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Comments
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You can't make people feel if they don't know what they're feeling for. Again, the problem is that it's hard to measure such a thing in terms of design and writing. There are some ways that most people use when they want to tap into people's emotions (Primal fears, fatherly love, etc) but overall, it's one of thse things that not everyone agrees on. You can't make people feel deliberately and universally, simply because each person has a different perception on what "hits close to their heart"
MGS3 did something similar. The only problem is that the healing process was rather immediate instead of having a recovery process for rather obvious reasons (To not hamper with gameplay/cause frustration)
It's like in SoTC. Agro doesn't reply to your call always. He sometimes ignores it because that's what horses do. The thing is, though, there's a certain degree to which this would be frustrating, so it was reduced from its original idea to be a half of the time thing in order to not cause the player many headaches.
That's kind of a gross overgeneralization of what happens in HR. It's true that there was an element of every day life actions, but there were also a lot of good set pieces that managed to raise the tension as well.
With that said, RE4 is still a better game because it manages to combine the cheesiness of Arnie Leon S Kennedy with the horror of the Wicker Man and get the best of both. And it did QTE well because one) It was new back then (Let's face it, if it were published today, they'd be sticking out like a sore thumb) and two) because it managed to not over do them and use them to actually create tension.
The basic idea is to impose stat penalties for certain wounds. They don't prevent you from fighting effectively, but they prevent you from fighting effectively with a certain approach.
For instance, a leg wound reduces your manoeuvrability. Therefore, footwork shenanigans will be pretty limited, which is bad news if you rely on flanking your adversaries. On the other hand, a style based on weapons binding won't be hampered at all.
The theory is basically that wounds force the player to rethink their tactics and choose their battles with caution rather than actually closing things entirely off.
From a bit earlier, right after I went to sleep:
Calling the Souls games difficult is extremely misleading, and I'm kinda baffled by people doing that. "Difficult" is putting someone up against a really tough enemy they don't have much of a chance against, then making them reload over and over again until they win it by sheer luck. This is something that mainstream AAA games do all the damn time; it's just not noticed as much because they only make you reload a save from five or ten seconds earlier, so it doesn't take up much of your time.
What Dark Souls does is send you up against enemies you can reasonably expect to beat, but then if you screw it up (and it'll be you who screwed it up, and you'll know what you did wrong) it actually punishes you for it, sending you way back and taking away your XP unless you can get at least to where you died. The word I'd use for that is "unforgiving."
IMO, they shouldn't be used at all unless they're a primary gameplay mechanic.
I think they shouldn't be used at this stage, as they've grown stagnant and become a sign of lazy design.
Lazy in terms of brain power rather than in terms of programming.
Ah, yeah, probably.
Though I think games using them as a primary mechanic get a pass there.
They're also lazy in terms of game mechanics. They're a quick, easy way of putting something you want in the game that the core mechanics don't account for. That begs the question of why the core mechanics don't account for them. Invariably, they're in action games that could probably use more complexity for the matter at hand.
It's kind of staggering how inefficient a lot of control schemes are. Something as simple as holding a shoulder button could be used to change the entire button map. This is done all the time for firearms related stuff -- how many console shooters have you hold L1 and then press R1 to fire? -- but seldom done for close combat, which is a shame.
A game with strong gameplay narrative (that is, how the game world is expressed via the natural mechanical interactions the player has with it) doesn't use quicktime events because it accounts for every action the player will ever need to undertake.
I think that it can be valid in such cases, but it's fairly unexplored territory. My problem with the idea is that it only helps to emphasize the lack of interactivity and it turns into a movie that forces you to push the "play" buttong every few seconds rather than an actual game with a challenge.
Er... not invariably? There are plenty of games that use quicktime events that are not action games. And, in fact, sometimes quicktime events are the core mechanics of a game (see:Dragon's Lair).
A sufficiently branching storyline could fix that problem. You'd keep going if you failed, but the story might be heavily altered if you lost a fight.
Well, what I'd like to see is a game with a sort of standardized QTE control scheme. So, for example, the same button always does the same thing, and maybe you have a choice between which buttons to hit. That would be interesting to see, at least.
^^ Perhaps I got ahead of myself, but I'm yet to witness quicktime events outside of the action genre. RPGs don't use them, RTS games don't use them, FPS games only rarely do (and are action anyway). Rhythm games do, but they're arguably quicktime events all up.
^ I'm not sure that would "count", because even if the events were context-sensitive, you'd have a standardised control scheme for them. That would make them standard mechanics that have a contextual condition that has to be satisfied before the player is given access to them.
They'd still be QTEs of a sort. Just...better?
It depends on your definition of a QTE. Personally, I define them as a any short-term, context-specific mechanic for performing a player character action that falls outside general gameplay mechanics. Making them consistent, to me, simply makes them regular gameplay mechanics that are context-sensitive.
Some Final Fantasy games do, particularly FFX with some of its overdrives (Tidus's and Auron's in particular) and FFXIII-2 with QTE's everywhere. Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land uses quicktime events when you attempt to open a locked or trapped chest. Dark Cloud has occasional quicktime event segments for some reason that I can not fathom.
Aside from that, I've also seen quicktime events in visual novels (specifically, Sakura Taisen V), which kind of seems like a more fitting place for them due to lack of many other game mechanics (though in that particular case there were SRPG mechanics, but not exactly things that could be applied to the situations they used QTE's for).