Pick up the pace, Starcraft 2!

In my last Smatterings, I talked about some of the plot issues of Starcraft II, focusing on how the lack of consequences made the game feel flat—why are we building these armies and crushing these foes if it doesn’t mean anything?  Why make choices if our flawed characters can’t make any mistakes?—and this time, I’m going to explore the in-game cinematics. 

Blizzard’s cinematics team is well-regarded—visually, they’re stunning, and they don’t slouch on the narrative delivery, either.  Let’s start with a sample of their work: there will be SPOILERS all over this article, so don’t continue if you hate SPOILERS.  Be aware that the first SPOILERS come in the following video, which SPOILS a game from 1998, so deal with it. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V1PwpoDqzM

Impressive, right?  But I want you to pay special attention to the delivery of dialogue.  Frequently, we’re watching one character speak, and then a second character begins speaking before the camera cuts to them.  Here are links to some examples: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V1PwpoDqzM&t=0m34s (watch until 0:43 or so)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V1PwpoDqzM&t=1m24s (watch until 1:40)

Notice how much the cinematic moves because of this?  We bounce from beat to beat.  It relies on shot/countershot (or shot reverse shot, if you prefer), a film technique in which the camera shows one character speaking, then flips to catch the response of the other character.  Humans pick up so much information from facial expressions that this technique does a lot of the heavy lifting in film—we note the subtleties in dialogue because the characters’ faces make it easy to do so.  The dialogue is still important, of course—there’s no lull in the action because we’re carried from exciting moment to exciting moment by the dialogue.  We hear a character’s voice (which makes us imagine the character), and then the camera pops over to show us their reaction.  It’s a great way to engage the viewer—we’re think about the character before we see them, the camera doesn’t bounce around too suddenly as to be distracting, but we catch them during important moments without slowing the pace of the exchange.  Nice. 

Compare that to this exchange between the dark templar, Zeratul, and his SPOILER high templar comrade, Tassadar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4MN6ljeURI&t=8m44s

Ugh.  Fucking… I can’t.  It’s so slow.  Painfully slow.  We watch Zeratul talk, wait for the screen to fade out, wait for Tassadar to fade in, then watch Tassadar talk, fade out, fade in, and skip the cinematic because goddamn.  Just goddamn. 

What can we do to solve this problem?  We’re dealing with a picture-in-picture issue—we want to watch the larger image with important action taking place (or allegedly important—watching overlords float through space might not be vital) while still getting the benefit of showing which character is talking.  And there may be technical limitations, too; loading each character’s animation takes time, so let’s take that into account. 

Well… add a second screen.  You have all that screen space.  Just… add another screen.  Then we don’t have to wait for anything to fade, we just start to watch the second character speak.  And the animation has already loaded, so we don’t need to wait for it.  That would pick up the pace dramatically, and keep us from having issues like this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrXUxVNHHVw&t=5m30s (watch until 5:40)

Cutting off a character is impossible with only one screen.  So… add a second screen. 

ADD A SECOND SCREEN!

Sorry.  It would solve so many of the pacing problems that I’m surprised no one at Blizzard pointed it out.  You could even put the second screen on the opposite side if the character was in a different place! 

The poor pacing caused by this single-screen approach deflates a lot of the drama and comedy in the game.  However, I wonder whether we’re really benefiting from the screens—after all, they’re looped animations.  We aren’t seeing characters react to each other anyway, so their only purpose is to inform the players of who is speaking.  Creating specific reaction animations (angered, surprised, satisfied) might be too much work for all of the characters, but they would help our protagonists out a lot. 

I might update this post after some more thinking (or just write a follow-up), but I’m also trying to work through why the delivery in the first level of the Heart of the Swarm campaign feels as flat as it does (here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZjJaM5WeDQ&t=3m24s).  When I close my eyes and simply listen, the delivery clips along and sounds well-acted; when I watch, however, it drags on and on.  What gives?  Am I bored by the character animations?  Is the camera angle jarring?  RTS games are generally top-down, so maybe I feel out of control when the camera moves to show us characters from a more horizontal angle.  Or perhaps I’m imaging more of the action with my eyes closed (as in our shot/countershot example from earlier), which excites my brain more than seeing it poorly represented from such a distance?  As much detail as Blizzard put into all of these locations, maybe the overworld camera is simply so far from the action that I still feel disengaged.  Input would be great—if I figure anything else out, I’ll let you know.  

Comments

[Dr.V]

Yet again, I agree entirely. I loved the idea of taking things from Kerrigan's side of the story and slaughtering the inferior races. However I played 1 mission a day due to the sluggishness and sometimes outright boring dialogue through not just the expansion, but all of SC2. But at the same time in my first playthrough, I sat through it just so I could know that little bit more of the lore. Was it worth it? Certainly (for me). Could it have been done better? Absolutely and the end result would have been a far better cinematic & engrossing game.