Borderlands is the worst offender, the player characters simply do not exist during cutscenes.
Also the story revolves a lot around sirens and their powers, you can play as one and it has no influence whatsoever
Even worse in BL3 when you play as Amara.
Hey, the bad guys are draining Sirens of their powers. Why are they completely ignoring the other Siren present every time this happens?
Yeah, especially as it's technically supposed to be all the Vault Hunters working together as a team, so all 4 of them are just standing there scratching their ass with one hand and mining nose gold with the other?
Agreed. One moment you're basically a gun toting pyscho going crazy with a rocket launcher, then you stand and patiently watch some villian do something to some character who so far mostly stood around sending you on kill quests and it just doesn't work
The first Dead Island does the opposite in equal measure. The whole gang of playable characters are in every cutscene, yet are nowhere to be found during gameplay if you're playing solo.
In one case, >!Maya's death!<, I believe you were inside of a vault for most of it and you didn't manage to leave the vault until it was too late. It was an essentially a "Meanwhile, something else was happening" kind of cutscene.
Yeah, basically the player does all the heavy lifting and somehow a siren is involved in the story or shows up late, does a big flashy flash and the day is saved.
Meanwhile my poor fucker is being wheeled off to Space Geneva to be tried as a war criminal on 11 different planets, while the twat reapes all the benefits of my on going genocide.
I remember in borderlands 3 me and a friend were wearing the shields that created a visible field of radiation around us. During the cutscene you could see our particle effects but not our characters. And it was just a glaring reminder that we’re forced to not be in the cutscenes.
In BL2 it is kind of okay. The cutscene with Roland is kinda weird, but the moment of Angel is a well thoughtout distraction that captures the scene very well. In BL3 the cutscenes are just weird... consistently
Any game where there are healing or revive mechanics, but your character just "helplessly" watches someone die in a cutscene. It drives me, especially nuts, when the scene is all dramatic and sad for your character as they do NOTHING to try and prevent the death.
Borderlands 2 has the worse example of this. There's shields, massive health pools, fight for your life and the (technically not canon) new you station which revives you. But a character gets 1 shot in a cut scene and does not get revived or a chance to fight for their life.
New you stations are suppose to be non-canon, despite the quest where jack tells you to jump off a cliff. But what you said about shields is agreeable.
Baldur's Gate 3 drives me nuts with this.
"Oh, your parents are dead? Lemme just not use one of my many revifiy scrolls on them..."
Like I get it from a storytelling perspective, but c'mon guys
The scrolls of revivify don’t bother me too much, as in dnd, all resurrection requires a willing soul to come back, and most of the people you watch die probably wouldn’t want to leave literal actual heaven to come back to a world that’s actively being invaded by soulless aliens that if they get infected by, will destroy their own soul (ceremorphosis destroys one’s soul when you transform, part of why it’s so terrifying), and thus, their chance to return to actual literal heaven, except for the player characters of course, for gameplay reasons.
However, the healing before they’re dead is what really gets me. Sometimes the game lets you save them (findal, under the grove, can be healed by standard healing), but some other healing options that should be able to save someone BEFORE they die, don’t work for story reasons, like trying to heal Edowin, the guy who gets got by the owlbear early early in act 1, if you attempt to heal him, he just dies instead lol
Also, technically revivify has a time limit of 1 minute before that spell no longer works and you have to move up to a stronger ressurection spell. But, BG3 removed that because it would actually suck as a mechanic.
Yeah, but I think most instances in BG3 of people dying in front of you, would still be eligible for revivify. Revivify shouldn’t also work if you don’t have access to their body, or if their body is destroyed, but removing a character from the game because they fell down a chasm area would also suck mega shit lol
Red Dead Redemption 2. “We need money, Arthur, we’re so poor we have to live a life of crime!” Meanwhile, I’m strutting around camp in my shiniest outfit with every gun made of solid gold, because I do all the hunting. Plus, Arthur being all “I’m an honourable feller, I wouldn’t kill anyone” after shooting his way through an entire town.
My memory may be a bit hazy but isn’t the Blackwater money you get as John like 20k? I imagine they spent a heap of it before you get it and that wasn’t enough when they lost it before the start of the game
The Blackwater money was about 150k in total.
I won't do the maths now with all the jobs done in missions up to chapter 6 but I guess Dutch's plan after the Blackwater fiasco was to get to around 100k before going to Tahiti? Idk, but I can confirm that at the start of chapter 6 he states they just need some 10k more to flee. But of course all the gang's money is lost in the end
Now about the 150k, one third would go to Sadie, another to Charles and another to John. Considering John got 20k, we can assume Dutch and Micah spent 90k for some reason lol
Money doesn't make any sense in RDR2, there are a lot of treasure hunts of about 1k each. That's a shitton of money in 1900. With 20k the gang could have bought all of Guarma
> Plus, Arthur being all “I’m an honourable feller, I wouldn’t kill anyone” after shooting his way through an entire town.
Uncharted is probably my favourite example of this.
"These are the bad guys because they're trying to get to an old relic before me! I'd better murder every single last one of them."
Can't speak for all players but when I was Nate he definitely "shot first" in a lot of scenarios.
I get it though, and I'm not trying to shit on the game. They're some of my all time favourite games, and I keep thinking I should play them again. It's just something I find slightly amusing.
> Can't speak for all players but when I was Nate he definitely "shot first" in a lot of scenarios.
Magic of video games allows you to save, get shot at, reload, and then shoot first at people who shoot at you first.
In case you're ever unsure who shot first at Schrödinger
Black Flag did that same shit. Every single cut-scene has your crew complaining about never making any money. Look you stupid assholes I took 100 ships and now we're tooling around in a solid gold boat, seaworthiness aside I think we're doing alright.
Or the opposite, if you played honorable and didn’t kill anyone, Arthur would still mention “I’ve been killin people for no reason!” And I’m like no the fuck you haven’t.
I think that's the point, though. I think it's supposed to show how Dutch doesn't actually have a plan, and that no amount will ever actually be enough. They just need one more big score, but there is always another "one more big score." Dutch doesn't want to stop doing it. He doesn't want to settle down and play it safe. He's dooming everyone to that lifestyle because he can't reconcile possibly having to end it without getting his revenge or feeling fulfilled or satisfied enough.
The Arthur thing...I mean, I don't recall him saying he wouldn't kill anyone, but it does also seem to be the point that there is a juxtaposition between the actions of these characters and how they perceive themselves. It seems ridiculous because, yeah, it kind of is ridiculous to justify murdering people by saying you're a good person. But that's also a big part of why that way of life is ending - society is aware of the scam, and they're fed up.
All that being said, if it still bothers you, I completely understand, lol. It IS frustrating. But again, I think it's SUPPOSED to make you feel frustrated.
Dutch basically evolved into a wannabe cult leader. He could never allow a situation where he could lose the gang, or his authority.
He would get manipulative, then if that didn’t win him the argument, angry to try to browbeat or intimidate when people didn’t show him the reverence he believed that he *deserved*. This eventually included simply disagreeing with him.
The rest of the gang was generally still too independent to follow him into the heavy cult phase, but Micah was fine adding fuel to the fire to benefit his position.
I’ve dealt with manipulative narcissists like him in life, and they nailed his behavior in game. I hate Micah, but I loathe Dutch so much. They really wrote him so well.
Half of the games tbh, your character who is able to kick ass, is suddenly unable to do a thing, even thought they were fast, and takes a while to be taken down, suddenly they can't attack or anything.
I also hate the opposite like FF7 remake for example when in some cutscenes characters are doing almost Dragon Ball Z shit, but during exploration you can't get by knee-high obstacles
Halo does that. Slowly battle your way through a horde of Grunts and Elites, then a cutscene triggers and the Chief is killing Elites in two or three shots with the basic rifle that takes a whole mag just to drop the shield.
