Videos in MMO. The development of the genre or art form?
My name is Dmitry Astapkovich, I am the leader of the cut-scenes team of the Allods Team. At the moment we are creating videos for the Skyforge project. At one time I worked on a large number of different projects: American Chopper 2, Biker Mice from Mars, Coded Arms: Contagion, Hot Brain, Insecticide and Prime World. In this article I will talk about the different types of videos and the difficulties faced by developers in the process of creating cut-scenes.
As time goes on, games evolve, and we see more and more beautiful pictures, we hear brighter sounds and plunge into more and more realistic game universes. Our generation still remembers "Mario" and similar games, but show the modern child such graphics - he most likely will not play. Users are spoiled, and they are no longer enticed by the standard story about saving the world or colorful landscapes. The war for the attention of consumers goes on a more subtle level, and the one who manages to engage the player in the gameplay as deeply as possible wins it.
')
Thanks to this race of games, gaming devices are forced to evolve. At the output, we get more and more complex mechanisms and powerful processors. Modern PCs and consoles of the new generation are capable of providing a picture of almost photo-realistic level. However, numerous examples prove that it’s impossible to entice a player with high-class graphics in the virtual world. The game is like a mosaic of a large number of elements, and if you remove at least one piece, the canvas will be imperfect. Great graphics, of course, is important, but without a fascinating story the game does not have to taste even the most indulgent consumer.
This trend came from the movie business, with its billions in turnover and availability to the most mass consumer. It was the development of cinema and serials that led to the emergence in games of more and more complex plots and characters, allowing the player to be more immersed in the atmosphere. Many processes in the gaming industry and in the cinema have become very close, which deserves to be the subject of a separate article.
And here they come into play ...
Modern games are hard to imagine without colorful in-game videos. The cut scenes first appeared back in 1985 in the Entop Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken game and have since gone a long way in their development. Initially, such videos were the prerogative of single-player games, but as time went on, even today there is no way to find a quality MMO game without such videos.
Cut scenes allow you to immerse the player in the atmosphere of the game, letting you feel the heroic moment of victory over the next "boss". It is in such fascinating and emotional videos that we most often watch plot twists. Rollers - an integral part of the gameplay. No one will ask, why bother spending so much time and energy on skits? Today, the developer is another task - to determine which movie should be used in a particular place in the game. Considering the means put into production, the question is far from idle.
Right choice
Definitely say which movie is better is impossible. To solve different work tasks, we can choose different types of videos. In some cases, the videos work well on the plot, to a greater extent developing it "bypassing" the main game content. Or even completely take on his presentation - as in Angry Birds, for example.
Under the conditions of almost no animation inside the game, as well as the minimal abilities of the characters, videos and comics in this project is the only tool for explaining the plot and motivating the actions of the hero. In other cases, using rollers produce a demonstration of the gaming abilities of different characters. It is very important to maintain some satisfactory balance for the player, giving him the opportunity to use most of the abilities shown in the video, within the game itself. In short, the choice of the type of video is completely dependent on the specific task in a particular project.
Conventionally, all videos can be divided into game and non-game. They differ in both the mode of production and the supply to the player.
Non-footage: expensive, long, cinematic
Non-player videos are a separate video that is not related to gaming assets, i.e. The game works as a video player. Such videos are produced in programs for creating special effects in movies (Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, etc.). In fact, these are mini-films with a completely cinematic approach to the working process and, as a result, a completely cinematic result. The main advantage of this production method is the quality of the received video content. The cost of the final product can be safely attributed to its obvious disadvantages - the cost of such videos are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. As, perhaps, the most striking example here is a video for the game Star Wars The Old Republic, MMO in a very famous cinema setting:
This video was created by Blur Studio, which has in its portfolio an extensive set of videos for all kinds of games.
Creating non-game clips is not only expensive, but also time consuming: hard work, consisting of many iterations, lasts up to 6-9 months. Such a long production cycle can provoke certain problems: since all this time the game has been actively developed, the initial data for the video may become outdated. For example, for the sake of more interesting gameplay, the game abilities of the characters or even the overall plot of the game will change. Postfactum to remake something in the video - doubly expensive. As a result, the budget movie is not at all a bit far from what the developers in the game actually got.
