Game rant - In game cut scenes

It's time for the first of my rants:

In game cut scenes/cinematics and the worst offender of them, Oblivion games!

Let me start by making a blanket statement: I don't mind cut scenes. They make for a logical transition between acts of a game, especially if time has passed and can even be enjoyable at times. However, too many games are becoming increasingly dependant on cut scenes to convey information which could otherwise be brought out by exposition, game play, hidden clues etc.

The problem is that developers like Oblivion have increasingly started to use cut scenes to push their single player games into a very linear fashion. I played the original Bioware creations of Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic to their conclusion. Oblivion then came in with the "2" versions of the games and took what was an enoyable experience and completely trashed them to the point where I cannot complete either game.

I'm an old school gamer. I expect my role playing games to have role playing in them, even if all the conversations you might have with an individual within the game only lead to a single conclusion (though often they did not.) I'm not sure if Oblivion just doesn't trust the intelligence of their audience, or if some marketing weenie took a look at a Blizzard RTS game which used cut scenes to further the plot, or they are just lazy, but they took two enjoyable games and comepletely destroyed the sequels.

I would love to see the time which they state the gameplay allows for, and then subtract the cut scenes to figure out how much actual gameplay there is. Because both of those games are incredibly weak on writing and they force you to view sometimes a percieved 10 + minutes of cut scenes which could have easily been achieved with maybe 16 options worth of dialog which brought you to 2 or three different conclusive paths. And no, I don't think watching a 2 minute cinematic, which then gives you a user clickable insteraction, which jumps into antoher cinematic, followed by another click and then a 3rd which resolves the plot in the direction which the developer wanted you to go meets the criterion for a role playing game.

For old school D&D players, the analogy I would use would be to compare a Judges Guild module to a TSR module.

At the time, I think the Judges Guild modules would run you 5-6 bucks compared to 3-5 for a TSR module.

Sure, TSR gave you a carboard stock cover which doubled as a fold out game masters screen with the dungeon map.

But the TSR module also gave you a single path.

Yes, there was some open endedness to some of their dungeons. You can go left, right or straight and each path lead you to a different area, but you always wound up at the same final destination.

A Judges Guild adventure was usually just that. You had probably 4-5 times the content of a TSR module designed to be played as a campaign. There would be multiple maps of different areas which you could adventure in the order you wanted. Sure, you had to complete certain tasks to unlock others.

But, more inportantly, JG trusted in the intelligence of it's players. They gave you a template that you could, with a little imagination, build years of adventuring from.

Now take a Bioware RPG. Is it linear? Absolutely! But the writing was done well enough that, while you would wind up at a final waypoint along the story tree, how and in what order you accomplished that was your own choice. And, along the journey, you uncovered more of the story/mystery through conversations with various NPC's.

Compare that to an Oblivion sequel. There is less open ended gameplay. A tackes you too B which takes you to C. And, in case you didn't know that this was the direction you were supposed to go, in a case where a Bioware conversation with 4 or 5 NPC's would gradually reveal the story, Oblivion force feeds you the story with a cut scene between your character and a single NPC, possibly bringing a 2nd into the conversation without your bidding.

The funny thing is, the folks at Oblivion are gamers. I've seen their potential employye questionairre. It asks what games you play not only PC, but RPG and Board Games. It just seems that they have yet to move beyond the TSR stage of design and into a much more open ended style which promotes not only good writing, but gives the user the illusion of control over the story.