Should story dialogue be replaced with cutscenes?

So this actually sparked as a conversation I was having with one of my family members who started playing GW2 after I had recommended it to him. He's got a few level 80s, enjoys the combat, and just generally has a positive view of GW2 as a whole. In previous MMO's he's played, he's mainly been a PVE player. He enjoys story, dungeons, questing, and exploring, but when he plays GW2 his time is mainly invested into SPVP with some WvW here and there.

Last night he told me he's been trying to play more of the story but just can't get into it, especially the heart of thorns story. He explains the biggest reason why he can't seem to get into it is because when NPC's start talking to one another he's allowed to just run around and completely ignore everything npc's are talking about. He explains to me, if the game had more cutscenes, even if it were just dialogue cutscenes he'd be far more invested in the story. It also doesn't help the fact that he's never experienced living story 1 and was off and on during living story 2 due to work, kids, and marriage.

As a disclaimer, I've been playing GW2 since its first closed beta, and I've played GW1 for over 3 years. For those of you who've played GW1, you'd know that GW1 had way more cutscenes than GW2, and they were all skippable if you wanted. In fact, while playing GW1 if you joined a pug group and some of the players had never seen a particular cutscene, some would tell you not to skip it because they wanted to see it. A lot more people back than loved the lore despite there being a lot less dialogue in GW1 compared to GW2.

There are so many people who play GW2 that just downright don't care for the story at all. Some will say, "oh Guild Wars as a whole has great lore, but Guild Wars 2 conveys it so badly." Now I'm well aware that some people out there will say that bad writing and story telling won't change peoples opinions of the story even if they did add cutscenes but I want to see what other people think. I'm not asking for the return of the one on one dialogues of when the game first launched either. But would cutscenes that replaced dialogue improve the story? Or would that make you feel less immersed into the world? Or is everything fine, its just another situation where some will like it and others won't.

I, for one, loved the cutscenes. I still watch them when doing dungeons, even if I'm not the main character. It's like watching a movie, and you get to see characters in great detail.

P.S. I watch all the vista movies too, regardless of how many times I've seen that vista before.

He complains about losing out on dialog because he runs around when NPCs are talking... so, can't he just sit there and listen to the NPCs? Sounds like your relative needs to chill out and just enjoy the content that's being delivered. He can start that today and not miss out on the exposition that is presented through NPC conversations... or, ANet can invest a ton into creating cutscenes for that one guy. /shrug

Seems easy to me.

@Chickenooble.5014 said:He complains about losing out on dialog because he runs around when NPCs are talking... so, can't he just sit there and listen to the NPCs? Sounds like your relative needs to chill out and just enjoy the content that's being delivered. He can start that today and not miss out on the exposition that is presented through NPC conversations... or, ANet can invest a ton into creating cutscenes for that one guy. /shrug

Seems easy to me.

I see your point and I told him that too, but I know he isn't the only one. Personally, it doesn't really effect me. Like, i'll stand there and listen in, but I'm leaning more towards if the game had more cutscenes like they had in GW1, it would get more people interested in it.

I think we're missing out on a lot in terms of storytelling without real cutscenes, here's why:

Important parts of the story should be comparable to scenes in a movie. Directors choose certain shots (close up, over the shoulder,...) to express the story and emotions in a certain way.There's perspective, image composition (which leads your eye to a certain part of the image) and the like. You can basically make someone aware of an endless amount of details and information without telling a single word.

There's a technique that's called Show, don't tell. Meaning that your characters won't necessarily say: OH, I'M SO DISAPPOINTED/SURPRISED/SAD RIGHT NOW. Instead, they would just show their facial expressions, their posture and reactions. But when our camera is miles away from the characters during the dialogues, we surely won't be able to tell anything about their expressions. Players might lose interest in the story and dialogue since it's distanced and doesn't concern them.

The final cut (showing the same scene from different perspectives, able to change pace) will then determine how we're experiencing the story in the end. Fast cuts = build up tension; chaotic, action,...

All of these tools are missing in their approach of 'open-world story telling'. I don't think we should get more cutscenes like the personal story had (empty background, generic expressions). Instead we should get more scripted and animated cutscenes in a real setting.

I wish they could do that, but it's likely coded in a way that makes changing them so hard that it would be easier just to make the content anew. And that would probably take a lot of time.

If there was some sort of "Refurbishing" team in charge of going back to old content and upgrade it to modern standards, I would be all for it, but unfortunately these things aren't as easy.

Skippable cutscenes and/or challenge/achievement/retry motes. Because from Season 2 on, if I didn't get the achievement on the first run, I was really not going to be in the mood to see the gagawoowoo romantic talk or legions of exposition just to get to the thing I actually NEED from it.

@MithranArkanere.8957 said:I wish they could do that, but it's likely coded in a way that makes changing them so hard that it would be easier just to make the content anew. And that would probably take a lot of time.

If there was some sort of "Refurbishing" team in charge of going back to old content and upgrade it to modern standards, I would be all for it, but unfortunately these things aren't as easy.

Although you may be right, like I don't think Anet will go back to improve the core game (least not that drastically) I still think it would be worth it especially for new players.

@Rauderi.8706 said:Skippable cutscenes and/or challenge/achievement/retry motes. Because from Season 2 on, if I didn't get the achievement on the first run, I was really not going to be in the mood to see the gagawoowoo romantic talk or legions of exposition just to get to the thing I actually NEED from it.

