Of course I'll have people disagreeing with me and all that sort of backlash, but these are simply nuances that I believe have overstayed their welcome and now need to go.


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1. Grinding. There's nothing fun about it and my recent experience with this actually drove me to write this rant.

In Dawn of Sorrow, after killing the same monster over and over again for about 30 mins, I finally get the soul to drop. Unfortunately, I only have 10hp left and no way to replenish my health apart from rotten slabs of meat. Thinking safely, I decided to grind the nearby ghouls for their soul, which would enable me to eat the rotten flesh to replenish health.... that's what I thought back then, but after 90 minutes of straight grinding (and by grinding I mean standing at one spot and spamming the x button for 90min) and no drop in sight, I just decided to take the risk of fighting through the maze with 10hp... and of course I died, so I wasted 2hours on basically pushing the x button.

Grinding isn't fun, it's not challenging nor difficult, it's just a time sink - an artificial way to extend gameplay time. It just puts me to sleep and still, more than a decade later the developers still haven't figured out that grinding is boring and takes up too much time. This really drives me insane and generally deters me from any game where luck becomes the determining factor whether I get a reward or not.

2. Quicktime events in cutscenes - why hate this? When I get a cutscene, I always put the controller away because to me a cutscene is the moment where I can relax and enjoy the flow of the story. Nothing angers me more than being killed in a cutscene, because I decided to watch it. That's also one of the many reasons I hated RE4 and 5, heck even Shenmue is guilty of the same thing. I don't want this to become some standard staple in gaming, so lets get rid of it while we can.

3. Length of cutscenes - As time goes on, video games have started to blur the lines between movies and games. Now this isn't that big of a problem and affects only a few franchises like Final Fantasy etc, but more prominently, the Metal Gear Solid series.

People regard MGS as one of the greatest videogame series of all time, and personally I just don't see why. The first one was already pushing it with its 15 minute codec conversations and now in the fourth one, we even got a whopping 90 minute cutscene. When anyone asks me what I thought about MGS4, I always answer: ''Well, it's definitely the longest movie I've ever seen.''

Relying too much on cutscenes kills the pace of the game and is just bad storytelling in a medium that should be interactive to its audience. I had a feeling that Kojima couldn't decide whether he wanted a movie or a game. His style of plot presentation is a complete de-evolution in storytelling. The story needs to be presented through the gameplay, for example Half Life 2 is a good specimen of a game that tells its story through the gameplay. There are no long cutscenes that slow the game down. Sure, it isn't perfect but it's definitely a step in the right direction.
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These are just my opinions and feel free to disagree with them. I have more, but I grew ravenous, so I need to go and scavenge food.

great ideas

i just say an add for LA noir - the whole commercial is cut scenes - and they look like crap. it just looks like a terrible cliched movie

but i guess that is the market now, if you want to be hardcore - go watch your game ovie and pray for some button presses - lol

i kinda agree with you.

for grinding, i find it cool for mmo's. just grind some mobs while watching tv to bump some exp without doing anything els is cool in my view.

for single player games its crap.

the other parts i agree.

I have a different way of looking at grinding. why should I play x ammount of hours just to see a few numbers increase in a video game? that is x amount of real time hours that I could spend doing something more productive something where I actually improve physically or mentally (Gym, Study, Fighting game training et al) just to see some ****ty virtual nonexistent useless numbers increase in my stats. hence a big reason not to play pokemon. I love it when in an action RPG I can find a place to level up by just holding a button or setting autobattle and come back a few hours later to find those numbers increase on their own.

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Agree with everything except the quicktime events. And even those I only sort of disagree with you.

Fact is, I consider cutscenes in general a poor and outdated method of telling stories in games. So adding a level of interactivity to cutscenes, while not ideal, is a step in the right direction IMO. Still, I'd prefer to have the story told in-game a la Half Life 2: where you never lose control of the main character, and the story unfolds around you. The fact that, 7 years after this game showed the industry how to properly tell a story, so many games still rely on cutscenes is telling of how little the industry actually cares about quality or progress.

i agree with everything except #3. cutscenes, the exception being MGS4 of course.
getting to the cutsence has almost an achievement vibe to it. it feels good and i love to watch them.

edit- now that i think about it a bit more you are right that its a dated method.
(i thought it was kind of funny in MGS4 where you could fidget with the camera during those long ass, boring movie sections)
and Opnickc said it best where the story should unfold around you during play
but you can have both and not have it hinder the gameplay too greatly.

The biggest problem with cut-scenes is when you can't pause or skip them. After getting destroyed in a bossfight for the fifth time i have no desire to watch that lenghty unskippable cutscene before said fight. Again. raaaAAAAAARGH!

Reminds me of kingdom hearts. The first one didn't let you skip cutscenes, I'm glad the others did though.

So I agree 100% with you on that one.

this^
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