Julio_Hyksos's Blogs

QTEs, WTF?

Published: Wed 24 Sep, 2008 | 18 Comments
Tags: qte, quick time event, heavy rain

QTEs (Quick Time Events) are the new 'it' things in games these days. Wikipedia informs me that Shenmue introduced them into the games we play these days, but their origin can be traced back as far as Dragon's Lair, which is essentially entirely made up of QTEs. A lot of people say that God of War really made them famous, and that's quite possibly true, I don't know though, I'm not a lot of people.

 

_{A scene in Shenmue using QTEs}

 

I don't like them, for the most part. I can see where they have their attraction, as it allows for some spectacular moves that your character just can't pull off with you in complete control (at least, not before mind control is brought into gaming), but they're flawed. The fundamental question I have for developers is thus:

How in all that is good and holy, am I expected to see what is going on in the scene when I have to be looking for, and concentrating on, the buttons to press at the right millisecond in order to progress the scene???

 

_{Part of a QTE from Spider-man 3}

 

Spider-man 3 is a game that comes to mind from recent memory. The gameplay itself was not all that fun, and on top of that, the QTEs were very hard to pull off. It became more an exercise of memory through trial and error, than quick reflexes, and you missed most of the action because you had to concentrate on what was coming up. Sadly, many games seem to go down this road. The only way to make it easier is to lengthen the amount of time the button prompt is on-screen, but that would take the Q out of QTE.

 

So how is this resolved? Does it need to be? These are questions I think developers need to be asking themselves. On one hand, it's cool to have an action cutscene, that is somewhat interactive, but on the other, it breaks the flow from the normal gameplay, and it can get extremely frustrating when you keep messing up. I think what makes them so hard as well, is that your essentially just there to move a cutscene along. You're not in control of where it's going, or what your character is going to do. It's like watching a DVD where you have to press the play button when prompted or it'll stop.

 

Heavy Rain looks like it may be going some way to getting it right, in my opinion. The QTEs aren't so much events, as extensions of the gameplay. It doesn't jarringly cut to a cinematic view, as the whole game is cinematic views. Plus, from what I've seen, they leave choice in the hands of the player. Buttons are mapped to objects in the environment for the player to use. If a character is attacking you, you can react and choose to use a nearby lamp, or a knife sitting on the table, or just running away. Check out the trailer and watch during the confrontation scenes how different objects around Madison get highlighted with button prompts.

 

So where to from here? Undoubtably many action/adventure cames will have QTEs in them for the forseeable future, but hopefully developers will realise that they're not really suited to action games. They're trying to give us a cool looking sequence that is impossible to acheive in the normal gameplay, but it's really at the cost of immersion, which is a high price to pay.

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