Taking control of the camera

Well, in my experience:

"mikesnail" wrote:
Gradually rotate the players view to point the direction I want

This'll make everybody hurl :)

"mikesnail" wrote:
Black the screen, the bring it up to show an 'event cutscene', then black the screen and return to the 'players' view

This will obviously break immersion somewhat, but otherwise sounds absolutely fine as long as you:
1) fade out - switch the camera - fade in
2) allow user control of the camera during the cutscene and don't move it yourself
3) back to normal view with another fade out/in

You will have the user looking at the action anyway during the cutscene, so giving him the ability to look around at this point won't make him miss the action (unless he really wants to look away :)

"mikesnail" wrote:
Avoid taking control of the view at all & give some form of visual prompt as to where to look (more immersive but harder to do in many situations)

This is obviously the best if you can pull it off seamlessly. Like having another character shout at the user with positional 3D audio, and then wait until the user actually looks towards that direction before triggering whatever you want to show. This of course implies that the cut-scene takes place in the same area as the player.

Depending on the type of game, you could have a notification appear on the 'HUD' that the user could interact with that would display the cutscene in a small picture in picture window, and if the user wanted to, they could enlarge it so the cutscene would fill the full screne of the user and continue to play. After it finishes, it would slowly minimize once again.

Naturally this wouldnt work for most types of games, but in the right setting, and having the right angle for the cutscene would keep the immersion in my opinion.

For example. The HUD for the player could be a screen on the users wrist (aka pipboy from fallout), and a noise / light notification could play to indicate a cutscene is waiting to be shown. When the player accepts this notification, the small HUD would be brought into view (model moves screen on hand into view) and the small cutscene would start playing. The user could then also decide to full screen the cutscene (model moves the screen directly into the main view so it fills the users viewpoint, and then after a second, the users viewpoint could transition to the viewpoint of the cutscene. (aka Matrix 2 with neo talking with the architect where the camera zooms into one of the tv screens, and then ripples to that viewpoint)). When the cutscene is finished, the reserve would happen. (Viewport ripples back out showing the HUD taking up the full screen from the models viewpoint, and the HUD is slowly moved away and back down to its inactive state).