Unskippable material on games

BIOS

will someone please tell me why ubisoft continues to insist on placing non-skippable movies at the beginning of their games? it's getting to the point where i'm less likely to even want to buy a game because i know i'll have to sit through 5-7 minutes of trailer type footage. chaos theory had a super long intro, and now far cry instincts is making me go through their long intro. i really hope this is a marketing trend that goes away soon.

adam

Uh - they want you to see the opening movie at least. I own Chaos Theory and know you only had to sit through it once.

KDR_11k

I wish more publishers would realize that the company logos must be skippable. Then I won't have to grab a no intro patch for games I play often.

CheapAlert

the first unskippable thing that annoyed me was C&C's intro

snemmy

my annoyance with this comes from lengthy cutscenes before a critical and usually insanely tough battle. so that every time you die you have to hear the same thing over and over and over... some times multiple boss forms are thrown in just for an even higher annoyance factor.. "i finally beat him! wtf?! i barely won and now i have to fight his second form! nooooooo!" *dies, repeats cutscene and battle(s)

KDR_11k

Ah, yes, that's lovely and the reason Final Fantasy X is gathering dust on my shelf.

Sage

All I got to say is that developers that at add some crappy element to the game that can't be skipped deserve to have a beating in the center of town. But it does get better, since usually this unskippable part of the game is the worst and most stupid piece of crap you get to experience.... AHHHH!!! Besides unskippable movies I hate games that don't let you exit either the game or a level you either just want to stop playing or won quickly. I think RTS games are the only ones that suffer from this and they happen to be the games I play the most. I mean how many freaking times do you have to say quit, God I hate when they make it be like the most important moment of your life. They always ask are you sure you want to quit, I can deal with that, want I hate is the crappy code that makes me have to open an entirely new menu to confirm I have to quit yet again just after I said I want to quit the freaking first time... Oh and they ask me the same damn question yet again. Ahhhh. Why, it is like they want you to have a crap load of fun just to make sure they can ruin the fun experience you had playing the game at the end, freaking bastards....

Alex

KDR_11k

That's why I love japanese indy games, there's a convention that ESC or ALT-F4 quits the game immediately.

Ninjas

I think complaining about unskippable stuff on first run is pretty lame. It would be like renting a movie on DVD just so you can skip to the action scenes. I mean, what is the point? The artist had a vision, If you are bothing to play the game, you should at least see what that is.

You should never have to watch a cut scene more than once. I think the best setup would be that as soon as a cutscene played once, it would go into a folder of all the game's cutscenes that you can watch at your leasure.

BIOS

i have no problem watching stuff that is story specific, but when you force me to watch game trailer type material that obviously is designed to be played on repeat at ebgames, i take offense. both of the sequences i'm referring to are trailer type videos, not story specific cutscenes.

hell, on far cry instincts, the game goes back to that beginning movie-trailer when i exit a game and i have to wait for the movie to end before i can see the menu again. THAT's just plain annoying.

Rick Stirling

On many games that I have worked on the Logo(s) is displayed while a load of stuff is being loaded in the background - thats why they don't skip. It's better than a black screen when are left thinking the game has crashed.

Mark Dygert

Rick is right, many Menu interfaces have a load time. Fry Cry had a 3D beach scene fly-by in the background of its menu. That stuff takes time to load. Maybe it would be nice if they put a small load bar at the bottom if the movie/trailer is being used as a catchy load screen. If the bar hits full it will let you skip what is left. It would be nice to let the player know why they are being subjected to the same content 20-30 times. But I guess the suits think every gamer is stupid and is in as much awe of thier trailer when they watch it for the 30th time as they did the 1st.

I know I go to EB and just watch the trailers for days, never moving, always watching, always in awe. I stand there with my mouth open, pointing at the screen, while drool pours from my mouth, slowly filling the store.

Ninjas

I guess I haven't experienced this abomination of trailer material on the front of a game yet. I haven't played much in the way of games in the last 8 months- too busy. Goibg to catch up these holidays.

flaagan

meanwhile, ea games (battlefield 2 in particular), have videos in front that are unskippable due to legal bs (it's written somewhere that the logo or trademark *has to* be on screen for so many seconds). thank goodness you can edit the directories to skip those movies, as they're covering up nothing..

KDR_11k

Am I the only one thinking that a menu shouldn't need load times?

System

no, not at all. Especially when you just want to jump in for a quick game!

Rick Stirling

They don't need load times? How do they get into memory? EVERYTHING has a load time, be it .01 seconds or 10 seconds. Sometimes you load several things into memory at once, so some things are preloaded, but they still have been loaded.

KDR_11k

Now that's arguing semantics.

