I don’t know maybe I’m a weirdo. If I haven’t seen them before in that particular playthrough, I always watch cutscenes in their entirety. If it’s the kind where it advances when you hit a button I listen to the entire bit of spoken dialog and watch the entire animation before hitting advance. I never turn off animations. To address @apreche 's thing about tabletop games, aren’t you describing TTRPGs? Tell story, play game, tell story, play game? Sure there’s some gameplay involved in the storytelling (skill/social checks) but not a ton.
In my example I was just imagining a generic board game.
Also, no. Good tabletop RPGs integrate gameplay and storytelling just like Dwarf Fortress does. Many do not do this, and I could easily argue they aren’t even RPGs at all. Even if they are, they are still bad.
My very happy TTRPG group would beg to differ. And I will clarify that by “tell story” I mean role-play encounters with players participating and interacting with each other and NPCs.
I do unless they’re boring. If the game itself is fun, I’ll skip them and just play the game. If the game is also boring, I just stop playing altogether.
Even if I like a game, I never wait for the voice acting. I can read the text way faster than they speak, and the acting is never good enough to care.
Cutscenes are not role-play though, freeform or otherwise. Cue hundreds of pages of RPG theory about how roleplaying games are a conversation and the rules are an active participant in that conversation and
… anyway I wouldn’t try to pull TTRPG stuff into a discussion about video games.
I do generally enjoy cutscenes, though. I rarely find myself saying “this game would be good, but the parts where you sit and watch are a dealbreaker.” I do not think Metal Gear Solid would be better if it didn’t have a 30 minute cutscene about nuclear disarmament or genetic determinism smack in the middle of the parts you interact with.
If you are alternating between game playing and role playing, then do you agree that Monopoly is also an RPG? There’s nothing stopping me from role playing.
“Good sir, I stayed in your hotel on Park Place, and it was a complete dump. Look at these bed bugs. I demand a refund!”
It really depends on the game.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution was super fun. But as the game went on, I cared less and less about the main plot and what characters were saying in cut scenes or interactions.
I really only cared about the awesome stealth missions. So I started skipping dialogue as fast as possible and just did the quest points as transactions to make more stealth game appear for me to play.
I don’t either. I think it would be better if it didn’t make you sneak around and play a stupid shooty game between those scenes.
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My main problem with the gamecube remake is they made it harder to just run up to people and punch them unconscious before they raise an alarm. I kinda like coasting through that game while playing it completely wrong.
I only ever tried to play MGS on GameCube. I think I still have the discs. Maybe they are Scojo’s discs? Maybe I gave them back? I don’t remember actually buying it.
Anyway, I couldn’t get past the second room. I got further in whatever one of those Souls games I played for ten minutes.
You’ve basically described what many people love about the MGS series. You can play it “right” if ya want, but most people in my experience just like playing with these levels. Whether that means punching people before they raise an alarm, shooting a beehive just to see what’ll happen or seeing how well you can make a sniper rifle work in a hallway.
It’s the game play many people enjoy. As a kid, I literally fought TheEND for like a few hours, trying to out snipe the sniper boss (all mgs3).
Some people like the movie, I don’t really care for it to be honest, I find it a bit convoluted. Sometimes cool stuff happens in cut scenes, and I am about as engaged as a 5-year-old watching football. It’s cool watching people get hit I guess but no real understanding of what’s going on.
If I’ve sat on the table with explicit expectation that there will be Scott story hour between turns, then yes, I’d listen to the story. And if the story was crap I’d use the extra time to plan my turn.
Your argument about this always goes in this odd gameplay or story you have to choose one bullshit argument when liking both and wanting both is perfectly valid too.
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Do we really need to re-hash some of these arguments? It’s always going to come down to particulars. Yes, you can role-play in monopoly, and that could be really fun for some group. How much I want to absorb the story or further role-play in any game context is going to come down to a lot of specifics. I don’t care about story at-all in Borderlands, but I care a lot in single player Diablo (as an observer, but not a roleplayer), and then not-at-all in multiplayer online Diablo (but I could if it was the first time and it was with a dedicated group), etc. Same applies to the pen and paper genre, I’ve played and ran all kinds of games and systems and I can’t evaluate any of them entirely in the void without context for the environment and people I’ll be playing them with.
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If you do that then it’s a TTRPG.
Then every tabletop game is a TTRPG. What’s the point then?
It’s fun, I’m not very good at it on PC, so I’ve mostly been sticking to playing PS4. But I was also better at Titanfall 2 on console than I was on PC, so I guess it makes sense. It’s definitely different than PUBG and all those others. It’s closest probably to Blackout (Black Ops 4 mode) but has many improvements to movement, speed, teamwork options, “hero” abilities, TTK, and inventory mgmt. Almost all are done better. Has the same level of microtransactions that Overwatch does with the exception of characters, but it’s also free to play, so it’s fairly nominal to buy a couple characters for ~$7.
Honestly, I like it way more than PUBG. PUBG has a very deliberate, methodical approach which gives you very little margin for error. Even with armor, you still are easily defeated if someone gets the drop on you and is stocked well. You still have a bit of this with Apex, but there have been many times when I’ve been able to escape, reposition, and overcome another player in Apex.
Every board game is -potentially- a TTRPG.
A games genre is a property of the game itself. Are you saying if I play Monopoly and decide to tell stories between turns that it somehow morphs and becomes a different game even though no rules have been changed?
If that’s the rule you make, that you role-play between turns by the pedantic math-y games-are-the-rules-that-make-them definition of a game then yes.
Does someone smell sandwiches?
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