But Crytek isn’t calling them quicktime events, it’s trying to avoid that term altogether. Crytek just wants every kill to look incredible, to look precise. It’s willing to go to strange lengths to make this happen.
Allow me to explain.
I’m on the battlefield. I’m stomping through the corpses of my comrades swinging my sword at anything that moves. I begin a combo, I slash twice and then whooom slow motion is initiated, stuff is about to get ‘cinematic’. A button prompt hovers elusively above the sword I’m about to drive into the throat of my enemy… argh I’m too slow! The prompt flickers, disappears.
I missed it. Damn.
But then somehow, for some reason, I still complete the cinematic ‘kill’.
What?
Maybe it’s a bug I think, but no. Next time I deliberately press the wrong button. The kill goes ahead, no consequences. Then I try hitting no buttons whatsoever. The kill goes ahead. I put the controller on the table in front of me, the kill goes ahead.
What is going on here?
I ask one of the Crytek people hovering at the booth – is this a bug? Why am I completing kills when I hit the wrong button prompt? Or, worse, no button at all. Turns out it was a deliberate design choice.
“We don’t want the player to feel frustrated,” I am told.
The idea behind this design decision, claims Crytek, is that players coming home from a hard day’s work don’t want to deal with the pressures and stress of playing perfectly. Instead of rewarding players with a gory cinematic for hitting the QTE correctly, players simply acquire a greater amount of XP or currency
Push 'X' when prompted - or not, makes no difference. It was sad enough when 'pressing X' when prompted constituted 'game play' but even that is too much now. Glad I am not a hardcore gamer, this reminds me of that Kart Racer MS made for Kinect, I forget the name, the one with dramatic auto steer and auto accelerate.