Please make cut scenes skipable

guyhumual

I know this has been suggested before, I know Cryptic has said that there's stuff going on behind the scenes of some of these cut scenes, but excessively long cut scenes should be skipable after a certain amount of time. If you need time to place characters, change setting, and ride out stacks on forms then make that much of a cut scene mandatory but don't make us sit through something we've seen dozens of times. Ideally you should adopt a system similar to other MMOs where you need everyone to agree on skipping the cut scene for the team to jump back into the action, but we should be able to avoid long and redundant cinematics if we've seen the scene before.

morigosa

As a stop-gap, get an editor to take a look at your cut scenes.

For example, in the current Nighthawk alert, you could cut out all of Stone's speech between when he says "Give what up?" and Nighthawk's reply of "I have all the evidence I need to bring my case to the police", and the cutscene would be better for it. (There's more that - in an ideal world - should be cut out, of course, but that's the easiest section to clean up without having to re-do any of the voice work.)

For another example, the Hi Pan alert, with its three cutscenes - drop the second one entirely; it doesn't add anything.

Forum Malvanum, with its parade of cutscenes - keep the existing voice work, but replace every cutscene that's not introducing a named opponent with just the announcer talking in the background, similar to how Warlord speaks up at the start of his special alert.

And so on and so forth.

aesica

morigosa said:

Forum Malvanum, with its parade of cutscenes - keep the existing voice work, but replace every cutscene that's not introducing a named opponent with just the announcer talking in the background, similar to how Warlord speaks up at the start of his special alert.

Or better yet, just use the voiceovers while the action happens for everything in every alert, except maybe in rare cases when a BRIEF cutscene has a lot to offer. This is how WoW handles it in most cases, and their dungeons (alerts) flow smoothly without interrupting gameplay every few seconds.

Oh and while we're talking about cutscene annoyances....

PLEASE fix the bug that constantly brute-forces the cursor to the middle of the screen when CO doesn't have focus.

mithrosnomore

morigosa said:

As a stop-gap, get an editor to take a look at your cut scenes.

For example, in the current Nighthawk alert, you could cut out all of Stone's speech between when he says "Give what up?" and Nighthawk's reply of "I have all the evidence I need to bring my case to the police", and the cutscene would be better for it. (There's more that - in an ideal world - should be cut out, of course, but that's the easiest section to clean up without having to re-do any of the voice work.)

For another example, the Hi Pan alert, with its three cutscenes - drop the second one entirely; it doesn't add anything.

Forum Malvanum, with its parade of cutscenes - keep the existing voice work, but replace every cutscene that's not introducing a named opponent with just the announcer talking in the background, similar to how Warlord speaks up at the start of his special alert.

And so on and so forth.

This.

Forum Malvanum is not made better by the constant cut-scenes. If they have to have something then make it as brief as possible, even if just a voice introducing each foe, like at the beginning of grabs, bursts, and smashes saying the name of the villain, only this would say "Gadroon" or "Gladiators" or "Ironclad and Duratok" or whatever and show a quick picture of the enemies. "Yo man, we ain't from Millenium" was moderately amusing the first time. The 10th time? The 100th time? Not so much.
Maybe Firewing gets a special cutscene, and defeating Firewing is worth a cutscene, but that's it.
Moving the rest of the talking to the background is a good idea.

Nighthawk's cutscene before the final fight is way too long, never mind that he knocks out your teammates as well as the baddies, and that they are not in the scene but their pets and even some auras put in appearances.
Heck, just a "Surrender! We have a warrant for your arrest!" followed by "Initiate whatever whatever whatever" and the VTOL appearing, and then Nighthawk saying "I have just the thing for this. Take the jets and I will download the evidence we need" or something to that effect would be fine with me.

guyhumual

Well a temporary fix to nighthawk would be nice I would prefer a skipping option for all cut scenes in the game.

n8mcd

The ideal mechanic for cut-scenes is for everybody who wants to skip it to press the skip-option button. If everybody has mashed the skip button, the cut-scene ends and the action resumes.

hypersphere

n8mcd said:

The ideal mechanic for cut-scenes is for everybody who wants to skip it to press the skip-option button. If everybody has mashed the skip button, the cut-scene ends and the action resumes.

I think that's the best option. SWTOR did something similar. Unfortunately it resulted in a lot of people screaming at the one person who was just trying to enjoy it for the first time. But even if people were waiting on you, at least their UI wasn't locked up; they could chat or sort their inventory, etc..

I just don't get the reasoning behind forcing folks to sit through it over and over. It just adds frustration, which is the opposite of fun, which is the entire point of a game.