Blacklightning
Insane Idealist
Hey guys, BL here again. I've been thinking of taking something of a journalistic route these days, so I thought I'd start a bit of a mini-series on some of the boards I go to, along the lines of popular subjects in the gaming industry. That said, I played WET recently and it got me thinking about QTEs again - as much as I usually hate them, there IS a right way to do them and I have to admit that. So...
Right and Wrong - Quick Time Events
RIGHT: It should look absolutely ****ing spectactular
A QTE is the one time in the game you should rightfully be robbed of any control in-game. This loss of control, despite being a limitation in itself, completely scraps another limitation - allowing the game to showcase spectacular feats that aren't normally possible in normal gameplay. The least any dev could do to compensate for lack of interactivity is to make the scene unfolding as incredible to behold as possible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyQcqDNoUHU
The awesome starts around the 2:40 mark. Ordinarily I'd embed this but it appears this board doesn't have an option.
WET has perhaps the best example of this I've ever seen in a videogame, bar none. I **** you not, this is one of the most awesome levels I've ever played in anything. Initially it seems like a generic QTE sequence ala the first Krauser fight in Resident Evil 4, but... well, for one thing, you're on top of a ****ing car in the middle of a high-speed highway chase, and you still get to shoot things between QTE prompts - an improvement in itself, but besides the point. The main point is... for christ's sake, just look at it for 30 seconds and try telling me that **** ain't worthy. Cars crash, bodies fly, explosions happen, and you actually feel some sense of involvement in it all. That's exactly what a QTE should strive to achieve - now to be fair, I don't expect any of them rival WET's awesomeness in a long time, but unless there's something interesting going on, it ultimately feels anticlimactic - something a disturbingly large number of developers seem to neglect when using QTE sequences as a crutch. Speaking of which...
WRONG: QTEs should not be a substitute for gameplay
Have you ever seen a game hype up a prospective boss fight throughout the majority of the game, only for it to actually refuse you a chance to fight it directly? Well, sad to say, but devs actually do this from time to time to save themselves the trouble of actually programming a decent boss. To make a case in point, let me introduce the last boss of Sonic Unleashed - Perfect Dark Gaia.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAakwnnGyqY
Moment in question is around the 4:30 mark.
Now, it's bad enough that you spend the majority of the fight bringing down a ****ing shield, but by the time you actually get a chance to do any real damage, control is completely robbed from you and the whupass consists merely of pressing random buttons until he dies. This is again, extremely anticlimactic and frankly, ****ing stupid, considering there's already a perfectly good playstyle outside of it that could easily have worked just as well. Now, a QTE can be an effective method of finishing a boss fight off, but for ****'s sake it shouldn't happen before we can even lay a single hit on them. Ironically enough, for all its showcasing of brilliant QTE usage WET ultimately succumbs to this eventually, too. The moral here is, at the very least actually allow the player to take the first and last few pops before using a QTE to finish the job, otherwise it completely defeats the purpose of having a boss fight and a major character to go with it.
RIGHT: Have a few QTEs that aren't actually QTEs
I can already tell I've lost some of you with this one. Well, the thing about this is, you don't always have to actually rob the player of control in order to tell them what to do next. Hell, sometimes it can even be something as simple as displaying an appropriate button when danger is approaching. And of all the things that Unleashed has done wrong in regards to QTEs, this is one thing it actually does perfectly right, at least in the early stages of the game.
Yeah, no video this time, sorry.
You see these pipes here? You grind along one of them. You can switch between them at will. Sometimes they end abruptly and lead into a bottomless pit, thus giving you incentive to switch poles strategically. But it's no big secret that Sonic's ****ing ludicrous speed can both obscure vision and leave much less time to react, which would ordinarily reduce these sections to horrible trial-and-error tests. But yet, a saving grace comes in the form of lesser-used "button prompts", a form of QTE which doesn't actually remove your control of the game, yet nonetheless offers a means of assistance that will likely save your life. If you're heading down a path that's likely to kill you, the game will display the main buttons that will divert you to a safe one. Given that there's only three, and you're locked to one of them at any time, this is easy. In other games, this has been used to avoid damage from powerful attacks (RE4 and 5 most notably), jump to offscreen locations (WET yet again) and sometimes even as an opportunistic counterattack (Mirror's Edge comes to mind) - all the same, allowing full player control and only interfering as deep as a one-dimensional button instruction can actually do the game a whole world of good, offering a chance of safety yet still allowing players to find their own way around if need be.
