[kouteiheika]

> 10-13 minutes if I remember correctly from booting the game to actually being able to do anything besides mash buttons to try and skip the cutscenes.

Genuinely curious - if you don't care about the story then why play an RPG? When you're speedrunning - sure, skip all of the cutscenes, but when you're playing casually - why would you want to do that?

[xandrius]

I could ask you a similar question: why play an RPG if you don't care about playing? Go watch a movie.

The point of many posters, I imagine, is that there is too much non-playing parts all at once, it's not strictly about them not being skippable.

This is especially damning when the long unskippable cutscene is during a boss fight or something which you might fail afterwards and cannot save.

[JoshTriplett]

> This is especially damning when the long unskippable cutscene is during a boss fight or something which you might fail afterwards and cannot save.

Some games have started to get this right, either by making cutscenes you've seen skippable, or by just automatically skipping straight to the battle if you've already been through it once. I suspect one reason it didn't happen on older games was the need to explicitly save, rather than autosaving.

[ThrowawayR2]

Unlike a movie, when done well, the combat/grinding add to player engagement because it places the player in direct charge of the characters' growth from a nobody to a legend. You can't get that from a movie.

[opan]

I agree with your take here that he should care about the cut scenes/story if bothering to play, but this has gotten especially bad in newer games where they try to shove you right into the game before you can tweak settings. I never played through Bravely Default on 3DS because the opening scene used the English dub instead of the original audio, and I had to skip it to access the settings and change languages, then there was no way to rewatch that opening scene. I've similarly avoided their other games like Octopath Traveler as I suspect they have the same issue. It seems like an accessibility issue. I don't think they should ever stop you from getting to the settings first thing. I am not entertained by them trying to be overly cinematic. I don't think it would kill them to wait until you hit "start new game".

[hombre_fatal]

Starting off with 10min of exposition is too much and it’s lazy. You don’t even know if you’re going to like the game yet. Do some en media res story telling and get on with it.

Most games I don’t care about the deep exposition. I’m fine with a vague notion and then starting from the main character’s insertion into it where the gameplay starts.

Not letting the player skip it is just hubris.

[YurgenJurgensen]

10 minutes is a long time now? Is this what TikTok does to a person’s brain? Cartoon Network typically had 11 minute episodes, so you’re complaining that you don’t even have the attention span of a child.

[jccalhoun]

For me, it isn't about not liking the story, but about having to watch a movie when I want to play a game. Don't show it to me. Let me do it.

[rkomorn]

I play RPGs for the fun of turning time and grind into more advanced abilities (eg going from getting slaughtered by dragons in Skyrim to being the one doing the slaughtering).

There are few games where the story has mattered to me, and even basically no games where the cutscenes did.

Edit: the presence of story and cutscenes in a game I enjoy is basically correlation and not causation (for me).

[TavsiE9s]

Oh I do care about the story, but please don't front-load the credits and make me sit through them.

[butlike]

Dopamine only hits when the numbers go up. So no min/maxing when the cutscenes are playing