While playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the game crashed after an important, somewhat lengthy conversation. I hoped that it might have autosaved after the talk, but when I got the game back up, my Rook was striding into the room to speak with that character yet again.
I was annoyed — no one wants to replay something they just played — but I was thankful that Dragon Age let me skip through the conversation a line at a time. I could just fast-forward through, stop briefly to make important dialogue choices, then keep it moving. I got through a five-minute long conversation in about 30 seconds.
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Please, Let Me Skip Cutscenes
This is good, and is a pretty standard feature in games today, and essentially functions as the fast-forward consumers have been accustomed to in movies and TV since VCRs arrived on the scene. Seeing The Veilguard implement it so effortlessly gave me flashbacks to some painfully slow moments I had while playing through Life is Strange: Double Exposure. Deck Nine’s lega-sequel brought back Max Caulfield and, with her, a dated design choice that also feels like it would be more at home in 2015.
Double Exposure (and Life is Strange as a whole) is all about replayability. You make one choice and get one outcome so, on a future playthrough, you make a different choice to see if and how it changes things. In Double Exposure, there are different outcomes depending on what you choose in conversations, who you romance, and what collectibles you find.
In order to get to those key fork-in-the-road moments on a replay, you have to get through a lot of stuff you’ve already seen before. I’m hyper-aware of this because I wrote guides for the game, and that often required letting the story progress through things I’d already done. It’s a major annoyance for anyone interested in Trophy/Achievement hunting, too.
To earn all of the Trophies/Achievements, you need to romance Vihn and Amanda separately, romance neither, and romance both. That’s four playthroughs of the game. Though things do change on the basis of your choices, a huge portion of Double Exposure is the same every playthrough, and will not ever change. On the second playthrough, watching every cutscene in its entirety might not be a big deal. On a third playthrough, you can bet you’d be annoyed. On the fourth, you’re probably doing chores while the cutscenes play without you, occasionally stopping to press a button.
Choice Driven Games Are Meant To Be Replayed
The game does let you replay chapters you’ve already played, and even the smaller scenes that make up those chapters. You can also load into those scenes for a quick look that affects nothing going forward, or begin a replay of the game from that moment. Deck Nine understands how its audience interacts with its games, so the inability to do anything to make conversations progress forward more quickly feels like a huge oversight.
Life is Strange: Double Exposure has received a ton of criticism from fans, and I don’t really want to dogpile it here (especially since I disagree with the widespread idea that it mishandles Max and Chloe’s relationship, which has driven most of the disappointment). In fact, I don’t think the game has one big issue that brings it down. Instead, a bunch of little things contribute to the game being not quite as good as it could have been.
In my review, I highlighted the pop-in that brings down the game’s overall stellar presentation, the corny dialogue that brings down the game’s great performances, and the lack of ambition that brings down the game’s well-realized setting. The inability to skip conversations you’ve already seen is another one of those minor problems that adds up. It’s death by a thousand cutscenes.
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