A new idea for Quick Time Events...

After reading one more time about how people hate quick time events I had an idea of how to remove one of the obstacles whilst still keeping them (since developers seem keen to tie them to cutscenes wrapped around gameplay).

Essentially, one of the complaints levelled at QTEs in Shamus' article/comic is that your attention is diverted away from the action. This is an entirely fair critique and is one of the reasons why i do not like QTEs. The idea i had was to separate QTEs from the cutscene. i.e. The gameplay would pause as if you were queuing up actions (which i seem to remember from a game i once played a long time ago - though which one it was escapes me at this moment) and the prompts would come up.

There's two ways you can do this and one is already sort of implemented in some games where they slow down the gameplay and blur the screen while you try and hit the button. The downside with this mechanism is that the player might have to go through the component parts of the cutscene and then fail again.

The second way, and the one i would prefer, is to have all the prompts come up on the screen before the action starts. Then if you pass or fail you get to see the whole sequence in one go - allowing the player to enjoy the action as if it were just a cutscene.

Of course, all of this is just an end-run around the problem: I'd prefer to just have a cutscene or actual controllable gameplay. Also remember, developers, don't put things in the cutscenes that you cannot do in the game!!