Ah, the Quick Time Event. How do I love thee? Not very much, honestly. There was a time when I did love them, back when they were first born in the games Dragon’s Lair and the slightly lesser known Space Ace arcade games…
In “the day,” they were absolutely amazing. I can’t even begin to figure out how much money I poured into the Dragon’s Lair arcade game itself, not to mention the strategy guides printed in gaming magazines, and I never was able to beat it. The characterization and animation was phenomenal, and why shouldn’t it be: you were essentially playing what boiled down to an interactive animated movie. True, some of it felt like a game: when you had to time jumps across perilous elements, but most of the time you just had to know when the right time was to give the proper joystick input.
Fortunately for gaming, this trend mostly lived and died with these Don Bluth games (and if you want to get super technical, the Cliff Hanger laser disk game as well), and went largely ignored for the remaining 20 years. Unfortunately for the rest of game development, the incredible God of War franchise brought the gameplay back with a vengeance. Don’t get me wrong; God of War’s use of the Quick Time Event was amazing. I loved it. I couldn’t get enough of it and couldn’t wait ’till I saw it again. They essentially used them as finishing moves, or complex “throws,” for the most part. Their boss finishers are the stuff of legend, and the amount of effort they made to tie the entire experience together transcends the QTE event itself. Having to input a button combo or mash on the circle button repeatedly felt good how they used them. It felt intuitive. I liked having to pound on the button to get the doors to open. In that instance, they took something mundane and made a game out of it, and more importantly, the gameplay when you weren’t doing a QTE was off-the-charts amazing.
But I’m still kind of cheesed at the fact they brought back (or at the very least popularized) the QTE, because it’s becoming a crutch in game development. Far too many titles are using mini QTEs instead of actual gameplay. I cringe now in meetings when people bring up “hey we could try using a Quick Time Event here.” It’s not that I don’t like them when they’re used properly, it’s that far too often nobody wants (or is able) to spend the time or effort to develop actual gameplay, and instead fall back on the QTE to give the false pretense of gameplay while the player watches a movie with pauses in it to cue the player to press buttons like a lab rat wanting more kibble.
Sure, there’s some things that need to be QTEs. Technically things like reloading a gun are typically QTE events: you pretty much can’t do anything besides move while reloading in most games. Dialog events in games are almost always a QTE. “Press A to talk to the mission giver.” These game-isms are going to be tough to change or improve upon (although Gears nailed the reloading mini-game nicely), especially the cinematic QTEs.
But what I’d love more than anything is for developers to think twice about the QTE. Is there some other way you can incorporate an actual mini-game that doesn’t involve hitting a random assortment of buttons to play through a movie? Do you have to show a movie every time your player does something dramatic? Zelda has Link pick up impossibly epic sized boulders or weild a hammer 5 times larger than him to smash improbably large objects all the time and we aren’t forced to watch a movie of him doing it.
To boot, QTE “interaction” doesn’t even hold up under outside scrutiny. We wouldn’t put up with QTE style films, would we? Watching the Matrix wouldn’t be any more entertaining if you had to hit buttons in the proper order to continue watching the action sequence play out or be forced to the beginning of the action sequence again, would it? The point I’m trying to make here is that more often than not if you’re not a God of War game I’d rather you just showed me a movie if you feel the need to use a QTE, and preferably I’d rather you just let me play a gameplay element instead of a movie. The QTE is rooted in gameplay that is twenty years old and hasn’t changed an ounce since then. It’s far time we moved past it whenever possible. Please.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
i agree that too much QTE is extremely tedious, and breaks the flow of play. but i think that the main reason we wouldn’t want a movie that has QTE button-mashing combos is that we expect an entirely different level of interaction from a movie. mainly more re-action than inter-action.
I like QTEs in one situation only… when use of the buttons is fairly well established already for the move (roughly the move) being done, and hitting the wrong button, or hitting the right button at the wrong time, has the appropriate side effect for the incorrect timing/wrong button… so if it says O and I press nothing that’s a different effect then when it says O and I press X (both of witch penalise me, possibly in different ways, and not nessessarly kill the character, and change what comes after if they don’t) which is a different effect then if I press triangle or square… and if I overcharge or undercharge the meter the result depends on how much I charge the meter.
I never put much thought into QTEs before reading this post, but now that it’s been brought to my attention, I realize that I subconsciously agreed with your arguments against it since their “inception” (recently, that is).
As you said, there are some events that QTEs are logically associated with. Beyond that, QTEs cheat you out of gameplay.
One example that comes to mind is the scene in Resident Evil 4 where Leon must do a series of acrobatic moves to avoid lasers in a confined corridor. I never thought about it before, but this is a slap in the face: if Leon is capable of these amazing acrobatic feats, why, why, -why- are our actions so limited in actual gameplay? Why is one of our only evasive maneuvers to simply back away from the enemy?
I understand that games will be games. No matter which way you slice it, we’re sitting on our asses pressing buttons to interact with the in-game world. However, if game designers are making such a great push towards realism and immersion, why do they constantly limit themselves with archaic mechanics?
I can’t say I have, here and now, a solution to these “archaic mechanics,” so it may be that I’m blowing smoke; however, it’s unlocked a new realm of thought for me to explore. How far can you overstep the line between simplicity and complexity to achieve the perfect balance between functionality and immersion?
You have to wonder: had Resident Evil 4 taken a more flexible and complex route, would an interactive, in-game knife fight with Krauser been more enthralling than the QTE we experienced? That’s a resounding yes, but it begs another question: would it be too difficult? Would it be -fun-?
Sorry for the rather vague and incoherent comment, I’ve always had that problem. Still, I think I got a few of my points across and I’d certainly be willing to elaborate.
In any case, I’m enjoying your articles. They’re rather well-informed, well-written, and thoughtful; a far cry from the typical gaming blogs you often read. For me, it’s welcomed food for thought.