I have to disagree with this. I get having to cut away from the main character once or twice to build the world around him. However, cutting up the gameplay in between nearly every loading screen for every area with it is excessive. It doesn't flow right, in my opinion. These moments, I feel, should be a lot rarer like after you've cleared an area and beat it's boss.
Let me use an example: Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's a children's show, I know, but it is one of, if not the best, show at world building around a single character at the start. You take a character and you start off by only building the world around that ONE character. You might have some cutaways from the main character to set up the ending of either the episode or the season (like you would do when you cut away to the succubi planning on how to deal with the main character), but you're not cutting away every single episode to see how or what the Firelord, the White Lotus, Omashu, the Southern Water Tribe warriors, the Kyoshi Warriors, or the Air Acolytes are doing. It isn't until the tail end of season 2 where A:TLA starts progressively showing the rest of the world by either cutaways or by having the main character interacting with those elements, because that's when you start going into grander plotlines and over-arcing stories.
Throwing everything at the player like you're doing in your first act is sensory overload, and it turns people off from the story you so value and into "gimme porn now" mode. And you're right it is basic, almost to the point of lazy. You don't need to abuse cutaways like this, especially in an rpg that only has you playing one character in it's beginning. I suggest having NPCs that tell you most of these things, or even have the characters you meet later on tell you these stories when you interact with them out of battle(You can even use flashbacks because that's a thing) instead of shattering the pace of your game over your knee and pissing on it's remains.
I understand your point of view, and I thank you for writing it down, but I completely disagree with it.
-You, the character, is part of the world, not the center of it. You used Avatar, but a better example would be something like Game of Thrones with multiple characters going back and forth around the world showing progress from all sides, while still retaining that "main character".
-The world is moving with or without the main character. For you to notice the difference between *what was* and *what is* you must present the player with both.
-To follow your example that, after you get there, you will be presented with a story about how it got into that situation by a NPC, for me, is throwing everything at the play simultaneously, instead of building it up game by game, chapter by chapter, while still developing all characters who appear in the following stories.
-People that just want hentai scenes and have zero interest in the story will just ask for a save file here or in another forum, like I've already seen. In the end, I make games for people that want to play them, not just quickly skip it for a hentai scene.
-The world is huge and each age is very different, and developing a place for an Era just after the MC arrives in a place would not capture the feeling of the entire Era that the game takes place. For example, the bloody jaw tribe might be a metropolis in the modern age.
-Making those cut-scenes gives me more work then what you suggested, with the NPC telling the story of the place. So what I'm doing is definitely not the "lazy" approach. One does not surpass 2 thousand hours developing a game by being lazy.