Another problem with videos of this type arises from deceived expectations: although modern computers are already very powerful, games still cannot bear cinema-like picture quality. The user sees absolutely fascinating shots in the video and expects something similar, but in the game he gets both a simpler picture and game features with a lot of restrictions. Therefore, in recent years, players before buying more often focus on the video, which shows the actual gameplay.
But…
And yet, non-player videos use the same popularity among developers: the time and financial costs of their production, although large, are fairly predictable. In addition, it is often possible to find inexpensive and successful solutions to make a movie relatively quickly and in acceptable quality. For example, the video for the game League of Legends, which was released in 2010:
This is a demonstration of the abilities of some heroes in combination with a conditional plot based on the gameplay. Players understand that this is more a variation on the theme of the game than an accurate display of game characters, and they are not looking for full compliance. At the same time, the video gained more than 14 million views and received about 75,000 likes - quite an eloquent indicator of how much the players liked it. It should be noted that in 2013 a new video appeared about the same game, which for 2 days of impressions gained already 6 million views and more than 150 thousand likes, and by the time of writing this article confidently went to the mark of 20 million views:
A good way to reduce the cost of producing a movie is to make it in the style of a comic. Besides the fact that comics are cheaper to produce, you can easily add interaction with the player. For example, click on the "Next" button or select options for the character on some screens. A bright representative of games of this kind - the first part of Max Payne, in which with the help of very stylish, but inexpensive comic book production, was told a difficult story of the protagonist. This technique is successfully used, there is a tendency to a certain qualitative development. For example, in the third part of Max Payne, stylization for comics has already passed into the game cut-scenes, which will be discussed below.
It is worth saying that now non-player videos are made not only in programs for the production of special effects. The growing quality of graphics in games allows you to make a beautiful, almost cinematic picture. The only problem is that the price of this quality is the time of frame visualization, which even on very powerful machines will not allow watching live video, i.e. at 30 frames per second. Therefore, sometimes developers use the game editor as a program to get the raw data for the video. After this, the data are processed in the editing programs and videos of excellent quality are obtained. An example of such a solution is the video for the Warface game:
It is necessary to mention one more important advantage of non-player commercials: most often they represent a kind of finished piece that is perfect for solving marketing tasks. Videos are easily laid out on social networks and video services, attracting the attention of more and more new users, and also fit perfectly into the main pages of gaming sites.
Cut scene requires sacrifice
Now you can go to the game videos - those that the game visualizes in real time right on the player's computer. These videos (they can also be called cut scenes: from the English cutscene) look like the game for the user, are well connected with it in meaning, and are made in the same style. And this is definitely a plus. As usual, there is a downside: the maximum quality of these clips can be assessed only on the most "top" machines. If the player does not have a powerful computer, then the video will probably “slow down”, special effects or some complicated shading will not work in it. For example, if the depth of field does not work on a “weak” computer, the frame looks much poorer and less collected. After all, initially the depth of field is a way to create for the audience a certain point of focus corresponding to the director's idea. It turns out that the developer cannot know in advance what the end-user movie will look like, and is forced to focus on a certain average configuration for which not all game features are available. However, this problem is typical only for computers, on consoles in this regard, everything is quite stable and predictable.
There is another significant disadvantage of real-time clips - to create game cut-scenes almost more complex technologies are required than to create the game itself. As an illustration, a small video about the technology with which the Warface movie from the example above was created:
Thus, we come to the third, perhaps the most important drawback of the game clips: the need to refine the tools separately leads to a strong increase in the initial budget for production.
There is a contact!
