I have numerous cutscenes that I created. These are not videos, but realtime events that happen. I put a lot of effort into the cutscenes and also much effort into allowing the player to skip the cutscene since many gamers tend complain about not being able to skip them.
However, it is not so easy to handle skipping these types of cutscenes due to the many state changes of objects that could occur during the cutscene (AI, lights, material, sound, gameobject positions, etc).
So trying to handle allowing the player to skip the cutscene at any moment it tedious to ensure the final state of everything is the same as it would be if the entire cutscene was allowed to play.
So right now I am at allowing to skip about 75% of all cutscenes, and have decided to give up on about 25% of them due to their complexity, to ensure no bugs would occur on skip.
Could this be why many games don’t allow skipping cutscenes?
Could a better solution here to create a video of the cutscene and play this, instead of trying to run these realtime?
Depending on how your game is programmed, you may be able to increase Time.timeScale to a very high value so that the cutscene plays out and all the state changes occur, but it all happens within one screen update, so it is just the same as skipping for the player (or have a black screen overlay and do it in a few frames to deal with trigger sequences, etc.).
I have done this only for development mode skipping. The time scale is increased to 10x. However, I ran into issues with physics. High speed objects have an increased chance of passing through colliders, so I decided to only use it while running in the Editor.
I browsed the internet to find a perspective from developers as to why many games don’t allow skipping cutscenes, but found nothing from that perspective. The only reasonable assumption is that the game is loading in the background so it can’t be skipped.
Probably. Witcher 3 does this little 2-minute narrated story recap whenever you start the game, and I would always jam the button and wonder why you can’t skip that part. One day it dawned on me that it was just the loading screen in disguise.
I could be wrong but I had assumed that most big-studio games use completely separate instances of everything for the cut scene (well, maybe not always the map, but probably sometimes). Basically when the cut scene happens, the actual game is just paused/deactivated/invisible until after the cut-scene is finished. Some games even have obviously higher-quality character models and atmospheric effects in the cut scenes than when the actual game play is happening.
If you set yours up like this (easier said than done ), then any changes that happen in the cut scene won’t affect the actual game because you dump all of the cut scene objects as soon as it’s over.
Basically they have two layer, a gameplay layer and a cinematic layer, they toggle teh two, so the action in the cinematic don’t affect gameplay, but “mocked” it, then they do the necessary state change off screen on the gameplay layer at once while the cinematic goes, then they switch back to the gameplay layer update to the new starting gameplay point.
In fact sometimes game bug and you can see the T pose of the cinematics being around (hello sonic boom BOUNCED PAD!).
Games usually have two major reason why they don’t allow skipping the cutscenes:
loading other content during it
artistic reasons (you need the cut scene in order to understand some important aspects of the game - story, emotion or game-play-wise)
And of course, because the developers are lazy and think players like long and sometimes boring cut scenes…
Don’t be lazy and design them sparingly and skip-able. We play games for the game play, not to watch cut scenes, if we want to watch stuff we turn on a TV-show or a movie or something.
This happened in Dead Red Redeption2. I viewed a cutscene that occurred in a building. After the cutscene I decided to go back into the building, and there was the guy in a T-pose where the cutscene occurred, lol.
I think @ArachnidAnimal probably has the best solution, give the players the option to skip through timescale, players absolutely despise unskippable cutscenes and they are particularly torturous if there aren’t decent save mechanics, the most infamous unskippable cutscenes of course being the bosses.
If possible, allow the players to control the character and move about during the cutscene. Half life 2 is a great example of this imo. It makes it a lot less problematic compared to a “movie” style cutscene. Especially if like HL2 there are physics things to do in the mean time if a player is bored from following the cutscene going on.
Isnt movie cutscenes dead, havent seen one in a long time. And I love Half life 2 style cutscenes they are the best. It was so clever how they tried to get the players focus for certain events so you wouldnt miss the good parts
They are still there, but being more closely integrated with gameplay, in fact a recent game with actual encoded movie is the game “hellblade” on switch, which replace all teh in engine cutscene with fmv BUT with seamless transition to gameplay where a part of the movie is cross fade into in engine cutscene before switching to gameplay. The notion of cutscene has greatly change, would “takedown” (which are fixed animation with fixed camera and no gameplay) considered cutscene? They are insert within gameplay, then there is walking section, they are cinematics in all but name, you just control the camera etc … in anything it’s a pacing issue, clear cut between gameplay and cinematic has just blurred to maintain a good pace, the long cinematics is only sparse now.
IDK if it is encoded movie or in-engine timeline-like cut scene, but it takes away the control: the latest Call of Cthulhu has done this mistake for sure. BTW, I’m really tempted to put the quick-time events infested cut scenes into the same bucket (or rather throw them in from a distance with grimace on my face).
Nowdays, with customizable characters (appearance, clothes) I would think the majority of cutscenes are procedural. Since create a video would “lock in” a particular character appearance.
A now day the graphical quality of the gameplay is the same as the graphical quality of the videos.
I remember on years ago on Xbox360, the majority of cutscenes were videos with somewhat higher quality than the actual in-game graphics.
…
Since everyone convinced me the importance of skippable cutscenes, I went back and re-implemented skipping the cutscene.
It seems you built your cutscene system, created a bunch of cutscenes, then tried to add skipping after the fact. Its not surprising that your cutscenes aren’t easy to skip if thats the case: you designed a system without a key requirement in mind.
I’m sure if you designed your system for skipping from the start you would have no issues, e.g. if your cut scene system stored a storyboard/timeline of key frames for each thing that changes then transitioned between them, then skipping would be trivial (set state of everything to the the final keyframe state).
), then any changes that happen in the cut scene won’t affect the actual game because you dump all of the cut scene objects as soon as it’s over.