I’m not sure if the author’s point here is “A lot of games emulated Half Life’s scripted sequences but in a worse way and that is Half Life’s fault” or “Half Life’s style of immersion overshadowed immersive sims and sandbox games and that was bad”. I could maybe get on board with the second but you can’t then go praising Naughty Dog because they mixed cinematics with their scripted gameplay.
As the author says, scripted sequences are a tool alongside cinematics and anything else. In the case of COD (I haven’t played a new one in around 15 years, so I’m talking from the perspective of COD4 and its derivatives. I don’t know how anything recent is structured) the briefing screens during loading are literally cinematics delivering narrative in a stylistically appropriate way. They do take away agency via QTEs (which act as resets for the gameplay and limit dynamism) or extended ‘you can jiggle your camera’ cutscenes, but those aren’t inherently bad, and Half Life doesn’t do them anyway.
Outside of maybe two moments in Half Life you have all of your weapons and abilities available, so those scripted sequences are not a cutscene you are forced to jiggle your camera at, but environmental set dressing or one-off combat scenarios. A cutscene showing a tank smashing into the room through a wall would break the flow of the firefight, and having it there from the start would take away the player’s ability to set up an ambush with tripwire mines or one of their other tools. A good scripted event doesn’t reduce interactivity, it is a stimulus for the player to interact with.
I’m not sure if the author’s point here is “A lot of games emulated Half Life’s scripted sequences but in a worse way and that is Half Life’s fault” or “Half Life’s style of immersion overshadowed immersive sims and sandbox games and that was bad”. I could maybe get on board with the second but you can’t then go praising Naughty Dog because they mixed cinematics with their scripted gameplay.
As the author says, scripted sequences are a tool alongside cinematics and anything else. In the case of COD (I haven’t played a new one in around 15 years, so I’m talking from the perspective of COD4 and its derivatives. I don’t know how anything recent is structured) the briefing screens during loading are literally cinematics delivering narrative in a stylistically appropriate way. They do take away agency via QTEs (which act as resets for the gameplay and limit dynamism) or extended ‘you can jiggle your camera’ cutscenes, but those aren’t inherently bad, and Half Life doesn’t do them anyway.
Outside of maybe two moments in Half Life you have all of your weapons and abilities available, so those scripted sequences are not a cutscene you are forced to jiggle your camera at, but environmental set dressing or one-off combat scenarios. A cutscene showing a tank smashing into the room through a wall would break the flow of the firefight, and having it there from the start would take away the player’s ability to set up an ambush with tripwire mines or one of their other tools. A good scripted event doesn’t reduce interactivity, it is a stimulus for the player to interact with.