There is a seriously great QTE near the end of Metal Gear Solid 4.
It’s a good example of how they could be effective, as opposed to the 99% of games that use them in lieu of an interesting combat system.
Jericho showed how weak it’s the idea of QTEs. The devs use it because there isn’t any better solution which can be easily implemented, the real solution would requiere hard work, budget and time.
For example, when the character had to climb a wall or fight in a confusing melee, they didn’t have combat systems or climbing mechanics, so they need to use QTEs. But still is the weakest choice.
Just about any counter system is basically a QTE, it’s just a somewhat dynamic one. You hit a button in response to a signal (the guy swings at me), you’re character does a fluid counter and counter attack. Assassin’s Creed’s combat read like an advanced QTE to me, which isn’t a bad thing.
I have nothing against QTEs as a concept and I think when they mimic the action on screen as a minigame, they tend to work best.
Crappy QTEs suck, but I do want to get in a word of support for their strengths.
I played Prince of Persia a few months ago and a large part of why I enjoyed that game was because of how movie-like it felt. At one point I was running down a collapsing tower, with streams of sand and rocks falling past me. I had to jump over a series of platforms, hop across pillars, etc. And yet all I was doing was pushing R every few seconds and holding ‘run left’.
I think QTE can be used as one of the best ways to give a game a cinematic feel. Nothing else lets you get away with such exciting camera angles or fluid and uninterrupted animations.
That also works in the other direction, though: good QTEs are essentially optional combos with onscreen hints so you don’t have to remember a dozen arbitrary button sequences. I quite like QTEs if they are used in this way since I’m very bad at memorizing combos…
That’s a nice take.
I guess the problem for me there would be ‘Quick Time’ portion, which means I’m just getting a reaction test, which can go essentially two ways - either I fail it because it flashes too quickly for me, or the action is so pointlessly easy that there was really no need for me to do it in the first.
If I had to press play every time my DVD player got to the end of a given chapter, or I had to rewatch the entire last chapter, I’d get a new DVD player.
That’s trite, I realize. If there’s one beacon of hope for the mechanic, I’m rather interested to see how Heavy Rain is going to pull them off. I like the notion of these events being subtly but clearly tied into the focal point of a given scenario, and seamless with the action.
And also that I might have a Dragon’s Lairesque choice between event paths rather than just pressing an Acme Disappearing-Reappearing Next Button. That’s another bit that bugs me about poor QTEs, I’m just continuing the action - not engaging in it.
If Heavy Rain can make that work, I’ll change my position to ‘mostly suck’.
Problems arise, though, when you try to do QTEs over cinematics, which is part of the problem. I get that “cinematic feel” that you’re talking about when I see my personal private prick on the screen do something really impressive and I feel in some way responsible for it, with “cinematic” being differentiated from “badass” mostly based on how much of the environment is falling out from under me at the time.
The problem is that QTEs prevent you from actually seeing this sort of cinematic action. QTEs divide the game screen into two fields - the foreground, where the things with which you interact appear (the button prompts) and the background where everything else happens. In order to successfully pass most QTEs, you have to watch the foreground of the screen, which is sort of like focusing your eyes on the fly hanging on to the airplane’s window instead of the vista outside. You can only succeed at them by not watching the cinematic - rather than enhancing the experience, they negate it. QTEs might be good for people who are in the room with you, but it’s like the background animations in Rock Band - the only people who can spare any energy and time to watch them are the people who AREN’T playing the game.
I think a much earlier post had it right - QTEs are useful if and only if they are repeatable, predictable, and do not harshly penalize failure. The God of War O-kills being a good example. To specifically address your example, Prince of Persia created big problems for me in that the entire game effectively boiled down to path memorization and quick time event response. It was less of a big deal in the scene that you mention, but the panel jumping and (particularly) horivertical green panel wall running segments created the same problem where I had to watch the same animation three or four times because I wasn’t prescient enough to know that I needed to be over here in order to continue my dramatic running sequence and not over there, so I spent all my time watching for fine details like whether that buttress was jutting out far enough for me to trip over and not nearly enough time seeing how freaking amazing the stuff my guy was doing turned out to be. QTEs are good when they form encapsulated reused elements of the control scheme. I can’t think of any other example where QTEs in any real sense (I specifically exempt MGS4 here - that’s only a QTE in the sense that there’s a button prompt - the thing you’re doing is incredibly simple and the goal that the game is trying to accomplish - making your finger hurt and making you feel stressed - is not similar to what most QTEs are trying to do) are useful at all.
