Cutscene

Cutscenes are non-interactive sequences inserted into the action of a video game. Sometimes also called "cinematics", they are included in almost every modern game that has any kind of story or plot. Often they are overused, causing the game to feel more like watching than playing.

Cutscenes can take two forms. They can be produced in-engine, by moving the characters and viewpoint within the game itself. They can also be pre-rendered animations or even live-action videos triggered during certain events.

Pre-rendered cutscenes can contain any content desired, and can be as detailed as your animation studio (or casting budget, as in the Command and Conquer games) will allow. Their drawbacks are the amount of data required to store video files on the game disc, and a noticeable visual difference between the video and the game content. Also, if a character's appearance is subject to change, the cinematic cannot reflect this.

The word "cutscene" itself was possibly first coined by Ron Gilbert while making Maniac Mansion, wherein he defined cutscenes as short "scenes" that "cut" away from the action itself, to show what else was happening in the game world when the player wasn't around.

An in-engine cutscene is by definition a form of Machinima. It will most often have custom movements for the character models that don't occur in normal gameplay. In-engine cutscenes have several innate advantages:

  • The scenes will look exactly like the rest of the game.
  • The animation data required to render the scene will take less storage space than the equivalent in video, allowing playback to cover up Loads and Loads of Loading.
  • If a character's appearance can change, the changes will be reflected in the cutscenes.
  • They can include interactive elements, like the ability to move the camera or zoom in during the scene.

The main disadvantage to an in-engine cutscene is that you are limited to the capabilities of the game engine itself. However, game engine technology can now do in real time what once took pre-rendering. Detailed and realistic hand and facial animation, camera and lighting tricks, and special effects are all possible within even a relatively old console architecture like the Sony PS2. The difference used to be a much bigger deal in older games; just look at the difference between the models used in the introduction and gameplay sequences of Resident Evil 2 to get an idea.

During the era of "Full Motion Video", a number of games featured cutscenes which were not simply prerendered, but live-action, with (usually not very accomplished) actors playing the roles of the game characters. While this could make the cutscenes look far more like traditional film and television, it also inflated the size of the game: FMV-intense games would run to as many as ten discs for a comparatively short game. It looked as if the advent of DVD-ROM would solve this issue, but just as the DVD-ROM format emerged, FMV was almost totally abandoned in favor of in-engine and pre-rendered cutscenes.

The now-deceased format of "Interactive Movies" used FMV even for in-engine play, and as a result often felt like a near-continuous stream of cutscenes. In a powerful example of what happens when the technology gets ahead of itself, few players have much affection for the format now, making it unlikely that it will make a return in the near future, even though the technology could probably support it far better now.

Presumably, in the future of games, in-engine cutscenes will continue to be the norm. However, many recent games have claimed to do away with cutscenes altogether. Half-Life 2 has many sequences where characters talk to each other and advance the plot, but control of the character is almost never taken away; it's arguable whether the result, frequent impossible to skip sections where you're locked in a room with nothing to do with said control, is actually much of an improvement. Cutscene abuse king Metal Gear Solid added several interactive elements to its story scenes for its third installment.

Some definitions say "cutscene" refers specifically to in-engine segments, and "cinematic" refers to pre-rendered. However, in use they seem to be interchangeable.

Not to be confused with Deleted Scene (scenes cut from the final product), or Unskippable (a show about MSTing these cutscenes).

See also Exposition Break, Going Through the Motions, Gameplay and Story Segregation, Cutscene Power to the Max and Cutscene Incompetence. Contrast Press X to Not Die, which makes you think it's a normal cutscene at first.