The undeniable advantage of game clips is that, unlike video, they can be inserted into the game in different ways. For example, to completely interrupt the process of the game, telling the story between the game missions, as is done in StarCraft. Or embed videos directly into the gameplay, taking control of the player for a short time. This approach is typical of many games like Gears of War: the player runs out of some closed area to an open area, after which the control is selected and the camera flies to a new opponent, who needs to be defeated. The enemy loses its separate animation, perhaps some special effect, after which the player returns the camera, as if to say: “Come on, act! Now you know who your opponent is and how he looks close. ” This technique is often used for various clues: “you need to run here,” “click this thing here” or “here your enemies have appeared, something needs to be done with them”. Below is an example of a similar clip from Gears of War 3 (the required fragment starts at 13:50, but for some reason the link for a specific time does not work):
In parallel with the transfer of useful information in such moments, you can relatively unobtrusively and appropriately show close-ups all the details of the monsters and environments that the player often simply does not notice during the game.
Another option: the player completely takes control of the character, leaving him control of the camera. Suppose it is put in some kind of cart, wagon, plane, car, etc. The player is traveling along a fixed trajectory and cannot move independently at the current moment. On the way, the NPCs sitting next to each other, or nearby, have some kind of events that reveal the plot. Recognizable? This is a very good and very common way to tell the player some introductory story. For example, in Call of Duty 2, it is on such minimalist scenes that almost the whole plot is presented, and the uncomplicated shooting of the Nazis looks much more meaningful.
There are also softer options - with partial loss of control. For example, a player presses a button - “pick something up” or “open a safe”. And then the avatar starts to play some complicated animation, interacting with the environment: some kind of lever pulls, then something opens, someone runs out, etc. In principle, it is impossible to say that this is a full-fledged cut-scene, rather, some kind of completely scripted piece in which the player took part. In modern games, such pieces try to be built into the game as smoothly as possible so that the game state switches are not noticeable. This is very well seen in new shooters, for example in Battlefield:
This is a very expensive and, perhaps, the most difficult version of the introduction, because, first, there are a lot of such scenes. Secondly, they should enter the game very smoothly. In this case, it is extremely important that the player does not miss them. After all, if we leave the control of the camera to the user, he can turn away and at the right time look at all in the wrong direction, where the mini-story takes place, which cost more than one thousand dollars in production. The developers of the Uncharted project told about such problems a couple of years ago at GDC. They had to experiment on some locations for a very long time in order to precisely align the place for the zone, at the entrance to which, for example, a truck arrives with a new batch of enemies. His appearance is completely custom: the animation of a driving truck, people jumping out of it, etc. But the player at this moment can be anywhere in the location and simply does not see it, rightly deciding that 10 people appeared from the air behind him, as was the case in old games. To avoid this, a very large number of iterations is required. It is necessary to adjust the gameplay so that at the same time not take away from the player the ability to control the camera and character, and at the same time tell a complex story in which he participates. In fact, come up with such tricks that will force the player to act in a certain, expected way. Actually, this is the most expensive part of the production of the game video - time, the amount of which is difficult to estimate even by very experienced developers.
There is another, simpler version of the implantation of this kind of scenes in the game - the so-called quick time events. For example, a player's avatar falls into the abyss, and the player must have time to press the right button in order to grab the ledge of the rock in time, that is, switch to the right action at the right moment. The sequence of such mini-scenes can give a very good result, which has been repeatedly proved by the games of the God of War series:
Specificity of cut-scenes in MMO games
In creating videos for online games there are quite a few important nuances. The main problem is a huge number of assets. As a result, what gets into the frame may not look very attractive, since, due to the abundance of objects in the world, it is impossible to detail everything for production or technical reasons.
For example, we make the whole game under the form “from behind,” in order to fully see the character and what is happening in the surrounding world. But in one of the frames we need a close-up of the face, and suddenly it turns out that no emotions are displayed on the face and there are pixels in general. A player might think that the game is frankly cheap, although this is not at all the case.
Such moments are the most cruel thing that exists in an MMO, since it is because of them that some decisions can be made at the “let all the characters make huge textures” level. Immediately the cost of all assets rises to the skies, and we need this for a five-minute video.
Another important nuance is the appearance of the game character. It can be of any height, sex, in any clothes. The director will build a frame for a long time so that everything looks harmonious, and then the character of small stature will come and the composition will break: the camera must be at a different angle. Accordingly, for a tall character, the camera should be at the third angle. This is the complexity of the work: to parameterize such nuances and correctly frame the frame. For us, this moment did not become a big problem. In Skyforge there are no, for example, gnomes, under which you would need to adjust the camera. All the characters we have about the same size and build, there is only an amendment to the floor. Accordingly, the composition is built for only one option.