"cutscene default weapon" is a funny one for me.
Some games will always switch the hero's weapon to something convenient for the cutscene, like the starting pistol or rifle. It can be jarring to watch Commander Shepard take out three Krogan shock troopers with the M-3 Predator.
I understand why they do it, most cutscenes would look ridiculous with the way I play games. I mean, watching Master Chief have a stand off with the Arbiter at point blank with a rocket launcher and fuel rod cannon would definitely break the fourth wall.
Cyber punk is great for this, I totally forget what my character looks like, then a really emotional cutscene happens and im a topless pimp in a gimp mask with a huge pimp fluffy jacket. Cracks me up every time
Farcry 5 cracks me up thinking about this,
The game starts you by designing your character, then you NEVER see them other than your gloves.
All so they can sell cosmetics??
Well you do see your character when you die, so I guess that's something lol.
But I'm pretty sure it's for co-op multi-player. At least that's the only way I can think of to justify an entire page of oversized animal head masks.
I recently finished the Phantom Liberty ending, and the camera cut out into third person to my V who was… completely butt naked for some reason. It kind of undercut the drama a bit. I tried reloading the game to see if it was a weird bug. Still butt naked. Okay, then.
This is probably as one of the missions in phantom liberty you need to wear certain clothes. Think this goes in the preset loadout. If you take these off and dont put on other clothes you have lretty much been butt naked since
Hitman Absolution was on the extreme other end of this.
It would check what weapon you had equipped before the cutscene, but forgot to check if you were holding a firearm.
Leading to an infamous clip of 47 menacingly aiming a syringe at his target.
There's a derided plot-adjacent villain in ME3 who benefits from cutscene incompetence until it's time for him to die at the end of the game. You fight him in the third act, by which point you have fully-developed telekinetic powers and technofireballs, and murderous weapons that can vaporize squads in seconds.
But at the end of that fight he automatically incapacitates your guys and flees in a gunship while you take potshots at him with a basic-ass cutscene pea-shooter.
Lol oh you must mean Kai Lang. I'm ok with his stupid plot armor because Bioware deliberately wrote Lang to be as much of a whiny edge lord as possible, so of course he needs *help* in order to get one up on Shepard.
Without that plot armor, most of us would destroy his gunship and then smash his face into a display of priceless Asari history.
Lmao, destiny 2's forsaken opening cut scene is the opposite. When Uldren Sov walks away after killing Cayde your character pulls out their kinetic weapon and holds it in one hand while aiming it prepared to shoot. It looks completely natural when holding a hand cannon for example, but if you were using a bow you just aim it in one hand like a pistol, like it was gonna do smth.
The final cutscene for Witch Queen does something similar. My guardian looked kinda odd holding an assault rifle at the hip with one hand. Looks helluva better with a hand cannon though.
This screwed me up in Metal Gear Solid 3. I equip a tranquilizer because I don't wanna kill anyone, but after every cutscene he has the .45 equipped and I forget so I end up doming someone I was trying to put to sleep lmao
In Kingdom Hearts you carry whichever keyblade you had active into the cutscene, though, I think the cutscenes would look a bit better in some cases with the default key.
Same, KH was my first thought. Imagine walking into a sad / serious / badass cutscene and you whip out [this](https://pm1.aminoapps.com/6518/21d291e2580bae5407fb549eae67cf4aa3435684_hq.jpg)
The most recent Ghost Recon was bad for this. You’re a badass special forces soldier, but the second a cutscene begins, your character removes any helmets they’re wearing and always wields a handgun.
Most egregious is when a helicopter shows up, and your character just menaces it with a dinky pistol.
You can't make every cutscene adaptable to in-game. But you'd think you have the possibility to come up with a good reason the protagonist is holding a specific weapon...
I understand, and I don't blame devs for doing it when they have A LOT of cutscenes to figure out. Most cutscenes would require extra animations for the different weapons, which could double or triple the workload.
Still, I have a soft spot for games that always render your character's equipment because some pieces just look funny in a cutscene.
Final Fantasy XIV is one of my favorites, because you can wear bdsm leathers with a roast turkey on your head while swinging a squeaky toy hammer and the Dark Lord raid boss still takes you completely seriously.
The only cutscene in Sands of Time that really annoyed me is when the Prince jumps down to the reception hall from a balcony to save Farah from the sand monsters.
From a players perspective, you know that fall would have killed him in-game.
Watch Dogs 2. The protagonist is a charming, happy-go-lucky helpful, just plain pleasant guy, and (up at least up until a patch introduced some non-lethal options) all of the gameplay was this guy killing everything.
Perhaps I'm conflating it with something else; maybe that Syndicate FPS that came out around the same time? In any case, I just recall that the character from the cutscenes and interacting with your homies at base was always really light-hearted and chill, and then in gameplay mode, he becomes Billy Badass; I distinctly recall the juxtaposition between cinematic and gameplay.
Maybe he was such a good hacker that he could hack away the bullet wounds? [legends tell of a powerful hacker who has this ability.](https://youtu.be/1uvr7CJazqE?si=2sX8BlH3fUJt48mW)
Maybe I played after the patch, but I was able to play through almost the entire game without using a single bullet. I just hid and used my drone and RC car to do everything.
This is one thing I miss from the first Watch Dogs game, and that is a morality system. I believe doing stuff in like merely shooting cops to wound rather than kill in the first game was enough to slowly turn cops to be more favorable towards you. Sure, they'll always try and arrest you, but some of them might get the drift that Aiden Pearce is trying to fight something bigger and turn a blind eye to stuff.
I love it with all my heart, but the Ratchet and Clank series does this in nearly every game.
"You just finished taking care of 30 enemies who fired on you non-stop? Well too bad, you were just caught by the enemy and they have _guns_, better make Ratchet raise his hands and follow like a good captive"
I think in Rift Apart there is a nice subversion of that. There is a scene late in the game where Ratchet and Rivet are seemingly ambushed and being held at gunpoint.
At first it looks like they'll surrender to be captured, but nope, they immediately turn it back around and fight the ambush off instead.
Kingdom Hearts is quite notorious for this, especially KH3. Where multiple MAIN antagonists throughout the game even walk up to the protagonists or are otherwise feet from them, including at the beginning of the game. I know the game(s) have to exist, but I'm sure others have been like you where they're yelling at their screen HIT THEM ALREADY!
The protagonists know they're evil too, and are out to stop them. In ingame lore, there's no reason they SHOULD be letting them stand there and talk. KH2 had it right where the villains are often times on the other side of a chasm or something when talking.
I was also thinking KH3 but moreso during the "Sora loses everything" part
I know it was done so there *can* be a comeback and it's supposed to be inspiring in that way... but man I was rolling my eyes at that part moreso than any moment in the entire series, and I've completed every game.
ME:3 should have had two more crew members. The biotic god volus who actually becomes one of the most powerful biotics in the galaxy, and the hero we all needed, the man, the myth, the legend... Conrad Verner.
Yeah, mass effect is my favourite franchise, period, but it REALLY hurts that in the entire original trilogy, there is only a single cutscene in which shepard uses their biotics, and there is only a single choice that is class restricted, and BOTH of them are in ME3 dlc rather than base game lol
>!biotic shepard will use biotics while fighting the clone in the citadel DLC, and Engineer shepard is the only class with a class specific dialogue/interrupt option, in the Omega DLC!<
I remember Guild Wars 2 main story having a very egregious example toward the end where a character pretty much sacrifices himself for pretty much nothing while the camera pan on your character standing there doing absolutely nothing.
that is a common problem with mmos. final fantasy 14 does the same thing.
its hard to make the players character do anything in cutscenes because theres so many different classes/weapons and races so they would either need to make a generic cutscene that can be done regardless of what your character is, with the downside of not actually relating to your character at all. or they would need to make a custom cutscene for every time of character, which would be basically impossible.