Some games notable for their cutscenes:
  • Metal Gear Solid - Pioneered the use of the in-engine cutscene to create cinematic effects. The first game of the series has over three hours of them. The second has closer to seven, including one notorious cutscene which was, literally, an hour long. The ending of the fourth game...well, make sure you hit the bathroom first.
  • Jak and Daxter - The whole series has good ones. Check out Jak 3's commentary section for some really informative stuff about Machinima.
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has a main character with a highly variable appearance, yet the cutscenes work with whatever you put together.
  • The Legend of Zelda CDI Games contain the most [f'ing] epic Cutscenes ever.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword was billed by Nintendo as having over 100 minutes of cinematic cutscenes.
  • Karateka for the Apple IIe and Prince of Persia for several early platforms, both by Jordan Mechner. These really invented the in-engine cutscene as we know it. Since the technology was so limited, Mechner used the techniques of the silent movie era to add drama to his ahead-of-the-curve action games.
  • Bug Eyes 2: Starman to the Rescue (1985, BBC Micro/ZX Spectrum): its infamous "C5 to the rescue" cutscene might be the earliest "annoying and unskippable" example. Just the one scene (Starman walks on, is picked up by a magnet on a string and dropped into a Sinclair C5 which he then drives off in), but repeated so many times over the course of the game.
  • Blizzard Entertainment's Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo games are renowned for having, at the time of their release, very well-done pre-rendered animation. (The most recent games have truly cutting-edge rendering. Warcraft III has both kinds of cutscene.
    • And now, StarCraft II has amazing real-time in-engine cutscenes and even prettier pre-rendered cinematics.
  • BloodRayne, the first one, for some really bad examples of cutscenes.
  • The Final Fantasy series (from Final Fantasy 7 onward) is known for its extremely high-quality pre-rendered cutscenes. Both the earlier and the later games also make ingenious use of scripted events that take place within the battle screen, a form of in-engine cutscene.
  • Kingdom Hearts is famous for having as least as much cutscenes as the Final Fantasy series itself. Most of the story is told through them and in many cases they can't be rewatched, or, in the case of the first game, skipped. Most of the cutscenes worked on the game's engine and would include opened or unopened treasure chests, changes in the party's weapons (if Sora attached another keychain to his Keyblade, its appearance would also change in most of the cutscenes) and Sora's drive forms (Whenever he fought in a drive form, but didn't change back before the next cutscene, he would stay in his drive-form in this cutscene, leading to hackers misuse this fact to create cutscenes with Anti-Sora in them). Due to the large use of Disney humor in the games, using Kingdom Hearts cutscenes to create Internet parodies is extremely popular, especially on YouTube.
    • The first game was also quite notorious for having unskippable cutscenes, which made the fight against Ansem possessed Riku even worse, since he was That One Boss, and the cutscene you'd be watching before fighting him was very long.
  • Xenosaga has extremely long cutscenes. Some of its cutscene sequences are more than half an hour long. In terms of "LONGEST CUTSCENE EVER", this series is right next to, or maybe more than, Metal Gear Solid.
    • A preorder bonus for Xenosaga II allowed for watching and summarizing the first game as one complete cutscene. It last for FOUR HOURS.
    • The second disk of its predesessor Xenogears was essencially a single 20 HOUR cutscene broken up by very short periods of action, usually a single boss fight or a short dungeon.
  • Super Robot Wars is probably the biggest example of cutscenes ever. It's a strategy game where every single attack resulted in a minute to five minute cutscene showing the resulting battles. And they always worked, mostly because something was actually happening game-wise in the battles.
  • Homeworld used in-engine cutscenes that would take control away from the player, but not pause the game, leaving the enemy AI a few minutes with complete control of the battlefield. Ships are invincible during cutscenes, but can still be reduced to one unit of health and destroyed the instant the scene ends. For those reasons, it was helpful for a player to memorize cutscene triggers, and put their fleet into a defensive posture before triggering the cutscene.[1]
  • Super Smash Bros Brawl comes up to nearly two hours of cutscenes, which doesn't seem like a lot, but it does when you're actually going through the Subspace Emissary (Adventure Mode).
  • One of the biggest complaints about Eternal Sonata was its large amount of cutscenes, several of which were also very long. It gets worse if you count the Chopin history lessons.
  • The phrase "Interactive Movie" is more associated with Wing Commander III, mentioned below, but the original game from 1990 was so labeled, with its animated cutscenes.
  • Ninja Gaiden was one of the earliest games to use cinematics to tell an elaborate story, as part of a way to motivate players to finish the level. In the era of Save the Princess, the relatively complex tale of Ryu's quest for vengeance, his inheritance of the Demon Statues, and his Unresolved Sexual Tension with Irene Lew was something altogether new and different.
  • Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers alternated between FMV and in-engine cutscenes, and the very long intro was unskippable for some reason.
  • Resident Evil Code: Veronica, having true 3D backgrounds, used more in engine cutscenes, but still used pre-rendered videos when that was not feasible. Resident Evil 4 and up used entirely realtime cutscenes, with many of them being unskippable and incorporating Press X to Not Die events.
  • The first two Silent Hill games mostly used realtime scenes, with a few CGI videos. All subsequent games were exclusively realtime.
  • Pokemon Black and White uses 3D cutscenes, as does Pokemon Heart Gold and Soul Silver. In a Game Cube Pokemon bonus disc, connect the Game Boy Advance and a copy of the English Ruby or Sapphire, and you will be rewarded with a cutscene of Jirachi appearing to you, the one who connected the Game Boy Advance in the first place.
Notable examples of games with full motion video cutscenes include:
  • Wing Commander III and IV featured Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell in its cinematics. One of the few examples of substantial FMV outside the Adventure genre.
  • Phantasmagoria, possibly the first Interactive Movie, mostly remembered for how well it exposed the limitations of the genre.
  • The X-Files, which featured the series' actors, probably had the highest production values in its cutscenes, but the use of FMV in-engine proved fatal to playability.
