An alternative to quicktime events

I finally got around to playing the Star Wars: The Force Unleashed demo today, and it seemed mostly enjoyable. I was slightly worried that the demo was so short – not even a whole mission – which might indicate that the actual game is also very brief. This doesn’t concern me because I have anything against short games, but because I prefer short games to be accompanied by am equally modest price tag, and I prefer them to be at least mildly replayable.

Its gameplay was fun though – of course it’s really really hard to mess up lightsaber combat, but even then, it was more enjoyable than I remember Jedi Academy being, which was enjoyable indeed. The force powers were decent, though I was slightly disappointed at my apparent inability to pick tie fighters out of the air. Generally speaking, it was a good demo, but it ended on a very low note – it ended with a quick time event (QTE).

I’m pretty sure it’s scientifically proven that nobody likes quick time events. They often come suddenly out of the blue, they’re a diversion from the regular gameplay, and it rarely feels like you’re actually responsible for whatever awesome actions are being displayed on screen. So I think it’s time for some of my usual armchair game design (hopefully mitigated by the fact that I do actually hope to be able to put these things into use some day).

The usual reason for including quick time events is that you want a boss fight to be something special, you don’t want the player to just be able to hammer away at it with his basic attack until it falls over. You also want to make the act of taking down the boss look cool, so you set up a complicated animation that may or may not roughly match the button sequence. In this particular case, I see a far more interesting way to pull these things off without letting the basic gameplay collapse into a burning pile of Simon Says.

In this case, the main challenge of taking down the AT-ST at the end of the demo is to reach it in the first place. It has two big cannons at the front that blasts you backwards and takes a good chunk away from your health when it hits you, and it has a smaller laser cannon with a very fast rate of fire. Getting into a position where you can activate the QTE to kill it is about as hard as the QTE itself, and it could easily have been made even harder (requiring good timing to close on it by moving from cover to cover, for example). The first time I made an attempt at it, I didn’t even notice there was a QTE to be activated, I just jumped up and hammered away at it – presumably thanks to The Force, the Apprentice can hover in the air for several seconds as he swipes away with his light saber.

Why not just change the animations for the player’s most common lightsaber combos when he’s activating them within range to hit the “body” of the AT-ST? That way the AT-ST will still require more skill to take down because you need to get close to it in the first place, and I’m pretty sure you could even implement exactly the same animations as the QTE uses if you want – now they’d just be activated with some of the same button combos that the regular gameplay uses. If you plan to make AT-ST’s a recurring boss fight, you can even justify making several different take-down animations depending on what sort of combo the player activates.

Wouldn’t this be more fun for the player while remaining just as impressive as the QTE’s special-case animation? And wouldn’t it be more fun to have to time your approach right, avoid the laser fire, and make proper use of your environment rather than simply being told to mimic a short series of very fast button pushes? If there’s a flaw in my idea, please do point it out in the comments, I’d like to see if this holds up as well as I’d like to think it does