Press X to eat toast

GamesPress photo for WET

Consider all the menial tasks done in life without any effort. Remember to the last time you perhaps made yourself toast. Your mind may have been on wishing you were still in bed while you put it in the toaster. You may have been planning out what you need to do that day as you slathered some butter on the now crisp surface. The realization that your laundry must be done comes to you as a bite is taken and chewed.

Now imagine that some random person tells you that you cannot eat that toast without first waving it around in the air until he says it is ok. You scoff at first, but as you try to eat the toast some force prevents it from ever entering your mouth. So you wave it around in the air, flecking crumbs and melted butter in all directions, but once he says “you may eat” the invisible barrier is no longer there. You can now eat your toast.

Now consider Rubi, the denim-clad femme fatale of the new shooter game WET. She has the gun-slinging and acrobatic talents that would put any circus performer to shame. She can run along walls, leap from pole to pole or slide along the ground while adorning her foes with bullet holes. Her blade-wielding skills are second to none as she out maneuvers her enemies while slicing their limbs into bits. All this she can do without breaking into a sweat or mussing up her Charlie's Angels haircut.

Yet a menial task such as opening a door requires the repetitive mashing of the X button.

It's a game mechanic that has become a tad too common since God of War first did it on the Playstation 2. When encountered with a door or treasure chest the player must repeatedly press a button or perform a sequence of gestures just to get through. In real life you may simply turn the knob without a single higher brain function, but in the world of video games such a menial task requires a bit more effort.

The general purpose is understandable. The developer doesn't want players to become bored, so they attempt to slide in small interactive moments in between the action. Yet for some reason it hasn't occurred to any of the programmers, artists or designers that having to mash a button in order to open a door or chest just isn't fun. The natural flow is instead interrupted like a dam blocks a river. It's like having to wave toast around in the air before you can eat it.

Let's say in a game that a player finds a secret passage with the hope of revealing a hidden treasure stash. The player spots the chest and eagerly goes over to see what they've found. Yet instead of being given their new discovery immediately they are commanded to press a button repeatedly until the game deems them worthy of it. The joy of discovery has been hindered, not helped.

Similarly, in the demo for WET, a player will leave a room they just fought in to relax, regain some health and maybe find a hidden item. By time they see the door to the next room they are ready to bust it down and start shooting whatever pile of polygons start to move. Instead, their anticipation is prolonged by a prompt to jam on the X button over and over, delaying the player from the main draw of the game.

Typically software companies use focus testing to see what players enjoy and dislike when using their product. It can be imagined that any studio who wishes to mimic the gameplay of God of War might ask players what they enjoyed, or to at least browse the forums and blogs across the Internet. Can anyone out there imagine someone saying “Man, I really loved it when I had to keep pressing buttons to open doors! The adrenaline just pumped like crazy as I was forced to wait to get to the fun part!”? Seems rather unlikely.

Now hand-in-hand with this object-opening mechanic are Quick Time Events. It seems impossible to have one without the other. Somehow developers continue to miss the articles on sites such as Gamasutra or The Escapist that decry the continued and confusing use of Quick Time Events at all, or the pages of forum posts wanting them to go away or countless blogs complaining about their over use.

It isn't wrong for developers to try and keep a game interactive in any way possible. By using Quick Time Events a developer can allow the game to be more cinematic yet also remain interactive. The problem is there is no control by the player. All they are merely doing is following commands instead of being a part of the action. That is not interactive gameplay, that is a very flashy version of Simon Says.

It is certainly possible to be cinematic without resorting to Quick Time Events, or at the very least minimizing the auto-pilot. Though it was not a very successful title, Bionic Commando managed to perform this feat well in a few boss fights. When battling a giant mechanical worm, the player used regular abilities to hook onto the creature, be flown into the air and then have to strike down into its mechanical eye before it blasted the hero with a massive laser. The player never once lost control and was never commanded to perform a button sequence, yet the battle remained cinematic.

There were later battles that prompted the player when to press certain buttons, but control was never sacrificed. Press the A button to leap from this plane before it explodes, but in order to stay alive you have to aim right and latch onto the next plane before it is too late. In the end it doesn't feel like the player is running through a Quick Time Event, but merely being warned when they ought to perform a certain action if they wish to survive.

GamesPress photo for WET

The car chase sequence in the WET demo could have worked similarly. Instead of prompting the player when to press a button and then following a cinematic non-gameplay sequence, they could have warned the player that they needed to find another vehicle to jump to and quick. Be forgiving and allow Rubi to grab onto a bumper or ledge of a truck's cargo if they just barely make it in time. This would not only allow the player to be fully in control while maintaining a cinematic flair, but would keep the level from being repetitive when starting over or playing through a second time.

Of course, for every one person that whines about yet another Quick Time Event there will also be another praising it or saying they're fine. If you are looking to please the fans of this mechanic, then take a hint from Turok. Sure it was a pretty flawed game, but the final boss sequence at the end was a Quick Time Event executed well. If the player screwed up and pressed the wrong button, they weren't forced to start over from the very beginning. The player was put in a position where they were closer to losing, but were also able to recover. This keeps the action moving, adds to the theatrical suspense and forgives the player of a mistake.

Once again, WET could benefit from this tactic, particularly since there are moments in the car chase sequence where the player may try to shoot between rapidly succeeding prompts and miss a command. Instead of being game over, Rubi should just barely grab onto a nearby vehicle, dragging along the ground and in a position near death but capable of last minute recovery.

The current system of implementing button mashing sequences seems to be a simple copy of major successes. Do it like God of War or Resident Evil did it. After all, they sold a lot, so clearly there is nothing wrong with those games, right? Wrong. What developers ought to do instead is consider what these strategies cost in the natural flow of gameplay.

So next time any designer reading this (yeah right) ponders the inclusion of a button mashing sequence, compare it to the action of eating toast. If it would disrupt the flow as much as having to wave your food around before eating it, then it probably isn't a good idea to include. At least, not without reworking it a bit.