POOPERSCOOPER wrote:I like QTE's when they are done well like timing of the buttons but I hate them when it's all "PRESS A" really fast and if you aren't fast enough you die. I wouldn't say Deadspace QTE's were great but I liked how the scenes looked. How often do you get pulled through the floors by a monster shoot its arm, run to a gunship that blows the glass and fly out into space with the monster which attaches to a space ship and you shoot the explosive barrels on the space ship to destroy it and you go back into the atmosphere into a building and break through the floors and not want to smile a bit?
I think RE4 had the best QTE's because they were all about combination's and some were directly related to the gameplay. RE5 didn't even do it that well maybe.
Games are supposed to be about gameplay first, then about everything else. What actual input did you have during the scene you describe? Correct me if I'm wrong but aside from the shooting I'm guessing you did nothing other than watch a cutscene.
That's mostly what annoys me in QTEs. Cutscenes have been used for the longest time as simple exposition tools. You played the action part of the game, and when the game decided to advance the plot it went into cutscene mode and you watched. Granted that's not particularly good planning but the way it's done today isn't either. Today cutscenes are used for audio visual wankery, rather than for exposition, leaving you the player to play the the most repetitive, boring bits of the game and when something that's actually cool happens, the game wrestles control away from you and delivers a cutscene where you have to press a couple of buttons so they can excuse it as gameplay (when it's not) and leaving you without that feeling of accomplishment you get when something that's awesome happened through your input alone.
To use your expression, what would today make me want to smile a bit is when, for instance you're on a motorbike being chased by a cop car in GTA and you make a blind turn, plant your bike in a pedestrian and fly off into a car door, and as you stand there waiting for your character to get up while thinking to yourself "Well I'm certainly fucked" and the cop car stops right in front of you only to be suddenly smashed by a passing truck, giving you a getaway window where you thought you had none. When shit that feels random (although it may not have been, and with good planning it could certainly feel that way while being scripted) happens is when I'm going "holy shit that was incredible".
As for events that are so clearly scripted that you could see them coming from a mile off, you may be right that it's not everyday that it happens in a game (although with today's games it certainly feels like it), but this recent push to "hollywoodize" has game makers ignoring not only that the scenes they're feeding us are extremely overwrought but also that as movie-goers we've seen them plenty of times before.
DS2 has a couple of good ideas, I remember a boss type guy that would lift you from the leg and have you shoot at its eye(?) so he'd let go but unlike the others that did take place during gameplay, whereas all the others are just detaching experiences. I'm not even going to mention (well I am, fuck it) that huge bastard that pushes you through a wall (when you get to the scientologist's top floor) and then gives you three seconds to shoot him before he crushes you while making it completely impossible to do so because the weapon I had equipped (the saw) didn't have enough range to hit him and the PC took longer to switch weapons than the time you're given to shoot the bastard. What happens when you die? The cutscene starts over, giving you no fucking chance to change your loadout. After dying some 15 times, I was eventually forced to reload a much earlier save in order to proceed. Oh joy.
