well, they could have had more tentacles, or perhaps made each tentacle require being trapped twice or more before being severed, or put more weak points on each tentacle, i suppose. i thought it was pretty good that you had to figure out the tentacle sequence yourself, then figure out where you wanted to put your Yrden sign, all without getting squished. as it is, a lot of players seem to have had a hard time figuring out how to finish the creature off.

more full-fledged gameplay is usually a good thing, but it often conflicts with a cinematic experience. most gamers like both, especially when fighting an 'epic' creature.

If you turn off the Difficult QTEs option, there's no issue with them. I never had an issue, they didn't bother me and I hate QTEs. At this point they were so uncommon that it didn't matter if they came up once or twice.

I would rather they had left them out. I don't really see the need for them. They don't add anything but the illusion of control during a cutscene.

But.. there is strategy involved in the boss fight, and a single instance of a 'Simon Says' routine doesn't make the gameplay any less involving or strategic, because the gameplay is already strategic to begin with - inserting a QTE in the middle doesn't suddenly make all the strategy that came before it vanish into thin air.

@Coelocanth

"the player should be able to approach that fight in more than one fashion in order to overcome it"

I think it's pretty standard fare for boss fights to have a specific strategy to them, since boss' usually employ a specific set of moves and animations that are unique to them - for example, there's only really one way to defeat the Kayran anyway, which is by using Yrden (or the Kayren trap), so inserting a QTE in that particular instance doesn't really make the combat any less linear. It wouldn't make sense to just run up close and try to hack away at the Kayran since it's so large and avoiding it would be impossible, so you have to fight it from a distance - this alone cuts down on your possible strategies greatly, so a unique strategy has to be crafted so that the player can solve it. Fighting Letho, for example, can be approached in a number of different ways - you can use almost all of your signs, traps, and bombs, but in the end the strategy for defeating him remains the same - wait until his Quen is down and use any combination of the above - all boss' have a certain pattern and more strategies will fail than will work - again, that's the puzzle element - watch, remember, and solve.

@vindik8or

"The inability of the creators to allow varied and exciting versions of a limited set of actions demonstrates their own lack of skill at the task, not some failure of the medium. "

It's not a failure of the medium, it's a limitation of the tools available. Both the Kayran and Dragon QTE would require some kind of addition to the combat coding and framework that would allow us to perform those unique actions - perhaps it could be accomplished, but that of course depends on the flexibility of the engine.

"You are simply following an onscreen prompt to activate a predetermined, prerendered result with no input as to the outcome. "

To be fair, that's all really playing a video game is, except you usually don't see the on-screen prompt (at least, in a well-designed game you don't) - press Space and I roll, press E and I block, press Q and I cast a sign - QTE's are the same thing, except with more limited rang of motion and control, but that loss of controls is a compromise of involving the player in a cinematic scene that is otherwise not capable of being rendered/played using the default gameplay mechanics. Or, the mechanics are technically possible, but would take too long to implement or code in due to time constraints, which are, unfortunately, a part of game development.

And to be fair does your example of a possible QTE not boil down to elmost exactly the same thing as a normal QTE - pressing a button at the right moment? I do like your idea of having a little more strategy involved by reaching a certain point while avoiding other dangers and THEN timing your button press over just getting the dragon down to a certain amount of health and starting the QTE automatically - it is an improvement, yes, but it's still ultimately no different form any other QTE - press a button at the right time.

"Not sit around watching endless cutscenes, and definitely not watching endless cutscenes for little flashing icons to pop up. "

Are there really that many QTE's in TW2 outside of the two boss fights already mentioned and the fist fighting, though? I never thought "HOLY SHIT ENOUGH WITH THE QTE'S" because quite frankly I can't even remember that many.

i believe the reason for the tentacle ride cutscene was to take control of the camera and show the bridge falling/its new position. you hear this a lot in game commentary, about trying to direct the player's attention to something important. if the player's looking elsewhere or doing something else, he might miss a vital cue.

in this case, the cutscene is necessary because the camera is zoomed in so much during the fight that you couldn't possibly see the entire field of battle at once. if it was zoomed out, then not only could you dodge tentacles more easily, but the 'all gameplay' sequence you mentioned (a great idea, btw) would be feasible.

