Make your cut scene compelling, or at least interesting, and people will slow down and experience it willingly. Once.
Force players to slog through your cut scene whether they enjoy it or not, and you’re just being self-indulgent, ignoring the fundamental purpose of a game (entertainment) in favor of your own ego. If you want to do that, make a movie, not a game.
Forcing them to do it again after they’ve already watched it (during a subsequent play-through, or after your game crashed during the mission, or because they made a mistake and want to retry) is well beyond game designer arrogance; it’s just plain bad software design. How would you feel if you had to read and click through time-consuming new user help screens whenever you launched an app, and not just the first time you used it, but every single time?
Red Dead Redemption 2 is particularly bad in this area, as it has cut scenes as long as ten minutes, and not only forces them down the player’s throat, but also makes it impossible to save the game just afterward, so fully restarting a mission requires slogging through the cut scene again.
Note that the emphasis here is on unskippable. Cut scenes on their own are fine. Even slow ones.
Make your cut scene compelling, or at least interesting, and people will slow down and experience it willingly. Once.
Force players to slog through your cut scene whether they enjoy it or not, and you’re just being self-indulgent, ignoring the fundamental purpose of a game (entertainment) in favor of your own ego. If you want to do that, make a movie, not a game.
Forcing them to do it again after they’ve already watched it (during a subsequent play-through, or after your game crashed during the mission, or because they made a mistake and want to retry) is well beyond game designer arrogance; it’s just plain bad software design. How would you feel if you had to read and click through time-consuming new user help screens whenever you launched an app, and not just the first time you used it, but every single time?
Red Dead Redemption 2 is particularly bad in this area, as it has cut scenes as long as ten minutes, and not only forces them down the player’s throat, but also makes it impossible to save the game just afterward, so fully restarting a mission requires slogging through the cut scene again.
Note that the emphasis here is on unskippable. Cut scenes on their own are fine. Even slow ones.