I remember the first time I played God Of War and experienced "quick-time events", which is basically seeing your character preform a move which is so extremely cinematic in nature that it could never be done with the standard controls used, and being amazed while being slightly disappointed.I wasn't disappointed at the concept or the practice of the move or the action itself but rather disappointed that my character could never do that constantly in the game. I mean why couldn't every move be so stylistic and extreme in action? Why did I have to wait for these unprecedented events to take place in order to seem my character to something amazing. Every moment should be amazing? Shouldn't it?
Well, thats when I understood the basics of story telling and presentation. God of War did multiple things while performing these "quick-time" moments. They showed the character preform something that made him stand out from the rest of the supporting characters while at the same time give the player the opportunity of being a part of it. So that if you were to preform the event and fail, the character's failure would be your failure. Of course the alternative would be that if you succeeded that character's success would be your success and thus your small victory over the general story. In a way enhancing the over all story and gameplay experience.
Presentation falls into the mix when these events make a clear showing on the character nature and style. That way he would kill or take down his opponent would influence the player on his "badassness". The showing of force would give a direct impression on the main characters position as the hero or villain, in this case as the anti-hero.
Other games have attempted doing this, while some have succeeded, others have failed miserably. The reason of my writing on the subject is to focus on these event as this seems to be a trend in games, the problem is that these events are present to a degree that you may just have a game completely made up of "quick-time" events. Now I'm not going to say this is wrong, but that along with a great many other things, they seem to turn negative with excess. However as the title implies, the general trend in games seems to be simple controls with overly complicated gaming, that may be great in theory but sometimes can be horrible in practice. So in the end you'll end up with game that's basically a non-stop romp of "quick-time" events. You press a button and that cause some kind of complicated combo move, while progressing through that story. A lot of this reminds me of old SEGA Saturn FMV games. Which were cinematic "quick-time" events that determined whether the player progressed or not. Some were popular but as an over all genre it has nearly died out, like the text based games in the US.
My thoughts are whether this may be good thing on games like Edward Nigma, which is a text adventure game at heart or with an action game like God of War? Can they work on both? Or do they need the graphical and visual capabilities of a full 3d game? All these questions will be answered to me as I further develop the fighting system but anything may change as we refine the system. While at the same make the best use of the tools available to us. Its a very hard decision to make with our the huge amount of resources available to "formal" development houses.
PS - Why can't the psp play formated mp4 movies under lua player? OUTRAGE!!! I want to speak to the manager!
