There’s a Quicktime Event at a Funeral in Advanced Warfare

Quicktime events must surely be one of the most loathed articles of modern gaming. It started out simply enough, in the days of Shenmue and other early examples of ‘cinematic’ gaming when the odd button-prompt added a dash of adrenaline and playability to a cutscene. Resident Evil 4‘s knife fight against Krauser remains my favourite iteration of the mechanic.

Now though, they’re fucking everywhere, cropping up whenever a dev team is too lazy to properly design a boss fight or they want to create the illusion of an active player role in a custscene. It seems like it’s reached some kind of awful fever-pitch with Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, as an early moment has you QTEing your way through a funeral.

Yup. Evidently it simply isn’t enough for the player to watch the protagonist solemnly pay his respects to his best friend/plot device, you have to ‘hold X to pay respects’. This means that in some regard or another it is now possibly to fail a funeral. If you don’t press the prompt the procession just awkwardly disperse, leaving you in the rather unfortunate position of ruining a funeral service by failing to press a button. There are claims that this scene neatly foreshadows later events and I don’t doubt it, but this is still a fairly ridiculous reminder just how redundant QTEs are, by and large. Sometimes the story needs to be taken out of the players hands.