  • Gabriel Knight 2 is often considered the only Interactive Movie that wasn't a monumental failure.
  • Time Traveler, a rare example of the FMV shooter, originally an arcade game which was not only FMV, but 3D, using holograms (actually just an optical illusion using parabolic mirrors).
  • Dragon's Lair, Dragon's Lair II and Space Ace were three arcade titles featuring animation by Don Bluth. While not live action, they were pre-rendered interactive movies, made with traditional cel animation. Recently, these games were re-released as a box-set, playable on any movie DVD player.
  • The Journeyman Project Part 3: Legacy of Time combined rendered environments with live actors, resulting in one of the most playable examples of the FMV-intensive format. The game was also released on DVD, demonstrating the advantages that medium held. Possibly the last major FMV game.
    • Parts 1 and 2 had them as well....just in lower quality and less frequently
  • A Fork In The Road, in which save points were rare, so you had to wait through FMV scene after FMV scene until you could make any new decisions.
  • The 7th Guest, one of the first CD-ROM games, was so popular that CD-ROM drive sales spiked to an intensely high number due to people wanting to play it.
  • Command & Conquer had FMV mission briefings and prerendered cutscenes. The series swears by them to this day (as do other RTS that used to be made by Westwood).
    • Starting with Red Alert 2, they used cutscenes that appeared mid-mission (to show a new unit, etc.) In Generals, these in-mission cutscenes became intrusive by taking control of the camera, and preventing you from moving units or ordering them to defend your base from the one or two hostiles that are trashing your defenses and buildings.
  • Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II The fighting is a little lame, but when you compared to the Original trilogy (which had gems like the Force Kick) it gets better.
  • Warhammer 40,000: Final Liberation, a turn-based strategy, used extensive live-action cutscenes to show the results of many of it's battles. The combination of terrible ork costumes and hilarious over-acting by humans is the stuff of legends.
    • The Commissar was awesome though.
  • Enter the Matrix relied on a combination of FMV and in-engine cutscenes.
  • Starfleet Academy and Klingon Academy used FMV for mission briefings, ship-to-ship communications, and important outside-of-mission events. Particularly notable is the fact that the studios brought in the relevant actors from the Star Trek franchise to be in the scenes, including William Shatner, Christopher Plummer, and David Warner.
Games which have in some way avoided or used an alternative to cutscenes include:
  • Half-Life (and its sequels and spinoffs) is played from the first person perspective of the protagonist of each game (normally the physicist-turned-saviour-of-mankind Gordon Freeman). Cutscenes are replaced with unskippable sequences of being locked in a room while you watch something happen or listen to a conversation.
    • Episode 2 adds slightly to the formula. Although the majority of the game follows the same pattern as its predecessors, it introduces one traditional cinematic cutscene (the conversation with the G-man), and three sequences where Gordon is fully pinned in place and the game restricts the player's ability to even look away.
    • Both Episodes also come with a cinematic cutscene at the start recapping previous events (although this isn't really part of the game as such).
  • The Metroid Prime series has a few cutscenes (mostly introducing a boss or new area), however the majority of the story is revealed by using a piece of equipment called the scan visor to read various pieces of lore and logs.
  • Dark Souls is very similar to the Metroid Prime example. The game is notable for how unintrusive the game's story is. There are very few Cutscenes except at the beginning and end of the game, and occasionally at the start of boss battles and when a new arc of the game starts. Most of the story is told through item text and NPC dialogue.
  • BioShock (series) also has most of its story told through various logs and audio diaries which have been left lying around by the (now dead or insane) inhabitants of the game world. It's particularly notable in that, apart from the intro and ending, it contains only one cutscene, and the fact that it's the one point where control is taken away from you is actually part of the plot itself, if you count out every mention of the phrase "Would you kindly"
  • Gothic only has a few major cutscenes. All other exchanges use a clever camera that frequently switches being centered on speakers during their specific dialog and utilizes generic NPC body motion for emphasis.
  • Ys IV: Mask of the Sun has a really long unskippable dialogue prior to fighting Gruda, That One Boss.
  • Toward the end of its run, the now-defunct MMORPG City of Heroes had begun implementing cutscenes at key moments in certain missions. Interestingly, they were not pre-recorded video, but were dynamically rendered in the game at the time they were played -- and if the players were close enough to the event being shown, they were visible in the shot (and if they weren't, they could still make their battle-cries appear in the scene). The best example of this was the cutscene of Romulus gaining a Nictus symbiote that played when one got close enough to the end of the last mission in the Imperious Task Force -- it was set up such that it had a wide, deep vista behind it, and it was not uncommon for the entire team to actually be in mid-battle behind him when the scene triggered.
    • Another was the arrival of an archvillain near the end of one of the Praetorian Incarnate trials. Since this occurred when an on-screen timer ran down to zero, it was possible for the entire team to run up to the point where he would literally drop in and stand next to him in the cutscene (often running emotes like bouncing a soccer ball) when he appeared and gave a lengthy speech about how he wasn't going to stand for their interference in his work.
  1. ↑ It can be gamed to your advantage in Mission 4: The Great Wastelands. Shortly after your fleet jumps in, there is a cutscene where the Bentusi traders show up, introduce themselves, and offer to sell you ion cannon technology. Accept or reject their offer and the cutscene ends swiftly, with the Bentusi jumping out to avoid the incoming Turanic raiders. If you don’t accept or reject, the cutscene and the dialogue buttons just stay up. Eventually, the game hurries you along, the raiders draw near and the Bentusi have to go, but you can still click "accept" while they’re saying goodbye. By which time your resource collectors will have cleaned out the system and be returning to safety, and you’ll have resources to build enough ion cannon frigates to destroy the Turanic capital ships easily.
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