Easy. QTEs don't belong in ANY game. Even action games should be moving past quick time events. Anything worth seeing in a QTE should be something, ideally, that we can do anyway. Some games still need them for very specific actions, like God of War, but they add nothing to cutscenes elsewhere.

A complex QTE are a waste of time sure... a short QTE (like paragon/renegade interrupts in Mass Effect 2) is a completely different thing :)

This is not just a problem with the QTEs, but also with the very action-oriented real-time combat.

In fact, no form of RPG is safe from this. In pen and paper RPGs a common problem is when a not-too-bright player tries to play a very intelligent, tactical character. Or when a socially inept player wants to play a charismatic character. Turning everything into a simple die roll with no player decisions at all, turns role-play into roll-play. But the more you let players play, the more player skill will start to matter, and trump character stats.

It's a conundrum for which I've never seen a good resolution. Rock and a hard place.

Yeah, the interrupts in ME2 were pretty well done I have to admit. The reason being that without the interrupt you got a different scene with more dialogue etc. The game rewarded you for not being a mindless monkey who presses a key as soon as a prompt appears.

The first meeting with Iorveth in chapter 1 was similar, if you didn't tell Triss to attack him you got to talk to the guy... and find out a little about him.

The QTE fistfight though... It was fun the first time when you didn't know how it works. Every time after that it was a mindless bore, press a correct key 5 times and then you win. If it were used that 1 time when you break out of prison then fine. But no, it was used thruout the game and there is simply no excuse that CDP didn't create an actual control mechanism for fistfighting. If it was too much work then they should have just dropped it completely like they dropped drinking games.

PS. What the hell is the matter with the "attention" of some guys here? How can a QTE in a middle of a cutscene make you pay attention? What do you usually do during cutscenes? Do you leave the computer and go make yourself some coffee or something? If a cutscene is so irrelevant that you gain nothing from watching it then it shouldn't be in the game at all. If it is relevant and you just don't care about it then why are you even playing the game?

Great! Now you don't need any friends anymore to roleplay!

While I love CRPGs, they're only a meager substitute for the real thing. My friends don't always have time, but my PC does. But I'd never in my life call the move to PCs "the best thing that could happen to RPGs". PCs can't improvise. It's unavoidably a very limited experience. In The Witcher, there's tons of stuff that I'd want to do but can't, simply because the system doesn't support it. Real RPGs tend to be much more detailed in the stuff they can handle, and even when they're not, you can always improvise, which a PC simply can't.

While it's true that some RPGs are so complex that the rules can get a tendency to drag things down, many modern RPGs solve this is various ways. Mostly by being more lightweight and more flexible, but some, like Diaspora/FATE, separate the GM's job: the GM only has to worry about the story and the interaction with the world, while the Caller (which could be the GM, but might easily be one of the players) tracks the rules, the combat sequence, etc.

But mostly, having more general, lightweight, flexible and tweakable rules is the most important thing. Don't have separate rules for every little situation that you need to look up in a book, have simple, general rules that can be adapted to any situation. Or do what WFRP3 did: put all the complexities and exceptions on cards and hand them out to the players to whom they're relevant.

With this amount of resentment, one would be misled to think that all the boss fights are QTE-based when in fact there is probably 5% of the game where QTE is involved.

.. might lead to a question like - why have them (QTE's) at all, when most of the game is untouched by them? Throwing them in at random? Testing how they will be perceived for the next part of the sequel?

The answer to this - only one of the developers could provide.

I stopped playing W2 as it was frustrating especially after playing W1 EE. The QTE is a fail on my computer, finally had to turn it off as the game simply would not respond to any key presses so . . . it turned into a platformer with repetitive attempts to get past a certain part.

There seems to be no response to key or mouse input during the QTEs . . . at all. (quad core ??) I set my affinity to a single core with the same results.

Another frustrating thing was as you found yourself needing to win the fight with the guards in order to escape. With key / mouse input ignored, you always lose. Had a couple of friends try with no change in the results. Turned off QTE and got by that event.

What made it frustrating was you couldn't save at any point so . . . every time you lost . . . you had to repeat the entire interrogation / Witcher's death section previous to the fight which was several minutes long. This just broke the game flow to the point that it was no longer fun to play.

The dragon on the bridge was the same with mouse / key input ignored (not as dysfunctional as QTE's later on)

I might give it another go after a couple more patches . . . =)

Edit: I should add that W1 runs flawlessly on this computer with all settings maxed out. The game responds instantly to all input . . . sad that the same interface was not used in W2 . . . =(

It could be a test. Use a few QTEs to see how they are received. With the response so far, I expect they'll drop them, or seriously redesign them.

every QTE lasts like for a second, and those haters hate the QTE because they are react as fast as a 100 year old man.

I BET THOSE QTE CANNOT EVEN DRIVE SINCE DRIVING DEMAND MUCH FASTER REFLEX.

Well, for me it's more "I'll relax for the cutscene... WTF I had to be ready to click?" It's not hard, it's just kind of an annoyance. The one place in the game I think it's justified is the fistfights.

I don't understand the complains about it , yes it was made for consoles in mind , but you can simply turn QTE off in the option as i did immediately the first time i played the game , then the problem is solved

Then only fistfighting has QTE , but very easy ones , i prefer this to what were fistfight in the first Witcher , but i still think they should have put more mini-games , and more interesting ones (i hate dice poker , too random , ai cheats , not rewarding enough ... ) , chess or card games for instance , not necessarily poker although i love it , but challenging mini games that give xp , fisfights should also be harder and reward xp

The QTE problems seem to be affecting certain systems more than others. Your age having absolutely no bearing on the problem as suggested early. Some have no issues while others find the QTEs unplayable. I believe it is a real problem and not one of age or "learn to play" issues.

It also seems that higher end CPU's and video cards determine how badly the problem affects a player's perception. In my case, the key prompts are visible for milliseconds, to the point that they are transparently displayed. A key press is totally ignored / missed by the game. It seems that some systems may run the code so fast that it's nearly impossible to input a key press in the also milliseconds time the input is expected. This is just my best guess rather than fact. The fact that many here and on other forums are having the same problem makes me believe this is a patchable problem that will be addressed in a future patch.

I am a Witcher fanboy but . . . berating / ridiculing / minimizing folks who are experiencing this problem is ridiculous. W1 took several patches and the release of an EE version before it was a polished game. This problem will be addressed, maybe by code querying the CPU speed / video card/ etc but . . . it will be fixed IMHO.

The only QTEs I've really been bugged by was the one in the prologue with the Dragon, because it was ridiculous, and was seemingly random, Foltest's and Geralt's speed just seemed random, and so was the Dragon's speed, so I felt like it was pure luck that I got through it after about 15 tries.