[quote name='panzerfaust']My immediate reaction to the beginning of Mass Effect, where a cutscene has Shepherd get zapped by that device for his squadmate was, "Wait, I would never have chosen to do that." So yeah, certain games can be a bit jarring and that's never a sign of good execution. You can decide when people live or die, or when you want to risk your life at any other point in the game -- but when the developers want something to happen, they will violate that experience.[/QUOTE]
The problem there is that if you leave it up to the players to do choose something, they often won't even realize that it's in their power. Let's say that in ME1, they didn't boot you in to a cutscene when Ashley started getting alien bug-zapped. Let's say that you could either let her sit there, or you could take her place, and the narrative was set up to allow either choice to be totally valid, etc.
Would you know that you
could take her place? Short of great big letters appearing on the screen saying "WALK UP TO ASHLEY AND HIT THE USE KEY, ASSHOLE.", how could you know that that was even an option?
It's a problem I see from time to time. Just recently in Baldur's Gate 2, I was given a time-sensitive quest. And I really like the idea of time-sensitive quests. But I had no idea that it
was time-sensitive, so I
ed around doing other things and got totally screwed over because I took too long. When you accept the quest you get a little "Yo, do this shit fast-like!" speech, but you get that for every quest. "Town is getting destroyed by ghost-werewolves" wasn't time sensitive. "Your best friend is getting mind-raped" isn't time sensitive. But this was, but short of blatantly telling me FOR REALS THIS TIME, how would I know?
Without establishing early on "This is how shit's gonna be," players will just feel confused and often disappointed when they realize after the fact that the how and the when of what they do actually mattered. And going in to a game, the expectation is that those things
don't matter.