QTE's in Tomb Raider

When I saw reviews of the Tomb Raider reboot, a common complaint was that it was just Uncharted but with Lara Croft. I loved Uncharted 1 and 2 so I knew I would like Tomb Raider. It's not exactly a recent release considering the pace of internet time, but it went on sale for five bucks on Steam and I just had to buy it. It is as awesome as I thought it was going to be! Another complaint I heard was about the abundance of everyone's favorite game mechanic, Quick Time Events. So when these "press this button to not fail" moments came up I took notice.

Press Y to not die.

Mini-QTE's

If this were Assassins Creed you'd grab the cliff automatically.

Ever played Gears of War? It popularized a mechanic called "active reload". Basically, Epic Games decided that pressing a button to reload your weapon was too boring, and decided to add a second button press that had to be timed right so you could reload faster or jam your gun if you mistimed it. The fact that it's a timed button press makes it sort of like a quick time event. Tomb Raider has the same sort of mechanic, not in reloading but in climbing. Lara gets a climbing axe early in the game, and gets to test it out right away climbing some mountain cliffs. After the first few jumps, where you have to press one button to jump and another to catch the rock with your axe, it stops telling you to press that button. You've just gotta remember to swing that axe or you'll just bounce off the wall. The same thing happens when the game teaches you that sometimes the edges you grab will break, and you're gonna have to hit another button to recover. It makes climbing much more exciting, because unlike Assassins Creed or Uncharted there's a risk you're gonna fall off. I'm going to classify these mechanics as "mini QTE's" because they're timed button presses where failing causes you to lose progress. They're not scripted and you actually learn to do them instead of being told to every time, and if you fail it often just continues I think they're a really nice unobtrusive way to spice up a tired old "press up to climb up" scenario. It certainly worked to keep me immersed.

The bad, the worse, and the downright silly: Cutscene QTE's

BF4- click mouse to win!

If you've ever even heard of videogame critique you've heard someone complaining loudly about Quick Time Events and how Call of Duty and/or Battlefield sucks, usually in the same sentence. So as not to bore you I won't go too into why it sucks, but a Quick Time Event in the usual sense of the phrase is where there's a cinematic scene where the player must press a button when a prompt appears onscreen, or you lose. Either press that button quick or you'll just have to restart. It's boring at best because you're not controlling the game, it's just showing what's happening. The point of most games is to put the player in control of a scenario. Anyways,  Tomb Raider's got some of these, like the one at the top, and they remind people of stuff like this BF4 scene here. These QTE's are the ones people complain about.

Too long, didn't read? Basically we should have more "mini QTE's" in action games, like active reload and Tomb Raider's climbing, because they do the same thing as cutscene QTE's, which is to get the player involved, putting them in control of an otherwise automatic event, or in the case of "press Y to win" give them the illusion of control. Either way, it can be fun! Just don't go making an entire game out of it.