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It will only feel limiting to the player when it’s made too difficult or if the gameplay is nothing but QTE which is a bad thing. Having QTE expands the options you have as design team to give players the best possible experience, there’s no way many of those scenes could have been done with normal gameplay only. It just wouldn’t be worth the effort for the players.

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Oh – QTE can be cool, like in Call of Duty 3 on PS3. They can be a pain in the ass too ;)

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That wasn’t really a QTE. Just a context sensitive key press.

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I think they worked for me on the Wii because of the physicality.

Personally in general I am not a fan of them, but so much comes down to implementation. Like everything else they can be done in a lazy way, or an interesting way.

Going back in the day, I really enjoyed the cut scenes in both Privateer2 and Wing Commander Prophecy – they added something that most games have lost, though they are cut scenes, so slightly different to QTEs.

Though HL2 didn’t use them, I got very bored by the essentially linear nature of the challenges, though that is more to do with my general malaise with FPSs, even ones as good as HL2.

Ah… I ramble… ;)

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Two reasons, the first mentioned just above:

1/ I can’t watch what’s happening because I’m watching for the on-screen indicators so the complex award-winning animation of my character pantsing the unfortunate opponent is lost on me, and I’m not there to entertain anyone else in the room. (Bright red face and swearing is normally more amusing for by-standers anyway)

2/ The QTE input generally has little or no relation to the normal interface of the game, being an arbitrary timed memory test of your beloved control pad. As such, they might as well black over the screen and put up a message saying “Please enter this button sequence to prove you are worthy of playing the rest of this game”.

To elaborate – well, I’ve used a Playstation pad for 10 years alone and I’m more than familiar with the Xbox one but in honesty, if you were to call out a button sequence to me I would hesitate before hammering it in because I just don’t think in terms of button names or colours. I’d have to actually look at the pad to memorise that stuff, and funnily enough I rarely engage this device with my eyes.

Controls of a game are learned initially from that quick reference diagram but eventually you forget it’s X to reload in Halo 2 or B to bash someone on the nose because the brain just links muscle memory to a concious action. QTEs by-pass that kind of learning generally, even if they establish a kind of per-event control analogy – to use the Jericho demo QTE, representing each arm with a button , the feet with another and so on.

Basically, it severs the man/machine interface you’ve established and returns you to pressing buttons on a control pad.

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My summary so far boils down to: “Don’t do it. They suck.”

Particularly for Reason 1 cited by Frosty840. If you’re paying attention to the screen interface, you’re not paying attention to the contents of the screen – the world and the story.

Apparently it looks great to observers though.

When I was playing – or trying to play – Fahreinheit, I thought that this was a game I could imagine a movie theatre full of people playing (or suffering through.) Everyone gets a controller, and the game averages out how well we do at the little simon-says games or whatever and then moves us on to the next bit.

QTEs are bringing us to what game-journalism claimed as soon as CD-ROM drives became in-vogue: That games are ‘interactive cinema.’

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But like most good things, if used too much, or incorrectly, it falls flat on its arse, its too easy to look at jericho and dismiss qte, because the game is already hobbling before it uses that particular crutch, lets be honest, i free reach around from a hot lady as in ingame effect isnt going to make it a good game, qtes have little or nothing to do with that.

Games like god of war, tomb raider, and more importantly resident evil 4 have all shown how qte’s can be used concisely and effectively, but as with most new gaming “fad” tech, its overuse tends to bring shame on it, which doesnt seem fair at all.

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I loved them in RE4, they kept indigo prophecy tense, and where usually fun (and failable without dire consequences) in shenmue.

However, I hated them in Jericho. Jericho is also a rubbish.

But the QTEs in Jericho are extra bad for being in The First Person it robs control from you in a much more literal manner.

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The first time I came across them was Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube, I was completely not expecting them and would usually forget, relaxing to watch a cutscene take place when suddenly: WOAH! SHIT! A! A! A!

I loved those moments for just really ramping up the old adrenaline.

The way I’ve always seen them was like the rhythm action game of an action movie, if that makes sense.

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