In addition, external attributes can destroy the whole epic of the moment. For example, you communicate with the NPC on the topic of saving the world, but at the same time wearing a pink suit with lace. Or even worse: the characters ride on the lilac ponies in the background. Therefore, when working on cut scenes in Skyforge, we try to build on the action itself, and not on external attributes. If a player wants to walk in a merry suit - this is his choice, and he is unlikely to feel embarrassed in him.
So that the player does not lose his character and saw the cut-scene, in some games other players are turned off. But here are some nuances. You stand on an area full of people, you start a dialogue and, suddenly, everyone disappears. A little strange turns out. Moreover, players often do not even realize what the problem is, they just feel that what is happening is wrong. They say that a five-year-old child can notice a bad animation: he will simply see that something is wrong. But only a cool animator will say what exactly is wrong. In our project, we abandoned the cut-scenes in large cities and other places where people gather. We transferred the main videos to instances, in which only the player and his group are simultaneously located.
Some projects turn a blind eye to such problems, some - focus on solutions from single-games or find their own. At the pre-production stage for Skyfroge, we watched dozens of cut-scenes from various MMO and single-player games in search of universal ways. As a result, after analyzing a lot of available material, we chose our own way of developing cut-scenes, but this is already a topic for a separate article.
About the most important thing
But do not forget that with all its diversity and functionality, not videos are the main element of the game - the game itself remains. You can entice a new player with great trailers, but if the gameplay is not interesting, the game will be deleted from the computer and forgotten, like dozens of others before it. And only when the quality of the virtual world is at its maximum, rollers and cut scenes will help to plunge deeper into the game.
A competent approach to the creation of the game covers many different aspects, which can be listed for a very long time. We try to work out even those things that at first glance seem insignificant. Production of our game in the end takes a lot of time, but the result is worth it. I only talked about cut scenes, but we are still planning a lot of interesting articles on the MMORPG development process using the example of Skyforge.
Our remaining articles on various aspects of game development can be read on our website and in our Vkontakte community .
If you want to know about any specific things - write in the comments.
As time goes on, games evolve, and we see more and more beautiful pictures, we hear brighter sounds and plunge into more and more realistic game universes. Our generation still remembers "Mario" and similar games, but show the modern child such graphics - he most likely will not play. Users are spoiled, and they are no longer enticed by the standard story about saving the world or colorful landscapes. The war for the attention of consumers goes on a more subtle level, and the one who manages to engage the player in the gameplay as deeply as possible wins it.
')
Thanks to this race of games, gaming devices are forced to evolve. At the output, we get more and more complex mechanisms and powerful processors. Modern PCs and consoles of the new generation are capable of providing a picture of almost photo-realistic level. However, numerous examples prove that it’s impossible to entice a player with high-class graphics in the virtual world. The game is like a mosaic of a large number of elements, and if you remove at least one piece, the canvas will be imperfect. Great graphics, of course, is important, but without a fascinating story the game does not have to taste even the most indulgent consumer.
This trend came from the movie business, with its billions in turnover and availability to the most mass consumer. It was the development of cinema and serials that led to the emergence in games of more and more complex plots and characters, allowing the player to be more immersed in the atmosphere. Many processes in the gaming industry and in the cinema have become very close, which deserves to be the subject of a separate article.
And here they come into play ...
Modern games are hard to imagine without colorful in-game videos. The cut scenes first appeared back in 1985 in the Entop Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken game and have since gone a long way in their development. Initially, such videos were the prerogative of single-player games, but as time went on, even today there is no way to find a quality MMO game without such videos.
Cut scenes allow you to immerse the player in the atmosphere of the game, letting you feel the heroic moment of victory over the next "boss". It is in such fascinating and emotional videos that we most often watch plot twists. Rollers - an integral part of the gameplay. No one will ask, why bother spending so much time and energy on skits? Today, the developer is another task - to determine which movie should be used in a particular place in the game. Considering the means put into production, the question is far from idle.