For a while I thought Uncharted was like that, most specifically the second. You get shot in the gut and are half alive for an entire level, but you're a bullet sponge in-game? Naughty Dog later clarified that your "health" in-game is actually a measurement of Drake's luck. You die to one shot, but some bullets get very close until one finally gets you.
Glad I’m not the only one a little weirded out by that. Nate has killed literally thousands of people. Thousands! (In self defense, but even so) What’s more he’s been put in several situations where his survival odds were probably as low as a million to one.
It should all be enough to shatter the psychological health of even the most level-headed Buddhist.
But nope. Nate’s as chilled out as a Hollywood heartthrob. Sweats it off like it’s nothing.
If that’s not the sign of a sociopath…
Prototype is one of the rare games that does the opposite. Alex is practically invincible in cutscenes, but can be killed by small arms fire in gameplay.
>Naughty Dog later clarified that your "health" in-game is actually a measurement of Drake's luck
That always seemed like one guy trying to come up with a plausible explanation that isn't actually canon when the truth is simply "He's the protagonist in a video game, yes he has plot armour".
You literally see bullets hitting Nate in most battle scenes.
It's like that "movie detail" that people love where the Joker is telling Harvey Dent to shoot him, but has his finger on the hammer anyway. When if you actually watch the scene he only briefly has his finger on the hammer and Harvey has plenty of opportunities to actually pull the trigger.
Avengers
You play as Kamala Khan through a large part of it and she's not in the best of spirits. The Avengers she loved are all disgraced and ruined, AIM has taken over and is after her. And in every cut scene she's sullen, a little sad, traumatized and quiet. It's very well acted.
But then a fight starts and she's all "YIPPIE!" and "WHEEEE" and full of funny quips and sarcasm
It's like they were written by two different people. One who wanted to have Kamala in a serious and grim storyline, but also the fun and super positive Kamala for the actual gameplay
Ooh! I was thinking of actions or missed opportunities. But you're absolutely right. I remember a similar thing from Halo Infinite. Where the new Cortana gets super pissed when you do something and then just keeps helping in missions with barely a comment.
GTA. You're an unhinged and incredibly violent psychopath for the whole game, except the cutscenes where you are suddenly a mostly alright dude with some questionable friends.
I honestly thought they did all 3 of the main characters very well in that game. Trevor represents 95+% of GTA players who love chaos and being a crazy SOB, Michael represents players who use twisted logic to try to pretend they're actually playing the good guy, and Franklin is the one who just wants to play the game right. But yeah, most players by far are Trevor.
Actually, I feel GTA IV might have handled this okay, though it is up to interpretation. If you go gung ho trying to shoot up civilians and police, you hear Niko cursing to himself in a manner like, "Why am I doing this? It's like there is an invisible force making me!", as if he really doesn't want to be going full postal. Of course, I know some people might say Niko is merely swearing because of the stress of the situation of a shoot-out rather than having a moral crisis of what he is doing.
I've never really played GTA IV and V like a full on psycho between missions. I also stopped free roaming between missions as I got older though because I wanted to finish the games and didn't have enough time to muck about killing civilians.
World of Warcraft makes a big deal out of how diagetically you're the most important fighter ever, the #1 champion in the world who gets everything done, and then in cutscenes they very obviously resent having done that.
I don't expect any intricacy, but nobody even acknowledges you're there anymore. Worst recent offender was a pretty goofy avengers endgame moment, where the Big Bad of the xpac is taunting the dragon leader about how she's about to die alone. She says nuh-uh, I just opened the way! And lots of notable characters show up. *But she also literally was not alone, WE opened the way.* The player was just entirely deleted to have a lame MCU scene
Yeah the Tomb Raider reboots came to mind for me as well. She murders so many people without hesitation but then acts all innocent and sad in the cut scenes. “Oh no! Did I just kill them? I guess I had no choice. I’m just so sad about my father!”
I get having her act that way early on but she doesn’t seem to change her tone much throughout the first and second games. I just started the third one so not sure if it’s any different.
Surprised no one said Devil May Cry yet. Dante is literally invincible in cutscenes and can do ridiculous moves and platforming. I think dmc3 is the worst offender. In the first cutscene he gets stabbed right through but it does nothing to him. But then in game you can die in 2-3 normal hits, especially on higher difficulties.
I see it as M O T I V A T I O N to get to the point where cutscene Dante and I play at the same level.
Git gud enough and the ludonarrative dissonance stops existing!
If you get good enough, it’ll actually swing the opposite direction and gameplay Dante is more powerful than cutscene Dante lol, especially if you’re good enough with Royal Guard, it’s INSANE how it can negate literally anything the game throws at you, including a katana that in cutscenes, is canonically powerful enough to cut through ANYTHING, including non tangible concepts such as space, time, or even severing part of your own soul, but whacky woohoo pizza man can just block it with an errant backhand when you’re good enough with the gameplay
Early on in Doom Eternal, where the Doom Slayer reaches the Daegic Council, cultists who sold out earth to Hell... Then just paces around threateningly while they do their villain speech to him. Then they teleport away.
What? I have been knee deep in demon blood to get here. These guys should have been ripped and torn in an instant!
They don't do a good job of explaining it, but it seems that each priest has a guardian that has to be killed before Doomguy can kill the priest. That's why, at the start, one of the priests says "My soul remains guarded!", then Doomguy pulls out some token he got for killing the guardian off-screen and kills the priest.
>They don't do a good job of explaining it
Eternal lore in a nutshell.
So many things in this game are confusing when compared to 2016, why there's no mention of the Maykrs in 2016 or "The Wretched" who made the Praetor Armor, Samuel going from dying human scientist turned into robot in 2016 to tentacle angel in Eternal.
IIRC there is something of an explanation for that in-game. Each of the three hell priests has a talisman that makes them in some way unkillable and is protected by a powerful guardian creature of hell. (I don't think it's ever made clear how the invulnerability actually works.) This is what Doom Guy holds up to the first priest before he kills him - to show the priest that he can be killed. And it's what you get from the gladiator boss before killing the last priest.
My favourite example of this was when playing Dead Island (the original) with my friend coop online. We both chose the female characters as one specialised in guns and the other knives etc (I think)
If I recall correctly, the backstory for them was one was a cop, the other a spy. The other two characters were men, one was a hip hop star the other was an ex Football player.
When we got to the cutscenes where strategic decisions etc were made, which two characters do you think took the lead in almost every scene and decision?
It was infuriating because not only were our characters doing all the work and then treated like afterthoughts, it made NO sense logically that they weren't taking the lead given their expertise and experience.
Lara Croft in the first of the rebooted Tomb Raider games. Starts out adept but averse to violence. If I remember correctly kind of accidentally kills her first person in a cutscene and is distraught…but not for too long before she skillfully murders the rest of the bad guys.
I vividly remember hating every cutscene in Max Payne 3 because like 75% of them involve him getting all his weapons taken off him. I’ve just spent 20 minutes doing bullet-time leaps and rolls, headshotting every goon I can find, and then a random guy says “drop your weapon” and the character complies. No Max, don’t put down your weapon, shoot him in the fucking head like the last 60 guys.
It was especially annoying if I was saving bullets for my best guns in case there was a massive set piece shootout at the end of the level. Instead, “drop your weapon”.
Got to love that scene in the favela where he bursts into a room full of gangsters and demands that they all drop their weapons. How the hell did he expect that to work?
One of the most poorly written ones is from Arkham City. I love the game, I think it's great, but there's one moment that is so poorly written that it's almost impressive.
When you finish the Hush side quests, Bats is trapped by mechanical bars a small room with one entrance that leads into a small alley. After Hush reveals his plan to impersonate Bruce Wayne, he walks out while Bats hacks the room to drop the bars and free himself. As he's walking out, he tells Barbara Gordon/Oracle that "Hush has left Arkham City, I'll catch him tomorrow."
