Cinematics vs Player Characters

Community General Discussion
1

So like a lot of people, I gave FF14 a spin over this last summer, to mixed results. While there were a lot of elements I liked, ultimately it was not the game for me. One of the major issues that turned me off of it was that although the game puts a huge focus on telling its story, the way it tells that story… sucks.

Every Main Story Quest (14’s equivalent of campaign quests) ends with a cinematic or cutscene, even if that cutscene is only the NPC questgiver talking at your character while they both stand still in the same place you already were. It’s tedious, it’s frustrating, and it really highlights just how much of a non-entity your character actually is when their full suite of acting choices in these scenes is, “walk/run somewhere,” “idle combat pose,” and “smile and nod.” Over, and over, and over this happens, and it tears the veil away from the illusion that your character is an actual character with their own identity or agency. Instead, 10 minutes of listening to NPCs talk to each other while occasionally looking at you for a smile and a nod just emphasizes that you are utterly inconsequential to any of the events going on beyond being a gun for the real characters to point at whatever they’ve decided you need to be pointed at.

It sucks, it’s boring, it makes the story unbearable, and it made me finally put my finger on how WoW has been steadily moving down the same road ever since WoD.

While WoW has not gotten so egregious as to yank us out of controlling our character every time an NPC needs to exposit at us or to have 10 minutes of unskippable villain monologue in the middle of a raid encounter, it has been relying more and more heavily on cutscenes and in-game cinematics to advance its plot for the last several expansions now, and is running into the same basic problems. Our characters cease to be ours when a cutscene starts, and are reduced to a tiny suite of acting choices that typically amount to “walk/run somewhere,” “idle combat pose,” and “swing weapon.” And just the same as FF14, it highlights the fact that we are interchangable puppets in a story that’s happening at us, not one which we have an actual say in. Especially if our character’s personality is anything other than “generic hero.” I’m sure every one of us has had at least one moment where we’ve thought to ourselves, “That’s not what I’d do,” in response to our character’s actions in a cutscene by now.

Obviously it’s unreasonable to expect to have full control of our characters in cutscenes, and the nature of an MMO means that we can’t actually make decisions that change the outcome of any major storybeats anyway because that would instantly fracture the story into multiple AUs. But there has to be more we can do than, “move to our mark and idle until the real characters are done talking.”

To that end, I suggest adding a new feature of character customization: Personality Settings.

It’s not reasonable for the devs to create branching narratives for our characters, but creating a small suite of cutscene variations for us would go a long way to giving back some feeling of agency in our characters without bloating the story’s scope or the animation team’s workload.

Add a setting to the character UI where we select a broad personality type from a list with options like Defender, Aggressive, Sneaky, Joker, etc. Whenever we enter a cutscene, our character’s behavior in it is then determined by which personality they have selected.

Say the story of a cutscene is that our character and Good NPC go to encounter Evil NPC, but Evil NPC puts up a magic barrier, talks to Good NPC, grabs the MacGuffin, and escapes.

Characters who have chosen Defender position themselves between Good NPC and Bad NPC, weapons at the ready to defend Good NPC from attack. Characters who set Aggressive lunge forward to attack Bad NPC as soon as they arrive, but are rebuffed by the barrier, and throw out a few /rudes while Evil NPC gloats. Sneaky characters slink off to the side upon arrival, preemptively sneak over to the MacGuffin during the conversation, but are blasted away before they can grab it. And Jokers photobomb every camera angle change with /dance emotes.

Further down the line, these variations could grow even further. It was cool the first time we got to see our own characters walk into an in-game cutscene, but could you imagine the playerbase’s reaction the first time our characters have voice lines in a cutscene? Where upon walking with a faction leader into a meeting with the villain we get to actually talk and feel like we contributed to the direction of the scene?

Aggressive
PC and Leader enter the chamber to find Villain waiting for them. PC /roars and draws their weapons into (idle combat).
Villain: (chuckles) So, you decided to accept my invitation.
PC: I’ve decided to take your head this time, (insult determined by PC race).
Leader steps forward and raises a hand between PC and Villain. PC and Leader share a look, then PC relaxes to (idle, weapons drawn).
Leader (to Villain): We’re here to…

Diplomatic
PC and Leader enter the chamber to find Villain waiting for them. PC hangs behind Leader’s shoulder as they approach Villain.
Villain: (chuckles) So, you decided to accept my invitation.
Leader (angry): You have a lot of nerve to call us here, after what you pulled.
PC steps closer to Leader, whispering over their shoulder.
PC: (Leader), remember what we’re here for.
Leader closes their eyes and takes a breath.
Leader (to Villain): We’re here to…

Joker
PC and Leader enter the chamber to find Villain waiting for them. PC /yawns and looks around at the decor instead of Villain.
Villain: (chuckles) So, you decided to accept my invitation.
PC: Your curtains are hideous and I was promised snacks.
Villain: I could promise you much more than that.
Leader steps forward, clearing their throat.
Leader (to Villain): We’re here to…

It doesn’t have to be a lot, it doesn’t even have to be every cutscene, but even little moments of agency and characterization for PCs in these things would go a long way to re-immersing us in an avenue of story delivery that has been instead kicking us out of the moment by railroading our characters into impotent puppets more and more often with each new expansion.

