Re-playing Resident Evil 4 recently, it's easy to see why the game was so widely-acclaimed. For one, it revolutionized third person shooters. In fact, that genre wouldn't exist without the 4th entry in Capcom's zombie-killing simulator. That facet of the game may not hold up today. The stop-and-shoot mechanic plays a bit stiff and awkward compared to Gears of War, but it's still manageable. However, one aspect that still clearly comes through is its atmosphere. Resident Evil 4 takes place in some imagined, backwoods corner of Europe, full of crumbling houses, rotting vegetation, and dense fog. For the first few sections, the game has some subtlety in that it's creepy and nerve-wracking without being chock-full of jump scares and gore scenes. There's a fantastic sequence early on where the player is required to backtrack, except it's now night and enemies can only be seen when lightning strikes. Tension is built through hearing the moaned mutterings of the zombies, getting a vague sense of where they are, and trying to carefully walk around until they are revealed.
Eventually that mood is left behind when the things go over the top and giant, slimy, tentacly Cthulu-beings start popping out of people's head, which makes for a great surprise the first time happens and feels a bit silly long before the 10th time. However, that's not the problem I want to discuss.
Mood can be difficult to dissect. Its creation is often due to the imperceptible combination of multiple elements. I know one thing about Resident Evil 4's mood for certain though, that it is totally annihilated whenever the game moves into a cutscene. RE4's cutscenes are full of awful, expository dialogue delivered in the worst, most cliche manner. I swear 30 minutes into the game, I'd heard "the president's daughter" repeated grimly about 50 times. And you know what the worst about the cutscenes are? Most of the time they are completely unnecessary. Any information or background they provide can be gleaned from exploring the environment.
This gets into my general annoyance with game cutscenes. They yank you out of the experience of playing the game. The medium specificity of video games is that they can be directly interacted with. Cutscenes take that away and ape the language of cinema, which brings up unfavorable comparisons as most games don't use cutscenes in an aesthetically interesting way compared to film. Cutscenes can also cause a battle between the forced narrative and the narrative created by the player's actions (there's term for this called ludonarrative dissonance, see GTA IV and Bioshock: Infinite for examples).
I don't think this problem has been "solved." While games don't necessarily need a complex story to be engaging, it's nice when it's attempted and cutscenes are the easiest, if not necessarily the best, way to do so. I do wish more games would experiment with storytelling methods though. The Half-Life series never stops for cutscenes. The player's movement is simply restricted for a short amount of time while other characters speak. Also, a lot of extra world-building is done through background detail. Thomas Was Alone and Bastion both use constant voiceover narration to relay the story without stopping gameplay.
This gets into my general annoyance with game cutscenes. They yank you out of the experience of playing the game. The medium specificity of video games is that they can be directly interacted with. Cutscenes take that away and ape the language of cinema, which brings up unfavorable comparisons as most games don't use cutscenes in an aesthetically interesting way compared to film. Cutscenes can also cause a battle between the forced narrative and the narrative created by the player's actions (there's term for this called ludonarrative dissonance, see GTA IV and Bioshock: Infinite for examples).
I don't think this problem has been "solved." While games don't necessarily need a complex story to be engaging, it's nice when it's attempted and cutscenes are the easiest, if not necessarily the best, way to do so. I do wish more games would experiment with storytelling methods though. The Half-Life series never stops for cutscenes. The player's movement is simply restricted for a short amount of time while other characters speak. Also, a lot of extra world-building is done through background detail. Thomas Was Alone and Bastion both use constant voiceover narration to relay the story without stopping gameplay.
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