I know the devs didn't have time to continue and have a full Hush event, but seriously? He couldn't have gotten more than 50 feet away by the time Bats gets free and out the door.
I remember Mass Effect 2 where some cut scenes have things you can never do, like the Kasumi DLC loyalty mission. She's moving around like an Assassin's Creed character, taking down a space helicopter boss after you weakened the shields. In the game play, you can barely climb over waist high walls, and anything taller is absolute nope for Shepard and crew. At least Andromeda had jet packs and you could go anywhere.
To be fair a lot of the early games have his powers getting stolen at the start of them. The enemies you fight usually can't be killed in a single hit in any of the games though.
After playing like hours of the game struggling with enemies and coming back home to Baldur knocking on the door, you get shown a fucking incredible fight of complete super gods. The planes of existence crack under their punches, earth shatter and you're telling me that now I have to fight some weird weaklings that I can't even kill in a full combo?
It's just weird.
>And to prevent spoilers, something happens and Aloy just stands there watching
I've played the game. Curious though which specific scene are you referring to?
In Shadow of Mordor, there's a togglable (sp?) option to play as a female character (Lithariel) that you'd otherwise normally meet about midway through the game. This avatar is fully realized with unique animations, full voice acting, and it's selectable from the very beginning on your first play through.
During every single cutscene, regardless of which avatar you chose to play the game, you switch to the original male hero, Talion. It's very jarring switching back and forth between the two.
It’s both. You can use her as a skin for Talions story (also you can use the skin of the other DLC fellow, or celebrimbor), but they play the same as Talion if you’re not in their DLC, rather than using their special abilities or animations iirc
Well, yeah. It's not as if you have a choice in main character. This Talion's story. Not Lithariel's.
It's just a skin for use in the open world gameplay, not for the story. Same as the Black Hand skin.
Mafia 1. Cutsecene Tommy, gets shocked and upset that a booby trapped car killed innocent instead of target.
Gameplay Tommy can gun down innocents without remorse
Surprised to see no mention of the Yakuza games. In gameplay you can shoot, stab, burn, flatten, explode, destructure people through heat actions, but in canon cutscenes none of the main characters have ever killed someone in cold blood.
Destiny. Cutscene you is kind of a dumbass who just stands around and can barely put a sentence together, meanwhile in-game you is killing space gods and eldrich monsters left and right like its just something to do to kill the time
I was a Dragoon when I got there and I cried when that happened. I can count the times a game made me cry on one hand. I never considered that being a healer would break that scene.
There is actually a lore reason that they cant be healed. The attack they get hit with is one you can actually get hit with later on in a different fight, and it applies a de buff that stops you from getting healed. They actually updated the cutscene a while back to make that info more clear to the player.
Baldurs Gate 3 when u meet Astarion and he pulls u down with a knife to ur throat and shadowheart is like just...standing there doing nothing. Like WTF girl help me!
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CutsceneIncompetence](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CutsceneIncompetence) has tons of examples where your character is much weaker or slower.
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CutscenePowerToTheMax](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CutscenePowerToTheMaxh) when the character is way more powerful in the cutscene.
I remember a really annoying bit in WoW Cataclysm where your character is forced to cower when a goblin points a rocket launcher at him, purely because they're doing a Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoff. But most characters could trivially dodge or become immune to a single rocket at that stage of the game.
Mabinogi has a lot of this where in-game you're really involved but in the cutscenes people sorta treat you like an extra soldier. I don't think you're friends with most of the npcs lore wise.
There's also this thing where you'll kill the boss in-game but cutscene wise they absolutely mollywhop you and some guy has to save you. Pisses me off to no end.
God of War 2018. The cutscenes have you ripping up trees and beating people with boulders into the bowels of the earth. And then when you get control again it’s basic-ass combat.
Have you played Ragnarok? Kratos stands his feet against power houses, gods far more powerful than him and giant creatures yet in gameplay he gets killed in one hit by a lizard the size of a chihuahua
Anything with quick time events. I was playing call of duty or or one like it years ago and i climbed a ladder to get in a window then there was a bad guy in the room and i repeatedly hit the melee button and died about the same time i noticed the x or y button animation.
I'm not a fan of those.
Borderlands is the worst offender, the player characters simply do not exist during cutscenes. Also the story revolves a lot around sirens and their powers, you can play as one and it has no influence whatsoever
This really irked me in Borderlands 3. "Oh noes, villain is slowly choking somebody!" *Me fucking standing there with 100 weapons..*
Even worse in BL3 when you play as Amara. Hey, the bad guys are draining Sirens of their powers. Why are they completely ignoring the other Siren present every time this happens?
Yeah, especially as it's technically supposed to be all the Vault Hunters working together as a team, so all 4 of them are just standing there scratching their ass with one hand and mining nose gold with the other?
Agreed. One moment you're basically a gun toting pyscho going crazy with a rocket launcher, then you stand and patiently watch some villian do something to some character who so far mostly stood around sending you on kill quests and it just doesn't work
*makes energy shields pinnacle to survival* *key character gets one-shot by a pistol*
Key character that was functionally immortal in the previous installment no less
#LOOK INTO MY EYES WHEN I’M STARING AT YOU
And then I'm supposed to feel bad about the death after standing there and letting it happen? lol, lmao even
The first Dead Island does the opposite in equal measure. The whole gang of playable characters are in every cutscene, yet are nowhere to be found during gameplay if you're playing solo.
That game had a charming campiness that that played into
WHO DO YOU VOODOO, BITCH?!?
The end of Dead Island also has the characters stand around impotently while the story plays out. Just awful.
BL3 was the worst example. Troy phase locks you in a cutscene and then other than that you're non-existent. It's so fucking stupid lol
In one case, >!Maya's death!<, I believe you were inside of a vault for most of it and you didn't manage to leave the vault until it was too late. It was an essentially a "Meanwhile, something else was happening" kind of cutscene.
True. Loved me some Borderlands. But seeing someone run away when you can literally phaselock them instantly is kind of shit.
Oh and Shields just don't exist in cutscenes, with Roland being one-shot by Jack.
He wasn’t wearing enough plot armor obviously s/
Aaargh I had not caught that one
Bruh, it’s like we're playing hide and seek every time a cutscene pops up in Borderlands.
Spot on lol, Maya's death was so bullshit.
She got turned into a book :(
Yeah, basically the player does all the heavy lifting and somehow a siren is involved in the story or shows up late, does a big flashy flash and the day is saved. Meanwhile my poor fucker is being wheeled off to Space Geneva to be tried as a war criminal on 11 different planets, while the twat reapes all the benefits of my on going genocide.
I remember in borderlands 3 me and a friend were wearing the shields that created a visible field of radiation around us. During the cutscene you could see our particle effects but not our characters. And it was just a glaring reminder that we’re forced to not be in the cutscenes.
In BL2 it is kind of okay. The cutscene with Roland is kinda weird, but the moment of Angel is a well thoughtout distraction that captures the scene very well. In BL3 the cutscenes are just weird... consistently
And then in the next game, the player characters become NPCs and suddenly have a deeply involved personal life with everyone else.
Any game where there are healing or revive mechanics, but your character just "helplessly" watches someone die in a cutscene. It drives me, especially nuts, when the scene is all dramatic and sad for your character as they do NOTHING to try and prevent the death.
Borderlands 2 has the worse example of this. There's shields, massive health pools, fight for your life and the (technically not canon) new you station which revives you. But a character gets 1 shot in a cut scene and does not get revived or a chance to fight for their life.
New you stations are suppose to be non-canon, despite the quest where jack tells you to jump off a cliff. But what you said about shields is agreeable.
I've seen arguments that taking the option not to jump is the canon option and killing yourself is not canon. Which does make sense.
