Monolith Soft details how the cutscenes and scripted moments in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 were crafted

Throughout the Xenoblade series, Monolith Soft has created an incredible amount of story content. This requires a lot of attention from the dev team, as countless character discussions and storytelling moments are necessary. Thankfully, Monolith Soft has a streamlined process for all of this.

In a new feature from Monolith Soft, two developers share some insight into how they convey the game’s story elements. One developer, Miura, comes from the cutscene side of things, while the second dev, Katsuta, handles scripted events. You can see how the two work together in the bullet point breakdown below.

• Monolith Soft has two types of events in most of their games: cutscenes and scripted events
• cutscenes use elaborate camera angles, particular character direction, and motion capture
• scripted events use premade stock character animations & movements alongside special tools
• if a technique is not usable at times in the game, this is accounted for in cutscenes
• if clothes get dirty during a cutscene, this is accounted for in gameplay
• the team has to work around the possibility that players may see a cutscene or event just once
• when a cutscene is immediately followed by a scripted event, animations are shared between the two to make for a better flow