The one annoying thing about the brilliantly designed Metal Gear Solid 4, is its overreliance on lengthy cut scenes. In fact it has been that way since the series' beginning, but luckily for us the game's designer Hideo Kojima has finally decided to change that in the next sequel.
"Gameplay is always fundamental", Hideo Kojima said. "Halo, BioShock - I see their approach and I think they are brilliant in some ways, but I still feel they still lack a kind of a deeper storyline or the expression of the feelings of the characters. I do have plans of how I should approach this and get around it."
"In MGS4, yes, I put everything in the cut sequences, which I kind of regret to some extent", he admitted. "Because maybe there is a new approach which I should think about. I'm always thinking about it - making it interactive but at the same time telling the story part and the drama even more emotionally. I would like to take that approach, which I am still working on."
"Storytelling is very difficult. But adding the flavor helps to relay the storytelling, meaning in a cutscene, with a set camera and effects, you can make the users feel sorrow, or make them happy or laugh - this is an easy approach, which we have been doing."
"That is one point, the second point is that if I make multiple storylines and allow the users to select which story, this might really sacrifice the deep emotion the user might feel; when there's a concrete storyline, and you kind of go along that rail, you feel the destiny of the story, which at the end, makes you feel more moved. But when you make it interactive - if you want multiple stories where you go one way or another - will that make the player more moved when he or she finishes the game? These two points are really the key which I am thinking about, and if this works, I think I could probably introduce a more interactive storytelling method."
