling" when in reality it was an average FPS that followed every cinematic and FPS trend set by Call of Duty and Battle Field.
The Last of Us got a lot of that same praise, even though it has a lot of game design decisions that would not have made it past the play-testing phase in previous console generations.
Heavy Rain also received critical acclaim due to its narrative but that was from reviewers who, at the time, were exclusively part of companies that would only allow enough time for a single playthrough to get a general overview of the game rather than an in-depth analysis and, in reality, everything it was praised for only works if you don't think about it too hard.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves got 30 perfect scores and used that to market the game on its box by the time my brother and I got a hold of our copy and that's just too many reviews from too many places to actually be able to background check all of them reliably.
Of course, there are games that I do not consider cinematic that are just as popular for reasons that are just as terrible. One such game is The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Not really a cinematic title as I've described it but its game design has no depth anywhere and its sword combat, for as much hype as Nintendo put behind it initially, was the worst or at least the most lacking in depth in a series that has okay combat at best.
But Skyward Sword suffers from game design decisions that are a result of pushing hardware too hard. And by that I mean Nintendo pushed selling the hardware too hard, not that Skyward Sword was actually hardware intensive. Cinematic games have a much larger issue, one that can not be as easily combated.
Skyward Sword was made to push the Wii Motion Plus add-on for the Wii but, in theory, Skyward Sword could work on any other motion control device if it were programmed the right way. Cinematic games are pushed by developers as a means of conveying stories on par with movies, which is stupid, and Publishers push it for easy money, which is a half-truth.
In terms of the stories on par with Movies, if we're talking about just the average quality of any given game script versus the average quality of any given movie script, they've been relatively even with each other ever since the PS1. And, before anyone jumps on me, that's not saying that all PS1 games had amazing narratives, most really didn't. What I am saying is that the average quality of a movie script is a lot lower than a lot of these developers seem to think they are.
Anyone remember Michael Bay? You know the one, the Movie Director who makes a lot of Licensed Action Movies that are filled with fanservice, bad writing, explosions, and dick jokes? Well, Michael Bay is considered to be the worst of these filmmakers, however, the truth is actually different. He's not a good script writer by any means but he's not the worst, he's just average. A lot of people think he's a lot lower on the Totem Pole than he actually is because, yes, he's an average filmmaker, but he's a famous average filmmaker.
There's something I want to bring up called Sturgeon's Law. For those of you who don't watch Gigguk or read a lot of Science Fiction Comics, allow me to explain. Back in the 1980's, a lot of comic book fans were complaining that there wasn't a lot of good science fiction in comic books, or that 90% of science fiction comics are crap. Science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon then replied "90% of everything is crap." He was referring to the fact that pretty much the vast majority of any given entertainment medium is crap with only a small percentage of any of it being good relative to the whole. This is Sturgeon's Law.
A lot of game designers who want to make cinematic games are under the impression that film is this amazing medium where everything is well told, well presented, and well written when, in reality, outside of a few companies like Disney, the vast majority of Film Writers and Directors have 1-3 solid movies under their belts and the rest are garbage.
George Lucas? The Original Star Wars Trilogy. M. Night Shyamalan (Sorry if I spelled that wrong)? The 6th Sense. Dream Works? Shrek 1 and 2. Quentin Tarantino? The Kill Bill movies.
Rarely do we actually get a string of movies that are all good. Pretty much the only Studio I can think of that does have pretty much everything under their belt good is Studio Ghibli and they're primarily an Anime Film company. Even the very highly esteemed Pixar still made Toy Story 3 and the Cars movies. They can't all be winners, unless you're Hayao Miyazaki, apparently.
That's really my problem with these developers. Sure, cinematic games are terrible for the most part but that's true of anything. Sure they may want to make movies and might be in the wrong industry, but that might not be entirely their fault, since film making is a very hard industry to get into if you have no previous pedigree.
No, my major issue with these people is that they assume movies have all the best stories when in reality, the quality of an average movie script is no better than the script of an average Call of Duty campaign. But where the Call of Duty games still have a multi-player mode that can be enjoyed until you get sick of the mechanics, and other games with average scripts can still fall back on their gameplay and features as well, an average movie has nothing to fall back on if it doesn't have good enough marketing to get to the box office.
