Animators do not decide how a game is made Unless you're Fumito Ueda. I think Team Ico and others have shown pretty clearly the value of putting an emphasis on strong animation and direct collaboration between programmers, designers and animators to achieve characters that are interactively alive.
Cutscenes CAN work as a reward - Starcraft comes to mind - but when cutscenes start showing things you'd rather be playing , they are a problem... and really, the gameplay should be its own reward. Personally I'm partial to the fully interactive Valve-school of scripted sequences... HALF-interactive cutscenes though ...
It would be good if Microsoft could avoid using Windows Live on Steam releases. Attempting to get GTAIV running on PC is painful. This might be acceptable if Games for Windows Live did something useful, like centralized save games, but no such luck... attempting to install my copy of GTA ...
I really hope floating exclamation marks are NOT considered best practice. Outcast did better with characters waving to get your attention in 1999. @Sean. I did not mean my statement to exclude influences other than games. I restricted it to that only for the sake of punchy simplicity. We are ...
