I play a lot of games, duh, it's the only that keeps me distracted from the overwhelming darkness in my head, but there's one habit of the gaming that I do not understand. It's something that I see in all walks of gaming life: I see it in big budget games, indie titles, souless crowd-pleasers, heart-felt thought pieces, multimillion dollar blockbusters and two-bit adventures cobbled together on RPG maker; it's some foul depraved pact that they all have in common, a disgusting deformity joining all these types of games together at the waist, it's a decent 50% chance that any of these games will have their save point occur just before a cutscene. As far as I am concerned, there is no greater sin that a game can commit. Even if the entire title freakin' implodes and takes my console with it, that is miles better than having to relieve the same dialogue over-and-over like I'm Dormammu going up against Stephen Strange.
In recent years there grew something of a movement around quality video games, and that was insisting how there should never be an unskippable cutscene. (Though as far as I'm concerned that was run by the sort of heathens who skip through all the story then complain about how they have no idea what's going on) As far as I'm aware the most famous example of this originates in one of the best games ever made; Mass Effect 2. (A game with quite a few cutscenes.) People bristled about having to sit through the same dialogue on repeat playthroughs and within a few years that practise was mostly abolished, but you know what? I have very different memories than everyone else of that game. I remember scenes, like that moment on Purgatory, where for some inexplicable reason the autosave hit just after a big dialogue and just before an ambush cutscene immediately throwing the player into combat. (thus restricting him/her from manual saving) So that issue with unskippable cutscenes? Made fifteen times worse when I'm watching that scene over and over each time that I die.
Now I do realise that a big part of why this is a problem for me is because of my insistence to always throw myself out-of-my-depth whenever I play games. Unless I push myself to the highest difficulty I feel like I'm cheating myself out of the full experience and thus have trouble enjoying the game as much as I could do. Unfortunately, the side-effect of this decision is that I die a lot, which means that if there is any point in the game where the savepoint is just before a cutscene that throws you into combat, you can bet by god that I'm gonna find it! So in some ways I guess you could say that this is sort of my fau- you know what? No. No it isn't. They are still the ones who fought every common law of sense in order to install an incomprehensibly ill-judged system!
This is a situation that has come most prominently to my attention lately as I've taken to playing older titles, which doesn't mean that newer games are immune, just that they're all mostly open world games without cutscenes these days. (So problem solved?) Back in the day, however, storybased titles could not wrap their head around this most simple of concepts: People don't want to hear the same tired dialogue cues over and over! Kingdom Hearts suffered from this in 'Chain of Memories' and 2, (For COM this was especially vexing because the game itself was just bad.) Jade Empire, (which I've recently started, also pulls this trick. But it's a Bioware game so what do you expect.) and even X-com sort of has this issue in 2, if you save the game around a mission with a character announcement in it. (Although you could classify that as a bug-due-to-design-flaw if you were being generous. Though then again, you could alleviate all games of blame through that same logic, so I retract that olive branch.)
Though it is likely obvious to anyone reading this, let me explain to you why the very concept of save points before Cutscenes is the worst thing imaginable. Imagine you're going through your morning routine and everyday before work you have to take a call. Every day you receive that call before you are allowed to leave the house, and everyday you have the same conversation, with the same person, in which the same inane words are traded back and forth. How long will it take before you start dreading the coming mornings, until you start dreading your phone partner? It doesn't matter what you were talking about, you might have devised the solution to climate change over that brief 2 minute chat, you'll still be wishing that phone wires were a thing again so that you could hang yourself with one. Familiarity breeds contempt, it's a simple as that.
And you know what makes things even worse then that? Cutscenes that take place after savepoints and feature a dialogue choice in them. The act of having a dialogue choice in a video game is an important moment, it empowers the player with control and makes them feel like they own the story in front of them. Even when the choice of dialogue both isn't voiced and has no direct impact on the story, it's still an expression on the player's intent to have a marked effect on the world around them, to mean something. It's a powerful expression. That power gets slightly drained, however, when they are forced to go through and make that same dialogue choice again-and-again; very conscious, by this point, that none of the options they choose will save them from the arse kicking they are about to receive. It eventually starts to whittle down all semblance of worth behind player choice and, before long, will have most players resort to callously slamming the skip button until the fight starts. (At least that's the journey I go on in these situations.)
Now the thing I don't understand about any of this, is why these situations pop up in the first place! Okay, that's not true, I know why, I just don't understand how. 9/10 times, these situations arise as a conflict between gameplay and intent. The scene usually carries greater weight if the player is thrown right into the action the second after the cutscene ends, which in some games presents a bit of an issue as players are disallowed from accessing inventory or saving in combat. This means that a save point can't exist at the start of combat, it has to exist before otherwise there's a possibility of the player becoming trapped into a battle that they can't win indefinitely, I get it. But there's a solution; use a separate Autosave slot so that player's still have their manual and quick saves to revert back to if things go south. (It's not rocket science!) Mass Effect 2, by the way, has no excuse for this; they'll straight-up save your game midway through a conversation leading into a fight, just to screw with you.
At the end of the day, this is a super specific gripe and I'm wondering if literally anyone else in the world is even fractionally as pissed off about it as I am. I'm being serious, I can get chopped up all day by the Dancer of Boreal Valley and not feel nearly as brutally wounded as I do after just 5 rotations around the 'cutscenes after save points' circus. Although I must be in the absolute minority because I don't think I've ever heard people talk about this once and that's just another ostracising quirk of my anomalous world views. Am I really that out-of-touch? Is everybody else looking at me like a loser? (Well, I think I already know the answer to that one, but you get what I mean. Don't you?) But there's no solution bar a new law written upon the commandments of game design and I don't have that sort of power or influence so I'm just going to dunk my head into a bucket of water before I start shooting steam out of my ears and explode out of frustration. (Maybe I can do that, you don't know.)
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