I’ve come to really appreciate when games aren’t merely graphically pretty, but that they also take great care with their use of camera angles and animation in general. I speak particularly of cutscenes and dialogue, but frankly this question applies to the entire game.
I find there’s a lot of games that do take cinematography in mind for cutscenes, but nothing else. Or at least the rest of the game is considerably less impressive than cutscenes. e.g., rather than animate something, some games will just have a text box say what happened. And dialogue in many games is very basic back and forth (often with very lackluster quality lip syncing).
RDR2 is perhaps the best game I’ve played so far in this regard. It felt like it animated everything carefully, even had a cinematic mode for horseback riding that I found very pleasing to use, and cutscenes often felt movie quality.
What other games (of any kind) put a lot of effort into cinematography?
Most of them have already been named but the ones I’d choose are:
Ico
Shadow of the Colossus
The Last Guardian
Journey
The Last of Us
The Last of Us Part 2
Half Life 2
Bioshock
Mass Effect 2
God of War (2018) / Ragnarok
Kentucky Route Zero
Limbo / Inside
Abzu
And similarly RDR2
Edit: I could also potentially consider Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Similar to the other first person games I listed, they designed their environments so that certain features are prominent as you move forward into them, which to me qualifies as this type of “cinematography” or framing we’re talking about in games
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Sub for any gaming related content!
Rules:
1: No spam or advertising. This basically means no linking to your own content on blogs, YouTube, Twitch, etc.
2: No bigotry or gatekeeping. This should be obvious, but neither of those things will be tolerated. This goes for linked content too; if the site has some heavy “anti-woke” energy, you probably shouldn’t be posting it here.
3: No untagged game spoilers. If the game was recently released or not released at all yet, use the Spoiler tag (the little ⚠️ button) in the body text, and avoid typing spoilers in the title. It should also be avoided to openly talk about major story spoilers, even in old games.
Most of them have already been named but the ones I’d choose are:
Edit: I could also potentially consider Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Similar to the other first person games I listed, they designed their environments so that certain features are prominent as you move forward into them, which to me qualifies as this type of “cinematography” or framing we’re talking about in games