It took a team of 100 scientists and engineers 3 months to construct this hair.
Thing is whilst I was in the shop I managed to pick up a few new games I have poor impulse control. And the first of these that I proceeded to actually play was Splatterhouse. Overall I'd say it was a fun if flawed game. As brawlers go it's not at all bad once it get's going, but there are these various issues which got me thinking. It has several instances of things which, in my humble opinion, break the rules of good game design. And I was thinking that perhaps what I should do is try to write up these nebulous concepts as a properly defined list of commandments.
And one day I will. But right now we're going to talk about Quick-Time events.
Now, to be fair Spatterhouse isn't the first game to overuse Quick-Time events, and is certainly not the worst for them by a long shot. That would be Dead Rising on the Wii.
The thing about Quick-Time events is, fairly obviously, that they're shit. I mean, they're just about ALWAYS shit. Have you EVER read any article about a game actually praising the excellent Quick-Time events? Of course not. The best you'll ever see is a line noting that they're not as painfully obtrusive as the might be.
The obvious question is why then do developers insist on putting them into games? As in ALL THE DAMN GAMES.
Unfortunately I'm not sure that "because they're a bunch of cunts" is an acceptable answer. So instead, let's try to take at look at them and understand why they're so shit, what they offer players and developers and how they might be improved.
The obvious problem with a Quick-Time event is that it's a game mechanic which actively inhibits player agency. This breaks the single most important rule of game design: That everything should work towards ENABLING player agency within the game. You go from playing to game to watching a cutscene fairly often in most games. A cutscene is there to deliver a bit of plot or exposition and drive things forwards, sending the player off on the next bit of whatever. What a cutscene should never do is take place in the middle of the action. What it ESPECIALLY should never do is make you sit there for a minute and then randomly ask you to press a button or start the whole business over again.
Perhaps that's the problem. The developers aren't trying to give you a big dramatic boss fight to DO, they want to give you one to WATCH. But since they're ostensibly meant to be making a game they throw a few token button presses in and pretend like it's gameplay. The obvious problem with this attitude is that if I simply want to watch awesome fights I already have plenty of options. Film, T.V. Hell, I can go on youtube and watch other people play video games to my hearts content. I really don't need the game to do it for me.
Of course, that's only one type of Quick-Time event. There is another and if anything it's even more annoying. The in game type. The one where, rather than switching to cut scene, you'll be happily doing whatever when suddenly some idiot prompt flashes up on the screen. These were a big problem in Star Wars The Force Unleashed. Sure, the finishing moves were kinda cool if you could do them. But 9 times out of 10 you'd instantly fail them because you were still attacking the enemy when the prompt flashed up. In Splatterhouse the offenders come from being grappled by enemies. You're busy punching everything in face and then suddenly some tentacled bastard grabs you and it's all press X not to die time.
The particular problem there being that pressing the specified button seems to do NOTHING. Seriously. The big club handed bastards you can get away from maybe 1 time in 3 by frantically hammering the A button, but in the entire run through the entire game I never once broke a throw from one of the tentacle guys. Why? I HAVE NO IDEA. There is no feedback from these events, no clues as to what it is you're doing wrong. Should you press the button once? Hold it? Hammer the shit out of it and hope for the best? I have no idea, and I've tried all of them. Maybe it's just that I was already pressing something else when the grapple started and that invalidated my other inputs.
Both these example show a major problem of the Quick-Time mechanic as it's commonly employed. Sure you get a prompt flash up for a button press, but if you press anything else then it doesn't count. This is simply not helpful when things get frantic. You might argue that asking for this to be a bit more forgiving is just whinging because it's too hard. But if you're all about the challenge then I've got a radical concept for you: It's called GAMEPLAY. There isn't any challenge inherent to Quick-Time events, and no satisfaction to be had from them. They're just an obstacle between the player and the game. I'd just like it to be over and done with as quickly and painlessly as possible.
I could of course make the point here about how often a Quick-Time bossfight will simply come down to rote memorisation of which button you're meant to press next (which as we all know is liquid fun. In a sea of sarcasm and pain.), but that's often not the case as they frequently like to make each button press RANDOM. This does not make your shitty quick-time fight about reactions, it makes it about LUCK. If you don't get me yet on this point, let me put it to you like this: How would you like to play a fighting game where punch, kick and block randomly remapped themselves after every single press? It would suck wouldn't it? Well that's what we have here. In fact, it's not just turning a 5 minute fight into 3 hours of desperately scrabbling to find the right button. The problem is that none of the players button inputs actually relate to what's happening onscreen. If the cinematic shows my guy winding up for a mighty punch then really, why you have me press kick at that point? Annoying as some of the Quick-Time bullshit in The Force Unleashed was, they at least got that much right. The buttons performed the same actions in Quick-Time as they did in actual gameplay. Quite why this is not always the case I simply cannot say, but in case I'm not being 100% crystal clear on this:
FUCK YOU DEAD RISING ON THE WII. FUCK YOU RIGHT IN THE EAR WITH A PIRHANA STRAPPED TO A DILDO CONNECTED TO A POWER DRILL. I DID NOT SIGN UP FOR THIS SHIT.
Seriously, they don't even look like zombies.
Anyway, moving on.
So, how could we conceivably improve upon the Quick-Time event mechanic? Well, firstly and most obviously we could stop using them. At all. EVER. That would be nice. You know, have the game designers actually design events that are part of the game? That would be nice.
Failing that there are other obvious improvements such as not suddenly switching from gameplay to Quick-Time, giving a reasonable amount of time to enter the correct input, not instantly failing if the incorrect button is pressed and of course keeping the required inputs consistent and meaningful.
But if you REALLY wanted to make a Quick-Time event that had some positive value, then I have the solution: Branching events. Think about it. Rather than simply saying press X not to die, the game gives you 2 or 3 choices. You still have to think quick to decide which course of action you want to take, but you get options. Punch him in the face or kick him in the kneecaps. Run up the colossus' right arm or jump up the torso. And each branch can lead to different outcomes with their own branches. The nett result of which is that you can do the event in several different ways. This restores some sense of agency to the player, and also gives some added replay value. After all, on a standard Quick-Time boss fight once it's done then you've seen everything. But like this a player might care to experiment a little more, to find the optimum way of doing it, or simply to see what happens. As long as no one choice results in instant death then there is no reason this couldn't work. Hell, you could even have a rare instance where NOT pressing the button gives you a new option.
This is so simple and obvious that I'm kinda surprised it hasn't really been done yet. But then again I suppose the designers really thinking about agency, fun and gameplay aren't the ones who would ever think any sort of Quick-Time event is a good idea.
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