...I do believe that cut scenes help make the storyline greater, look at final fantasy and World of Warcraft, and Guild Wars. Cut scene is a great option to go for when making a great storyline, otherwise to me it's nothing more then just meager game for only gameplay filled with repetitiveness.
I have to disagree with this. Cutscenes are okay, but as a story telling method, I think things like cryptic notes are far more effective.
The best example I can think of is probably the Shalebridge Cradle in Thief III. It's this huge, imposing, abandoned pseudo-Victorian building, that was first a bleak pseudo-Victorian orphanage and then a bleak pseudo-Victorian insane asylum and then burned down. And for a while, it was both an orphanage and an insane asylum. And it's haunted with more ghosts than you can shake a blackjack at. And the building itself has its own malevolent sentience.
Sounds a bit clichéd, no? Well, the twist is that going in there, you don't know that. You're told that it was an orphanage, and that it was a loony bin, and that there was a fire. You can guess that there is pretty much no way that the place
isn't going to be haunted, but you're never explicitly told that, and have absolutely no idea just what you are going to find inside. What happens next is that you meet one of the resident ghosts, start taking creepy missions from her, get further into the building, find some incredibly creepy enemies, go on creepy dream-quests into the building's past, read pages and pages of cryptic notes, and generally figure out on your own what the place's deal is. And because you're figuring it out yourself, it never occurs to you to doubt all the stuff you're digging up, or stop to think about how it's, well, a bit clichéd at places. It's a powerful persuasive technique, used by cult recruiters and game designers alike.
The reason for the retcon seems pretty simple to me. It's what I've been saying for years. The fact is, the more generic it is, the more people will relate to it. Tons of people had a hard time liking Morrowind for the simple fact that it was unique and interesting. So if unique = less mass appeal = less money, then generic = more mass appeal = more money. The ret-con was purely a business decision. Well that's what I assume. It's always possible that Todd Howard really is as much of an idiot as he sometimes seems to be, but if you listen to the man talk that seems unlikely.
Not convinced about this. I can see people having a hard time liking Morrowind because it's
alien with its giant insects and giant mushrooms and whatnot, but "unique and interesting" doesn't require that. You can have memorable scenery in the most generic of pseudo-medieval European fantasy settings. The real medieval Europe had plenty of interesting landmarks. And having interesting and memorable places and characters doesn't result in less mass appeal. Shakespeare wrote his plays for the kind of people who frequented the sleazy part of sixteenth-century London, and
he certainly didn't need to make his characters as bland as possible to draw in an audience.