Watch Dogs Skip Cutscenes

[Danny Hosford]

Its OK, you can admit it. Sometimes you're enjoying every part of a game except for the story and you just want to keep playing without having to watch several minutes of a bad movie between every level.

Just kidding! People worked their fingers to the bone crafting those scenes, sculpting them from the hard stone of pure imagination. We owe it to them to watch every indulgent minute of the story of that guy and the two ladies who are into him for some reason and that other guy who is his friend or rival or possibly father.

Lauren Morton: I would never. I've always been here for the stories in games. Cutscenes are the reward. Why on earth would I grind through nigh endless fights with nameless bandits and spend twenty minutes sweating through a boss fight if not to hear a condescending monologue from the villain followed by a heartwarming scene in which my protagonists pledge their undying loyalty to one another?

Andy Kelly: Never. I like to have context for what I'm doing in a game. Even if the story sucks, I will still watch every cinematic. It's just the way I'm wired. Of course, there have been moments of weakness. I ended up skipping most of the cutscenes towards the end of the original Mirror's Edge because the story was so terrible. And the cutscenes between missions in the recent Hitman games, despite the fact they're among my favourite games of all time, are immensely skippable. But in general, no. If I'm playing a multiplayer/co-op game where players can vote to skip cutscenes, I get really annoyed when everyone presses the skip button. One of many reasons I just like playing games on my own now.

Alan Dexter: It depends on the game. Multiplayer shooters will have me bouncing off the skip key faster than you can type something derogatory about my mum. For single player games I tend to try and sit through them. Yes, even if the story is awful. Things get a little sketchier when I'm playing WoW. Sometimes I skip, particularly if I'm in a new raid, but then I tend to go back and watch them at my own pace later. For the last expansion a group of us tried levelling together, which meant skipping all the cutscenes. I just couldn't do it. After roughly an hour of intense levelling, I dropped out and returned to playing at my own speed so I can soak up those cutscenes. It made the boar killing that little bit more manageable.

Dave James: No. Never. Well, not unless it's a Kojima Special. I even sat through a whole lot of rambling David Cage, but I had to hit the ultimate skip button on MGS V and uninstalled when it all got too much.

Those intro montages of cutscenes and action that sometimes play when you launch some games, usually at the wrong resolution because you haven't even been given the option to adjust the settings yet? Yeah, those are getting skipped.

Jody Macgregor: I don't skip cutscenes unless I'm replaying, then get mad if I'm not allowed to. Some games only let you skip after you've seen something once, which seems sensible until you get a crash right after a long one then have to sit through it again because the game thinks this is your first time. I don't like skipping but it should always be an option.

Pausing too. For god's sake, let me pause a cutscene so I don't have to YouTube it because my dog wanted to go outside or our weekly ramen order arrived while I was in the middle of finding out how Grahuul the Wise was betrayed by Slimefinger the Weaselly after the Council of Rivermeadowhill in the Year of the Suspicious Councillor.

Sarafan: I like to skip cut-scenes only if they're very repeatable. For example Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag lacks this option and that's why I never finished it. It was annoying to watch the same animation dozens or maybe even hundreds of times after every sea battle. If the cut-scenes give important information regarding the story of the game I never skip them. Even when the story isn't very important I just need to watch it. It happens sometimes that I accidentally skip such a cut-scene by pressing the wrong button. In this case I always load the game (if there's an option to do so).

drunkpunk: I usually watch them the first playthrough of a game, unless like Sarafan said they are repeating cutscenes that don't really add much. If I'm going for full immersion I'll usually let them play out even in a subsequent playthrough. Or if I'm not really invested in the story of the game, just the gameplay, I'll skip right through them. I tend to avoid cutscene-heavy games, though, since gameplay is a bigger draw to me than story a lot of the time. RPGs are a bit different, but if I've played it many times I'll usually skip the cutscenes, as well.

End game credits are a different story. If they don't have anything other then a wall of text, i don't hesitate to skip it if i'm bored. Yes, i appreciate all the staff's efforts but frankly i'm exhausted with playing your game and you're now boring me. Let me move on so that i can play something else!

badman: It depends. If we're talking about cutscene heavy games with a lot of story, length and character development/twists (in general: story that gets hard to follow after some time), I usually skip the storyline after a while. Games like the Witcher 3 or Deus Ex HR are a perfect example. Great games, but I'm the guy that usually just wants to jump in and play. A short but decent (Max Payne) , exciting (Jedi Knight games) or 'interesting' (Stupid Invaders/Normality), storyline is my type of game. Don't make it too lengthy or complicated.

Zloth: Only if I had already seen it that same day and had it play again because I had to re-load. Even if it was the next morning, I would probably watch it! I've only skipped them in one game: Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. After watching BJ crying into his mamma's skirts (literally) then going to his boyhood farm where we were clearly going to see how troubled his childhood was, I was done.

ZedClampet: I have a tendency to relax my hand when I'm watching something and accidentally do a right click, so I've skipped cutscenes in every game that uses a right click to skip, like Darksiders.

Other than that, I skip cutscenes if I've already seen them, as in games where I'm grinding and doing the same levels/missions over and over. And, of course, there's always the tragic failed boss fights that let you watch the same cutscene as many times as you can fail. I've actually rage quit before when a game wouldn't let me skip a cutscene tied to a boss fight.

Mazer: I've been skipping Mr Kojima's cut scenes for close to two decades, ever since MGS2 wore out my patience, and not felt bad about it once. I made an effort to engage with the plot of MGS5 but not even Snake himself seemed entirely invested so I found myself slamming skip every time it told me this was a Hideo Kojima game.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame."}), " -0-10/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Jody MacgregorSocial Links NavigationWeekend/AU EditorJody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

I have a bone to pick with a lot of gamers. Some of these are my friends, whom I love dearly, but I simply cannot bear to watch them play games. If I see one more loved one telling me they skipped every cutscene in a video game, I might cry.

Doing some research, I found that it's an issue in several games. I wonder, why? Some says that it's for masking loading times, but I prefer to see a loading bar, and skip when ready, that watch the same cutscene over and over again.

I hate this feature in Telltale games: sometimes I want to replay a certain fragment because I'm unsatisfied with a choice made, and I have to watch the same cutscenes again. Sure, it's hard to separate cutscenes from the gameplay in this sort of games, but, for example, Life is Strange manages this problem just fine.

Yep, i love storydriven games, but unskipabble cutscenes is literally the worst. From recent examples, this is one of the things that ruined my experience with STASIS game, unskipabble cutscenes doesn't work well when you character can die and you'll be forced to listen whole scene again. Simply bad game design, any sane and experienced developer will never allow to add unskipabble cutscenes to his game.

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