WRONG: Never use more than one button for a single action
Is your QTE a password? A game of Simon Says? An Ultra Combo? A Tony Hawk game? If you feel the need to use more than one button and answered "no" to all of these, you've already ****ed it up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWsXqDM_xGM
Absurdities start at 1:20
This is really more of a common sense issue than anything else. Have you ever had to type in a ****ing password to access a move in any game? Well erm, there's always Mortal Kombat, but that was more of an optional finishing move than anything else - this is a mandatory method of progression we're talking about. If you never do anything even remotely that convulted and complex in standard gameplay, there's no reason for it to be done in a QTE, end of. Which brings me to another point:
RIGHT: QTE inputs should be consistent with ingame controls
No vids or pics this time, but if you really need a visual guide for this, refer back to the first YT I posted. If the character's required to jump, you press the jump button. If it's required to duck, you press the duck button. If it's required to attack, you press the attack button. Surely most of you can already see where this is going. But for some mysterious reason, this rarely actually applies to QTEs. It's almost as if the buttons are arbitarily picked out of a hat, and some games even go as far as to randomly generate which button is required to progress. Case in point, the previous vid (not that you can notice it, being only one pass through).
Now here comes the obligatory question: why? You've spent most of the game using very specific buttons for very specific tasks, why should the controls be any different just because we're watching a barely interactive cutscene? It's almost as bad as a typical Genre Roulette, serving little purpose than to throw the player off at the most inopportune of times. If you really want to "test reflexes" as other people have put it on occasion, it should actually be a test of reflexes, not a ****ing guessing game.
Now then. I guess this is the part where I let the rest of you discuss and expand on this until I feel again, it's time to move onto a new subject. Here's to hoping I can make a habit out of these.
Right and Wrong - Quick Time Events
RIGHT: It should look absolutely ****ing spectactular
A QTE is the one time in the game you should rightfully be robbed of any control in-game. This loss of control, despite being a limitation in itself, completely scraps another limitation - allowing the game to showcase spectacular feats that aren't normally possible in normal gameplay. The least any dev could do to compensate for lack of interactivity is to make the scene unfolding as incredible to behold as possible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyQcqDNoUHU
The awesome starts around the 2:40 mark. Ordinarily I'd embed this but it appears this board doesn't have an option.
WET has perhaps the best example of this I've ever seen in a videogame, bar none. I **** you not, this is one of the most awesome levels I've ever played in anything. Initially it seems like a generic QTE sequence ala the first Krauser fight in Resident Evil 4, but... well, for one thing, you're on top of a ****ing car in the middle of a high-speed highway chase, and you still get to shoot things between QTE prompts - an improvement in itself, but besides the point. The main point is... for christ's sake, just look at it for 30 seconds and try telling me that **** ain't worthy. Cars crash, bodies fly, explosions happen, and you actually feel some sense of involvement in it all. That's exactly what a QTE should strive to achieve - now to be fair, I don't expect any of them rival WET's awesomeness in a long time, but unless there's something interesting going on, it ultimately feels anticlimactic - something a disturbingly large number of developers seem to neglect when using QTE sequences as a crutch. Speaking of which...
WRONG: QTEs should not be a substitute for gameplay
Have you ever seen a game hype up a prospective boss fight throughout the majority of the game, only for it to actually refuse you a chance to fight it directly? Well, sad to say, but devs actually do this from time to time to save themselves the trouble of actually programming a decent boss. To make a case in point, let me introduce the last boss of Sonic Unleashed - Perfect Dark Gaia.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAakwnnGyqY
Moment in question is around the 4:30 mark.
