No More Relying On Dated Gameplay Mechanics
I honestly wouldn’t mind this rule being applied to all of gaming. I’m not saying Quick Time Events (or QTEs, as us hip industry folk refer to them) should disappear entirely. That will never happen and despite my general distaste for them, QTEs can have a positive effect on a game. It’s just that, like many of our favorite things, they’re best experienced in moderation.
I wait to develop a problem with QTEs until after they’ve either been used cheaply or too often, because either results in a distracted player who’s too busy looking for the icon to appear so they can press the corresponding button to notice all the cool stuff that’s going on on-screen.
If you’re a developer, this means that epic event you and your team just spent months planning, coding, designing, testing, tweaking and perfecting was essentially for naught. For players, it means a meaningless mechanic just made you miss out on something interesting in that game you just spent $60 on.
Quick tangent while we’re on the subject of dated and/or abused mechanics — Doom 3 couldn’t get away with its liberal use of monster closets back in 2004, yet here we are ten years later and it’s still an issue. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a monster closet is a room whose sole purpose is to spawn enemies for you to fight. It’s a mechanic that’s usually employed for a cheap jump scare. If you’ve ever cleared a room only to turn around and come face to face with the bloated face of the creature that just silently stepped out of an armoire, you just found yourself a monster closet. The concept has been used by game designers for decades, but seeing as it’s been dated for one of them, I think it’s about time we get more creative with our monster placement.
