Sirch.Cajnos said:
i honestly don't get it, and don't go quoting Yahtzee either i have an excellent memory and have seen every ZP, i want actual reasons explaining why QTEs deserve such hate. Personally i think that they give you some control over how awesome your character is like the QTEs from God of War or the Force Unleashed, they also give you more reason to pay attention in cutscenes, which i do anyway but that's beside the point
First off, they're a linear type of gameplay. A cutscene with QTEs (usually) isn't going to give you an option of doing several things, it's just leading you down one road where you have the option to press that button on time or die. To do that one action or die/try to do it again. Now, in some situations, that can be ok, where it's just win or lose, but in most aspects of gameplay, that's bad cause there are (or at least should be) a lot of ways to accomplishing one thing.
To give you an analogy, it's like playing Pacman where there's just one corridor, it turns left and right and if you miss the turn you die, but it's still one corridor.
They're not proper gameplay imo (in 99% cases, there are places where you can use QTEs intelligently, Force Unleashed is not one of those places). They're the easy solution for a developer to force a player to do what the developer wants.
You know from Unskippable, think it's the cutscene from Devil May Cry... they say "man, that looks like fun, why don't we get to play/do that?".
That's just it - see, improving gameplay and controls with the target result being letting the player do something that looks awesome is a fantastic idea and what, imo, gameplay should be focusing on. QTEs are a quick, easy and most importantly uninventive solution to that, replacing gameplay with cutscenes using "press X to look awesome" to pass it off as a game, where instead you're just watching a movie that requires pressing a button every once in a while to keep it going otherwise it restarts.
What I hate about QTEs is that they take away the gameplay. Force Unleashed has you fighting whatever the hell way you want through hordes of enemies. Then you come to the boss, expecting to use those awesome skills and combos that you've practiced, but hey, it instead decides it's more awesome to force a cutscene on you every few seconds and ask you to press buttons in the order it wants. What, why? Why not just let me duke it out with the big monster whatever way I want to and/or give me those abilities you use on "press x now" so I can use them all the time or when certain conditions are met?
That's the problem with it, instead of sitting down and saying: "ok guys, we have a boss fight, we want it to look awesome, so lets see how we can 'lead' a player into doing something awesome (and give them a few ways to do it) with the gameplay we have", they instead go "ok guys, we got a boss fight, we want it to look awesome, so let's make it basically the same as all the trash fights, but add in cutscenes of the fight looking awesome and whenever something needs to be 'done' like a jump/lightsaber slash or something like that, just put a random button and say 'press button to do'". It takes away the control of your character and even worse when it's done intermittently, then it additionally breaks the flow of the game.
Now check out Prototype. See, that's the kind of gameplay that Force Unleashed should use. Instead of taking away the gameplay, Prototype gives you tons of options of what to do and you can go through the whole game getting just as much awesomeness in terms of different combat moves as Force Unleashed, except that instead of taking away your character, the character is
all yours and all those moves you're doing - it's done by you, you choose what to do.
Now, ok, trashing aside, are QTEs entirely useless and awful whenever used? No, there are a few places where it can be used, but even there it should be used with discretion. What's (imo) a good way to use QTEs? See Mass Effect (2) conversations. Fuckin' A. Here's what's awesome about it and why it's ok to use QTEs:
1) Conversations are already 'cutscenes', places where the control of your character is taken away from you. You put gameplay aside and enter the "let's talk" mode.
2) They don't break the flow. First off, see 1. Second, ME2 does them intelligently, your character doesn't stop doing what they're already doing, the talking cutscene continues until/if you press the button and then cuts off appropriately if you decide to take the action. They also aren't twitchy, they give you time and are hard to miss, it's an obvious window of opportunity, so you're not just going to keep loading to a previous save if you miss it.
3) Notice the
if in point 2 - they're optional. Further avoiding that awful quality of breaking the flow. You missed or just didn't want to catch the QTE? No problem, game goes on, not the end of the world, it's
your choice.
4) They add to the gameplay instead of subtracting from it. Conversations are already usually relatively narrow corridors. ME (again, 2, didn't play 1 so dunno if it works the same) adds spice to the conversation, giving you an option to insert a bit of extra 'customization' in terms of the way you handle the conversation, rather than taking away your combat to just film it instead.
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