Oooh, I know how to play this game!
Ummm… things MTV will make a reality show about in 2010?
You’re why we can’t have nice things.
I agree with Zylon for once!!
You win! It’s called, “The Worst Day of Your Life!”
No, I’m pretty sure those are called combat mechanics.
The thing about QTEs is they typically do not provide an out - once you’re in a QTE, the only way out is a fail or a succeed state. The combos you’re describing have tons of other options, including running away, taking a hit to position yourself better, dodging, using a faster blow, etc.
Plus there’s the thing on the other page about taking away your hard-earned association of X to swing or Y to parry. What you’re talking about works WITH your game education; QTEs work against it.
If designers REALLY want to be lazy and do nonsensical QTEs, here’s some tips:
- Tell the player beforehand that there’s incoming button input - foreshadow it with some sort of obvious prompt. This will prevent frustration.
- Make the QTEs happen in slow-motion or make the input windows really long. There is no fun in failing something in less than a second because you just weren’t prepared.
- Make the buttons correspond to what is happening. If the character is running, use the run button - don’t tell me to wiggle the analog stick around, because that’s just plain dumb.
- If I fail it, the scene should just rewind back a bit and allow me to retry (or keep a continuous loop going). Better than being killed and asked to do everything again from the last checkpoint.
But the best solution, of course, is to completely skip them. Because they suck.
It worked in Shenmue because it was used very sparingly and paired with a very solid fighting engine (expected from the people behind Virtua Fighter) and interesting interactive setpieces (grabbing the leaf in Shenmue 2) so you could do plenty of awesome stuff, and the QTEs just spice it up a little.
Other game developers seemed to take from that that its a good idea to lard up games with a combination of the coolest scenes in the game, stuff not possible through non-QTE mechanics, as well as mundane, repeatable sequences.
I think my point here is that the designers, rather than QTEs themselves, are the problem.
One thing I’d add to this is make the input window visible in some way, for example, in the form of a diminishing bar.
QTEs suck. Furious button pressing sucks.
They make me want to burn the world
Hate.
Every game I’ve played with a QTE would have been more fun without one. Jericho, Mercs 2, and maybe one or two I’m forgetting, all would have been much cooler if the QTE was an in-game rendered scene showing my character being awesome. Thankfully there was some cheat thing that auto-completed the Jericho QTEs for me (really interesting game for a bit… till we went from annoying QTEs to the most hilariously awful monster closets I’ve ever seen in any game, ever).
Jesus I could do an entire thread on this.
Stealth missions in a game with little to no stealth mechanic. Bonus points if the mission is insta-fail if you’re seen.
Having to babysit AI buddies that can and will be killed. Again, bonus if this results in game over.
Not just jumping puzzles in fps games. Pixel perfect jumping puzzles. Bonus if character movement is as stable as jello on blacktop in August.
Changing game mechanics for the last boss fight/end portion of the game. I had an example in mind for this one, but it died in the vast fire of nerdrage that prompted me to post.
Having an NPC give directions for a quest when said NPC thinks north happens to be the way he’s facing.
Savepoints/checkpoints that are a good ten minutes of play time before anything listed here. Bonus if there is a ten minute cut scene thrown in as well.
Maybe I’m just getting too old to play games these days. My ability to accept seemingly arbitrary design decisions has dropped into the negative. Any one of the above, including QTEs, and I’m pretty much done with the game.
Now we’re getting into “I hate games” territory. Seriously, just kill the QTEs. Everything else is fine and I can deal with it.
Oh, except for having your save point right before a long ass cut scene. AFTER the cut scene, plz. Or at the very least, make the cut scene skippable.
There are a lot of them, but my personal example is Rayman 2. Rayman’s a 3d platformer with occasional racing-type segments where you ride on a missile. It’s a bullet, so if you hi anything at all you blow up and have to start that section over! Hooray! There are maybe 2-3 of these segments in the game.
The final boss takes that concept, but then has you navigating in a 3D arena instead of just along a rail-like corridor. I hate you, boss of Rayman 2.
I don’t mind QTEs inserted occasionally to provide some interaction in what would otherwise be a straight cutscene. That said, I wouldn’t cry myself to sleep if I never saw another QTE.
If you find yourself wishing for interaction in a cutscene, then it’s a bad cutscene. Wish for better cutscenes instead.
Or possibly more cinematic interactions. The Heavy Rain hope.
I don’t see how there’s any hope in Heavy Rain. Indigo Prophecy was an entire game comprised of nothing but QTEs. Awful, awful fucking game.
I saw Indigo Prophecy more as an outgrowth of adventure games that simply ran out of steam too early. The QTE bits were extraordinarily painful, certainly, but I really liked the promise of the first level. I’m skeptical, but unwilling to completely write off the Rain.
Another sin that I’m running into with Ghostbusters right now is having a checkpoint save system with no indication when saves occur. Listen up devs, I know you don’t want to break immersion by tossing up a “Checkpoint Reached” on the screen, but for God’s sake give me some kind of feedback when it happens! I don’t want to play a guessing game of wondering when it’s safe to exit to the menu.