I've tried to consider some kind of devil's advocate post to the one you'll find here, some ironclad defense of Quick Time Events as a whole that could neatly justify their existence. Some shield of reason that might otherwise protect this go-to mechanic from—what is for me—what is becoming a ceaseless tide... well not rage, but frustration. For a while now, I been been somewhere in the continuum between "bored with" and "resigned to" the idea of QTEs pervading lazy and slapdash game experiences, but I think the last straw, the one that put me in the "fed up" zone was encountering it in a game that I liked, that otherwise had the mechanical and technical chops to keep me engaged.
It felt like the game in question stumbled or perhaps even lurched across the finish line, like one of those runners whose nervous systems go haywire at the end of a marathon. Not to sound overly-dramatic, but increasingly, when I encounter a QTE, it feels like not only a poorly-articulated piece of game design, but also a break in the contract established up to that point between the player and the developer.
Allow me to elaborate.
Everyone's doing it, so you should stop...
Point the first: quite a few high-profile games use QTEs now (some recent shooters being the most egregious examples) but they've been part of the landscape ever since Shenmue made them a thing over a decade ago. Still, just because they're an accepted decision that a lot of developers are making for their games, this doesn't speak to whether or not it remains a terrible choice when you're actually stuck playing it.
Breaking an implied contract...
Before you ask based on the image at the top, no, Battlefield 3 wasn't the game in question, but its campaign was one of the more painful examples of QTE use in recent memory. But I am going to cheat a little and point out how the problems with that game were endemic of everything that's wrong with (most) QTEs as a design choice.
In my review for Battlefield 3, I was concerned that there was no real relationship between the contents of the campaign and the multiplayer, something that feels like a necessity with a multiplayer-focused game. Essentially, I felt like if DICE expected the bulk of my experience with BF3 to be in its competitive multiplayer modes, then the offline single player mode should have felt as close as possible or articulated as much of the online experience as possible.
By the same logic, the QTEs in BF3 and most other games where they're egregiously used felt divorced from the overall gameplay experience. Pressing X or RT to kill a rat has almost nothing at all do do with the other five to eight hours of gameplay going on around it, an instead of feeling like a respite or cool break in the action, I constantly regarded it as an intrusion.
It's killing player agency...
And so that intrusion made me feel like I wasn't being allowed to play the game I set out to play any longer. But worse, it narrowed my options of how I could engage with the game to a single, sometimes nonsensical choice. I wanted to bring the rat killing in BF3 to the conversation, but let's pick on another game. Let's consider another recent title with a schizophrenic relationship between its various mechanics, Need For Speed: The Run the racing game that would occasionally segue into a running away from cops on foot QTE game.
In NFS, there were multiple sequences where you were dumped out on foot and had to make your way to another car all while being pursued by the police. This meant that the primary means of solving problems in the game, racing (and your problem was winning races here, let's be clear) was taken away from you and substituted with these limited points of interaction. So, instead of evading the cops in your car in an interesting way (say, with a damaged vehicle or through the inclusion of frequent roadblocks), the developers of the game took away all control from the player as it was directed towards engaging the game.
It doesn't make your storytelling any more interesting...
This is kind of a two-pronged issue dealing on one hand with the story that the designers are trying to tell with the game and the one you're telling yourself as a gamer. But the problem isn't so much how it detracts from the former but how it damages the latter in profound ways. To the former, I can understand the instinct to use it to keep players active during the infodump sections of their game, and actually really liked it all the way back in Resident Evil 4 in the Krauser/Leon knife fight, but a large part of that was the initial novelty of the experience. In subsequent playthroughs of the game, I had little to no interest in doing it again—plus, how often have you missed story bits because you were wrestling with a game's fiddly QTE bits?
The secret there, is to never have infodumps in your story, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
How it's a big problem for the player is that all throughout their gameplay experience, they've either been experiencing the game in terms of rules of interaction. "I did this," the players says, "and then this happened." And in the best games, this extends to "I learned how to do this, and then I did this, this, and this." What a QTE typically does is ignore those other two statements and throws them out. For most, where your actions are restricted to pressing X to live or LB to dodge, it adds this statement to the overall narrative: "Oh yeah, and at one point, I had to do some random stuff to not die."
And this may be the biggest detriment to a game overall—that feeling of disconnect from everything that came before or might come after. Allow me to return to the game that inspired this piece, Modern Warfare 3 and the last chapter of the game.
****Of course, expect spoilers to follow****
In the final chapter of the game, Price and Yuri lay siege to a hotel where the series bad guy, Makarov is holed up. The best part: both of our heroes are decked out in full juggernaut body armor and armed to the teeth, and really, really hard to kill. And that whole section leaves you feeling like a badass without coming off as a drastic break from what came before. You can still die, albeit under adjusted conditions—everything is just ramped up to 11 in terms of how you're able to fight enemies. Then comes the end of the level, and it's all collapsing floors, broken glass, and bad guys staggering around with blood coming out of them in jets.
And here's your final encounter with the game's heavy, the guy you've been waiting to kill as a player and as the character of Captain Price and it's reduced to a few timed button presses. You can see it here if you don't mind spoiling the experience for yourself, and it's kind of ridiculous.
****End Spoilers****
Sure, most of it actually looks pretty cool, but I just don't think we need to stay locked into the model of the interactive cinematic. But I'm also thinking of big character action games like God of War which, even in its most recent sequel, went kind of heavy on encounters where you had to take out the bosses with timed button sequences. What's the solution? Well, not to be glib, but better designed encounters with thinking towards not trying to take control away from the player. That would be a nice start. But also thinking about what the QTE is standing in for—what's it actually trying to communicate?
Before I go, I want to revisit Modern Warfare 3 again, specifically the breach sequences used in this and the last game in the series. While not QTEs, these are points where the designers want to narrow what you can do for a limited period of time. So for about five seconds, your field of view is limited, and you're forced to engage enemies in a brief, slowed-down shooting sequence. This kind of thing, I love. While it doesn't need to crop up every chapter, it has a reason for being in the game and it actually feels like the shooter that I've been playing throughout the rest of the game. If designers would continue to think in terms like this, I wouldn't hate their games a little bit because of their QTEs.
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