Quick Time Events In Games

I don't know about you, but I have never liked the notion of the quick time event in video games.

For those of you that do not know, a quick time event in a video game is a sequence in the game where you have to press a specific button, of which is normally displayed on screen, within a given amount of time. Press the correct button in time and you are allowed to advance; failure results in something bad.

To my knowledge, the quick time event (QTE) first appeared in the game Dragon's Lair, a widely popular title even to this day. I never understood the appeal to that game. It's QTEs had you guessing every step of the game since it didn't have any onscreen display of what button to press. More recent games like Shenmue, God of War, Drake's Fortune, and Heavenly Sword make use of the QTE in a less stricter fashion than Dragon's Lair - namely you don't instantly die when you press the wrong button.

Now, QTEs have never bothered me this much before but thanks to the efforts of the huge success that God of War was, QTEs are finding their way into more and more games. God of War itself had pretty relaxed QTEs, giving you enough time to understand that a QTE is happening and plenty of time to react accordingly. God of War also has the benefit of giving the player a reward of some sort for successful completion. Heavenly Sword, however, is a different story and the reason why I'm writing this post.

I felt that Heavenly Sword's QTEs were brutal and felt like they were tacked on to add some kind of depth to the gameplay. First, they didn't allow enough time for me to react after first popping up onscreen. Secondly, when you failed the QTE the punishment usually screwed me out of the time I just spent getting up to that QTE section. Namely, when you failed during a boss fight, the boss would regain their entire health bar. The whole damn bar! Now that's just wrong and needlessly frustrating. If this is the way that QTEs are gonna be in games, I'm just going to avoid any game that has them.

So to any developer out there that is thinking about putting quick time events in their game, please do it right. Don't make it so frustrating and punishing to the player. Make them fun and rewarding - not just to be there as a means to an end.