Ark of the Lost Angels

There’s the idea held by several people that cutscenes are a method of storytelling separate from the main gameplay, and it’s lazy as a tactic.

The argument is that you could excise every cutscene from a multi-hour long campaign and tell just a competent story as you could with the gameplay segments. In many cases, you could do that, but a lot of getting between point A and B would be lost, as would a lot of other context as to why things are happening.

To refute this, I am going to use Halo 2, specifically Halo 2 Anniversary, because of the beautiful remaster cutscene work that Blur Studios did. The Covenant Holy City of High Charity, a massive space station, is shown in cutscenes, but up until the mission “Gravemind” (which begins Act 3 of the game), the player never had no sense of scale. The mission deposits the player inside a room in the station, and they fight their way out to realize that the mobile city is more of a moon, and the interior is largely hollow. It’s a wham moment of the highest order, and such an experience was saved for gameplay to capitalize on that feeling of seeing the interior for the first time in such a manner. Similarly, the explosion of the neighboring defense stations around Earth due to the Covenant’s bombs is also seen in gameplay, and killing the Prophet of Regret is something the player does in gameplay. All of these moments are lost in a cutscene only experience, and while not always the most significant plot points, a game that came out in 2004 understood the significance of playing moments and not just watching every significant one in a cutscene.