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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7829866" data-attributes="member: 4937">Basically never.   The only time anything comes up like that is when someone casts 'Suggestion' on a PC and they fail a saving throw, and even then in cases of Domination and other mind control, I really try to leave the player in control of the character with only minimal guidance as to how to play the character.   If I ever do find myself saying, "Your character doesn't want to do that.", it probably would be in a case where they are suffering from mind control.First, great shout out to 'The Mighty Jingles', who I encountered during my 'World of Tanks' addiction years ago and whom I still watch for my now faded 'World of Warships' addiction and other content.Secondly, I very much do feel that cut scenes can be devastating to the enjoyment of an RPG - even one on a computer. You should never hand wave a player through an important moment of choice. It's fine perhaps to have a cinematic scene before or after a moment of choice, but by golly the choice should be a major element of the gameplay. Good cut scenes are expository only. They help you understand what is going on without removing you from the action.My hatred of cut scenes extends vastly beyond just that they railroad the player though. I despise any cut scene that portrays something in a way that the fiction is vastly different than the game play.Mass Effect 1 is one of my favorite video games of all time. Mass Effect 2 on the other hand was for me deeply disappointing. The larger fan base tends to act as if the game crashed and burned suddenly and unexpectedly with Mass Effect 3, but in my opinion the writing was on the wall in Mass Effect 2. And that in part came down to expectations about game play and cut scenes. For example, Mass Effect 2's cover system meant that the gameplay largely divided into two parts - regular non-combat action and 'roll for initiative drop into the subsystem' combat action. As such, combat only occurred in Mass Effect 2 in highly defined rigid planned battles in arenas specially designed for the combat to happen in them. And they generally as a result had a puzzle quality of there being some specific tactical choices you had to make in order to make them work. By contrast, combat in Mass Effect one can and did occur everywhere - in staircases, in open rooms, in vast outdoor spaces, in tight corridors. This meant among other things that in Mass Effect 2, cut scenes were generally not tightly integrated with either environment or gameplay. The place that they were occurring was clearly not the same play you were inhabiting, and didn't abide by those rules. In Mass Effect 2, you were always cutting in and out of subsystems - cut scenes, combat scenes, non-combat scenes. In Mass Effect 1, you were always basically in the story and whereever you were, anything could and would happen.Two examples immediately come to mind that indicate how the mindset of the developers had changed. In Mass Effect 2, there is this scene where you rescue a trope psionic girl (see Carrie, Charlie McGee, Eleven, etc.) and there is this cut scene where psionic girl is established to be powerful because she single handedly destroys several of the large defense robots that are some of the most powerful foes in the game. Except, in gameplay, psionic girl is actually one of the weakest characters in the game and would struggle to assist you in destroying one such foe, much less taking on several single handedly. That scene told me that the developers no longer cared about gameplay as much as they cared about their conception of the story. By contrast, one of the reoccuring cut scenes in Mass Effect that garnered some derision is the elevator scene, where the developers made lemonaid out of the slow loading of levels by having the characters in an elevator carrying out small talk. There aren't choices going on, there is just characters talking about themselves. And this is mildly interesting even as it stresses people who want to get back to the action just for wanting to ride in elevators with favored characters to learn more about them, and to see how they react to each other, but the whole thing is actually a set up for the single best cut scene usage in my opinion in the history of gaming - the scene where the predictable boring elevator ride turns into an intense combat scenario. That scene when I first encountered it blew my mind, and it's probably the best example of one of my favorite table top gaming rug pulls - "Everything everywhere is the dungeon."Cut scenes in Mass Effect 1 largely questioned you how you would behave as part of an entire game of questioning how you would behave.  Cut scenes in Mass Effect 2 tended to show you how the character behaved as part of an entire game showing you how to behave - even nominally when you were in combat you actually had little or no choice.   In Mass Effect 1 you could profoundly alter your game experience by chargen choices that gave you profoundly different capabilities.   In Mass Effect 2, the game told you how your character would be built, and the impact of your character was limited - basically, every character had more or less the same gameplay.   In Mass Effect 1, there were several choices with profound consequence, and neither were more right than the other.   In Mass Effect 2, there was a funnel at the end of the game you had to go through, and that funnel required that up to that point you made every choice exactly as you were supposed to have made it or you would be punished - in cut scenes - for not having made the right choice.</blockquote>

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