115376-in-game-cinematics-feedback

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Doubt this is cereal... But all the LOPP quests in Whitevale... especially the wedding. Reason Lopps Rule. Also they need an animation for the quest where you kill the moles in Malgrave was it... for no reason.


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Hey, you've got a tag! I wasn't going to respond until then. Not sure why not, trolls don't ask about cinematics, usually. I like the cinematics I've seen (they were all very well done). There are, however, very few of them. In addition, they almost seem to occur at random. Such as, I'll be questing in Algoroc, I will play through the entire Gallow storyline (the lynchpin of the zone), get to the Eldan digsite (with its initial robot epicness), then, suddenly, the cutscene will show up during the augmentation break. That's kind of a random time for a cinematic. More short ones once you get to towns or some such would be nice, things to show "you're at a new quest hub". I actually liked the one entering Blighthaven, when you get Mr. Narrator giving you his awesomesauce speech over a short zone cinematic. More of those would be nice.


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I'm not far enough along in the story to answer #1-3 with any accuracy (although I am still very fond of the cinematic where Artemis Zin fails to capture the Elder Cube). But I have enough experience with cinematics in other multi-player games to have a very strong opinion about #4. Whatever else you do, if you put cinematics in repeatable group-only content, you need to follow two rules or the screaming matches will be epic. (1) Keep them short. 15 seconds is almost certainly too long. 10 seconds may actually be pushing it. And (2) do not even allow opt-out unless everyone in the instance has seen the cinematic. (If you don't want to add a separate tracking bit for that, tie it to whatever is the first achievement after the cinematic.) In City of Heroes' "Incarnate" raids, there was one cut scene per raid. Most of them were mercifully short. People who were repeating this content every day got really tired of those cinematics ... but they weren't bloodthirsty about it. If anything, they became pop-culture jokes within the community, mocking something about each one. If memory serves, they eventually made some of them them auto-skip (or manually skippable? I forget) if everybody had seen them. But nobody got angry at first-timers who hadn't seen it yet, so everybody got to see it at least once without getting punished for it. By contrast, Defiance has skippable cut-scenes in all of its original repeatable instances. Even if you haven't seen the cut-scenes, people are so bored with them that if you're new to the game and haven't seen them, you will still be kicked off of must pick-up group teams if the cut-scene plays and they figure out you're the one who didn't press escape. The anger of people who waited a long time to get into an instance only to be kicked after the first cut-scene actually managed to exceed the anger of the bored instance-grinders who really couldn't stand to see that cut-scene even one more time. It was (and is) a major source of toxic behavior. So, yeah, let me say it again: as short as possible, and each one not able to be skipped if there's anybody who hasn't seen it. Spare yourself and the community from a lot of rage.


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