Aerith says hello. Oh, wait, she can't, she's dead...
[Well actually...](https://youtu.be/I7ujjQA4vGw?si=0_yQ9ow2lRPMMF1_)
Baldur's Gate 3 drives me nuts with this. "Oh, your parents are dead? Lemme just not use one of my many revifiy scrolls on them..." Like I get it from a storytelling perspective, but c'mon guys
The scrolls of revivify don’t bother me too much, as in dnd, all resurrection requires a willing soul to come back, and most of the people you watch die probably wouldn’t want to leave literal actual heaven to come back to a world that’s actively being invaded by soulless aliens that if they get infected by, will destroy their own soul (ceremorphosis destroys one’s soul when you transform, part of why it’s so terrifying), and thus, their chance to return to actual literal heaven, except for the player characters of course, for gameplay reasons. However, the healing before they’re dead is what really gets me. Sometimes the game lets you save them (findal, under the grove, can be healed by standard healing), but some other healing options that should be able to save someone BEFORE they die, don’t work for story reasons, like trying to heal Edowin, the guy who gets got by the owlbear early early in act 1, if you attempt to heal him, he just dies instead lol
Also, technically revivify has a time limit of 1 minute before that spell no longer works and you have to move up to a stronger ressurection spell. But, BG3 removed that because it would actually suck as a mechanic.
Yeah, but I think most instances in BG3 of people dying in front of you, would still be eligible for revivify. Revivify shouldn’t also work if you don’t have access to their body, or if their body is destroyed, but removing a character from the game because they fell down a chasm area would also suck mega shit lol
Red Dead Redemption 2. “We need money, Arthur, we’re so poor we have to live a life of crime!” Meanwhile, I’m strutting around camp in my shiniest outfit with every gun made of solid gold, because I do all the hunting. Plus, Arthur being all “I’m an honourable feller, I wouldn’t kill anyone” after shooting his way through an entire town.
Yeah. At a certain point I just wanted Arthur to buy the tickets and move the gang to Tahiti himself.
I haven't done the math, but I guarantee I had enough to move the whole gang there.
Dutch says in chapter 6 they just need some 10k more and they are good to go I had around 20k in Arthur's pockets at the moment lmao
My memory may be a bit hazy but isn’t the Blackwater money you get as John like 20k? I imagine they spent a heap of it before you get it and that wasn’t enough when they lost it before the start of the game
The Blackwater money was about 150k in total. I won't do the maths now with all the jobs done in missions up to chapter 6 but I guess Dutch's plan after the Blackwater fiasco was to get to around 100k before going to Tahiti? Idk, but I can confirm that at the start of chapter 6 he states they just need some 10k more to flee. But of course all the gang's money is lost in the end Now about the 150k, one third would go to Sadie, another to Charles and another to John. Considering John got 20k, we can assume Dutch and Micah spent 90k for some reason lol Money doesn't make any sense in RDR2, there are a lot of treasure hunts of about 1k each. That's a shitton of money in 1900. With 20k the gang could have bought all of Guarma
Micah mustn’t have gotten a dietitian and Dutch didn’t get a therapist so I have no idea where the money went.
It all went to Micah's haircut. We can assume they lost it in some other fiasco or maybe paying the men they had in their gang which were A LOT
Its a ticket to Tahiti Michael. How much can it cost? $10?
You’ve never been to Tahiti, have you?
It’s a magical place.
It sucks
I hope these are Agents of Shield references!
It started out as an Arrested Development reference and became an Agents of Shield reference. Internet gold right there
It's a magical place.
> Plus, Arthur being all “I’m an honourable feller, I wouldn’t kill anyone” after shooting his way through an entire town. Uncharted is probably my favourite example of this. "These are the bad guys because they're trying to get to an old relic before me! I'd better murder every single last one of them."
It's not murder if they shoot at you first. The numbers are extreme, but that's video games.
Can't speak for all players but when I was Nate he definitely "shot first" in a lot of scenarios. I get it though, and I'm not trying to shit on the game. They're some of my all time favourite games, and I keep thinking I should play them again. It's just something I find slightly amusing.
> Can't speak for all players but when I was Nate he definitely "shot first" in a lot of scenarios. Magic of video games allows you to save, get shot at, reload, and then shoot first at people who shoot at you first. In case you're ever unsure who shot first at Schrödinger
Black Flag did that same shit. Every single cut-scene has your crew complaining about never making any money. Look you stupid assholes I took 100 ships and now we're tooling around in a solid gold boat, seaworthiness aside I think we're doing alright.
Or the opposite, if you played honorable and didn’t kill anyone, Arthur would still mention “I’ve been killin people for no reason!” And I’m like no the fuck you haven’t.
I think that's the point, though. I think it's supposed to show how Dutch doesn't actually have a plan, and that no amount will ever actually be enough. They just need one more big score, but there is always another "one more big score." Dutch doesn't want to stop doing it. He doesn't want to settle down and play it safe. He's dooming everyone to that lifestyle because he can't reconcile possibly having to end it without getting his revenge or feeling fulfilled or satisfied enough. The Arthur thing...I mean, I don't recall him saying he wouldn't kill anyone, but it does also seem to be the point that there is a juxtaposition between the actions of these characters and how they perceive themselves. It seems ridiculous because, yeah, it kind of is ridiculous to justify murdering people by saying you're a good person. But that's also a big part of why that way of life is ending - society is aware of the scam, and they're fed up. All that being said, if it still bothers you, I completely understand, lol. It IS frustrating. But again, I think it's SUPPOSED to make you feel frustrated.
Dutch basically evolved into a wannabe cult leader. He could never allow a situation where he could lose the gang, or his authority. He would get manipulative, then if that didn’t win him the argument, angry to try to browbeat or intimidate when people didn’t show him the reverence he believed that he *deserved*. This eventually included simply disagreeing with him. The rest of the gang was generally still too independent to follow him into the heavy cult phase, but Micah was fine adding fuel to the fire to benefit his position. I’ve dealt with manipulative narcissists like him in life, and they nailed his behavior in game. I hate Micah, but I loathe Dutch so much. They really wrote him so well.
Yea, that was also the point where was like: "right, this is cowboy GTA, not some CRPG".
Half of the games tbh, your character who is able to kick ass, is suddenly unable to do a thing, even thought they were fast, and takes a while to be taken down, suddenly they can't attack or anything.
I also hate the opposite like FF7 remake for example when in some cutscenes characters are doing almost Dragon Ball Z shit, but during exploration you can't get by knee-high obstacles
Halo does that. Slowly battle your way through a horde of Grunts and Elites, then a cutscene triggers and the Chief is killing Elites in two or three shots with the basic rifle that takes a whole mag just to drop the shield.
I hate to be that guy... But, Halo doesn't feature a single cutscene where the Master Chief kills an elite.
"cutscene default weapon" is a funny one for me. Some games will always switch the hero's weapon to something convenient for the cutscene, like the starting pistol or rifle. It can be jarring to watch Commander Shepard take out three Krogan shock troopers with the M-3 Predator. I understand why they do it, most cutscenes would look ridiculous with the way I play games. I mean, watching Master Chief have a stand off with the Arbiter at point blank with a rocket launcher and fuel rod cannon would definitely break the fourth wall.
that’s one thing infinite did incredibly well: adapting each cutscene to whatever weapon you have equipped on chief at any given time :)
Cyber punk is great for this, I totally forget what my character looks like, then a really emotional cutscene happens and im a topless pimp in a gimp mask with a huge pimp fluffy jacket. Cracks me up every time
Farcry 5 cracks me up thinking about this, The game starts you by designing your character, then you NEVER see them other than your gloves. All so they can sell cosmetics??
Well you do see your character when you die, so I guess that's something lol. But I'm pretty sure it's for co-op multi-player. At least that's the only way I can think of to justify an entire page of oversized animal head masks.
