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Geek Culture / Live Action Cut-Scenes in games

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CapnBuzz
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Posted: 20th May 2010 21:26
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Popularized in the 90's, live-action cut scenes ("mini movies" shot with actors) were big for awhile on PC games. Nowadays -- with PC computing power and strong consoles -- the technology has allowed animation to do the cut-scene work and live-action cut scenes are few and far between. So, my question is this:

If they are done well, will you accept live-action cut scenes in a game... or not... and why?
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BearCDP
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Posted: 20th May 2010 21:35
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If they are done well, I'm totally down for it.

I loved the well-done campiness of Red Alert 2 & 3, and the new C&C4 seems like it will manage to execute them well without campiness.

However, having live actors of in game characters while simultaneously having a 3d model of that character can be really awkard and totally kill the experience. Imagine playing Metal Gear Solid, and all of a sudden for a cutscene the 3d environment goes away, and there's Kurt Russel or even some unknown actor as Snake. It would totally remove any sense of immersion.

It worked well for Wing Commander, Myst, and Red Alert because the characters were rarely in-game objects, or if they were it was from a point of view that would make it believable that they would not look the same (as with Tanya in Red Alert).

This doesn't necessarily apply for games in which individual characters are not important. You can get away with generic actors, like in a Call of Duty-style FPS, so long as you don't expect your characters to have easily identifiable faces outside of the cutscenes.

Check out this WIP flash game from the Global Game Jam!
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zeroSlave
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Posted: 20th May 2010 21:45 Edited at: 20th May 2010 21:47
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Well done or not, I still get a chuckle out of Tim Currey being "Premier Anatoly Cherdenko" in Red Alert 3. But then again, I enjoy the cut scenes between missions in all the C&C games.

As far as accepting cut scenes, I think it depends on the game. C&C did it relatively well, yet I would hate to see a live action cut scene in a game with a little more immersion. I think it would detract the player from the essence of the game. Plus, if I see an NPC running around with 2000 polygons making up the model, then I see the live actor that the model was based on, I would start thinking about the graphic limitations of the game, or why they didn't work harder to make him/her look more like the actual actor.

EDIT: Grrr... you called it, BearCDP!

My green thumb grew the tree my Trojan War horse was crafted from. With roses in our pockets we rally round the tombstones. Ashes to ashes, we all fall down.
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CapnBuzz
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Posted: 20th May 2010 21:58
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Thanks for your responses!

So from what I'm gathering from your posts... in your opinions live-action cut scenes might work best in an FPS game?
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FPSC AGENT F
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Posted: 20th May 2010 22:05
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Totally Agree with you CapoBuzz. The Need for Speed games had some great live action cutscenes

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zeroSlave
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Posted: 20th May 2010 22:51
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@ CapoBuzz: With C&C, the cut-scenes were up-close and personal. In a way, this can make the player feel closer to the individuals fighting for you; the individuals that you never see up close and personal when playing the actual game.

An FPS might be interesting. It just depends on how it's presented. Take The Daedalus Encounter for example, (I loved this game when I was younger) but then again, there was very little to the game other than Live Action cutscenes.

I would suggest to not put anything in the game that will be in the cutscenes, and vica versa.

Quote: "But when a cutscene drags me away from that world and forces me to watch, well, me, interacting with others, fighting in ways that I'm incapable of or doing things that my own controls won't allow, I'm taken out of that experience and made a spectator. And while it's nice to see that the characters look great, I couldn't care less -- I want to be put back into that environment."

-Don Reisinger

An interesting article.

My green thumb grew the tree my Trojan War horse was crafted from. With roses in our pockets we rally round the tombstones. Ashes to ashes, we all fall down.
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CapnBuzz
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Posted: 21st May 2010 23:35
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My interest in live-action cut scenes is because I'm a filmmaker making my way into game development and it just seems a natural extension to shoot scenes with actors for cut scenes. Also, my games come out of ideas I originally envisioned as movies...

... but I too play a lot of games and hate when the cut scenes take over the game. Games after all are made first to be played... not watched.

Thanks for your input everybody! It really helps me seeing things from others perspectives. If anyone else has ideas, I'd love to here them.
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JLMoondog
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Posted: 22nd May 2010 00:56
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Check out this post. First game listed used live actor cutscenes, and I thought they pulled it off really well.

I was a big mechwarrior junkie when I was a young-ling and they had some decent cutscenes with actors on 3d backdrops and vehicles. Another good game with some decent live actors was Omega Boost. The video compression was so bad that I actually thought it was animated at first. Quickly figured out after squinting my eyes that it was actors.


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Darth Kiwi
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Posted: 22nd May 2010 02:18
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From the comments on Command and Conquer, it seems that live action cutscenes work best if they show a world which is not normally available to the player during gameplay. If you enter a room in-game and then see the room in a live action cutscene, the two images of the room (one totally realistic, the other from within the game-aesthetic) will jar with each other.

So perhaps you could use fully-immersive gameplay to give the player narrative within the game world (ala Half-Life 2 - so the player would be completely immersed in the game world and it would be coherent from a narrative perspective) but also tell a parallel story, not immediately connected with the game world but still relevant to the story, in the cutscenes? So, for example, the main game could detail a soldier's attempt to fight his way through hostile territory, but the cutscenes could show news footage from the wider conflict, video diaries made by civilians and maybe even docu-dramas that were made years after the conflict which put forward a distorted view of what the soldier actually sees during gameplay.

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Asteric
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Posted: 22nd May 2010 05:18
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I actually enjoy live action cutscenes, just have more life. But i was blown away with the cutscenes in halo wars, if they were 3 hours long i would watch, no questions asked.

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TechLord
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Posted: 22nd May 2010 09:42
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I would accept a game using live-action as part of the action.

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Fallout
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Posted: 22nd May 2010 13:39
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Yes, but only if the actual game doesn't show the characters portrayed in the video. By that I mean, cut scenes for an FPS would be wrong. I dont want to see a real person, and then their polygon representation straight afterwards. For an RTS, or car, or space sim or anything where I never have to make a comparison between the real actor and his polygonal counterpart, then I say go for it.

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BearCDP
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Posted: 24th May 2010 11:10
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[quote]EDIT: Grrr... you called it, BearCDP! [center]

Haha, sorry about that. Great minds think alike

Check out this WIP flash game from the Global Game Jam!
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