QTEs, and their hellish offspring the Random QTEs, need to die. Now.
Not as bothered by them as I am turret sequences.
Anytime a game decides to abandon its core design for a chance to wrangle the analog stick around for the sake of ‘variety’, is a declaration of failure. Actually QTE’s are generally under the same scrutiny, but when half the boss fights in RE5 are entirely ‘turret’ sequences(tough ones too), it’s clear the vision is corrupted. I’d argue that MGS4 and Gears 2 suffers the same problems. It’s more insulting that these sequences are generally the biggest brick-wall moments in terms of progression as well.
Fuck em.
Yeah, and there seems to be a worrying trend to making the QTE notifiers hard to see as well (like the next-game-by-indigo-prophecy-people shown at E3 recently). If you make them big and the same colour as the button you should be pressing it’s not too bad.
I can’t see the fun in quicktime events, but instead I often find them rather frustrating. For myself, it really breaks the immersion of a game. Games can suck me into their world pretty good, as I become completely focused on the it and the surrounding action, trying to survive and fight. I enjoy dodging on my own and learning how to do badass moves, and feeling like part of the game.
Quicktime events generally feel like “press X to win.” There is no real skill involved or any satisfaction when completed. The game starts to feel rather empty instead, as I sit there after a big boss battle and realize I didn’t do anything to win it. I just move around and wait to hit a button when it tells me to, so I can magically win this fight. It’s even worse because QTEs are rarely random from what I have seen, and just a matter of memorizing the sequence. There is no real interaction or depth to this kind of system.
I enjoyed RE5 playing coop with a friend for instance, but the QTEs really began to ruin it for me. I found this image in some online article about gaming mistakes and it made me laugh, because to me, it’s true. Press X and win, completely breaking the immersion and satisfaction of winning a big fight or completing the game.
I agree with the above. I never got into the God of War games because so much was based around QTE, which are visually impressive the first time you see them, but generally aren’t very fun gameplay.
I didn’t mind them in Dead Rising or Gears of War because they weren’t core gameplay and they generally existed to either get you out of a really shitty situation that you got yourself into (and were therefore entirely avoidable by other means), or to add something optional to combat. That’s probably only a minor defense of them, but I don’t think they’re inherently evil.
In regards to Gears, are we talking about chainsaw duels and active reload? Because I really don’t see those as being the same thing. I don’t mind mashing a button to do something (open a door, push a wall, etc), what I mind is having 10 milliseconds to hit ‘A’ or I have to watch the cut scene all over again.
Games featuring QTEs:
Bill Harris post about Indigo Prophecy, which goes into its use of QTEs and how they ruin immersion.
Yeah, I don’t understand why people love Indigo Prophecy, when it wasn’t fun to play.
My experience with Indigo Prophecy was that it was like going to see a cool movie, only the usher stopped by every five minutes to punch you in the face.
The QTEs in Indigo Prophecy were nonsense. Just a big game of Simon that got punched up on the screen.
The QTEs in Heavy Rain look far better implemented. So much so that they’re not a part of the game, they are the game. Rather than being an impedement to the immersion, they’re as much a part of the environment as the mission briefings and background info in SC:Conviction. It’s an interesting direction in which to take adventure games and I can’t wait to play it.
I thought they were really cool back in the God of War days or even by the time Spidey 3 hit. They’re kinda meh now. Don’t really affect me either way. QTE-lite, like skyjacking a plane in Prototype, work better since the buttons you press make sense given the game’s controls.
I do think that they’re a good way for the developer to show off something cool. If the alternative is to simply make it a cutscene, I’d say keep the QTEs.
- Having a catheter removed without anesthesia
- Illinois Nazis
- Quicktime Events
- Crib death
- Cockroaches