Can Skyrim Engine do scripted cutscene?

[tomomi1922]

This is the opening of Dragon Age: Origins. For a 2009 game, this scene is incredibly epic.

I believe this is the opening battle that sets the story in motion where the player is not a part of (partly due to hardware limitation). But I highly believe this is not a pre-generated video (because they could have done so much better) but using game asset to generate all these scripted sequences in real time for players to watch. Side note: I know, the stupidest part of this video is to send all the war hounds to die first. I would have the war hounds with the main army for maximum effect. War hounds can easily identify friend and foe, not like The Hulk.

I am wondering if we can do this in Skyrim. We know the game engine can limit player's interaction and force eye direction, but can Skyrim jump camera angles like a cut in movie editing? This would be nice to have for quests where we want to dramatize a certain scene.

[kthompsen]

Even that scene from DAO is not a render. It's a movie. As a graphics guy, you should notice that :tongue: You can tell how different Duncan and King Cailan look and the occasional grainy-ness of some of the scenes. If anything, they improved this stuff much more in DA2 and actually had some decent scenes. Like Isabela's intro in the bar is a good one. Great animation there. DA2's main fault was having next to nothing in the environment. It's just well designed characters without much else to render.

 

But you can do scripted scenes in Skyrim. It's just a ton of work and wasn't really made for it. It's purely designed for open world exploits. Just like Dragon Age and Mass Effect were designed for tight knit gameplay... and completely sucked at anything attempting an open world. The whole schtick of Bethesda, if you will, is in it's randomness and what we would call emergent gameplay. Not scripted stuff, but the unpredictable, with plenty of unspoken environmental storytelling.

 

That said, I wish they were better at the other stuff too. Rockstar are the reigning kings of doing both well.

 

You definitely need to watch ShoddyCast's Skyrim Lore series. It's a great use of animation in this world. Even if none of it is particularly epic.

[fore]

There is one way I know of. You could do this with a combination of animated camera animations, and forcing the player not to move. For example there is a kissing animation from zaz where the camera circles around the actor, just like with Skyrim cinematic camera, but included in the animation.

 

Not being a gifted animator myself, I have used this only for a very simple situation. In FNIS Flyer I have implemented different watching angles from above. Different animations will force the camera either down earth, or like 45 degrees angular.

 

It is done by changing the Camera3d bone in the animation, and then define the animation in FNIS with the "ac" parameter.