Ugh, I wonder if this has anything to do with iD's somewhat recent acquisition by Zenimax and the decidedly "dumbed-down" approached they've really started heading into over at BethSoft?
The old style is not flawed: it's just that making a game with lots of good gameplay is HARD. It's much easier to throw in tons and tons of filler. And fixed cutscenes are an easy way to do it. Even better yet, you can convince people that "less is more" by fooling them into thinking such things are NECESSARY to develop the plot and story, when that's largely utter BS.
A real good game can develop the story and characters without having to have the player wade through hours and hours of cutscenes. to refer to original-story FPSes, take a look at
Perfect Dark, for instance. (since
GoldenEye 007 was based on a movie, after all) The game has cutscenes, yes, but I clocked the total to almost EXACTLY half an hour for the main campaign... That's split for both intro and outro cutscenes for 17 missions, plus numerous mid-level cutscenes. That proved plenty enough to fully develop a pretty wide cast of characters and a deep plot, all without pulling away from the gameplay... Mostly, in many cases, because the cutscenes were used to set the FEEL for a level, something sorely missing with our 1080p pre-rendered eye candy that serves little more than to take up time.
Similarly, if we go to non-FPS action games, we see the same story: in spite the fact that each MGS game has had progressively more and more of the time taken by cutscenes, they've NOT had any more development in plot, character, or theme: MGS1 pretty solidly hit it right on the first try, and it only had a handful of cutscenes compared to later games.
Personally, I want my games to focus less on the "SO REAL" feel, and provide a far more compelling gameplay experience. the scary thing about parodies like
Duty Calls is that they hit WAY too close to the bone. Is that what we really want our FPSes to be like?
Yes, I do like realistic gameplay, but it seems we're now choiced with either taking a "srs game" that you spend half your time in cutscenes, or you have to go with a simplistic, cartoony game like
Serious Sam or
Bullet Storm that eschews mechanics I like, such as stealth, in exchange for joke mechanics. (
Fallout: New Vegas, although a semi-RPG, falls into that category as well)
[citation][nom]tlmck[/nom]It is the game makers who love cut scenes and such. Much cheaper and easier to make non-interactive content(filler material). Tim Willits is full of beans.[/citation]
This is the truth. we're heading towards an era of massively more and more dumbed-down games. I don't even really think it's the consoles' fault at all, but rather that developers have all jumped on the bandwagon du jour, which basically says "screw the serious gamers, let's waste millions trying to re-win these casuals for each and every release, while the base bleeds off and leaves us."
Eventually, this pile of cards they've built will fall down, destroying a lot of them in the process. In the meantime, anyone who's a serious gamer suffers.
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