10 Video Game Tricks Players Fall For EVERY Time
8. Inconsequential Fail States & QTEs
A video game fail-state involves making the player panic at the thought of something bad happening if they fail to do the right thing at the right time. In particular, their progressive could be lost forever or an important character could be irreversibly killed.
Fail-states can happen for numerous reasons, such as losing your partner during an escort mission, losing a boss fight, and neglecting to hit the correct buttons during a QTE (quick-time event). Afterward, the screen typically fades to black or a cutscene shows the catastrophic consequences of your mistake.
No matter how accustomed gamers are to these tactics, they continue to feel the urgency and dismay developers intended whenever things go wrong. They shouldn’t, though, because most fail-states are inconsequential.
Why? Because they usually result in the player restarting from the last checkpoint or save state, which is seldom a significant setback. Occasionally, players simply restart at the beginning of the encounter in question.
Sure, it's frustrating to repeat segments multiple times, but there’s rarely the risk of anything permanently detrimental happening within the game world.
Plus, some titles – such as Marvel’s Spider-Man and the recent God of War duology – are quite generous with how much time someone has to complete a QTE, thereby making it almost impossible to fail in the first place.