I hope heavensward steps the cutscene game up

im tired of sitting in the background of cutscenes playing the bystander, we get a littl ebit more action in the cutscenes with the latest story update but most of the game you're just kinda there, gaping at the action but almost never joining in. stoiclly nodding now and then. hells, even thancred joked about it at one point. i want to see my guy in the action! beating up the sahagin alongside thancred and yshtola! i want to be more than as midgardsormr says a "pawn" or a "chesspiece" to everyone elses schemes
im really hoping heavensward will bring that up to the plate. im not saying every cutscene needs to be a fully interacted cinematic masterpiece, i just want to see more of that in this game.
boo for playing the observer

Well the thing is, Square would have to either give all classes generic melee animations, or they'd have to redo the same cutscene several times over with us using a class skill. That's not gonna happen. What can happen is our costars showing off though! Like Yda punching bullets, or Yshtola stopping a gunblades rounds away using magic

As awesome as that would be, it would take too much effort to make that work with every class/race.

Although I think it would be pretty cool to see my Lalafell White Mage take down a Roegyden with a spinning jump kick.

They couldn't give us the same action but I hope they can still add more animations & emotes that can add variety to the cutscenes.

Let our characters get angry and yell. Let them smirk in amusement when someone makes a witty remark.

It would be cool if instead of creating custom animations, the cutscenes change based on class.
If you're a WHM the 'aero' cast animation can be used.
A BLM can cast 'fire', and so on.

Since the cutscenes are in-game rather than pre-rendered. It should just be a matter of triggering one animation instead of another at 1 or 2 points in the cutscene according to certain variables. But I know nothing about the time or effort so I'll I'm saying could be absolute rubbish :P

Also, in 1.0 there were occational CG animations during the main story arch. I miss that. :(

Edit: Never mind, not so. Still, the cutscenes were good. :I

CGI and better cutscenes and also better voice acting would be really nice but I don't think we will see anything so great.

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Originally Posted by HReincarnate

Let our characters get angry and yell. Let them smirk in amusement when someone makes a witty remark.

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The thing is, the player defines his character's personality, and that's why if they put a specific personality, it might not meet the player's expactation. What if my character is the quiet type who don't yell? what if he's so chilled that he never gets angry?

That's why SE picked to put a minimal personality to chars at all. So players can imagine the rest of it exactly how they like it. It's not like FF7 where you have a set char. Here you create your own char, and SE can't decide or force a personality on him/her.

I like how my character only nods and mostly stays quiet lol, the type that talk less but do a lot XP

I have an idea, but honestly I think it'd be too much effort on developing for just a cutscene you will watch once. IMO one-time content should not be given a lot of effort by the developers (yeah yeah, i know FF and story blah blah, but that's my opinion).

Anyway my idea is, that part of character creation you pick a character's personality. You can pick from kind, lone wolf, tsundere (lol) etc etc etc, and based on your choices, your character will react differently on cutscenes. Again, I think that's a lot of work for little gain (a cutscene you wil watch once and forget about an hour later)

What's the point? If you don't watch them within the first week of release, elitists are going to vote kick you for watching them.

1.0 had fully animated cutscenes, some even done with motion capture.

People forget that ARR was made in the space of one year, breaking the record for shortest development of an MMO. Corners had to be cut somewhere.

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Originally Posted by Leowilde

Also, in 1.0 there were occational CG animations during the main story arch. I miss that. :(

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Except the 1.0 intro and the 7th umbral era ending, where? If i don't forget anything, everything else was ingame graphic.

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Originally Posted by Razzle

The thing is, the player defines his character's personality, and that's why if they put a specific personality, it might not meet the player's expactation. What if my character is the quiet type who don't yell? what if he's so chilled that he never gets angry?

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And this ^^
In the original 1.0 story it was solved with giving the player's character a mainstory partner, and let the player choose the personality of the partner (each gender and race had a own personality). And then the partner did all the talking, screaming and scolding

While it would be cool but it be hard but not impossible but hard and costly I'd rather they add more content than time and money go into such a small thing like this but it would be cool to have.

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Originally Posted by Felis

Except the 1.0 intro and the 7th umbral era ending, where? If i don't forget anything, everything else was ingame graphic.

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You had me checking it up, and it seems I remember wrong. It wasn't CGI, just my mind that remembers it more grand than it was. :p Still, the coblyn scene I was thinking of was pretty good, with lighting and voices and all:

http://youtu.be/U_IyHqqt0a8?t=4m5s

Wouldn't you rather.... I dunno actually fight these challenges yourself instead of watching a predetermined cut scene? Lets just skip all the dungeons and trails and just turn it into a movie.

It almost sounds like you're looking for XIII-2 cutscenes where you'd need to spam X or O at specific times to act in the cs.

MORE CGI PLEASE :D
I can live with my character been a mute but the lack of full CGI depresses me :( if im honest the awesome FMVs have been a favourite feature of FF since I started playing 16 years ago. Also whats the point of SE owning great animation houses and artists if their not gonna use them :p

Even if its just a sweeping tour of the city/zone like they did with XII when you entered a new zone/area - so please Yoshi up the CGI budget, I'll give you a cookie :)

I just hope there'll be more animated scenes rather than just people standing there and talking at you. Too bad that's reserved for hildebrand

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Originally Posted by OranKells

Wouldn't you rather.... I dunno actually fight these challenges yourself instead of watching a predetermined cut scene? Lets just skip all the dungeons and trails and just turn it into a movie.

