The Quick And The Dead

I’m not the first person to raise concerns about quick-time events, and I’m certainly not going to be the last. This game mechanic has been named since Yu Suzuki coined the term during the development of Shenmue but has arguably existed as far back as Dragon’s Lair. There’s a lot of history to it, and it isn’t all pretty. Generally speaking, a quick-time event is a moment in a game during which the player has a limited time in which they need to press a button to avoid failure. That’s an unhelpfully broad definition because it encompasses nearly any action in a video game, so more narrowly, this button prompt should appear in a moment when the player doesn’t have manual control of what’s going on. Unlike normal circumstances in which buttons correspond to universal actions, here, a bespoke sequence is playing out, and seeing it through to its ideal conclusion requires the correct input. An incorrect input will result in a failed version of this animation, and sometimes a game over for the player.

It’s a bit hard to illustrate the pros and cons in the abstract, so let’s look at one of the most infamous examples of the quick-time event. Resident Evil 4 has a few of them, and they’re one of the more notorious parts of a game that’s generally quite well liked. They happen during cinematic cutscenes and a failure to complete them will set the player back to some time before the cutscene. In theory, these serve two purposes. One is that they turn the cutscene from a video in between gameplay into a part of the gameplay. The other is that they force the player to pay attention to the cutscenes. The first one is a problem in that it’s simply not very interesting gameplay. It gets the job done I suppose, but it’s something of a lazy solution. There’s a tacit admission that they’d rather be telling the story through gameplay, but they aren’t doing that, so they’ve come up with a compromise that doesn’t really please anybody. The second one is a bigger problem. If someone’s not interested in the cutscene, you’re punishing them by making them watch it again if they fail, which is probably going to make them like it even less. But it’s even more self-defeating than that suggests. A player that is invested in the cinematic playing before them is probably so invested that they’re more likely to be caught off-guard, thus punishing them for caring too much. I’ve seen a few solutions to this, such as giving the player advance notice that a QTE is coming (something of a mood killer) or making failure impossible (inevitably very goofy looking when a player doesn’t do the inputs), but maybe it’s a sign that it’s just not a very good idea.

Let’s look at another approach that has it’s own problems. Bayonetta was released a few years after Resident Evil 4 and features a different kind of quick-time event (don’t worry, the first one is in there plenty as well, and it still sucks). Here, they happen during gameplay while using certain special attacks. That way, the player can reasonably expect when they’re going to come, which already alleviates a lot of the issues with the first variety. But the problem is that these QTEs are a lot more involved than just pressing one button. Instead, that one button needs to be pressed a lot of times very quickly, or else one of the control sticks needs to be spun in a circle very quickly. Failure does not result in a game over, but it does have consequences like taking damage, not defeating the enemy, and feeling like you wasted your time. This is fine on occasion, but not as a central gameplay mechanic, which is exactly what it is in Bayonetta. This seems to have been inspired by the God of War games, which similarly use QTEs for cinematic finishing moves, but this just results in drawn-out and overplayed animations that lose their novelty very quickly and are simply tiring to perform.

So, is there a way to fix this? Believe it or not, there is. No More Heroes was actually released earlier than Bayonetta and managed to avoid these pitfalls. Like Bayonetta and God of War, the QTEs come during gameplay rather than in cutscenes and in a fairly predictable way. There are no game overs because you thought you were safe to set your controller down for a moment. Already better than Resident Evil 4. But it does better than Bayonetta in a few ways. For one, it’s a whole lot harder to fail. The emphasis is shifted away from the performance of rather mundane QTEs and towards the more involved parts of the game. Another is that the inputs are much simpler. You don’t need to repeatedly mash one button; most of the time, it’s just a single directional input. Sometimes it does involve rotating the analog stick, but for a much shorter duration of time than in Bayonetta. Lastly, they don’t correspond to long animations but rather short, punctual attacks, so the flow of battle isn’t completely thrown off by initiating them. These attacks also have the ability to damage other enemies adjacent, so it doesn’t feel like your QTEs are completely siloed away from everything else going on. There are a few moments in the game that don’t work as well, but generally speaking, No More Heroes is about as good as it gets.