AAA QTE rant

I'm sure this post is going to stir up some controversy... well maybe not this is the tek after all. I finished Dying Light a couple days ago and couldn't believe how shitty the final boss fight was. A shitty QTE. A game built around parkour and brutal melee combat ended with a lame QTE event....yeah. I'm not even going to ask the question is this what the industry has come to because we see it everyday in all of the unfinished, buggy, hand holding linear $60 pieces of shit that pass as games today. I know I'm preaching to the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NowB4QPZR4 Yeah that's the last straw for AAA gaming for me. I guess technically the new DOOM is a AAA game but that doesn't really count. Any thoughts? Any game suggestions? Sorry for the bad sentence structure I went to public school in Florida.

A few things:

You should never be paying full price for games. This is the PC Master Race ffs! That is against the foundation tenets of the faith :D

What do you mean "technically"? The new Doom game is undoubtedly a "AAA" game with tons of funding and development costs. Any game with a large marketing budget, developed by a decent-sized studio should be considered a AAA game.

Witcher 1-3
GTAV
Mass Effect series
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Far Cry series
Skyrim

These are all good AAA games in my opinion. Just don't pay full price for them and you'll have yourself a good time :)

If you want something challenging try Dark Souls, you will need a controller though, PC controls are shit.
If you want to explore and have a challenging game try Fallout or Skryim, with some mods of course.

Random titles that are pretty solid-

  • FTL
  • Bioshock
  • The Witcher

Beat Dark Souls with a mouse and keyboard, you will loose your sanity, but I ain't using a controller XD

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I couldn't agree more. A lot of it has to do with heads of big publishers being non gamers. They want to make movies. Games journalists are also to blame, they blindly give high scores to games that comes from big publishers.

We keep accepting QTEs in games, it's disgusting. If a game has a QTE, cut scene or a moment where the player is not completely in control it should be panned but it's not! Iā€™m so sick of it. People who praise games like The Last of Us ruin the fun for the rest of us. QTE apologists peasants.

If you can't make a great experience without QTEs and cut scenes, you shouldn't be making games, you should be making films. Look at Half-Life 2 Just a quick epic intro and ending, other than that, the player is always in control, still a great story, because the story is told as you play, not in between sections of play.

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I have Dark Souls on 360. Found it too frustrating. Stopped playing it.

The combat was fun for awhile then it started to feel like a repetitive slog. The storyline,script and characters were really generic. I guess I played it to the end just to see it through and was hoping for at least some sort of interesting boss fight...nope. I wouldn't say I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Forgot to add that I'm not some AAA hating hipster. I don't automatically hate anything based on it's popularity. I try to keep an open mind about the new major titles but find myself disappointed more times than not. Whether it be a generic 1 dimensional main character like in Dying Light or a bad script or big neon arrows telling you where to go. The solution is simple though. I should just stop playing them. This post was just a drunken rant.

I have the 1st Witcher game but haven't got that far in it. I should really sit down and play it. I played GTA V for a bit but I just don't think that type of game is for me anymore. I played GTA 3 and Vice City way back in the day and loved them but the appeal just isn't there for me anymore. Mass Effect trilogy was great despite the abysmal ending. I have Deus Ex as well again just haven't got that far in it. I'm actually playing Skyrim right now :P.

Dark Souls brings out an ugly anger in me that I don't want to come to the surface again. I don't play Dark Souls simply to keep my blood pressure down.

I guess I should clarify my definition of AAA games because I can see how it's a bit specific and misleading. I'm referring more to the overblown bloated generic dumbed down titles like Call Of Duty or anything similar to that ilk. Not the techincal definition of a game produced by one of the major publishers. My apologies for that. Yes DOOM is obviously a AAA title but it's a classic series from an era back when game devs actually had originality and imagination which are two things I wish we had more of today. It's the same concept as movies. Studios could easily greenlight interesting and unique screenplays but instead they play it safe with sequel bating franchises and reboots/remakes. I've been gaming since the NES days and IMO the industry is in the toilet despite a few good games here and there.

"You should never be paying full price for games. This is the PC Master Race ffs! That is against the foundation tenets of the faith :D" I didn't pay full price I was just using that as example for how expensive games are when most of the time they aren't finished at launch and generally aren't very good these days. Not all but most.

Exactly THIS ^^^^^^

Would you say that CD Project Red should stop making games? As far as I remember, Witcher 2 had a QTE boss-battle in the second act.

Yeah Witcher 2 had some awful QTE and QTE-like sections. Glad they payed attention to the backlash and dropped them from TW3 (unless there's one later on that I havent gotten to yet :D)

I wish I had time and budget to upgrade my GPU and buy W3. Looks awesome and I spent many sleepless teenage nights rereading Sapkowski's stories. I might be biased by being a Slav myself, but I love his reinterpretations of our folklore and bedtime stories.

They got a lot of criticism over it, and rightfully so. It was a weak moment of peasantry and they repented. Look, things like that comes from pressure from the marketing department and from a fear that the peasants will react poorly to it.

Don't be a QTE apologist just because some decent games have them, the bottom line is that they failed at making good boss fight and cut a corner by implementing a QTE.

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You're probably right. I haven't played W3 yet, so I can't judge their progress. Anyways, I might be crucufied, but I liked the first Witcher game much more than the second one. It simply felt more true to the source material both in lore and feel. The only other good QTE heavy game that I recall is Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones.

I don't really get the hate, though. Recently I've been playing through the classics, most recently Mega Man X and it's gameplay wasn't that much different from QTEs. It's all just remembering patterns and reacting to big flashy clues. Maybe the modern QTEs are just a little bit too dumbed down, and cross the line, but it's really the same concept.

Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones is ten times worse than Sands of Time.

It's really about putting button prompts on a screen that is just inexcusable. Mega Man X never changes the rules for how you play, jump button jumps and shoot button shoots. There is no other story than what you play, maybe some text boxes, but thats it.

Games like The Last of Us, Heavy Rain and Assassins Creed sometimes feel like watching a bad movie, just that you have to press buttons to make the movie not stop.

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I think overall I agree with what I've heard TB say in regards to QTEs. Basically, there are certain situations when using QTEs or QTE-like mechanics are ok, but, in most cases they are over-used and AAA developers rely too heavily on them. In my opinion, the main issue is that AAA dev studios ares still using them in the first place, which is a bit unforgivable. If a small indie studio uses a few QTEs in an effort to provide the player with an event that either would cost too much time/money to develop in-engine or because of other technical or budgetary hurdles, then that is a bit easier to stomach. When I sit down to play a game from a large studio with copious funding thrown at it and see QTEs, it's a real black mark for the title. I fought through Witcher 2's terrible QTE events (the timed sequence running from the dragon on the bridge was horrendous), but that was just because I was such a fan of the series at that time. If it would have been almost any other game, I might have ditched it.

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