So I have been thinking on this for a while. It came up during the latest Podtoid and I think I know what my problems are with QTEs. I don't hate them mind you. I will try to sum up what it is I do not like and what it is I do like about them, and what could make them better.
First, the cons:
They take control away from the player. Your character is on the screen doing some acrobatic/brutal stuff and you are just pressing a button now and then.
They distract from game play. As in, tossing out an awesome combo in God of War and then..., a giant X appears. What the..., oh. I looked up at it suddenly because it's not supposed to be there and I lose my 160 hit combo. They make me play Dragon's Lair when I should be focusing on the game. Have you ever been playing a game with QTEs and a specator says "Oh! Sick! That was insane!" but you are stuck looking to see if you need to press X again.
They are very linear. Press X! ok... now Square! got it... now Triangle. oh wait.. I pressed O. This equals start over, or death.
We've all heard these before.
The Pros:
They allow the common man to play Killer Instinct. Did you ever have a friend who played Killer Instinct REALLY well? So well that he could tap out a combo, then go get a soda while his character beat you into a quivering paste? Not everyone can do that. We don't all have the combos memorized. So with 4 simple button presses, we can eliminate the timing and the memorization.
They can define a character concept further. No one questions that Kratos is a bad ass. He is a killing machine, that runs on the organs of dead orphans. He's just that evil and mean at the same time. His combos are insane, but when you, with the press of a single button, grab a flying enemy and tear its wings off it adds punch to that. Not to mention that that act, pressing a single button, and prompting Kratos to do that, further cements that without a combo, without a special power, and without remorse, he can kill you... with one button.
They allow the character to step out of their box. Who has played a game where you fight things and you get a character with 5 combos? When you get to kill an enemy in a way that is not in line with one of those 5 combos, it breaks up the monotony of the limitation. While the argument could be made that better game design should have been on the developer's agenda, even in a game where you have 100 different ways to pound people into the dirt, you can still easily get attached to specific powerful combos and QTEs break this up.
There are many more that I am not listing on both sides, but lets just stop here in the interest of keeping things brief.
So, some ways to make QTE's better?
A lot of these run together....
Don't force them. A lot of developers have already started figuring this out. You can kill most enemies in God of War, or Force Unleashed without a QTE. Not all of them mind you. How about giving the option of the "easy" kill for newer gamers and for the more experience gamers, just show me a cinematic and let me continue without forcing me into it? Imagine a mode that turns all boss battles into QTEs if you turn it on, thus making them easier. If you want to avoid the QTE, you can just fight he bad guy, and you will still get the cinema without the button pressing. Just an idea.
No more starting over/death for failure. How infuriating is it to press one wrong button (because you are playing on the XBOX instead of the PS3, or whatever reason) and have to start over, or die? If this is a QTE I am being forced into, I am being punished twice. Once by being railroaded into the QTE and another time for failing it.
Drop the linear approach. Regardless of your opinion on the latest Prince of Persia game, the battles were essentially QTEs with options and that was rather nice. Why can't we have a QTE where all bets are off? Where each button still is active? Essentially what the developer is looking for is timing and accuracy here. Why not make the QTE much more robust and keep the timing angle? Or give us 3 options to continue the QTE instead of one. Current Gen consoles render QTEs in real time, so its not like a whole new cinema has to be rendered.
Integrate them into the gameplay better. Instead of a giant "A" button flashing, why not flash the color of the button on the enemy or object. Combined with some of the other concepts, this could improve QTEs in a big way.
Any other ideas?
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Just make the QTE buttons coincide with their respective actions rather than make them random button presses. Need to jump? Press the jump button, as opposed to the attack button or, god forbid, one of the shoulder buttons. The Wet demo is the only recent thing I played so far where the QTEs don't bother me, just because the game does the above.
If more games did that, they wouldn't bother me as much. But they don't, so they do.
I personally like QTEs in the God of War series, but I think in those games that they are used in the correct manner. They are not over-used as some people claim. In most boss fights you're still using the regular combat until a certain point, usually when the boss is weakened. Then you get the QTE as a sort of visual reward.
Still, even GoW got a bit ridiculous. In the final boss battle of the second game, the QTE were kind of a nuisance and also kind of difficult to pull off properly. They used like every button on the remote.
Then again, even in that instance there was a redeeming feature: The ways Kratos was killed were cool, like getting stabbed in the head with a big ass sword.
I hope the new game has the same type of balance and restraint when it comes to using QTEs.
I agree wholeheartedly with EDS and know from first hand they are even better in GoW3 for one main reason: the buttons appear on the screen in the respective portion where the button appears on the controller.
For instance, when having to press the X button, the prompt appears slightly toward the bottom of the screen versus O which appears off to the right, which is a nice visual aid to help you more quickly press the proper button. It's subtle and yet genius and makes it much easier to quickly process what you have to press due to the extra visual cue.
I stand by what the Podtoid crew said, that QTEs should use buttons that are already mapped to an action, like Fahrenheit or Metal Gear Solid (in a sense).
Awesome analysis though.