The Witcher 2 Diary – Quick Time Events, Delight and Frustration

There are two kinds of Quick Time Events in The Witcher 2: those that annoy me and that I wish would be eliminated from the game and those that annoy me much less because they can be safely ignored for pretty much the entire game.

A Quick Time Event is a piece of game mechanic that asks the player to press keyboard keys or controller buttons in a quick succession in order to execute a number of on-screen actions that are normally impossible to perform.

I hate QTEs because they tend to take me out of the experience, showing me in no uncertain terms that I, as a player, am weak and limited and only the developers have the power to make the main character perform extraordinary things, with me only acting as a kind of button-pressing conduit for them.

This kind of QTE appears in the Prologue of The Witcher 2, with the player needing to press buttons and push directional keys in order to get rid of a troublesome dragon that makes a castle assault more difficult that it should be.

It breaks the flow of the action and shows the player a series of moves that he can never again perform in the game, ending with an incredible heroic feat that again breaks the limits of what the player can do in The Witcher 2.

Thankfully, there are not too many of the QTEs in the game.

The same mechanic pops up elsewhere in the CD Projekt RED-created role-playing game when Geralt goes up unarmed against other enemies who are ready to prove their worth with fists rather than with weapons.

The mechanics here is not that intrusive, but there's quite a bit of lag between the button presses and the actual character movement meant that the experience was not as pleasurable as it could have been.