I usually don't mind them. But I would much rather just relax and watch the story unfold, rather than focus on pressing the right button.

I'm with Yatze from Zero Punctuation on this: The Press X to not die QTEs need to get cut down for games - they're becoming a crutch for most developers. Then you have BF3 type QTEs where it's more like "Press X after you get back from making your sandwich." These should get cut altogether.

This, too.


Link to the event, please.

I guess they should be called Slow Time Events.

yeah nowadays! at least in resident evil 4 (the first action game with QTE i played) they were fairly challenging. now it seems they are impossible to fail and if you do the checkpoint is right before the button prompt!

No! I mean...I can quit any time I want to!

If done right they are okay. I actually love cutscenes. They felt like an award to me. I hate having QTE's interrupting them. Some games it works for but it just feels lazy sometimes. Other times it allows you to do something's outside the games limitations which can be cool. Like ripping off Apollo's head in God of War 3. However sometimes those things are bad. Like having 20 effing QTEs in one God of War boss fight. Zeus anyone!?! As has been said. When done appropriately they can be cool. But they should never be a replacement for gameplay. They should enhance it. Moderation and placement are important.

http://www.twitch.tv/totalbiscuit

He hasn't announced the time yet, just that it'll be next Sunday. He's from England so it'll probably be in the afternoon/evening in Europe. It'll eventually appear on his http://www.youtube.com/user/TotalHalibut?feature=chclk as well.



Are QTEs still very popular in console games? I haven't seen many of them in PC games recently.

Thanks.

I don't mind QTEs and like some you see in games such as Bayonetta. It's fun serving a purpose to delight the gamer + deal damage to the boss. However, if you are dealing with games like RE4, and RE5 where QTEs mean life or death then I hate them. Another problem is QTEs were a bit new so developers thought it was the next big craze adding them EVERYWHERE they could. This just degraded experiences proving you need a good striking balance to make thing enjoyable.

Right, Xenosaga 1 had so lengthy cutscenes thye had save points in them A good cutscene is a pleasure to sit trough, bad ones are just bad though. Like in MGS4, "Shut up and let me shoot something already! " about summed up one chapter of it to me

As for QTEs, the way Resident Evil 4 did them was interesting, but some of the longer ones were just annoying. Usually i don't mind them, though.

I don't even know what QTE are in a game. Maybe I've encountered one but didn't know what they were called. But in terms of cutscenes/any interruption etc. in general....I'm ok with them as long as there's a "skip" function/key. I loathe being forced to watch anything. And I definitely don't like it if I have to watch it repeatedly while trying to kill a boss over and over.

I can appreciate a well done animated story cut-scene on its own merits, but I'm not really fond of them being in my game. When games are completely enclosed, senses-surrounding/included, 3D experiences or something, maybe then, but on a flat monitor, no.

This.

QTEs are quick time events -- cutscenes during which you have to press a (usually random) button in order to do something or avoid something. It usually pops up on the screen and you only have a limited time in which to respond, or else fail.

Just out of curiosity, why do some people dislike cutscenes in this thread? Is it only bad cutscenes or just all of them?

For me it's mostly unskippable ones that are annoying. Luckily that doesn't happen very often anymore.

But I also dislike cutscenes that serve no real purpose. Ones that involve your character doing some kind of action that easily could've been part of the game itself. Rock Paper Shotgun mentioned in their Max Payne 3 preview that there was a cutscene in which Max runs and ducks from snipers until he reaches another room, where the game would give you the control back. No interactivity, you just had to watch the cutscene. While earlier on in the game, you were avoiding snipers yourself as part of the actual gameplay. So that cutscene was rather pointless.

I don't like cutscenes that show the character doing something that s/he'll suddenly be incapabale of doing onceI regain control, or that only serve to put me in a position I'd never get into if I had the control of the character.

Playing Deus Ex: HR at the moment and it's incredibly frustrating to watch my stealthy hacker guy, who just spent ages working his through multiple levels of of an area avoiding or quietly knocking out enemies, suddenly decide to walk straight out into a room and get spotted because the game decided he should.

In general cutscenes are, at best, tolerable for me. Even then they better be skippable if I so choose. The start of Mass Effect 2 is a good example of a section I hate. Its only real purpose is to establish how you ended up in the lab the real game starts in. Once you know that there's absolutely no point to it; and yet you're forced to go through the entire thing each and every time you create a character.

Hated QTEs since I first stumbled upon them back in the 80s with Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, and I still don't like them. Usually I just consider them to be a very poor design choice that no competent game designer should choose. They can work okish as best when integrated into the gameplay, but I really don't like them at all during cutscenes.

The best implentation of QTEs I've seen is in the Yakuza series, where you can do special moves once the "heat" meter is full with a press of a button. But the Yakuza series also have cutscene QTEs, bleh.

As for cutscenes themselves, I'm usually not fond of them either. Nothing wrong with a cutscene here and there pushing the story forward, but when the game is filled with cutscenes so it feels more like a movie than a game, they should have made a movie instead. Also feel that a game designer that fill their game with lots of cutscenes is very lazy when it comes to tell their story, rather than to try to incorporate it into the gameplay.

