Button-mashers and QTEs - A Plague on Both Your Houses!

Over the last decade or so, gaming (particularly console gaming) has come into its own with several styles of gameplay that seem to dominate many titles nowadays.  While button mashers date back to the dawn of modern arcade (a minute of silence for 'Track and Field'), we have certainly witnessed an evolution of the brand along with the introduction of its relatively young descendant: The Quicktime Event.  Has the Quicktime Event enhanced gaming?  Or has QTE lowered the bar for designers more interested in finding an outlet for their animations and story telling?

To understand the origins of QTE gaming, we must first look at console hardware itself and appreciate how the design of the modern game controller played its role in giving birth to this well-known style.  Long gone is the familiar 'A' 'B' of the original Nintendo NES which innovated over 1st/2nd generation consoles by introducing a second action button and bringing the familiar 'Start/Select' to the controller, current generation controllers share a much more recent ancestory in the Playstation 'X' and the 4-pointed layout of 'X', 'Y', Square and Circle.  Certainly, the Xbox controller traded up the shapes (rather cheekily) with 'A' and 'B' almost in hommage to an older generation, but in essence - a console isn't a console with that comfortable 4-point layout that has been with us for over a decade; honourable mention, of course, to the L1/LB, L2/LT, etc - but most people will agree that most of the action sits smack-dab on the right face of the controller.

So now we have the controller - but why is that signifigant? Well, although 'Dragon's Lair' is largely considered the first QTE game of any consequence, QTE gaming as a format didn't really solidify until the appearance of the first QTE title to really capture the layout of the 4-point controller - and that title was 'Parappa the Rapper.'  Even as I mention it, some of you old PS1 owners are mouthing 'Kick, Punch, It's all in the mind!'   Indeed, it was a very addictive title for a number of reasons, but Parappa the Rapper is largely forgotten as the game which brought QTE and the 4-point layout into its own...and it inspired studios to think about the role of the QTE/4pl combination and how it could be adopted into various styles of presentation.

Two games spring immediately to mind: 'God of War' and David Cage's weird acid-trip adventure, 'Farenheit' (Indigo Prophecy)

The God of War series has proven to be enormously successful and proves that the culmination of QTE and story telling can be an excellent combination - at least for some.  Personally, I was inducted into modern QTE gaming with the latter - and even to this day I have a hard time convincing myself that it was a worthwhile experience.  As both are completely different presentations, lets focus on the interactive adventure presentation first.  To me, Farenheit was a game that was both interesting, frustrating and boring all at the same time.  While part of my brain was pulled in to the adventure and the impressive graphics, I found it extremely tedious at times that rather than solve a puzzle (as is with most adventures), I was focused on the button sequence just to make it through an interesting cut-scene.  Perhaps I'm in the minority here - but I have a hard time looking at all the 'purty graphics' when my attention is being forced on hitting the right buttons at the right moment.  It's games like this that make me feel as though I'm one of the hapless minions following tedious instructions in a 'Billy Blanks' exercise video rather than actually playing a game.  To me, gaming is about intriguing the mind, not engaging in a ten-hour session of 'Simon Says'.  On that basis, I have high criticism for Fahrenheit despite it being decent in other respects.  No doubt people will sing praises about Cage's upcoming 'Heavy Rain' as well - but while some will worship this title without deviation, I suspect older gamers like me will begin to question themselves after a while and ask 'Am I having fun?'  This is where QTE interactive adventures fall apart for me.

That leaves us with the more direct action games such as God of War.  Although God of War suffers from the same affliction for QTE sequences, its a bit harder to criticise because it IS an action title of some shape.  Arguably, the God of War series has a much stronger entrenchment into hardcore gaming and so there's a much larger fanbase for this type of game.  Having said that, there is a definitive recipe to God of War which is both its strength and its Achilles heal. Much of God of War's gameplay is focused on slaughtering your enemies in mammoth proportions.  Some fanboys get upset when I call it a 'button-masher' - and I'll accept that to an extent when you take into account combos, etc.  But for the most part, a 5-hour session playing any God of War title is bound to make those thumbs hurt a little.  For me, again, it becomes all the more tedious.  Sure they mix it up with different elements (piloting beasts, level-design twists, etc) but most fans say the Boss Battles are the best part; and that's where my criticism begins and ends.  The boss battles embrace a QTE sequence that require the gamer to battle and at key moments, execute a number of button presses or movements awhile the animation plays along - now people will disagree with what I have to say here, but I find this a bit of a cop out for the developers.  To me, introducing QTE to make your animations more 'interactive' is a way of artificially trumping up your gameplay to look better without actually providing any real innovation.

If you consider the debut of Grand Theft Auto 3, cut-scenes in games were already prevalent (without the QTEs) but what made GTA3 innovative was that it was achieving gameplay on a presentation scale that most developers at the time considered only achievable as a cutscene.  I realise that's not the best example, but what I'm driving at is this:  If defeating a boss requires you to jump out of the way of a huge fist, grab its knuckle and run up the arm, jump across to the nose and jam your sword into the beast's bulging eye - GREAT!  But why orchestrate that entire sequence to 'press X now' type stuff?  Why not actually require the gamer to execute these actions through the existing motion controls of his character?  Answer?  Because it takes a lot more effort to do that and keep it looking pretty and convincing.  Almost always, such sequences are waved about at E3 and TGS because they look fantastic and fun - but when you look under the hood and realise that its QTE-driven  - to me, that's like buying a Ferrari and discovering that someone has swapped its engines with a Toyata Prius; sure, it looks good - but what's the point if you're driving along to impress the girls and suddenly your hippy neighbor passes you riding a Vespa?  I found this particularly annoying when playing the boss battles in Star Wars: Force Unleashed.  It was neither challenging nor engaging to execute the QTEs to defeat various enemies.  On the contrary, I found it boring, repetitive and distracting from the actual game play - especially when it occurred in the midst of multiple enemies because pausing for the QTE animation would leaving me momentarily disoriented after resetting my position - not a great thing to do if you are trying to move about tactically to keep track of enemy positions.

So to sum up - I think gamers need to stop praising such titles that endorse the use of QTEs as a fallback method to present gameplay because to me, it's a dumbing-down of gaming as a whole.  It also gives developers that we'll pretty much accept any poorly-designed title they throw at us provided there's enough QTE sequences with 'awwws' and 'ooohs' to keep us interested.  I sincerely hope not.  I challenge developers to avoid the trap of QTE gaming and get back developing the gameplay itself.  In an age where graphics are pretty much scoring well across most titles on average, the focus really needs to be on making your game unique at the core level - the gameplay itself.

Lovingly Yours,

The Angry Rabbit.