There are plenty of games which never use QTEs, so I doubt the issue is that they HAD to use them, but that they wanted to, which is a bad idea for an RPG IMO, because an RPG should be about player control, and not "Simon Says".

I hate QTE mechanics, because they replace skill, player choice, and even the rules of the game world. IMO, developers should avoid taking *real* control away from the player, except maybe a few key story points, and even in those cases, they should think long and hard about whether it's really necessary. (I'm thinking of a couple scenes where you win a fight and the opponent magically gets to escape.)

Anyway, I've never seen a QTE that I thought was satisfactory, and don't think I will, because the play seems "cheap" to me. I thought they did a pretty good job on the Kayran, but I would have enjoyed it much more if I had to use my own tactics and skills (real and/or RPG), rather than learning an arbitrary set of patterns. Also, the engine has problems with the camera, and this makes QTE like the kayran fight even more annoying, because you have to compensate for the camera spinning you around against your will. The whole idea is a bad design decision IMO.

I say get rid of them. The boss fights don't need to be God of War style affairs, not in an rpg; such large enemies set up tricky design problems to begin with. Maybe we could have lobbed bombs at the Kayren or set traps and such, then finally it knocks down the bridge and we continue the battle up until we insert the final bomb.

CDPR has a strange fascination with QTE's and I hope they realize many fans simply did not want them in the game.

some qte need to remove, like in mahakm gate while the fight you have to put oil , and for that you have to perform qte, that qte never work for me no matter how hard i try its not works at all, in hard qit, and without it.
where i am actually stuck , i am on 1.3 patch
btw hand fight qte are ok and nice , rapid mouse click qte are bad, tooo bad cause its damage mouse . now my mouse auto double click :| , i had to change my mouse

If QTE's "damaged" your mouse, then it was on it's last legs (feet?) and would have died soon anyway,

This is a good point, but for me the issue with QTEs is that they are usually quite unexpected, and have little to do with the normal gameplay. There's nothing wrong with a timing-based or reaction-based control scheme as long as the player gets to learn it and knows that they will be using it. The combat system in The Wticher 1 is an example of this; it plays out similarly to a QTE in some ways but the player learns how to do it in the prologue and is therefore prepared for it when they get into fights later on.

In the Witcher 2, on the other hand, there are several instances in boss fights where a QTE will show up that's completely unexpected. I'll do a bunch of fighting, then a cutscene starts, so I think I can sit back and watch, but then suddenly something flashes on the screen, and since I wasn't ready, I miss it and die. This is annoying.

The Witcher 2 does some QTEs well, though, like in the fistfights. The player is given a chance to learn how these work, and so whenever they are in a fistfight, they know that some QTEs are coming and they're ready.

I think the issue many players have with QTEs in general is that they are often "tacked on" without a lot of thought. "Right-click to not die" in the middle of a cutscene isn't really very engaging, but a reaction-based control scheme for a fistfight makes more sense; the fighter needs to be able to react quickly to an opponents attacks, and the player knows that quick reactions are going to be needed. QTE mechanics can work well if there's thought put into their design, but too often they're just added to cutscenes to make them "interactive", and completely fail to do so in any meaningful way.

The truly weird part is when we get warned a by a popup window in the prologue about a forthcoming QTE.

O_o

I like QTE the way they are most of the time.

At QTEs I just want Interesting secuences or beatiful graphics, not a challenge.

There are some dificult arm-wrestling matchs and I didn't enjoyed that much.

The only difficult one was the first round with Numa the Steroid Abuser.

The rest were easy, especially if you use a low DPI mouse.

The QTE for fistfighting doesn't work as well as the mouse did in Witcher EE, especially for disabled people who have nerve damage in their hands. It's much easier to click two mouse buttons than to try and keep up with WASD - especially in the first fight. The mouse wasn't broken, it should have been kept.