Unskippable

You stand your game character suddenly still. You can sense something big is about to happen, some culmination of the efforts that have gotten you this far. You know the way it works. You know there’s a boss fight just around the corner. Maybe it’s intuition. Maybe it’s experience. Maybe it’s that viscera-strewn room you’re about to enter. You can’t be sure how you know, but somehow you do know.

A moment of delicious exposition occurs on meeting your nemesis. You enjoy it whilst you mentally prepare yourself for battle. The scene runs its course all the way to its satisfying end.

You fight. You die. You reload.

Now, the last thing the player is going to want at this point is a repeated sitting of the scene they watched not five minutes ago before being able to reengage battle. It doesn’t matter how sweet the preceding exposition was, how beautifully it was delivered, or how graphically-perfect it appeared, the player is only going to look upon it as an annoying barrier to the rest of the game. This is particularly true with challenging boss fights; I have sat through the same cutscene more than 15 times over in the past. It’s a persistent and horribly deflating issue for gamers. It’s a total deal breaker.

This practice is such unbelievably poor form on the part of the designer that people flat-out refuse to believe that they’ve fallen victim to it, much like when you repeatedly search the fruit bowl for your car keys in the hope that you missed looking behind one of the mouldy grapes occupying it. During these cutscenes, people find themselves engaged in this ludicrous finger-straining controller-fingering exercise in a bid to discover a ‘skip scene’ button combo that simply doesn’t exist. Frustration eventually overcomes motivation. The towel is thrown in, the controller is thrown at the standard appliance of choice and, ultimately, Guitar Hero is thrown on.

Anyone who plays third-person action games will have experienced this at one time or another. For me, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed was a killer. Who would have thought that a game so centred on random and pointless button-mashing would forgo the practice in areas that might actually benefit from it?

Unskippable scenes of dialogue count, too, something that Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Boss Fight Introduction demonstrates perfectly. The fantastically engaging Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is yet another offender, proving that this issue cannot simply be attributed to sloppy game design.

Moving forward, I hear Mass Effect features the unskippable. Tomb Raider: Underworld did, also. Unfortunately, BioShock, a game that attempts to overcome the issues associated with using cutscenes as a form of narrative delivery, places itself in this category to some degree. Because significant story events are integrated into the gameplay, there’s no grounds to skip the action. I found this was a bit of a problem with BioShock 2, although not a great one.

Anyone know why there are still occurrences of this practice in modern games? Anyone want to stage their rage?*

*Note: The author would like it known that her next blog will be upbeat, pleasant, even jovial and will encourage only a minimal amount of rage-staging.