That's why Michael Bay does so many licensed movies. He has to appeal to the demographic that will see those movies based on nostalgia because, if he doesn't, he won't make money any more. Sure, when you make enough money that you're set for life no matter what you do, you can do whatever you want, like George Lucas or M. Night Shyamalan. But Michael Bay, and other average directors with no really notable works under their belts, need something else if they're going to make money and survive.
And that brings me to the publishers of these Cinematic experiences. Publishers like to push and fund cinematic experiences because it's easy money. Or so they'd like to think. In reality, a game that has high graphical fidelity and a linear script is easier to market than a game with good gameplay and lower-tier graphics that runs really well.
For developers of Niche Titles, like the Developers of the Yakuza series or the Way of the Samurai series, they can afford to not have strong marketing because a small enough amount of money was spent on them that they don't have to sell as much in order to produce more. That's why Way of the Samurai is currently on its 4th installment even though the series was at the height of its popularity on the PS2, and it's why Yakuza Zero is coming out later this year. These titles have a small but devoted fanbase that keep them alive long enough to get to the next entry and, even if Way of the Samurai doesn't fit that bill anymore, there are still plenty of other titles that do, so it doesn't destroy the point.
For other AAA game publishers though, whether due to need or simply desire, their goal is to make as much money as possible and for that, they need something that will go far above their bottom line and can be easily marketed. Cinematic Experiences have that covered, for the most part.
A game that is visually appealing, or at least graphically intensive, is easier to market than a game that doesn't achieve that standard. In fact, just for the sake of the argument, let's say you're a parent looking for a game to give their child or an average consumer, who wants to pick something up without doing any research. Bearing in mind, the actual ESRB rating is not a factor here, since parents will still buy their children M rated games when the ESRB would tell them they probably shouldn't.
With all of that set, if I presented you two games and you had no prior knowledge of either of them, which do you think would look more appealing: Devil May Cry or Uncharted 4? Of course, if you had no prior knowledge of either of these titles, you would pick Uncharted 4 because it's visually much more pleasing.
And of course, some will argue it's an unfair comparison because Devil May Cry was a PS2 title and Uncharted 4 is a PS4 title two generations later but that's kind of the point. If Devil May Cry 1 or a game like it were made today for the PS4, with the qualities that it has now after releasing on the PS2, it would have to fallback hard on gameplay trailers to sell.
The upside to that? Devil May Cry is a PS2 title and thus much less expensive to create than a PS4 title. Though budgets for video games are hard to come across, in general, an average PS2 title will have a budget of around $6 million. Devil May Cry was early PS2 so drop that figure down to $2 million. An average PS4 title will cost around $25 million. And that's the problem that Publishers don't see.
Yes, cinematic and graphically-intensive games are easy to market but developing them takes up so much money that Uncharted 4 would have to sell a hell of a lot more than Devil May Cry 1 to make a profit. And of course, it did make a profit because it's Uncharted, Sony, and Naughty Dog, but that's not the point.
"What is your point then?"
Well, my point is that, if more AAA developers and Publishers focused on making experiences that are less expensive to make, they wouldn't have to sell to basically the entire population of China and then some in order to pay their staff.
That's also why Indie Developers tend to be pretty well off even if they don't make it into the mainstream. A lot of Indie Developers either use mostly free software, have volunteers or friends helping with the game, a job to pay bills in the mean time, or some combination of the 3, so if an Indie Developer makes a game using these methods and sells 10k units across all platforms they're good. That's 10k dollars multiplied by the price of the game that they have in gross income.
When TheGamingBritShow commented on DMC4:SE that getting additional levels or bosses wouldn't have been a big deal on the PS2, he's right. He's right because back then, expansion packs and special editions were made for far lower prices than they are now, so getting a hold of extra stuff wasn't a big deal.
That covers today's rant. Next time, I'm going to be talking about Emulators and why I think they're the perfect solution to backward compatibility. See you next time.
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