He sealed his argument for me when he showed the QuickTime events that go crazy slow, and you still succeed even when you don't press the button. What are we doing here?
The Spider-Man games have the same thing, I just replayed Spider-Man 2 and started not doing QTE’s to see what would happen, most of them just complete themselves anyway
The one that drives me the most crazy is "stick bashing."
Nintendo is most guilty of wanting you to do it in games, but it appears in things like Dave the Diver, too.
Look, it's not a fun mechanic, and it actively destroys control sticks.
If we have "hold to tap," we also need a mechanic that gets rid of "furiously jam your control stick in random directions" or "spin it like a psycho," as well.
I'd rather companies stop putting QTEs in at all. They can be cool if there's major consequences or special animations to losing them, but if the worst that happens is you lose some HP I'd rather not have them at all.
Don't lie and act like they're QTEs if they're not lol.
If you're gonna make a QTE, you need to have something actually happen if I fail to do it, be that taking some damage, failing to do extra damage to the enemy, or, the holy grail, a hilarious game over screen.
They do and it’s abysmal, but I do remember that (at least in miles morales) there were still alt animations where something else happens when you fail, even if not failure itself.
we're so.. sooo close to the point where AAA-Games turn into horribly executed idle games that play themselves... and the sad part is thst I freaking love idle games, just not the idea of watching my 80€ game playing itself without any inputs from me.
They'll call it "movie/cinematic" mode, like those YT videos that combine all the cutscenes while quickly pacing through any of the gameplay that has any relevance to the story.
I play games on easy due to time constraints in real life to avoid things like bullet sponges or dying to a few hits. However, I haven't been able to enjoy modern games for a long time because they've gone to such extremes in easing cognitive load. This is the first I've heard about QTE just being pretend, but I can believe it in a world of highlighted objects with text and audio prompts every few seconds dictating what to do in game en route to the next cut scene.
look.. it's perfectly fine to not want to play a game on a harder or even on a "regular/medium/normal" difficulty. But a reguoar difficulty game should still be at least somewhat challenging to people who choose that difficulty. nowadays it often feels like even the hardest difficulties aren'r "hard" but rather annoying or outright grindy and filled to the brim with bulletsponge enemies.
I'm gonna sound so old and boomer brained here but, I just got myself a handheld emulator console and I've realized there's hundreds of games I've never played that I want to, across snes, dreamcast, PS1, psp, etc.
let modern AAA gaming shit the bed for all I care, it'll finally give me a chance to complete chrono trigger
between indie games and pre-9th generation console games, I have more games than I could complete in a life time, seriously
This is what happens when the world's biggest video game producer is a movie producer.
They just make movies. Before anyone says a thing to me, explain why chromatic aberration is even a thing that anyone ever considered necessary in a video game.
We know the developer. We know they can make a fantastic game. I think they really didn't want to make this one. I called it way back. I'm not sure if this was a low effort while they work on what they wanted to work on or what but it's a shame. I was hoping they would pull out brutal punisher killing animations in a berserker raccoon but we got this. Ah well. There's too many games right now to bother with this my back log is full as it is.
Are they turned on or off by default? Because if they're turned on by default then that's the intended way to play by the devs and then the criticism is valid. If they're turned off by default and he turned them on then yeah, it would be on him.
Accessibility features cannot be opt in, they have to be turned on by default or they have no use.
Someone that need a blue line to keep going in the right direction in a long corridor is never ever going to go into the setting to enable it themselves if they are disabled by default.
But, the game should at the very least ask you when you start if you want to disable them.
I mean there's no reason for me not to trust you lol, so I'm totally fine agreeing with you. But on my personal experience whenever I play games with accessibility features they had to be turned on the settings. Usually under "accessibility". Otherwise if all features HAD to be turned on which color would be the one turned on? Because color blindness has lots of variations so they usually have multiple options.
Closed Captions are usually turned off too, the multi tap or hold for prompts, audio descriptions, hell most games I play have basic subtitles turned off by default, that one I encounter all the time because I HAVE to have subtitles myself so that's usually the first thing I do with a game lol.
