#quick-time events

I'm a roman general who will fight for his country!

Paste: “The QTE is Dead—Long Live the QTE!” by Katherine Cross

Paste magazine’s Katherine Cross has written an interesting analysis on the state of the Quick-Time Event mechanic in modern games.

  Quick-Time Events, or QTEs, are like all popular or common game mechanics, useful tools for a game designer that can be misused. I remember having to mash the A button in Star Fox Adventure in a test of strength and thought that was a brilliant use of a QTE. I also…

Depends on the context. I think I like God of War’s implementation the best - where it’s used sort of as a “cinematic kill” option that you have to initiate. When it’s just like "hey you are watching a cutscene and WHOOPS you weren’t paying attention to our 3rd-grade-level storyline and missed a button prompt!”, it kind of sucks.

Spider-Man Web of Shadows does that a lot. You’ll be two minutes deep on a cutscene and suddenly “PRESS THE X BUTTON TO NOT DIE!!!!" pops up without warning. It’s the worst!

Shenmue’s kind of guilty of this, too, but at least Shenmue is slow enough that you can usually feel the tension ramping up to a QTE. Like, if its a cutscene of Ryo chasing somebody through the streets, there’s a 90% chance you’re going to have to do a QTE to jump over some crates or something.

In a game like Spider-man, you’ll go through a big long boss battle, and then a cutscene will play where the villain is punching Spider-man, and then for some reason one random punch out of a dozen will be tied to a QTE.

I keep pressing the X button because that usually does stuff in the games but it just makes me jump and I just get so frustrated that I don’t want to play anymore.

Played the Asura's Wrath demo and it made me think about Quick-Time Events again. Asura's Wrath did pretty well in the demo with them i thought, but all it takes with QTE is one that you don't have the ability to do. That's the main problem i have with QTE, there is no way around them most of the time. If you just can't do them, you can't simply try a different tactic, you're simply stuck.

Quite a few games i've suffered from this, usually the offending QTE is one where you have to rapidly mash a button. Not entirely sure why, but those bits always get me.