Criticism of 'cinematic' games

That's too reductive. During a QTE there can be significant reduction in the sense of control, and consequently of immersion, relative to being outside of one. Part of that I suppose comes from a lack of choice. Outside of an event you're free to play around with whatever the game allows you to do. In a QTE however you're locked down to whatever the game dictates that you do in that particular instance, and rather than perform the actions directly you're just playing Simon Says with the buttons to keep the event (of which your attention is now also not fully towards) from stopping.

Dividing your attention between an abstract minigame and the animations on screen can help break immersion, which would obviously affect the impactfulness of your actions. But that's all in Batman. In God of War the brutality of the quick time events is what's impactful. In Asura's Wrath the presentation of the prompts in tandem with the insanity on screen is what's impactful. But in Batman, I'd say it's the tight controls coupled with the fluidity and brutality of the combat that's impactful. Like cinematics, there's no singular universal rule for these things, nor should there be.

I remember back when the cinematics argument was a big thing. A lot of people against them were saying it was just lazy, a crutch for conveying story when the medium is capable of so much more. Since then there's been a bunch of games with interactive cutscenes, whether with dialogue circles or the whole walk 'n talk thing, or something else, but also still cinematics. The medium is capable of cinematic experiences and your Super Puzzle Platformer games all the same, and there's gonna be an audience for both. Hell, sometimes it'll be the same damn people.

If there's ever too much of a thing, maybe the mainstream shifts gears. If it doesn't, there's surely some corner of the industry that'll have what you need, whether it's an indie or something on kickstarter. But trying to force a shift probably won't get you very far.

I don't really need more or less cut scenes because story telling can be done like Persona 4. Which I think is fantastic.

The problem isn't cinematic games, the problem is people (in general) buying too many games and expecting them to meet their specific tastes.

On the flipside, the industry needs to stop bleeding money - so that they dont need to sell five million to break even.

On the one hand, I love Half-Life 2 and the way it never breaks from first-person, letting the player control Gordon during what would otherwise be a prerendered cutscene. On the non-crowbar-wielding hand, I dig the MGS games and all their bizarre cutsceney goodness (read: lunacy). The thing that sets MGS apart, I think, is that cutscenes are used to tell a story in a way that the moment-to-moment gameplay isn't able to.

The problem comes when games use the "cinematic experience" to take away control from the player to show the player something that would be cooler to do.

for fucks sake...

Let people play what they want, and let designers make whatever they want.

Who cares.

The issue here is that what makes video games interesting and unique from other forms of entertainment is the interactivity you get from it. If that is taken away, then videogames lose there uniqueness or the thing that makes them special or different.

If the game is a qte fest like say Tomb Raider (literally the first two hours of Tomb Raider is just you constantly mashing buttons on your keyboard) then it just makes the game less interesting. And while I think a game like Tomb Raider has decent mechanics, they could have tried some interesting mechanics that focused on hunting and survival instead of turning it into a shooter which is just playing it safe tbh.

But one of the reasons they need to safe it gameplay wise is b/c of this cinematic story they want to tell. This leads to using mechanics that are safe and easy to grasp instead of something that a little more unique and different than just another third person shooter.

That's way I think most people have an issue with cinematic game design. That and for every Bioshock or TLOU, there far too many games (like Tomb Raider) that are hurt by it and its clear that they would be better if this focus wasn't present in the game to begin with.