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It's not a matter of replacing the fights, but rather adding a cutscene as intro or ending to them. Personally I actually like my character being the silent nodding type, but that's because it fits the personality I imagine for him. I woudn't mind seing my character actually doing something in some of the cutscenes as well. It is after all an MMO based on one of the heaviest story-driven RPG series, so it's not so strange that some of its players enjoy their cutscenes.

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Originally Posted by myahele

I just hope there'll be more animated scenes rather than just people standing there and talking at you. Too bad that's reserved for hildebrand

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Actually, that's a good point almost made: Hildibrand is a step in the right direction. Perhaps they can take their time and resources to amp it up now, more than at launch. :)

I stopped following the story long time ago, there was one cutscene where you had to pick the food for someone and he says something like "Of all people they sent you to collect the food, I'm sure you had more important things to do and I could've done it.", and you stand there like an idiot. I feel like our characters are like training dummies thrown into the cutscene on which others can practice their jokes. Doesn't matter how much I try it's just impossible for me to be drawn into watching the cutscenes. Having a window full of text would even be better than dealing with the terrible english and voice acting, I'd prefer a window full of text written in a more comprehensive english.

Well they certainly have alot more time/ budget than they did with 2.0 So hopefully many of the mainstory cutscenes will have alot more movement and action as a result. Maybe even have some cgi thrown here and there, but I think Yoshi don't want cgi since that really cuts into budget/time.

Post 2.1-2.5 cutscenes have been getting better and better; and we know from Hildebran that they can do crazy stuff with animations using the current engine.

Here's hoping that 1.0 cutscenes (or close to it) will make a comeback

I can think of one 2.0 cutscene where our characters do something based on their job ("special" weapon, cough cough...) and the world didn't end. They can do it, but do they want to do it?

One thing that I've been specially disappointed with lately regarding the cutscenes was when certain ascian was in front of us and we just stood there doing nothing, while he was doing his things. I don't know, maybe they could have made us at least try to run to him or something? Because I was thinking that my character didn't care, was stupid, or worse, a coward (quite the Warrior of Light, uh?).

On the other hand, we have cutscenes like the one that I've hinted on the first paragraph, or the last ones on Prae, or even the escape from WoD. At least there we were moving instead of just standing there nodding. I would really like to have more of these, and more single player encounters too, linked to these cutscenes, where we can fight the baddies by ourselves (killing a ladybug doesn't count). I'm sure that they can do it, as they were able to do it with class and job quests. And if they're worried about the balance for each job, they have the encounters from the alexandrite maps, as I'm sure that they learned something from them (or they can balance it by role, as other MMOs have been able to do very challenging single player encounters that way).

They don't have to do every cutscene that way. I would be against that too as that would be overkill, but it would be nice to see an improvement in what our characters (and we, too) do during the main storyline. After all we're supposed to be the "main character", not a random NPC that is there doing nothing. It doesn't even have to change our "default" silent and somewhat calm personality.

It's something that they should really consider now that they don't have to re-do the game in a year.

I rarely ever complain about anything in this game... I honestly think this game is darn close to perfect... HOWEVER ... this subject is one I strongly agree with. SE is getting lots of money from us and has a very large budget. SE should honestly start milking these cutscenes a little more.

Don't get me wrong.. the latest batch of cutscenes have been a vast improvement over the ones at release of 2.0, however it still doesn't feel like SE's 100% is being put into them. I hope this changes with Heavensward... give us some excitement during cutscenes.. wow us!

PS. I'd also like to see more branching cutscenes like the one where the children are asking you how to become an adventurer. Make the answers we give mean something. The whole approach of just letting my character nod at everything isn't fun... let me respond in my own way by presenting dialogue that's dynamic depending on how my character answers ..

If this game has such a large budget, how come we can't have more servers? More housing lots? More space for our items? Why is it every time anyone asks for a new feature, the answer is always some form of no or PS3 limitations?

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Originally Posted by MilesSaintboroguh

If this game has such a large budget, how come we can't have more servers? More housing lots? More space for our items? Why is it every time anyone asks for a new feature, the answer is always some form of no or PS3 limitations?

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Why do you want more servers? Some servers are not even close too full.. as long as people try to join popular servers like balmung all the time, there wont be new servers, because they are not needed, just like more housing lots are not needed, because people mindlessly join an overcrowded server, just to blame SE for not enough lots.

I think full voice acting in all the cutscene is a good start, but I too would like to see my character interact more. My character might be one of the many heroes of light, but to me, she is the protaganist and right now it does not feel like that.

Funny thing is, this reminds me alot of FFXII. Vaan is the main protaganist, but anyone who played game knows that his role is almost non-existent. I remember Vaan only staying in the background while the others were talking..... I do not want to be Vaan.

Cutscenes have improved lately but it's still sooo below the standard past FF have set. Voice acting is on a whole other level as well compared to XII and XIII. I understand the limitations of having to break up all the dialogues but the budget excuse shouldn't exist anymore. They could at least pretend the cash shop money are going towards the game.

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Originally Posted by Leowilde

You had me checking it up, and it seems I remember wrong. It wasn't CGI, just my mind that remembers it more grand than it was. :p Still, the coblyn scene I was thinking of was pretty good, with lighting and voices and all:

http://youtu.be/U_IyHqqt0a8?t=4m5s

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Damn those animations were smooth.... and great voice acting too!

That's child Minfillia no?