Rick Stirling

Nope, thats me layin' it down like it is.

BIOS

the movie that you have to watch when trying to return to the menu in far cry instincts is NOT something to watch while the menu loads, it's a LONG winded "trailer type" video. the fact that you have to watch it every time you return to the main menu seems to be a bug.

KDR_11k

Rick: I'm saying you know exactly that I mean load times that are long enough to warrant a loading screen with a progress bar and that you're just nitpicking.

BIOS: Have you really tried everything? Mouse, keyboard, etc?

TomDunne

Last night I finally got around to checking out the Metal Gear Solid 3 PS2 game. 20 minutes into Metal Gear Solid 3: The Movie, I was ready to fall asleep. It must be a half an hour from the tie you first put the game in until the time you actually get to shoot at something. I'm all for narrative and backstory, but cheese'n rice guys...

danr

i spent the first 45 minutes or so of Black and White 2 frantically hammering every key i have in vain effort to skip all the fucking gabbing ... and that was in-game. Hideous.

BIOS

i have tried every button on the xbox controller to skip through the video on far cry instincts.

JKMakowka

That reminds me of f***ing unskippable tutorials in generic FPS games

I'm all like 'yeah I get the point, I haven't been living under a rock for the last few years'

That reminds me, I still haven't finished those annoying tutorial sequence you have to do in 'AmericasArmy' to be allowed to play online. After about 2-3 minutes it bored me to death

System

Rick: yeah, but you get kdr's point though, right? We're talking about things like hl2 etc.. where you have to wait untill the main menu loads (with progress bar), only to click a button there to start loading the actual game.
I'm just very unimpressed by fancy 3d menus, and hardly ever think it's worth the wait.

thomasp

yeah, FFX end battle comes to mind. no idea why they made it that you cannot skip their cutscenes, that's the most obvious thing to do - cultural difference?

i agree, everything should be skip-able. i couldn't care less for some artist's vision which makes me sit through some blabla when i want to play instead. movie and game are totally different things imho (even if kojima might disagree ).

san andreas had a nice feature where you could fast forward through missions and skip already finished parts. that should be a standard.

edit: i was actually quoting snemmy. no idea where the quote went...

Ninjas

Well, I know some people simply hate cutscenes, but for those people who do actually like them, how long is too long?

KDR_11k

Any length is too long if you're seeing it for the second time in a single playthrough.

Ninjas

Yeah. You should never have to watch the exact same thing twice.

I find it funny that a lot of game start off with a huge cut scene, and then have hardly any after that. I mean, I don't care about the damn characters yet, give me a few hours to get used to them first. At the end of the game, I think 10 minutes would be the absolute max that I would sit through (excluding credits), but only because I know there is no new gameplay afterwards.

Rick Stirling

Pea - you don't know that (and neither do I, Devils Advocate and stuff..). HL2 might be loading the engine and stuff, THEN loading the level and missions.

KDR_11k

If the engine is that hard to load (or more likely, initialize. The engine is a part of the code and at most one or two megabytes in size) then wait with loading it until the user has chosen to access a part that needs the engine. If you absolutely can't make the main menu load in less than a second perhaps you should rethink your approach to that. That background scene cannot be completely free to load, either so by putting a picture there instead of a level the load times WILL be reduced.

ElysiumGX

UT2k4's (and all mods) splash screen stays on my desktop for several seconds. Long enough to slightly annoy me each time.

This time last year I was playing a game on my PS2. I'd been playing for several days, and at each save point a cutscene appears that can't be skipped. After playing for so long, I reached a save point which loaded a cutscene. There was a small scratch on the disc which caused this sequence to freeze each time. After a week I gave up and took the CD to be repaired, but they said the scratch was too deep. So, I then purchased the same game through ebay. My original CD was given to me. And I tried to find the cheapest deal. I loaded up the CD, played through the cutscene, and to my surprise, it was the LAST savepoint. 5 minutes later the game was finished. One of those situations where an unskippable segments causes a lot of problems. Took one month to pass that simple cutscene and finish.

Fear's intro cinematic was one of the worst I've seen. It stopped just seconds before I would have decided to uninstall the game before playing. Don't ruin the entire game with crappy writting and animation.

Frank

[ QUOTE ]
That's why I love japanese indy games, there's a convention that ESC or ALT-F4 quits the game immediately.

[/ QUOTE ]
Um, KDR, alt-F4 is the 'close active window' shortcut in Windows.

Frank the Avenger

KDR_11k

Yes and your game only gets a "user wants to quit" message which it has no obligation to heed. Photoshop can ask "Do you want to save?", a game can (and often will) decide to do nothing at all.