Yup, when I went back to replay season 2 for achievements, failing them, then having to wait for everyone to finish talking to try it again was painful... If it were just a skippable cutscene I'd be 100% for it.

Cutscenes are fine, but frankly I;d prefer consistency now at this stage. I don't think changing to cutscenes is going to make any major difference to most people not into story anyway, but a change at this stage would make for an inconsistent experience between seasons and expansion.

GW1 used essentially the same system as we have now - they were live in game scenes, with the twist that they were framed to look like cutscenes. Sure they were skippable, but as the devs pointed out, that created a range of problems they didn't want carrying over here.

As you allude to, I'm more inclined to believe players aren't invested in the story because of issues with narrative/dialogue rather than whether it is a cutscene or not. Something I can more sympathise with. I don't believe cutscenes themselves would make any real difference across the board.

Way I see it, the issue with dialogue during gameplay is that other npcs around you very often talk loudly in the background and it gets very muddled and confusing for quite a few people, if they could cut back on this I can see that fixing a bit.

On the other hand when it comes to the story, having a mix of what we currently have in Season 3 and what we had in dungeons/original personal story would be great, specially when the systems are in place, be kind of odd if they completely abandoned that way of story telling.

Meh ... I just want a skip button. Especially on replay. None of the story is so good that it is worth rewatching. Right now I just alt+tab out and check back once in a while to see if the NPCs are done wasting time.

@Randulf.7614 said:Cutscenes are fine, but frankly I;d prefer consistency now at this stage. I don't think changing to cutscenes is going to make any major difference to most people not into story anyway, but a change at this stage would make for an inconsistent experience between seasons and expansion.

GW1 used essentially the same system as we have now - they were live in game scenes, with the twist that they were framed to look like cutscenes. Sure they were skippable, but as the devs pointed out, that created a range of problems they didn't want carrying over here.

As you allude to, I'm more inclined to believe players aren't invested in the story because of issues with narrative/dialogue rather than whether it is a cutscene or not. Something I can more sympathise with. I don't believe cutscenes themselves would make any real difference across the board.

Now you actually bring up a good point here regarding consistency. But as noted by a few people in this thread already, most wouldn't care anyways. They just want the ability to skip. Adding a cutscene system would give them that option. At this point however, it may not be worth adding a system like that to previous story telling elements (past content) because it would potentially take too long and theres bound to be a ton of bugs. But I still don't think its too late to add something like this to future content. Especially if the Devs are gonna be building this new content, hopefully from the ground up with only a few re-used assets to quicken development.

To help reinforce your comment "create a range of problems they didn't want carrying over here." A content designer named Jeffrey Vaughn, explained that adding such a feature would cause technical issues:

Jeffrey VaughnContent Designer

"There’s a bigger technical issue—during “in game” scenes, the NPCs are moving around and things are happening (gadgets might be activating, props may be animating, etc.) and if you just skipped all that, it could lead to some really bizarre behavior. Trying to manually set a “failsafe” to teleport the NPCs, fire off effects, etc. to replicate what the world state is if the cutscene plays is extremely tedious and error prone.That’s why the old style “dialogue cutscenes” (and the fancy but rare full blown cinematic sequences, like the Order movies and racial intros) are skippable, because we aren’t doing anything to the world while the dialogue plays, so skipping it doesn’t have any effect. We’ve moved away from those, because the in-game scenes are a lot more satisfying, but there’s a trade off."

However, he later states this:

Jeffrey VaughnContent Designer

"We’re continuing to experiment with improving the way cutscenes work. I won’t go into details, since I don’t want to say “We’re trying out X” or I’ll get asked after every update “What happened to X?” "

Both of these statements were said two years ago. Is Anet still working on it? Are they planning anything? Or is living story 3 it? Don't get me wrong, It doesn't bother me too much either way, I'm patient. But its obvious that there are still lots of people who want something like this. Take swtor for example. Personally I think their version of the hero engine is pretty bad, but they were clearly able to solve most technical related issues involving skipping dialogue while also presenting users with a cutscene.

I would be surprised if they don't find a way round the skipping issue. That I would say is a priority over adding in a cutscene for storytelling purposes. I personally have no issue with unskippables, but it is a highly requested feature and Anet, whilst often quiet usually come good such things.

Loved the base-game cutscenes. Makes everything more epic. Not everything has to be in-engine. Look at Blizzard for this.

I would be all for cut-scenes as long as they include the ability to be skipped. I have 22 level 80's on my main account and I make sure to pay attention to the dialogue, etc the first time I go through a story step. The next 21 times through the story I really do not care to have to sit through all the crappy dialogue. I get that some might and I have no problem if they want to but I have a problem with being forced to watch/listen to it over and over and over. Give us the choice whether to watch/listen to it or not to.

I get that the developers have spent time and resources on making the dialogue/cut-scene and I would be completely fine with having to watch it the first time through but having to watch it for every single character I have is just tedious repetition. Yeah, I have a lot of extra characters but I feel it's boring and tedious during the second play through unless I feel I've missed something or maybe it's been a while since I've gone through it. Most times I want to get through it with as many characters as possible while the mechanics are still fresh but the constant tedium is too much.

i line the new way of doing things, cutscines are great for epic moments like the end of a big boss fight but never OK triggering in the middle of a fight

PLEASE NO!!! When HoT came out and NPCs started talking to me in game without cutscenes it was so much more immersive! I absolutely love the new way of doing things and hope Anet continues to do it this way