2 Likes
2

Maybe blizzard should stop designing the game like a single player with the story it’s tedious and annoying. I bet you the story telling would get much better if we went back to just being a mercenary for our faction

1 Like
3

Sir this is Wendy’s

1 Like
4

Kind of reminds me of personalities in ESO. You can “equip” a personality, and it changes your idle animation, walk/run, certain emotes, etc.

I like.

5

Can I get a Big Mac meal with an Oreo™ Blizzard?

6

It isn’t a bad idea, but the problem is our character has never really mattered in this world. The tags we’ve been getting - Champion, Maw Walker, etc. - have only made that issue stronger. Even as far back as TBC, we were only mentioned as “adventurers” while the story happened between naked characters. From Maiev’s pursuance of Illidan to Kalecgos’ Sunwell girlfriend, we didn’t have a role. Not directly, anyway. And Blizzard has since tried to give us a role but the story still only matters to the main characters of the chosen expansion (Khadgar, Velen, and Illidan in Legion; Nathanos, Greymane, Talanji, and Jaina in Battle for Azeroth; Sylvanas, Thrall, Anduin, and Jaina in Shadowlands). We’ve always not mattered to the story, it’s just even more evident now.

In regards to your idea with personality types, the concept is an interesting one. I would argue that we shouldn’t stop there, but that may be asking for too much. For me, as an example, the way Blizzard has shoehorned and forced our characters into the current narrative has completely broken me away from being part of the game. The whiplash especially of the Horde player character has broken my suspension of disbelief in a way that may be irrecoverable. And that’s because even if given the above choices, the story forces us into these situations regardless of, well, anything. Having a small variation of movements in a cutscene wouldn’t have solved this issue because that’s more an illusion of choice that doesn’t impact anything substantial.

The concept is there, but there should probably be some fine tuning before it would be something I would endorse.

7

Not to nitpick on this, but don’t single-player games have a heavily emphasis on the Player Character, narrative-wise?.. :thinking:

8

That’s the point this game was designed with us not being the protagonist I felt like. Wow lost a lot of quality when they have to focus on main character. Ff14 is designed with you the player character in mind. WoW is designed with the NPC in mind

9

And Waffle Fries. This thread definitely needs some waffle fries.

1 Like
10

I preferred things that way, too. You can’t honestly try to tell me that I’m the One True Savior of Azeroth when the entire damn point of an MMORPG is that I’m not the only anything but myself (especially when you also glue a giant glowing badge proclaiming such to literally every player’s back, looking at you, Legion artifacts).

But at this point, I think that ship has sailed, and barring a major narrative upset like a massive timeskip or straight up moving on to WoW 2, I don’t see us ever going back to that. The story can’t unpull the trigger of putting us on a first name basis with the most powerful characters in the world.

Agreed entirely. Playing through BfA’s story was the final breaking point for me and engaging with the narrative because it was so utterly divorced from anything my character would be doing in that situation. Even setting aside moral dissonance like participating in the Derek Proudmoore debacle without lifting an eyebrow, my character was inspired to take up shamanism by Thrall. Her father died at the Battle of Mount Hyjal fighting side by side with the Alliance and night elves. Her damn wife is human. Lokka would have tried putting an axe through Sylvanas’ skull herself before going along with anything I had to make her do in BfA.

But the content of the narrative is its own topic that’s had much said about it already, and will continue to be talked about in other threads. Here I wanted to focus on the method of the story’s delivery, separately from the story’s direction.

11

Personality settings would be neat but the much cheaper and simpler route would be to revert to the older style of writing where the player character for most intents and purposes is a non-entity, or at most a hired sword, while the actual characters do the story-moving things, with most of the players’ effect on things being handwaved away with the doings of a more nebulous “party of adventurers”.

Some may not like this but it wouldn’t bother me a bit. I don’t play to be some kind of fantasy-flavored Superman.

12

Holy wall of text.

I was told time and time again that FF’s story is amazing. Well, sure, it’s good for an anime/teen fiction. The thing is, FF is a game first, before it’s a story.

The way FF presents the story is just bad story telling. You’re exactly right, you’re locked into visual novel segment after visual novel segment (I refuse to call those cutscenes), and it wears on you fast.

I still avoided the skip button but I so dearly wanted it to be over long before I was near the end. I had to take breaks – breaks – so I wouldn’t start mass spamming the skip button.

In the end, I didn’t even like the story much. Coming from a high fantasy background it was mediocre at best. I wouldn’t personally recommend it to anyone and I had to constantly bite my tongue when anyone asked what I thought. “I mean the owl maze stuff was cool.”

Story telling is just as important, if not more important, than the story itself. FF failed miserably at story telling. WoW is doing the same. We need to go back to the Classic days of story. Quests that lead to action with minimal cutscenes. Not locked cutscene after locked cutscene.

13

They can they have a spell ingame wipe their memories of this champion and simply refer to him or her as the champion

14

Right, planet-wide amnesia would be one of those major narrative upsets I was referring to.