Now, it's bad enough that you spend the majority of the fight bringing down a ****ing shield, but by the time you actually get a chance to do any real damage, control is completely robbed from you and the whupass consists merely of pressing random buttons until he dies. This is again, extremely anticlimactic and frankly, ****ing stupid, considering there's already a perfectly good playstyle outside of it that could easily have worked just as well. Now, a QTE can be an effective method of finishing a boss fight off, but for ****'s sake it shouldn't happen before we can even lay a single hit on them. Ironically enough, for all its showcasing of brilliant QTE usage WET ultimately succumbs to this eventually, too. The moral here is, at the very least actually allow the player to take the first and last few pops before using a QTE to finish the job, otherwise it completely defeats the purpose of having a boss fight and a major character to go with it.
RIGHT: Have a few QTEs that aren't actually QTEs
I can already tell I've lost some of you with this one. Well, the thing about this is, you don't always have to actually rob the player of control in order to tell them what to do next. Hell, sometimes it can even be something as simple as displaying an appropriate button when danger is approaching. And of all the things that Unleashed has done wrong in regards to QTEs, this is one thing it actually does perfectly right, at least in the early stages of the game.
Yeah, no video this time, sorry.
You see these pipes here? You grind along one of them. You can switch between them at will. Sometimes they end abruptly and lead into a bottomless pit, thus giving you incentive to switch poles strategically. But it's no big secret that Sonic's ****ing ludicrous speed can both obscure vision and leave much less time to react, which would ordinarily reduce these sections to horrible trial-and-error tests. But yet, a saving grace comes in the form of lesser-used "button prompts", a form of QTE which doesn't actually remove your control of the game, yet nonetheless offers a means of assistance that will likely save your life. If you're heading down a path that's likely to kill you, the game will display the main buttons that will divert you to a safe one. Given that there's only three, and you're locked to one of them at any time, this is easy. In other games, this has been used to avoid damage from powerful attacks (RE4 and 5 most notably), jump to offscreen locations (WET yet again) and sometimes even as an opportunistic counterattack (Mirror's Edge comes to mind) - all the same, allowing full player control and only interfering as deep as a one-dimensional button instruction can actually do the game a whole world of good, offering a chance of safety yet still allowing players to find their own way around if need be.
WRONG: Never use more than one button for a single action
Is your QTE a password? A game of Simon Says? An Ultra Combo? A Tony Hawk game? If you feel the need to use more than one button and answered "no" to all of these, you've already ****ed it up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWsXqDM_xGM
Absurdities start at 1:20
This is really more of a common sense issue than anything else. Have you ever had to type in a ****ing password to access a move in any game? Well erm, there's always Mortal Kombat, but that was more of an optional finishing move than anything else - this is a mandatory method of progression we're talking about. If you never do anything even remotely that convulted and complex in standard gameplay, there's no reason for it to be done in a QTE, end of. Which brings me to another point:
RIGHT: QTE inputs should be consistent with ingame controls
No vids or pics this time, but if you really need a visual guide for this, refer back to the first YT I posted. If the character's required to jump, you press the jump button. If it's required to duck, you press the duck button. If it's required to attack, you press the attack button. Surely most of you can already see where this is going. But for some mysterious reason, this rarely actually applies to QTEs. It's almost as if the buttons are arbitarily picked out of a hat, and some games even go as far as to randomly generate which button is required to progress. Case in point, the previous vid (not that you can notice it, being only one pass through).
Now here comes the obligatory question: why? You've spent most of the game using very specific buttons for very specific tasks, why should the controls be any different just because we're watching a barely interactive cutscene? It's almost as bad as a typical Genre Roulette, serving little purpose than to throw the player off at the most inopportune of times. If you really want to "test reflexes" as other people have put it on occasion, it should actually be a test of reflexes, not a ****ing guessing game.
Now then. I guess this is the part where I let the rest of you discuss and expand on this until I feel again, it's time to move onto a new subject. Here's to hoping I can make a habit out of these.