Right choice
Definitely say which movie is better is impossible. To solve different work tasks, we can choose different types of videos. In some cases, the videos work well on the plot, to a greater extent developing it "bypassing" the main game content. Or even completely take on his presentation - as in Angry Birds, for example.
Under the conditions of almost no animation inside the game, as well as the minimal abilities of the characters, videos and comics in this project is the only tool for explaining the plot and motivating the actions of the hero. In other cases, using rollers produce a demonstration of the gaming abilities of different characters. It is very important to maintain some satisfactory balance for the player, giving him the opportunity to use most of the abilities shown in the video, within the game itself. In short, the choice of the type of video is completely dependent on the specific task in a particular project.
Conventionally, all videos can be divided into game and non-game. They differ in both the mode of production and the supply to the player.
Non-footage: expensive, long, cinematic
Non-player videos are a separate video that is not related to gaming assets, i.e. The game works as a video player. Such videos are produced in programs for creating special effects in movies (Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, etc.). In fact, these are mini-films with a completely cinematic approach to the working process and, as a result, a completely cinematic result. The main advantage of this production method is the quality of the received video content. The cost of the final product can be safely attributed to its obvious disadvantages - the cost of such videos are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. As, perhaps, the most striking example here is a video for the game Star Wars The Old Republic, MMO in a very famous cinema setting:
This video was created by Blur Studio, which has in its portfolio an extensive set of videos for all kinds of games.
Creating non-game clips is not only expensive, but also time consuming: hard work, consisting of many iterations, lasts up to 6-9 months. Such a long production cycle can provoke certain problems: since all this time the game has been actively developed, the initial data for the video may become outdated. For example, for the sake of more interesting gameplay, the game abilities of the characters or even the overall plot of the game will change. Postfactum to remake something in the video - doubly expensive. As a result, the budget movie is not at all a bit far from what the developers in the game actually got.
Another problem with videos of this type arises from deceived expectations: although modern computers are already very powerful, games still cannot bear cinema-like picture quality. The user sees absolutely fascinating shots in the video and expects something similar, but in the game he gets both a simpler picture and game features with a lot of restrictions. Therefore, in recent years, players before buying more often focus on the video, which shows the actual gameplay.
But…
And yet, non-player videos use the same popularity among developers: the time and financial costs of their production, although large, are fairly predictable. In addition, it is often possible to find inexpensive and successful solutions to make a movie relatively quickly and in acceptable quality. For example, the video for the game League of Legends, which was released in 2010:
This is a demonstration of the abilities of some heroes in combination with a conditional plot based on the gameplay. Players understand that this is more a variation on the theme of the game than an accurate display of game characters, and they are not looking for full compliance. At the same time, the video gained more than 14 million views and received about 75,000 likes - quite an eloquent indicator of how much the players liked it. It should be noted that in 2013 a new video appeared about the same game, which for 2 days of impressions gained already 6 million views and more than 150 thousand likes, and by the time of writing this article confidently went to the mark of 20 million views:
A good way to reduce the cost of producing a movie is to make it in the style of a comic. Besides the fact that comics are cheaper to produce, you can easily add interaction with the player. For example, click on the "Next" button or select options for the character on some screens. A bright representative of games of this kind - the first part of Max Payne, in which with the help of very stylish, but inexpensive comic book production, was told a difficult story of the protagonist. This technique is successfully used, there is a tendency to a certain qualitative development. For example, in the third part of Max Payne, stylization for comics has already passed into the game cut-scenes, which will be discussed below.
It is worth saying that now non-player videos are made not only in programs for the production of special effects. The growing quality of graphics in games allows you to make a beautiful, almost cinematic picture. The only problem is that the price of this quality is the time of frame visualization, which even on very powerful machines will not allow watching live video, i.e. at 30 frames per second. Therefore, sometimes developers use the game editor as a program to get the raw data for the video. After this, the data are processed in the editing programs and videos of excellent quality are obtained. An example of such a solution is the video for the Warface game:
It is necessary to mention one more important advantage of non-player commercials: most often they represent a kind of finished piece that is perfect for solving marketing tasks. Videos are easily laid out on social networks and video services, attracting the attention of more and more new users, and also fit perfectly into the main pages of gaming sites.
