QTEs have received mixed reactions from players and journalists. They can be used effectively to enhance
cutscenes and other actions. The use of QTEs within
Shenmue is often praised, as "they seamlessly flow from cinema to the QTE sequence without any loading pauses at all", and sections which utilized the QTE were considered "some of the most thrilling in the whole game". At the same time, they also are considered to be a weak addition to gameplay, and often force the player to repeat such sections until they complete the QTE perfectly to move on. They are often considered a "bane of action games", as their presence breaks the standard flow of the game and reduce the control of the game for the player to a few buttons, distracting, and turning interactivity into a job. Also, QTEs may frustrate the player due to the fact that they might not have any sign that they are about to happen. ''. The player is prompted to repeatedly press Y to make the character
sprint. QTEs are often used during dramatic cutscenes.
Resident Evil 4 uses QTEs (described by cinematics lead Yoshiaki Hirabayashi as an "action button system") to "facilitate a seamless transition between gameplay and the in-game movies" and prevent players from losing interest during cutscenes. One example in
Resident Evil 4 is a
knife fight. The fight occurs during a late-game cutscene where the protagonist meets a major villain, who explains missing links in the game's story while periodically slashing at the protagonist and requiring the player to quickly press a button to parry him. Furthermore, when a QTE is used during such a scene, the player's attention is drawn away from the animation and instead to the area of the screen where the button control indicator would appear, rendering the effort put into animating the scene meaningless. Another problem with the use of QTE during cutscenes is that it can dilute the emotion and importance of the scene to a single button press, trivializing the nature of the scene. This issue was raised from
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, in which during an early scene where the player character attends the funeral of a fallen fellow soldier, the player is given the option to
press a button to mourn for the soldier. Forcing this type of interaction has been considered a poor form of storytelling, as some have argued the scene could have been played out without requiring player action to make the same form of emotional connection to the protagonist, or with the player given more control of the character. QTEs may be used to provide a limited control scheme for a scene within the game that would be otherwise difficult or impossible to perform with the game's standard controls.
Telltale Games'
The Walking Dead includes QTEs intermittently, creating tension throughout the game. Furthermore, during
conversation trees with non-player characters, failure to select the next choice of topic in a limited time may affect later events in the game. This "quick time conversation" mechanic is used in other Telltale games as well. More recently, the games
Fahrenheit (
Indigo Prophecy in North America),
Heavy Rain, and
Detroit: Become Human from
Quantic Dream are primarily presented as sequences of QTEs, integrating the mechanic as part of the core gameplay, and present controller actions that correlate directly with the character actions on the screen; this was emphasized further in
Heavy Rain by a game patch to support the use of the
PlayStation Move motion controls where the player could actually physically perform the moves that corresponded with character actions. In both games, players may miss certain QTEs, or may be given a choice of multiple QTEs they could perform; opting of which QTEs to perform would alter the story, with the possibility of character death at some later point. In
Heavy Rain, for example, the player controls the fates of the game's four playable characters, leading to numerous different endings if the characters remained alive and if they had discovered critical information. Even prior to
Heavy Rains release, the game's director
David Cage had to defend his vision of the game from critics that were skeptical of the reliance on QTEs within
Heavy Rain and created an early stigma on the game's reception. Despite the integration,
Heavy Rain was often criticized for use of QTEs in otherwise non-dramatic situations. In an early sequence in the game, the player has to control the lead character to find his son Jason in the mall, with the only available action of pressing the "X" button to shout "Jason" having no apparent effect. With the onset of newer technology to improve graphics, controls, in-game physics, and artificial intelligence, gameplay elements previously simulated through QTEs can potentially be re-implemented as core game mechanics.
Road Blaster used QTEs to steer the car and ram other vehicles off the road in pre-rendered animated scenes, while a modern game like
Burnout Paradise gives the player full control of the vehicle and uses its game engine to create real-time crashes with other vehicles. == References ==