Buckle in kiddies. Buy your candy and snacks. Remember to use the bathroom. This is a lengthy read. There will not be any bathrooms for the next 100 miles. There will not be a TL:DR.
Also, readers, if you’re going to blindly post that all QTE’s are bad: Shut up. Right now. Leave. Do not bother posting.
Now, on to business…
Why did you bother adding QTEs to H4?
You use them two times: To open an elevator, climb up the shaft and kill an Elite and then to shove a grenade into an incapacitated Didact for a near killing blow. If you added them to other parts of the game, then you failed at their implementation because they were so unmemorable.
Don’t worry though. Pretty much nobody has gotten QTE’s right and on the Suck-O-Meter, “Minimal, Under The Radar, No Making Waves, No Boat Rocking” QTEs are a far, far, far cry from the horror that was Capcom and RE4. But you could have done more, you should have done more. And not just more QTE’s but better quality QTEs. Meaningful QTEs. Purposeful QTEs.
First let me identify the problem.
What is a video game?
“It’s an interactive-” I hear you saying, interrupting you with a statement that it was a rhetorical question. Video games are an interactive medium.
So why, in a medium that is entirely interactive, do we stop interacting with the medium to just simply watch and listen? Why in a medium where the player must create his own story do we remove that control from the player just to simply show a short movie clip to tell a story? Originally it was epeen flexing. ‘Look at all my processing power! RAWR!’ and all that. Now a days? Tradition. Checking off little tick marks on the laundry list of features.
How about this for an idea: Instead of watching a cutscene, how about I play a cutscene.
I’m going to give a plug and shout out right now to a game that already launched and flew under everyone’s radar: Asura’s Wrath. It is a game that simply must be played. I’m giving this game a plug and a shout out not only because it’s a -Yoink- crazy insane Japanese title that has you dueling a man on the moon that ends with the you and the Earth being impaled by said man’s Earth lengthed sword, but because they pushed the boundaries on QTEs.
A significant part of this game is just nothing but QTEs. But here’s the kicker: You don’t have to press this QTEs. You certainly want to though, if you want a good score for the game. But from a storyline perspective, there’s no need. The other kicker: The QTEs that you perform have a rhyme and reason to them. When Asura swings his arms out wide before delivering an epic punch, you move both the LStick and the RStick out wide to simulate the action on screen.
Now, this is the point where I marry what I just said together with what I said earlier and pitch this idea to you.
You create a game that has cutscenes that are loaded with QTEs. Utterly loaded. But you don’t have to press any buttons during these cutscenes. And if you don’t, the only ‘punishment’ you get is the absence of interacting with the video game and a corresponding reaction on screen for your action. You get the normal cutscene while if you follow one of the several simultaneous QTE prompts, you get a slightly different story being told.
What this accomplishes is that it allows us to “play” cutscenes, tailoring them though the details to the type of player we are and restoring the interactivity to the entirety of the game. This is what should have happened with H4’s QTEs. I’m sad it didn’t. I’m hoping you deliver in H5.