Cut scene requires sacrifice
Now you can go to the game videos - those that the game visualizes in real time right on the player's computer. These videos (they can also be called cut scenes: from the English cutscene) look like the game for the user, are well connected with it in meaning, and are made in the same style. And this is definitely a plus. As usual, there is a downside: the maximum quality of these clips can be assessed only on the most "top" machines. If the player does not have a powerful computer, then the video will probably “slow down”, special effects or some complicated shading will not work in it. For example, if the depth of field does not work on a “weak” computer, the frame looks much poorer and less collected. After all, initially the depth of field is a way to create for the audience a certain point of focus corresponding to the director's idea. It turns out that the developer cannot know in advance what the end-user movie will look like, and is forced to focus on a certain average configuration for which not all game features are available. However, this problem is typical only for computers, on consoles in this regard, everything is quite stable and predictable.
There is another significant disadvantage of real-time clips - to create game cut-scenes almost more complex technologies are required than to create the game itself. As an illustration, a small video about the technology with which the Warface movie from the example above was created:
Thus, we come to the third, perhaps the most important drawback of the game clips: the need to refine the tools separately leads to a strong increase in the initial budget for production.
There is a contact!
The undeniable advantage of game clips is that, unlike video, they can be inserted into the game in different ways. For example, to completely interrupt the process of the game, telling the story between the game missions, as is done in StarCraft. Or embed videos directly into the gameplay, taking control of the player for a short time. This approach is typical of many games like Gears of War: the player runs out of some closed area to an open area, after which the control is selected and the camera flies to a new opponent, who needs to be defeated. The enemy loses its separate animation, perhaps some special effect, after which the player returns the camera, as if to say: “Come on, act! Now you know who your opponent is and how he looks close. ” This technique is often used for various clues: “you need to run here,” “click this thing here” or “here your enemies have appeared, something needs to be done with them”. Below is an example of a similar clip from Gears of War 3 (the required fragment starts at 13:50, but for some reason the link for a specific time does not work):
In parallel with the transfer of useful information in such moments, you can relatively unobtrusively and appropriately show close-ups all the details of the monsters and environments that the player often simply does not notice during the game.
Another option: the player completely takes control of the character, leaving him control of the camera. Suppose it is put in some kind of cart, wagon, plane, car, etc. The player is traveling along a fixed trajectory and cannot move independently at the current moment. On the way, the NPCs sitting next to each other, or nearby, have some kind of events that reveal the plot. Recognizable? This is a very good and very common way to tell the player some introductory story. For example, in Call of Duty 2, it is on such minimalist scenes that almost the whole plot is presented, and the uncomplicated shooting of the Nazis looks much more meaningful.
There are also softer options - with partial loss of control. For example, a player presses a button - “pick something up” or “open a safe”. And then the avatar starts to play some complicated animation, interacting with the environment: some kind of lever pulls, then something opens, someone runs out, etc. In principle, it is impossible to say that this is a full-fledged cut-scene, rather, some kind of completely scripted piece in which the player took part. In modern games, such pieces try to be built into the game as smoothly as possible so that the game state switches are not noticeable. This is very well seen in new shooters, for example in Battlefield:
This is a very expensive and, perhaps, the most difficult version of the introduction, because, first, there are a lot of such scenes. Secondly, they should enter the game very smoothly. In this case, it is extremely important that the player does not miss them. After all, if we leave the control of the camera to the user, he can turn away and at the right time look at all in the wrong direction, where the mini-story takes place, which cost more than one thousand dollars in production. The developers of the Uncharted project told about such problems a couple of years ago at GDC. They had to experiment on some locations for a very long time in order to precisely align the place for the zone, at the entrance to which, for example, a truck arrives with a new batch of enemies. His appearance is completely custom: the animation of a driving truck, people jumping out of it, etc. But the player at this moment can be anywhere in the location and simply does not see it, rightly deciding that 10 people appeared from the air behind him, as was the case in old games. To avoid this, a very large number of iterations is required. It is necessary to adjust the gameplay so that at the same time not take away from the player the ability to control the camera and character, and at the same time tell a complex story in which he participates. In fact, come up with such tricks that will force the player to act in a certain, expected way. Actually, this is the most expensive part of the production of the game video - time, the amount of which is difficult to estimate even by very experienced developers.