But again, that has been my experience. Idk how this game works but lately I've seen games launch first with the settings screen before any main menu or gameplay, before that I remember usually they launched straight into the main menu or the worse ones for me were the ones that launched into a cutscene or gameplay and no subtitles.
It seems like newer games are doing in the direction of having accessibility turned on by default.
When I started up Marvel Tokon, it had the caption voice reading all the text to me to the point I thought it was supposed to be s character like JARVIS, but then I went into the main menu and it was naming all of the options there too.
The option was well hidden too. Took a really long time to find where it was in the menu to turn it off.
on my personal experience whenever I play games with accessibility features they had to be turned on the settings. Usually under "accessibility
You are correct, but the industry made a lot of progress on that front.
There are now so many new types of accessibility features that didn't exist before, and the philosophy around them changed to.
At some point they would be considered cheating. Like auto completing QTE, pausing game when doing X action, reducing ennemy damage, etc...
Control let you be an invicible God with infinite ressources, one shot everything, infinite ammo and powers in its accessibility settings.
One major changes are accessibility features being turned on by default.
Like screen readers being on by default when you boot a new games. If it wasn't the case, a screen reader would be useless because how can a blind or visually impared person find the settings if they can't use the game without the screen reader?
That's why all the game that goes heavy in accessibility features usually open the game with a popup to remove them.
I think here they failed at showing that initial screen asking you if you want to turn them off.
That's a bit extreme. The game can do what many other games do. If you keep getting lost in that straight corridor, just pop up a window to turn on navigation.
In other words, actively prompt a player to turn on an accessibility feature when they show they need it.
Why does something being turned on, mean it's intended? Accessibility features are something that everyone can adjust how they like and most of them are by default turned on, because there are players who have hard time to play like rest of us. If I review game, I never account as part of score or my conclusion of the game, accessibility features (no matter if they help or not). I only mention that there are options. If the game has option to give me clues, I simply turn it off.
I still don't know what people mean when "most of them are on by default"?? There are several accessibility options that contradict each other, like color blind options, you can't have those by default because you have like 10 different options...
Also by intended for example. If in Quick time events the game prompts you to tap a button quickly then the devs intended for that to be the game mechanic, usually to represent exhaustion or effort. A lot of games lately give you options to change the tap for hold or even skip quick time events all together. The one by default are intended. The other ones are not.
If I start a game and hear a robotic voice explaining every button I'm gonna assume that it's part of the gameplay, and if I see that I the audio descriptions were turned on by default I would assume it was a bug. I haven't seen any game, triple A or else that has audio descriptions, color blindness, turned on by default and then makes you go to the settings to turn them off.
Another example is FOV. Most games have a default FOV. Some people get nauseated with close FOVs (me included) and many, MANY games have warned me of raising the FOV because it would "break" animations. In that case, clearly the game was intended with certain FOV, it's specifically warning you to not increase it.
No, Spider-Man 2 has unfailable QTE's for set pieces (although in SM2 it just freezes the game IIRC) and a QTE autocomplete feature. The autocomplete feature just makes the game register the button press.
In the videos shown, the game isn't registering an input and just decides to continue anyway.
Even if that wasn’t the case not all of the game design railroading is behind a toggle. Neon signs, white cloth, narrow level design with no room for creative navigation or player expression, unusual item box placement arranged in such a manner which suggests the devs have no faith players will know where to go
Even if those features can be toggled off I don’t think it invalidates his points
I have gone up and down on customizable experiences. In many ways they are an unambiguous win for accessibility, but oftentimes it feels like an opt-out for developers who are unable to settle on a vision and actually commit for fear of narrowing their audience even a little. Doom the Dark Ages felt this way for me, for example. I want to experience something well-designed, not try to design it myself.
It also makes a difference whether such features are opt-in or opt-out. I would hazard a confident guess that Skill Up did not go into settings to turn all this bullshit on.
He sealed the deal for me when they had 3-4 different call outs for 'hidden' chests, waypoints and ledges. Imagine being treated like a mouth breather.
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u/Truthforger Sep 10 '26
He sealed his argument for me when he showed the QuickTime events that go crazy slow, and you still succeed even when you don't press the button. What are we doing here?