Reasons Why Games DON'T let you Skip Cutscenes // [Game Designer Explains]

GENSHIN COULD NEVER -------- I'm half-expecting to receive angry comments because some people feel so strongly about cutscene skips and any attempt to justify or explain why they're there will just be met with vitriol... Though I suppose reading angry gamer comments is part and parcel of a game developers job. Or at least, it is for whoever got tasked with community management... To a degree, it's understandable. There's a VERY thin line between "reason" and "excuse", and what exactly tips something over onto either end is somewhat subjective and dependent on a person. Even if a game does have a justifiable reason (e.g. programming), some people will always view it as an excuse. Yes I do play Genshin and Star Rail, and yes Genshin's lack of skipping also annoys me sometimes. Ironic, considering one of my previous jobs involved developing mobile gacha games (and we did run into this problem, as our internal user data tracking showed people would skip story and complain they don't understand what's happening)

If I ever end up making my own JRPG, I want to have an easter egg related to skipping cutscenes. If you skip a lot of cutscenes during your playthrough, the in-battle dialog with the final boss would change to the hero responding to him "I don't even know who you are!".

I like story, and I will watch them. But not giving the option to skip the cutscenes destroys replayability.

Genshin dosent give you cut scenes they give you lectures.

You know, I did not know that some of the cutscenes were just loading time covers... that is super interesting...

traveler slowly getting electrocuted to death mid-cutscene and being able to do nothing about it is hilarious

Genshin's problem is not disallowing skipping the entire cutscene, but rather that they make player feel like they need to skip it. There are some pretty pointless cutscenes that drag so hard, prevent you from advancing the text before you watch the minor animations, usually are unvoiced, and are filled with wordy explanations filled with jargon that just gate you out of timed events. It really does not respect your time and that's the core problem. Temporary Event dialogue and cutscenes need to be abbreviated or skipped. Main story stuff is fine.

I think it's also important to remember that in the past, having cutscenes at all was kind of a novelty, so skipping them might not have crossed the minds of most people. Older Dragon Quest games used to advertise how much new text the newer entries had

I personally don't mind cutscenes, but what I will say is it can really feel tedious when I'm not allowed to skip things that do not feel as important. Like, for example, a lot of Genshin side quests can drag on the dialogue with banter-- banter that can at times be humorous and charming but when you factor in how many quests have a lot of the same running gag and you're just trying to keep things moving along, it can make otherwise fun quests feel like a chore. I also have a friend who has chronic wrist/hand pain, and for him having to repeatedly tap through long dialogue makes the experience worse for him; I feel really bad that with that in mind, cutscenes in extremely slow and dialogue-heavy moments in Genshin that aren't as important (especially when the game incentivizes you to do the sidequests for primogems and other awards) don't have a skip. It's made me appreciate games that do allow for a skip, but provide ways of recapping/summarizing the information should players need to access it later, as well as games that can expedite the text progression process by selecting a "I understand/I have no questions" option to keep things moving faster, or games that have dialogue as you're actively doing stuff rather than sitting around. As I said, I myself don't mind cutscenes, but I definitely appreciate games that go the extra mile to have a better flow, allow player choice, or have taken the time to decide what cutscenes are or are not important. Great video by the way!

My problem with not being able to skip things is that I read fast. By the time they're halfway through the sentence, I already got the gist of it and want to move on. For this reason, Genshin's dialogue is so frustrating... Because they let you skip to the next sentence, sometimes. But EVERY TIME one of the characters or npcs moves it will NOT. LET. YOU. SKIP until after they finish the animation. Its maddening. Breath of the Wild's dialogue system is leagues better, because you can just spam the B button to skip anything you don't care the hear/read. I can actually speed-read what they say without needing to sit through a long drawn-out animation of them standing and talking. I'm also incredibly grateful for the Pokemon games, which often have settings to effect text speed and turn off battle animations.

skipping should always be available when possible but it should be hard to accidentally skip. Just very convenient for if say im redoing something because i lost my save or am on a different platform or what have you

Its also worth noting, hoyo games are fairly likely because they want to punish having alternate accounts and make it more tedious Same reason they have the occulous

I remember hearing about a theory that cutscenes and stories are unskippable because they also add to the overall playtime for the game, which is a good statistic for the market since players are spending more time on the game as a result.

I am honestly suprised that there are people who skip cutscenes and dialogues for games that they haven't played before. It just never crossed my mind. I only know if a game has skippable cutscenes or not, when I have played them more than twice. In my opinion games with a lot of replay value should have skippable cutscenes but I wouldn't be that upset if they didn't. Other than that it is a great video and I hope you keep it up.

Solution: when skipping a cutscene a short summary of what happened gets displayed on the confirmation prompt, so you know what they’re talking about. And have an option to see the full cutscenes later, when you are in the mood

TBH, the slow, boring parts of Genshin Impact's story, largely via seemingly endless text that i often skip through without reading anyways, is part of why i cant bring myself to get through it. ive still got alot of the story to go, but dozens of lines of unvoiced samey dialogue between almost every single event in a story makes me feel like im reading a book instead of playing a game. im playing a game instead of reading a book for a reason. its not like i chose to play a visual novel and complain that it plays like a visual novel. i think theres a perfectly acceptable degree of unvoiced dialogue in games, but Genshin goes well beyond that. but TBF, even Skyrim does this to me, so i think im just not into exposition in videosgames much at all to te point where some otherwise great games will go largely unplayed by me because of it. and i cant be the only one who struggles with this.. sure when i was a kid id absolutely Kirby-style inhale every moment and aspect of the games i played over and over, but im a jaded adult now and the patterns in games and dialogue that ive seen repeated thousands of times just dont do it for me as much anymore. maybe its just a mental problem, but i feel like games should try to cater to people who have issues like mine by atleast giving us the opt-in choice to skip stuff we dont want to endure. maybe give those Sonic Adventure 1 style recap videos. i really liked that. no one should be forced to play a game like i want to, and i shouldnt have to play like they do. options,choices and customization of ones personal experiences should be as crucial to a game as the gameplay itself. art should not be dictated from on high, it should be personally interpreted. you cant do that for someone else, you can only let them do it for themselves. and honestly, isnt this the point of art?

Every time the topic of loading in cutscenes is brought up, I'm reminded of the legendary "ladder sequence" in MGS 3, it was practically an interactive cutscene (the player needed to climb the stairs) that served the purpose of hiding a gigantic loading, and seize the opportunity to create anticipation in the player by playing "Snake Eater" and making him think "Damn, whatever it's waiting beyond this ladder is going to be the biggest challenge yet". I'm more of a story-driven player, so I rarely find it annoying when the game doesn't add a skip cutscene option, when I play games with a heavy focus on the story I'm playing for the story. When I only want action I play a beat'em up or an action shooter (big fan of those genres too).

FF14 has one of the best stories ever told in a live service game format, in an engine that is decades old and has a lot of technical baggage from it's PS3 version, and STILL lets you to skip 99% of cutscenes in the game. It's baffling to me that Hoyoverse won't allow the player to skip cutscenes as it kills replayability and makes the player not wanna listen what is being said in them, it comes off as pedantic and makes you think hoyo has no confidence in their story as the player has to be forced to watch it.

I am really torn of this. Especially as a Genshin Player. In equal parts do I support and hate the lack of a skip-feature. I hate it, because in some parts, I'd really just love to get to whatever's behind the cutscene. But then again, there are many Stories in the game that I probably would've skipped, but in the end I found myself admitting that I found myself happy that I couldn't skip it and actually immersed myself in it.

Cutscenes are literally the only thing that are keeping me from coming back to Genshin...