However some games have become well known for this B-movie like quality. Live action cutscenes are generally known for being filmed on a low budget, with the dialogue and quality of acting often being rather poor.
Uncharted 2 cutscenes full#
Sometimes full games were made from these cutscenes, like the infamous Night Trap. During the early days of using disk technology (CD-ROM for example) in the 16bit consoles like the Mega Drive/Genesis Sega CD, there was a boom in this type of cutscene. On the production side, it has little to do with the development of the game on the actual ‘game’ part of the production.
Uncharted 2 cutscenes tv#
In that sense, they are not that much different from any film or TV show you watch. Unlike the other types ofĪ screenshot from the FMV game Night Trap.Ĭutscenes, the live action ones are just recorded film. I’ll discuss Live Action first, since with the continuing growth of graphics, cutscenes being filmed with a physical cast is becoming a rarity. Dark Souls is a recent example of a modern game that does this. You can provide a perfectly good narritive without resorting to cutscenes as all pre CD based games often did. It’s worth nothing that cutscenes aren’t important to narritive, being more of a cinematic tool. We’ll look at the pros and cons of each, and I’ll also discuss how they can best be used–or not, in some cases. You can group cutscenes into three categories Live Action, Pre-Rendered and Real Time. Real time cutscenes have, however, evolved more from the evolving technology of games consoles, not the storage based media of the game itself since they are shown in real time and are sometimes interactive. Final Fantasy VII onwards show great examples of pre rendered cutscenes, while the Uncharted games demonstrate real time cutscenes used effectively. Other games took the route of pre-rendered or real time cutscenes. But this was fine, because it’s not like we expected much from shooting anything that wasn’t you, or rescuing the kidnapped Princesses from monkeys, right?ĭisk based media obviously had the biggest impact on cutscenes with some games going the live action route–often with poor production values, but sometimes becoming popular for that very reason alone. The EvolutionĬutscenes in their most basic form since the mid 70s were nothing more than a little character being moved across the screen and some text displaying the story. Sounds impressive right? While all this has taken place in the short time frame of just a few decades, with each generation taking a giant leap in one form or another, cut scenes have perhaps taken the biggest leap in an even shorter period of time. The evolution of video games is quite amazing in itself when compared to the evolution of other industries, if you consider that we’ve gone from text adventures, all the way up to the HD systems we use today. Over the decades, the use of cutscenes has expanded from simple on screen text, to full animated movies with production budgets that can rival films.īut what really goes into making a cutscene? How much time does it take to develop the cutscenes in a game? How are they integrated? How has their use evolved over the years? Let’s take a closer look at the world of cinematic animation in video games. They’re prominently featured in video games these days. Cutscenes, also known as full motion videos or interactive events, are some of the most important parts of storytelling in video games.