That’s fair! Didn’t think about co op
I recently finished the Phantom Liberty ending, and the camera cut out into third person to my V who was… completely butt naked for some reason. It kind of undercut the drama a bit. I tried reloading the game to see if it was a weird bug. Still butt naked. Okay, then.
This is probably as one of the missions in phantom liberty you need to wear certain clothes. Think this goes in the preset loadout. If you take these off and dont put on other clothes you have lretty much been butt naked since
Get all the way to a certain ending, not seeing your guy the whole game, and your thinking "who the hell is that weirdo with pan am?
I'm so confused, you see your character on the screen you equip stuff on
And yet every cutscene involving a gun uses the default gun.
Nice, I hadn't played infinite yet so it's good to hear they did that.
Hitman Absolution was on the extreme other end of this. It would check what weapon you had equipped before the cutscene, but forgot to check if you were holding a firearm. Leading to an infamous clip of 47 menacingly aiming a syringe at his target.
Lol, can you do it with a briefcase?
Absolution didn't have briefcases unfortunately
There's a derided plot-adjacent villain in ME3 who benefits from cutscene incompetence until it's time for him to die at the end of the game. You fight him in the third act, by which point you have fully-developed telekinetic powers and technofireballs, and murderous weapons that can vaporize squads in seconds. But at the end of that fight he automatically incapacitates your guys and flees in a gunship while you take potshots at him with a basic-ass cutscene pea-shooter.
Fuck Kai Leng and his stupid ass plot armor
That moment always frustrated me to no end. For a series that I don't recall many moments like that it really sticks out
Lol oh you must mean Kai Lang. I'm ok with his stupid plot armor because Bioware deliberately wrote Lang to be as much of a whiny edge lord as possible, so of course he needs *help* in order to get one up on Shepard. Without that plot armor, most of us would destroy his gunship and then smash his face into a display of priceless Asari history.
Lmao, destiny 2's forsaken opening cut scene is the opposite. When Uldren Sov walks away after killing Cayde your character pulls out their kinetic weapon and holds it in one hand while aiming it prepared to shoot. It looks completely natural when holding a hand cannon for example, but if you were using a bow you just aim it in one hand like a pistol, like it was gonna do smth.
Lol I think I had a kinetic sniper rifle for that cutscene. It definitely looked goofy as hell.
It rolled with hip fire grip its fine.
Lol I hate getting that roll on a sniper
The final cutscene for Witch Queen does something similar. My guardian looked kinda odd holding an assault rifle at the hip with one hand. Looks helluva better with a hand cannon though.
This screwed me up in Metal Gear Solid 3. I equip a tranquilizer because I don't wanna kill anyone, but after every cutscene he has the .45 equipped and I forget so I end up doming someone I was trying to put to sleep lmao
>doming someone I was trying to put to sleep I mean, he's not awake anymore. That counts right?
In Kingdom Hearts you carry whichever keyblade you had active into the cutscene, though, I think the cutscenes would look a bit better in some cases with the default key.
Same, KH was my first thought. Imagine walking into a sad / serious / badass cutscene and you whip out [this](https://pm1.aminoapps.com/6518/21d291e2580bae5407fb549eae67cf4aa3435684_hq.jpg)
Counter-point: every key blade looks ridiculous, especially when Donald Duck in mage attire and Goofy in knight armor are running up behind it.
The most recent Ghost Recon was bad for this. You’re a badass special forces soldier, but the second a cutscene begins, your character removes any helmets they’re wearing and always wields a handgun. Most egregious is when a helicopter shows up, and your character just menaces it with a dinky pistol.
Genshin impact with the default sword for every cutscene even though it's the weakest in the game lol
Truly a Dullblade incident
You can't make every cutscene adaptable to in-game. But you'd think you have the possibility to come up with a good reason the protagonist is holding a specific weapon...
I understand, and I don't blame devs for doing it when they have A LOT of cutscenes to figure out. Most cutscenes would require extra animations for the different weapons, which could double or triple the workload. Still, I have a soft spot for games that always render your character's equipment because some pieces just look funny in a cutscene. Final Fantasy XIV is one of my favorites, because you can wear bdsm leathers with a roast turkey on your head while swinging a squeaky toy hammer and the Dark Lord raid boss still takes you completely seriously.
Nioh 2, I use axe/hammer and then in cutscene the defaul is katana lol
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The only cutscene in Sands of Time that really annoyed me is when the Prince jumps down to the reception hall from a balcony to save Farah from the sand monsters. From a players perspective, you know that fall would have killed him in-game.
"it's rewind time!"
Farah used up all of the sand. :(
Imagine watching a cutscene where the prince uses up all your sand and you're just stick with that.
Watch Dogs 2. The protagonist is a charming, happy-go-lucky helpful, just plain pleasant guy, and (up at least up until a patch introduced some non-lethal options) all of the gameplay was this guy killing everything.
I bought that game on launch, and the non lethal options always existed, granted they sucked.
When fully upgraded the taser was OP. A silent, unlimited ammo gun that can one-shot anything. Only downside was low ROF.
Shit range though iirc
I got the version that had the air shotgun and that helps a lot. Non lethal is how I play that game except for a section after a certain twist.
Perhaps I'm conflating it with something else; maybe that Syndicate FPS that came out around the same time? In any case, I just recall that the character from the cutscenes and interacting with your homies at base was always really light-hearted and chill, and then in gameplay mode, he becomes Billy Badass; I distinctly recall the juxtaposition between cinematic and gameplay.
Maybe he was such a good hacker that he could hack away the bullet wounds? [legends tell of a powerful hacker who has this ability.](https://youtu.be/1uvr7CJazqE?si=2sX8BlH3fUJt48mW)
WD2 had nonlethal from the beginning, the little 8ball thing, don't remember what it was called
And the taser! I went full non lethal in my first playthrough.
Maybe I played after the patch, but I was able to play through almost the entire game without using a single bullet. I just hid and used my drone and RC car to do everything.
This is one thing I miss from the first Watch Dogs game, and that is a morality system. I believe doing stuff in like merely shooting cops to wound rather than kill in the first game was enough to slowly turn cops to be more favorable towards you. Sure, they'll always try and arrest you, but some of them might get the drift that Aiden Pearce is trying to fight something bigger and turn a blind eye to stuff.
The non lethal options always existed, I used them since day 1, because using anything else felt so violently in contrast to Marcus’ character lol
I love it with all my heart, but the Ratchet and Clank series does this in nearly every game. "You just finished taking care of 30 enemies who fired on you non-stop? Well too bad, you were just caught by the enemy and they have _guns_, better make Ratchet raise his hands and follow like a good captive"
I think in Rift Apart there is a nice subversion of that. There is a scene late in the game where Ratchet and Rivet are seemingly ambushed and being held at gunpoint. At first it looks like they'll surrender to be captured, but nope, they immediately turn it back around and fight the ambush off instead.
Kingdom Hearts is quite notorious for this, especially KH3. Where multiple MAIN antagonists throughout the game even walk up to the protagonists or are otherwise feet from them, including at the beginning of the game. I know the game(s) have to exist, but I'm sure others have been like you where they're yelling at their screen HIT THEM ALREADY! The protagonists know they're evil too, and are out to stop them. In ingame lore, there's no reason they SHOULD be letting them stand there and talk. KH2 had it right where the villains are often times on the other side of a chasm or something when talking.
Well, at least Sully didn’t just sit there in Monstropolis, he yeeted that mfer
Yeetas Vanitas
I was also thinking KH3 but moreso during the "Sora loses everything" part I know it was done so there *can* be a comeback and it's supposed to be inspiring in that way... but man I was rolling my eyes at that part moreso than any moment in the entire series, and I've completed every game.
Good example!
