I still have some time before the game is released though so I asked around for some good recommendations for story driven games. The Uncharted series and Metal Gear Solid 4 were both recommended to me.

I had heard that MGS4 had an epic amount of cut-scenes and have been a follower of the series since the NES days. For those that haven’t played the game it is broken down into 5 acts with a very lengthy cut-scene between each act. All of these scenes tell the story and tie together the numerous locations involved in MGS4.

I found I was getting sucked into the story as always but one thing constantly bothered me about the presentation. The pacing of these cut-scenes were far to slow. It seemed like the pauses in dialog were much too long, sections could have been easily condensed giving the scenes even greater impact.

The scene opens up with Liquid driving into a trap set my Meryl. The tension is set from the first few shots but it drags on too long before anything happens, the shots of the faces, some random grunting you lose a little intensity.

Then as the trap is revealed you see Meryl’s forces revealing themselves first some assault boats, then some very badass looking blackhawk helicopters, then some not very impressive jeeps. Again the intensity of the scene drops because of a poor choice in pacing. The focus shifted to a less impressive element that retained that focus for far to long.

The whole scene is still very impressive there is no doubt but If you are going to create a 10 minute cut-scene the pacing needs to be bang on as well. You could probably cut the scene down to 8 minutes quite easily and even up the intensity a little with very little effort.