TOP-6 most annoying game design techniques: from QTE to open world

Over the entire existence of the gaming industry, hundreds of different formulas for entertaining gamers have been invented. Some techniques died out over time, while others, after modernization, still exist to this day. But there are also those who manage not only to exist, but also to poison the lives of lovers of interactive entertainment. It is these pests that we will discuss in our material today. Sit back, it will be interesting.

And we will start with such a phenomenon as quick time events — QTE for short. Behind this completely harmless combination of words lies a feature that almost destroyed the market for interactive stories. Those that you don't need to play so much as just press the illuminated keys in time and enjoy watching. Yes, yes, we are talking about that very «press X to win».

This phenomenon did not arise yesterday. Back in the ancient Alien 3 for NES, you had to quickly click the button several times to throw off the facehugger. Quite a prototype of what later became known as QTE. However, the heyday of quick time events as a phenomenon happened already in the 2000s — not without the help of our beloved Japanese from SEGA with their super hit Shenmue. Well, then it started: Fahrenheit, God of War, Heavy Rain, The Walking Dead , Beyond: Two Souls, Life is Strange — the list of projects that are based on intense keystroke is endless.

In some places, QTEs became an optional element — and in some games, even the core gameplay was based on the rhythmic twitching of sticks. And by 2020, it became obvious that stupidly pressing buttons at the right moment, to put it mildly, was already infuriating everyone. And the point is not even that there are many similar games. It is important that only a few developers know how to make really good QTEs, and even more so, how to base the basic gameplay on them. The last example of real usefulness came out five years ago — we are talking about the PS4-exclusive Until Dawn.

The next «problematic» mechanic manifested itself most clearly in such a wonderful genre as RPG. Remember how in the 2000s we all waited for TES 4: Oblivion? And then it came out... and it immediately became clear to everyone that the game was good, but it had a lot of problems. And almost the main one among them is the automatic growth of the «toughness» of opponents in parallel with the development of the main character.

The essence of the drama is simple. Imagine that you decide to play the role of a cunning thief who relies on stealth skills more than a cool dagger and a trusty shield. You clean out your houses, grow in levels, and then suddenly you start completing a task that is impossible to complete «through stealth.» And quite suddenly it turns out that your Khajiit is not a warrior, but there are many opponents and they bite painfully. It's then that it dawns on you that the enemies were swinging along with you. Moreover, while your cat was spending points on thieving skills, the adversaries were developing combat skills and getting new equipment. When, in the later stages of the game, every shabby Bosmer robber began to show off in full Daedric armor, it was easier to create a new hero than to deal with it.

This misfortune has ruined the lives of many lovers of interactive adventures. But the idea was good: just to keep the player in constant tension, so that the overly pumped-up hero-demigod, who has no serious rivals left in the world, would not commit local genocide out of boredom. The execution, however, let us down. And even though auto-leveling in Bethesda games has become much less since then, fragments of it are still found — and they still infuriate.

Who would have thought that in the second half of the 1990s every second game would imagine itself to be a role-playing game? Take shooters, for example: skills, abilities, leveling up... And what about adventure action games? Yes, we have the magnificent Uncharted and the excellent Tomb Raider with a minimum of RPG elements, but... there is also Assassin's Creed, the last parts of which, starting with Origins, have completely gone crazy with numbers.

Do you want to watch the next part of a quite well-staged plot? Please save drunks from crocodiles and carry out similar investigations to gain levels. Needless to say, how different this was from Ubisoft's time-tested formula? Yes, it was not ideal and many people got tired of it, but those old «Assassins» had their own concept — and the pace of the game did not sag so much. But such restrictions are increasingly becoming the norm for the industry.

Fortunately, there are examples to the contrary. Let's say CD Projekt RED with its The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Do you know what the difference is between the Poles and the French? The creators of The Witcher did not try to artificially slow down the progression through leveling! Geralt doesn't need to run around like a grasshopper all over the map, completing the same type of quests, so that his level grows to the minimum required to complete the main storyline. If you want a plot, get a plot; if you want smaller adventures, go through side quests; if you bite off a piece that you can't swallow, don't be offended. Freedom!

The next «evil» mechanic follows directly from the previous one. At some stage in the development of the gaming industry, developers for some reason decided that creating well-designed, well-thought-out missions was evil. Alas, but in return these authors offered such a Frankenstein monster that gamers still hiccup. Here is a very specific example.

In 2016, Hangar 13 studio released Mafia 3. It had a wonderful plot, a well-written conflict, a brilliant (by the standards of the genre) narrative in less than five minutes... And only one drawback: in order to see it all, you had to complete dozens of similar tasks. Have you missed a piece of history? Have you watched the story video? Amazing! Let's clear the map.

And so over and over again, without end and light.

At the same time, it cannot be said that the action in Mafia 3 was completely bad — it was simply drowned in dozens of monotonous activities. And if you throw out all this tinsel with the capture of spheres of influence, then there will be only about three hours left in the game of pure plot. But this is really good content — unlike a ton of fillers that are literally crammed into the rest of the game.

And now the most important thesis: there is nothing wrong with side quests if they are not imposed to the detriment of the plot core. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens in the vast majority of modern sandbox games. And this is not some kind of game design move — this is a new logic of thinking for developers. Just look at the last two Ghost Recon games from Ubisoft, or the Just Cause series, or Mad Max — or a million other examples.

And here we smoothly move on to the main (but not the last) our guest today. Inimitable open world! Oh, how many gamers dreamed about the very possibility of just taking it and walking through game locations without haste! Previously, technology did not allow releasing such games on stream. Today it is extremely difficult to find a game that is not based on open world mechanics. And this is really a problem that threatens to multiply by zero the very concept of story-driven video games.

And if they knew how to make them, these games in the open world — but no! As a result, the market is literally drowning in monotonous crafts, which for some reason compete with each other only in the size of the map, and not in the excitement of the missions or the depth of the mechanics. It's no joke, even the master of long dialogues and intricate plots, Hideo Kojima, in his latest games — MGS 5: The Phantom Pain and Death Stranding — almost refused from your favorite features for the sake of huge and half-empty open worlds.

Alas, AAA story-driven gameplay seems to be a thing of the past. Since the days of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, very few good single-player video games have been released: not about multiplayer, not about exploration, and not about the sandbox. But not so long ago we shouted to ourselves: «No more corridors!» Give me an open world already!" Well, they interrogated.

Well, for a snack we have games in the fashionable Souls-like genre. More precisely, not even in a separate genre. Purely technically, FromSoftware worked in a clear and simple action-RPG niche. But the Japanese created a perfectly working mechanic, and today everyone is copying it.

It's so simple! Write some kind of plot, fill the locations with monsters, set up spawn points — and let the player run around killing bosses. Having fun, in a word. But it's just simple at first glance. The crowd of imitators did not take into account one important detail: each FromSoftware game is a unique work with history, the environment and the balance of difficulty. Epigones, of course, do not dig so deep, and the result is complete nonsense instead of the expected masterpiece.

The explosive popularity of Souls has played a bad joke on the industry: today you can hardly find a classic action-RPG. That's why these seemingly cool Souls-like mechanics made it onto our list. Alas, even the best ideas can sometimes lead to disaster — and in the case of FromSoftware's creativity, its dawn is already underway.

That's all! Tell us in the comments which game design techniques you personally consider the most unsuccessful and annoying. And we will see you very soon. We don't say goodbye.