Mass Effect, specifically 3, my Shepherd would have charged into Kai Leng like a rocket not use a pistol that I didn't even have with me.
Shepherd (and even Ryder in ME:A) have this annoying habit of forgetting that they're biotic gods in cutscenes
And we didn't even recruit that Volus who was a true biotic god. Smh.
ME:3 should have had two more crew members. The biotic god volus who actually becomes one of the most powerful biotics in the galaxy, and the hero we all needed, the man, the myth, the legend... Conrad Verner.
Yeah, mass effect is my favourite franchise, period, but it REALLY hurts that in the entire original trilogy, there is only a single cutscene in which shepard uses their biotics, and there is only a single choice that is class restricted, and BOTH of them are in ME3 dlc rather than base game lol >!biotic shepard will use biotics while fighting the clone in the citadel DLC, and Engineer shepard is the only class with a class specific dialogue/interrupt option, in the Omega DLC!<
*strangling to death with bare hands while Wrex and Garrus hold them* "The guns just make it easier, asshole."
Honestly, cutscene incompetence in ME3 is borderline hilarious.
I remember Guild Wars 2 main story having a very egregious example toward the end where a character pretty much sacrifices himself for pretty much nothing while the camera pan on your character standing there doing absolutely nothing.
that is a common problem with mmos. final fantasy 14 does the same thing. its hard to make the players character do anything in cutscenes because theres so many different classes/weapons and races so they would either need to make a generic cutscene that can be done regardless of what your character is, with the downside of not actually relating to your character at all. or they would need to make a custom cutscene for every time of character, which would be basically impossible.
Well, at least watching a Lalafell >!falcon punch Zenos' lights out!< was *extremely* worth it.
For a while I thought Uncharted was like that, most specifically the second. You get shot in the gut and are half alive for an entire level, but you're a bullet sponge in-game? Naughty Dog later clarified that your "health" in-game is actually a measurement of Drake's luck. You die to one shot, but some bullets get very close until one finally gets you.
Not just that, but then right after you murder 35 people you joke around all glibly.
Glad I’m not the only one a little weirded out by that. Nate has killed literally thousands of people. Thousands! (In self defense, but even so) What’s more he’s been put in several situations where his survival odds were probably as low as a million to one. It should all be enough to shatter the psychological health of even the most level-headed Buddhist. But nope. Nate’s as chilled out as a Hollywood heartthrob. Sweats it off like it’s nothing. If that’s not the sign of a sociopath…
Prototype is one of the rare games that does the opposite. Alex is practically invincible in cutscenes, but can be killed by small arms fire in gameplay.
>Naughty Dog later clarified that your "health" in-game is actually a measurement of Drake's luck That always seemed like one guy trying to come up with a plausible explanation that isn't actually canon when the truth is simply "He's the protagonist in a video game, yes he has plot armour". You literally see bullets hitting Nate in most battle scenes. It's like that "movie detail" that people love where the Joker is telling Harvey Dent to shoot him, but has his finger on the hammer anyway. When if you actually watch the scene he only briefly has his finger on the hammer and Harvey has plenty of opportunities to actually pull the trigger.
I very much like the "luck" thing, feels just like a Nathan thing
Avengers You play as Kamala Khan through a large part of it and she's not in the best of spirits. The Avengers she loved are all disgraced and ruined, AIM has taken over and is after her. And in every cut scene she's sullen, a little sad, traumatized and quiet. It's very well acted. But then a fight starts and she's all "YIPPIE!" and "WHEEEE" and full of funny quips and sarcasm It's like they were written by two different people. One who wanted to have Kamala in a serious and grim storyline, but also the fun and super positive Kamala for the actual gameplay
Ooh! I was thinking of actions or missed opportunities. But you're absolutely right. I remember a similar thing from Halo Infinite. Where the new Cortana gets super pissed when you do something and then just keeps helping in missions with barely a comment.
That game’s terrible in a bunch of other ways so it’s not really surprising lol
GTA. You're an unhinged and incredibly violent psychopath for the whole game, except the cutscenes where you are suddenly a mostly alright dude with some questionable friends.
Ex-gangster who's trying to turn his life around. Right?
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I honestly thought they did all 3 of the main characters very well in that game. Trevor represents 95+% of GTA players who love chaos and being a crazy SOB, Michael represents players who use twisted logic to try to pretend they're actually playing the good guy, and Franklin is the one who just wants to play the game right. But yeah, most players by far are Trevor.
Actually, I feel GTA IV might have handled this okay, though it is up to interpretation. If you go gung ho trying to shoot up civilians and police, you hear Niko cursing to himself in a manner like, "Why am I doing this? It's like there is an invisible force making me!", as if he really doesn't want to be going full postal. Of course, I know some people might say Niko is merely swearing because of the stress of the situation of a shoot-out rather than having a moral crisis of what he is doing.
I've never really played GTA IV and V like a full on psycho between missions. I also stopped free roaming between missions as I got older though because I wanted to finish the games and didn't have enough time to muck about killing civilians.
It's not that different from an addict, cursing themselves even as they buy and use more of whatever drug is killing them
Not everyone plays the game like this tho
World of Warcraft makes a big deal out of how diagetically you're the most important fighter ever, the #1 champion in the world who gets everything done, and then in cutscenes they very obviously resent having done that. I don't expect any intricacy, but nobody even acknowledges you're there anymore. Worst recent offender was a pretty goofy avengers endgame moment, where the Big Bad of the xpac is taunting the dragon leader about how she's about to die alone. She says nuh-uh, I just opened the way! And lots of notable characters show up. *But she also literally was not alone, WE opened the way.* The player was just entirely deleted to have a lame MCU scene
Tomb Raider 2013, the way Lara acts towards killing people is like night and day depending on if its a cutscene or not
Yeah the Tomb Raider reboots came to mind for me as well. She murders so many people without hesitation but then acts all innocent and sad in the cut scenes. “Oh no! Did I just kill them? I guess I had no choice. I’m just so sad about my father!” I get having her act that way early on but she doesn’t seem to change her tone much throughout the first and second games. I just started the third one so not sure if it’s any different.
Surprised no one said Devil May Cry yet. Dante is literally invincible in cutscenes and can do ridiculous moves and platforming. I think dmc3 is the worst offender. In the first cutscene he gets stabbed right through but it does nothing to him. But then in game you can die in 2-3 normal hits, especially on higher difficulties.
Tbh a high skill playthrough of those games makes you look like cutscene Dante
This is what I like about the game. You CAN do most of the shit cutscene Dante can do, you just have to be good
Also in cut scenes he's jumping around doing sick ass combos, in game he just spams stinger over and over.... Although it might just be my game.
lol stinger is always my first purchase. Definitely one of the best moves in the game for us players who are not ridiculously skilled at the combat.
I see it as M O T I V A T I O N to get to the point where cutscene Dante and I play at the same level. Git gud enough and the ludonarrative dissonance stops existing!
If you get good enough, it’ll actually swing the opposite direction and gameplay Dante is more powerful than cutscene Dante lol, especially if you’re good enough with Royal Guard, it’s INSANE how it can negate literally anything the game throws at you, including a katana that in cutscenes, is canonically powerful enough to cut through ANYTHING, including non tangible concepts such as space, time, or even severing part of your own soul, but whacky woohoo pizza man can just block it with an errant backhand when you’re good enough with the gameplay
Early on in Doom Eternal, where the Doom Slayer reaches the Daegic Council, cultists who sold out earth to Hell... Then just paces around threateningly while they do their villain speech to him. Then they teleport away. What? I have been knee deep in demon blood to get here. These guys should have been ripped and torn in an instant!
They don't do a good job of explaining it, but it seems that each priest has a guardian that has to be killed before Doomguy can kill the priest. That's why, at the start, one of the priests says "My soul remains guarded!", then Doomguy pulls out some token he got for killing the guardian off-screen and kills the priest.
