If there is one mechanic that has become over saturated in games today it is the Quick Time Event (or QTE). Most modern gamers will say that God of War popularized this , others Shenmue, but the real old school will say Dragon’s Lair.
Before going on, a QTE is requiring the player to enter in a button sequence to determine if the character will live or die. If we were loose with that definition we could say that applies to every video game ever made, as aren’t you just entering a string of commands in to determine if you win or lose ?
I just want to say that I was a huge fan of Dragon’s Lair, Space Ace, and any other game of that type (and yes I enjoyed Shenmue, sailors and all) which I’ll will be classifying in one minute. Back in the late 80s an animator by the name of Don Bluth wanted to create what could be described as an interactive cartoon (which would be the classification). Using the power of the laser disc (which as we all know would never die 🙂 ) Dragon’s Lair was born. Games like Dragon’s Lair had the player controlling the responses of the character in specific situations, where making the wrong decision meant death. Since the mid 90s we saw the last game of this type with BrainDead 13 ( I think, I don’t remember anymore after that). While the genre itself has seemed to die the mechanic has made its way to modern games.
Today it seems that every action game has a QTE thrown in for good measure. I have two problems with this, first is the cool factor. QTEs are used so that the player will watch the cool stuff happening and not actually participate in it. Second is that it becomes more of an annoyance in action games. When your busy fighting and shooting it becomes jarring to have to stop what your doing and enter in a button sequence to finish off an enemy. Then there is the problem of the game picking up either a button you pressed or while your still holding the control stick automatically failing the QTE. Back to my original point, QTEs have become over saturated in action titles. Hell Resident Evil 4 had a fight that was nothing but QTEs and missing one command meant death. Now I’m going to play the optimist card and say that we could bring back the genre, but in a different way.
One of my favorite types of books growing up were the choose your own adventure series and I believe that the model used in those books could be applied to a new sub genre of adventure games. Imagine a game where you do control the responses of the character, but you can still explore. The biggest change is that actions and choices aren’t all binary, life or death or yes and no. Many actions will set the player down a completely different path heading towards a new ending. Yes some actions will result in the player’s death or failing (“do you want to jump into the pit of death? Y/N?”). Another idea is that during action sequences the player has “chances” used each time they make a wrong choice in the scope of the sequence, such as not parrying a sword slash when all the chances are gone the player will be killed. Most of the interactive cartoons of yesteryear were linear experiences, same path every time. With this idea the player should have a different experience each time, I also want to avoid having one “good ending” and dozens of “bad” endings.
While I’m being optimistic I’m not blind to some problems with this idea. First is , are there people interested in this type of game play? Also the challenge of this would be that storytelling and animation would be the key features of this genre, not game play which means that the writers and artists will have to step up and this goes against my game play comes first principle. However the act of creating interesting choices and showing their implications outside of a standard rpg could be used to make some unique stories and show the consequences of your actions in a way that most games can’t.
This idea of mine is still in it’s infancy and I don’t think I’m the guy for the job, as my prototype story for my action title isn’t going to be winning any awards I can say that for certain.
Josh