There is another, simpler version of the implantation of this kind of scenes in the game - the so-called quick time events. For example, a player's avatar falls into the abyss, and the player must have time to press the right button in order to grab the ledge of the rock in time, that is, switch to the right action at the right moment. The sequence of such mini-scenes can give a very good result, which has been repeatedly proved by the games of the God of War series:
Specificity of cut-scenes in MMO games
In creating videos for online games there are quite a few important nuances. The main problem is a huge number of assets. As a result, what gets into the frame may not look very attractive, since, due to the abundance of objects in the world, it is impossible to detail everything for production or technical reasons.
For example, we make the whole game under the form “from behind,” in order to fully see the character and what is happening in the surrounding world. But in one of the frames we need a close-up of the face, and suddenly it turns out that no emotions are displayed on the face and there are pixels in general. A player might think that the game is frankly cheap, although this is not at all the case.
Such moments are the most cruel thing that exists in an MMO, since it is because of them that some decisions can be made at the “let all the characters make huge textures” level. Immediately the cost of all assets rises to the skies, and we need this for a five-minute video.
Another important nuance is the appearance of the game character. It can be of any height, sex, in any clothes. The director will build a frame for a long time so that everything looks harmonious, and then the character of small stature will come and the composition will break: the camera must be at a different angle. Accordingly, for a tall character, the camera should be at the third angle. This is the complexity of the work: to parameterize such nuances and correctly frame the frame. For us, this moment did not become a big problem. In Skyforge there are no, for example, gnomes, under which you would need to adjust the camera. All the characters we have about the same size and build, there is only an amendment to the floor. Accordingly, the composition is built for only one option.
In addition, external attributes can destroy the whole epic of the moment. For example, you communicate with the NPC on the topic of saving the world, but at the same time wearing a pink suit with lace. Or even worse: the characters ride on the lilac ponies in the background. Therefore, when working on cut scenes in Skyforge, we try to build on the action itself, and not on external attributes. If a player wants to walk in a merry suit - this is his choice, and he is unlikely to feel embarrassed in him.
So that the player does not lose his character and saw the cut-scene, in some games other players are turned off. But here are some nuances. You stand on an area full of people, you start a dialogue and, suddenly, everyone disappears. A little strange turns out. Moreover, players often do not even realize what the problem is, they just feel that what is happening is wrong. They say that a five-year-old child can notice a bad animation: he will simply see that something is wrong. But only a cool animator will say what exactly is wrong. In our project, we abandoned the cut-scenes in large cities and other places where people gather. We transferred the main videos to instances, in which only the player and his group are simultaneously located.
Some projects turn a blind eye to such problems, some - focus on solutions from single-games or find their own. At the pre-production stage for Skyfroge, we watched dozens of cut-scenes from various MMO and single-player games in search of universal ways. As a result, after analyzing a lot of available material, we chose our own way of developing cut-scenes, but this is already a topic for a separate article.
About the most important thing
But do not forget that with all its diversity and functionality, not videos are the main element of the game - the game itself remains. You can entice a new player with great trailers, but if the gameplay is not interesting, the game will be deleted from the computer and forgotten, like dozens of others before it. And only when the quality of the virtual world is at its maximum, rollers and cut scenes will help to plunge deeper into the game.
A competent approach to the creation of the game covers many different aspects, which can be listed for a very long time. We try to work out even those things that at first glance seem insignificant. Production of our game in the end takes a lot of time, but the result is worth it. I only talked about cut scenes, but we are still planning a lot of interesting articles on the MMORPG development process using the example of Skyforge.
Our remaining articles on various aspects of game development can be read on our website and in our Vkontakte community .
If you want to know about any specific things - write in the comments.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/188658/
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