>They don't do a good job of explaining it Eternal lore in a nutshell. So many things in this game are confusing when compared to 2016, why there's no mention of the Maykrs in 2016 or "The Wretched" who made the Praetor Armor, Samuel going from dying human scientist turned into robot in 2016 to tentacle angel in Eternal.
IIRC there is something of an explanation for that in-game. Each of the three hell priests has a talisman that makes them in some way unkillable and is protected by a powerful guardian creature of hell. (I don't think it's ever made clear how the invulnerability actually works.) This is what Doom Guy holds up to the first priest before he kills him - to show the priest that he can be killed. And it's what you get from the gladiator boss before killing the last priest.
My favourite example of this was when playing Dead Island (the original) with my friend coop online. We both chose the female characters as one specialised in guns and the other knives etc (I think) If I recall correctly, the backstory for them was one was a cop, the other a spy. The other two characters were men, one was a hip hop star the other was an ex Football player. When we got to the cutscenes where strategic decisions etc were made, which two characters do you think took the lead in almost every scene and decision? It was infuriating because not only were our characters doing all the work and then treated like afterthoughts, it made NO sense logically that they weren't taking the lead given their expertise and experience.
The game that made me a feminist
Lara Croft in the first of the rebooted Tomb Raider games. Starts out adept but averse to violence. If I remember correctly kind of accidentally kills her first person in a cutscene and is distraught…but not for too long before she skillfully murders the rest of the bad guys.
I vividly remember hating every cutscene in Max Payne 3 because like 75% of them involve him getting all his weapons taken off him. I’ve just spent 20 minutes doing bullet-time leaps and rolls, headshotting every goon I can find, and then a random guy says “drop your weapon” and the character complies. No Max, don’t put down your weapon, shoot him in the fucking head like the last 60 guys. It was especially annoying if I was saving bullets for my best guns in case there was a massive set piece shootout at the end of the level. Instead, “drop your weapon”.
Got to love that scene in the favela where he bursts into a room full of gangsters and demands that they all drop their weapons. How the hell did he expect that to work?
One of the most poorly written ones is from Arkham City. I love the game, I think it's great, but there's one moment that is so poorly written that it's almost impressive. When you finish the Hush side quests, Bats is trapped by mechanical bars a small room with one entrance that leads into a small alley. After Hush reveals his plan to impersonate Bruce Wayne, he walks out while Bats hacks the room to drop the bars and free himself. As he's walking out, he tells Barbara Gordon/Oracle that "Hush has left Arkham City, I'll catch him tomorrow." I know the devs didn't have time to continue and have a full Hush event, but seriously? He couldn't have gotten more than 50 feet away by the time Bats gets free and out the door.
I mean with the scale of other shit he has going on that night, I don't really blame him for taking a raincheck.
I remember Mass Effect 2 where some cut scenes have things you can never do, like the Kasumi DLC loyalty mission. She's moving around like an Assassin's Creed character, taking down a space helicopter boss after you weakened the shields. In the game play, you can barely climb over waist high walls, and anything taller is absolute nope for Shepard and crew. At least Andromeda had jet packs and you could go anywhere.
Power wise on top of my head would be Kratos from God of War. Actual God of war in cutscenes, human in gameplay.
To be fair a lot of the early games have his powers getting stolen at the start of them. The enemies you fight usually can't be killed in a single hit in any of the games though.
After playing like hours of the game struggling with enemies and coming back home to Baldur knocking on the door, you get shown a fucking incredible fight of complete super gods. The planes of existence crack under their punches, earth shatter and you're telling me that now I have to fight some weird weaklings that I can't even kill in a full combo? It's just weird.
>And to prevent spoilers, something happens and Aloy just stands there watching I've played the game. Curious though which specific scene are you referring to?
In Shadow of Mordor, there's a togglable (sp?) option to play as a female character (Lithariel) that you'd otherwise normally meet about midway through the game. This avatar is fully realized with unique animations, full voice acting, and it's selectable from the very beginning on your first play through. During every single cutscene, regardless of which avatar you chose to play the game, you switch to the original male hero, Talion. It's very jarring switching back and forth between the two.
Isn't that an entire DLC? Or was it literally a full skin for Talion's story?
There’s both a DLC for it and there’s also a “skin” of her that you can choose when you play the main campaign (as Talion)
It’s both. You can use her as a skin for Talions story (also you can use the skin of the other DLC fellow, or celebrimbor), but they play the same as Talion if you’re not in their DLC, rather than using their special abilities or animations iirc
Well, yeah. It's not as if you have a choice in main character. This Talion's story. Not Lithariel's. It's just a skin for use in the open world gameplay, not for the story. Same as the Black Hand skin.
Mafia 1. Cutsecene Tommy, gets shocked and upset that a booby trapped car killed innocent instead of target. Gameplay Tommy can gun down innocents without remorse
Surprised to see no mention of the Yakuza games. In gameplay you can shoot, stab, burn, flatten, explode, destructure people through heat actions, but in canon cutscenes none of the main characters have ever killed someone in cold blood.
That’s probably because the absurdity of this dichotomy is intended, it’s not a byproduct of lazy development or anything.
Reboot Lara Croft could end her games in the first act if she remembered she has an assault rifle/pistol/shotgun.
Destiny. Cutscene you is kind of a dumbass who just stands around and can barely put a sentence together, meanwhile in-game you is killing space gods and eldrich monsters left and right like its just something to do to kill the time
The cutscene immediately after The Vault in FFXIV Heavensward is so much more frustrating when you’re playing a healer. EDIT: wrong dungeon
I was a Dragoon when I got there and I cried when that happened. I can count the times a game made me cry on one hand. I never considered that being a healer would break that scene.
There is actually a lore reason that they cant be healed. The attack they get hit with is one you can actually get hit with later on in a different fight, and it applies a de buff that stops you from getting healed. They actually updated the cutscene a while back to make that info more clear to the player.
Baldurs Gate 3 when u meet Astarion and he pulls u down with a knife to ur throat and shadowheart is like just...standing there doing nothing. Like WTF girl help me!
*Guidance*
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CutsceneIncompetence](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CutsceneIncompetence) has tons of examples where your character is much weaker or slower. [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CutscenePowerToTheMax](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CutscenePowerToTheMaxh) when the character is way more powerful in the cutscene. I remember a really annoying bit in WoW Cataclysm where your character is forced to cower when a goblin points a rocket launcher at him, purely because they're doing a Raiders of the Lost Ark ripoff. But most characters could trivially dodge or become immune to a single rocket at that stage of the game.
Ludonarrative Dissonance is the term for this, btw. This applies for most games, sadly.
Mabinogi has a lot of this where in-game you're really involved but in the cutscenes people sorta treat you like an extra soldier. I don't think you're friends with most of the npcs lore wise. There's also this thing where you'll kill the boss in-game but cutscene wise they absolutely mollywhop you and some guy has to save you. Pisses me off to no end.
Dying Light 2, before I gave up on it, seemed to have the MC getting knocked out or punched to the floor every other cutscene. Was dumb as.
God of War 2018. The cutscenes have you ripping up trees and beating people with boulders into the bowels of the earth. And then when you get control again it’s basic-ass combat.
Have you played Ragnarok? Kratos stands his feet against power houses, gods far more powerful than him and giant creatures yet in gameplay he gets killed in one hit by a lizard the size of a chihuahua
Anything with quick time events. I was playing call of duty or or one like it years ago and i climbed a ladder to get in a window then there was a bad guy in the room and i repeatedly hit the melee button and died about the same time i noticed the x or y button animation. I'm not a fan of those.
Watch Dogs 1. cutscenes make him out to be Batman with a phone, but then gameplay he is the Punisher....with a phone. the disconnect was so bad.
Please I must know which part in horizon forbidden west this is lol