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maybe realism and atmosphere arent the correct words here.
... Immersion thats it. Makes it feel like you are reading a book or watching a movie. I mean in that BF4 video, i thought the part where you are running away from the gunship is awesome.
And the way you shoot it down at the end leaning out of the car with a grenade launcher (scripted) is awesome. Idk about anyone else but if things like that instead of scripted events were part of the non scripted gameplay, it wouldnt be near as awesome and wouldnt be that special.

I don't often find set pieces like that immersive. They normally take camera control from you or at least limit it slightly. Then it normally takes a random grace of God "homing AA nuke launcher just round the corner guys" turn. CoD does this a lot.

I prefer the Half Life approach, where I can miss all the big set pieces if I'm too engrossed in crowbarring some crates, and where I spend as much time scurrying over the battlefield desperately scrabbling for health and rockets while Striders gun me down.

I miss non-regenerating health. IT made firefights meaningful.

There's an issue with that though, which campster explains brilliantly in one of his videos (I can't remember which one). Modern military shooters use hit-scan weapons instead of slow moving projectiles, which means you cannot dodge bullets like you could in Doom, which means you either need to constantly be in cover or have some kind of shield to stop you from instantly being killed. Realistic fire-fights are incredibly long drawn out affairs so CoD (and most MMSs) opted for a shield, but since the game is set in the present it doesn't make sense contextually to have an energy shield, like in Half-Life, so the health itself acts like a shield. Because there is less of a consequence to damage the player is free to run out of cover and be a one man army, so long as he returns to cover before his health totally runs out.

I liked the way Brothers in Arms tackled the issue: they had no health bar at all and instead used a kind of "lock-on" system, whereby the longer you were out of cover the closer the enemy got to making a killing shot on you; the time this took depended on various factors such as line of sight, distance and enemy suppression. This system forced you to use tactics to break from cover safely. I'm not sure if the system has ever been implemented in PvP though.

youd rather crowbar crates,.. like the thing that you pretty much do throught the whole game, than see some Awesome and unique sequence? Well i guess it makes sense for the replay value sake because every time i play HL2 i often notice small cool scripted stuff usually in the background that i never noticed before.

This reminds me of the Time where my friend was playing Blackops Campaign and he was too busy looking at the weapons stash to see the scripted sequence of Dr Clarke Blowing up his lab via remote control and destroying a Spetsnaz helicopter with it.

I told him that he missed pretty much one of the coolest scripted events in the game. A few months later, my friend replayed Blackops single player after upgrading his computer and told me that he couldnt believe that he missed that awesome scene the first time he played.

For anyone who played BulletStorm I really like the way they did it. Every cool looking scripted event was prompted with a button to slightly zoom to where all the action is happening. Release the button and you automatically regain full control of the camera. Its like We wont force you to limit or give up control of your charecter, but there is cool stuff happening in that direction that you wont regret seeing.

Yeah that was well done, but there was one part where it just made you look at a stick with skulls on it

That wasn't my point.

My point is that cool set pieces like that work so much better when they're placed where the player can notice them naturally, and are normally big and impressive enough to gather attention.

(One HL2 example is when the Citadel goes on alert after you get stuck in the teleporter, it's just a cool world detail where it opens up and spews out city seekers that could be missed.)

Most modern games seem to lock your view onto each set piece, to the point where it gets a bit ludicrous. Either that, or you're penned in somewhere, (like that scene in MW2 where you're in a crashed chopper before the nuke goes off.)