Press X To Save The World

How many times has this happened to you: you’ve just battled your way through wave upon wave of enemies in the final level of whatever game you’re playing. You eye up the big boss, the evil Russian/Mexican/alien from planet ‘Whatever’ and steel yourself for the epic showdown to follow. You run forward, readying your weapon, when suddenly… “Press X to punch bad guy in the face.”  Oh yes, the one thing that every gamer hates: the joke of the industry that we call a quick time event. It’s bad enough when an action sequence is taken over by a cut-scene, but then to add arbitrary button presses to prevent us from losing the fight? Now that’s adding insult to injury.

And it seems now that every developer is falling into the trap of hastily tacking on a QTE instead of a boss fight these days. Take, for example, the recent shooting behemoths Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3. Relatively different games (particularly in the multiplayer department) with their own take on the whole ‘Russia attacks America’ story, but at the end of both single player campaigns what does the game do? Throws you in to a quick time event (which was especially annoying in MW3 as there hadn’t been a single one throughout the rest of the game and it totally came out of left field).

What happened to the final boss battle? It used to be an industry standard to have a three-part battle against a giant enemy that could kill you in one hit if you weren’t careful. They were nail-biting pieces of madness that had controllers thrown against walls while you screamed in agony about how cheap the fucker was being. Now it’s either been replaced with a QTE or it’s been completely avoided altogether (in the case of Deus Ex: Human Revolution it was replaced with standing around for five minutes, which was equally not fun).

Annoyingly, I can sort of see why this change has happened. It’s the same old bloody argument of games getting better and more cinematic, from the graphics to the story (well, only in some cases), and there’s nothing particularly cinematic about circle-strafing an enemy while blasting it with a minigun for half an hour. Switching to a QTE means that the player can still be involved in the game, while still being able to experience a satisfying end that looks pretty and is far more impressive than what you’d be able to achieve with the actual in-game mechanics.  It also means that people who were playing for the story (although why anyone other than myself was playing Modern Warfare for the story I don’t know) doesn’t have to contend with a horrifically tough boss battle; if they screw up, it’s only a short reload back to the start of the sequence.

Then, however, you’re missing out on what games have slowly stopped having over the years: fun. It’s fun to constantly blast a giant mutant/mech/alien disguising itself as the President in the hope that you can chip away at its health for long enough to reach the next stage in the battle. It’s fun to actually be a part of the action, rather than just sit back and watch as you suddenly become a spectator in a battle you’ve been building up to over the last six hours.  Yes these battles can be frustrating, but the sense of accomplishment you feel as you watch the bastard explode/fall into an abyss/turn into your dead mother and give you a big hug and a box of chocolates is overwhelming.

Of course, I’m not suggesting we need to make every boss battle a JRPG-style eight-part fight where you destroy your opponent’s health bar only to see it refill three times over. A bunch of games last year pulled off a final boss fight pretty damn well; Portal 2 springs to mind as the best one (even if it was essentially a repeat of the original, but in reverse), and while Duke Nukem Forever had a lot of bad things going for it, the final battle was pretty damn epic. It just goes to show that with a bit of thought and effort, developers can still make an exciting and interesting conclusion to their games.

I expect that we’re going to see a lot more quick time event closers in games in the coming years, as developers strive to make their titles  more like multimedia experiences, accessible by anyone, instead of simply ‘games’. But, hopefully, one of those bright sparks we call designers will say, “hey, how about we stick in a huge boss battle at the end?” and no one will reply, “nah, let’s just have them hammer A for a while.”

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