Ah, thanks. Doesn't sound familiar to me, but if I encountered it I'd probably be fairly annoyed with it.
For me it's partly what Freddo already said, and partly because they take me away/out of the immersion that I've built up for myself. I'll be running around, playing the game the way I want, imagining what I want, and I dislike being ripped away from that in order to watch someone else's vision. A movie is me accepting & watching entirely for someone else's vision. A game is (still) not a movie and current methods of trying to make them "interactive" or cinematic doesn't work for me. They might get there one day.

Note that brief NPC dialogues with choices to make and their backgrounds to learn doesn't bother that much, since those can make me feel a connection to the character I'm dragging along with me & add to my own imagination of who I think "they are." It's mostly cinematic scenes or cinematic storytelling, where I have no involvement whatsoever, that annoy me.

I don't mind QTE's when they are done right and have good VA's but they wouldn't be my 1st choice in a game due to the memory size and the linearness of them.

Not a fan of QTE in cutscenes at all.

I LOVE Mass Effect, but the QTEs in ME2(can't remember if they were there for 1) are absolutely frustrating. It's as vague as the dialogue system can be, but with the added benefit of having to make a split second decision; there were numerous renegade QTEs that I didn't pull the trigger on, even though I wanted to, because I had no clue whether it would make Shepard roughly interrogate someone, or throw them out the window.

I'm about the opposite in that I really dislike modern games that attempt to tell a story during gameplay. Retaining control of my character does nothing to enhance storytelling, instead forfeiting things such as actions, facial expressions and body language that are tailored to that specific event. Cutscenes make for a much more directed experience, though hardly to the point where I'd say they'd be better off making a movie. Even in a game like Metal Gear Solid 4, there was still plenty of gameplay to accompany some terrific scenes.

Oblivion and Fallout 3, where characters essentially just stood there while their dialogue played, is horribly boring. Oddly enough, it isn't something that bothers me with older games that didn't feature cutscenes as they are today.

So what I take from what has been said from my question. People hate pointless unskippable cutscenes that rip them out of character, basically.

Seems like that is mostly an issue if you are playing a game that does not have a set and defined character in it. One that lets YOU make the character. Like many RPGs or like a TES or Fallout game. Those kinds of games should have few or no cutscenes but they should always have a very light touch imo. Nothing involving YOUR character and their choices. Even if the choice is simply running from a boulder or standing in front of it and blasting it with a fireball or missile launcher. All a cutscene in that regard should do is give some notion of events, or let you witness some events, and they should remain as impartial to character choice as possible to reduce conflicts with peoples characters. The cutscenes should also always be skippable except on a first playthrough or something. This seem right?

IMO if you are playing a game with a set main character, like Kratos or Dante, they simply are not you. You cannot be THEM. You are essentially playing THEIR story. The Devs are making the cutscenes to flesh out those characters in a way that THEY say a character should act as they were the creators(or have a license to do as they please) of said character. If those cutscenes conflict with the way the gameplay lets you interact with that character then it is a poor implementation. But other than that basically anything goes. I view cutscenes like the ones in Final Fantasy games like a reward and I hate to miss even a second of them. But I HATED FF13. It felt like it was all cutscenes and the most linear game of that series that I have played. So obviously for some games there needs to be a balance. So cutscenes should not be abused as a method or storytelling and they should fit seamlessly into the game as much as is possible. I do prefer cutscenes that are set pieces though. Not interactive. They just let you see the game with enhanced looks for a little bit. Those are what I prefer in these kinds of games.

Thoughts?

I understand what you're saying and I don't completely disagree with it. Any game (even an in-depth story RPG), you're playing with someone else's world, including the provided characters. It's just the nature of such things.
I don't mind "reward" cutscenes (after killing a boss say) or the very occasional story cut-scene at certain progression points (start, middle, end), but even in a straight FPS or action/adventure game (Tombraider) I become extremely annoyed if it feels like there's a cutscene every 15 minutes. I don't care if the cutscene is a separate uber quality graphic entity that lasts 45 seconds or an in-game bit that lasts 5-10 seconds. It's still annoying and takes me out of immersion because I'm forced to watch rather than interact.

The best comparison I can make is .... movies with voice-over narration. Most people find more than the very occasional and brief voice over narration (to explain plot stuff) in a movie "lazy" and annoying. A sign of poor direction, writing, whatever. There's a few stylistic exceptions, but generally speaking, it's considered a pretty shoddy thing to do. Show, don't tell, or something. I view cutscenes in the same way. Give me your game story, but do it in a way where I feel part of it. Make me discover it through my actions (dialogue w/chrs, in-game books I can read if I choose, recordings I find/pick up, even posters on a wall or papers on a desk) as I go through the game, don't "show" it to me via mini-movies. I don't care if it's an action game, adventure, strategy or RPG. It should still keep it to a minimum. The point where I stopped liking Tombraider series was when the cutscene hell seemed to takeover.

THIS
end thread/

I actually hated the QTEs in RE4, and have steadfastly refused to buy any game which featured them since. If that game is an example of QTEs at their best, I'd hate to see them at their worst.

I wouldn't consider the Mass Effect 2 and 3 interrupts to be QTEs though. You can safely ignore them, and frequently ignoring them is the best character choice.