Halo 4 did quicktime events very poorly. I'm sure you all booed when you had to slug the elite in the first level, or punch the Didact at the end. We don't need to get rid of quicktime events, we just need to do them right! Let's look at how a classic game did them right: Super Mario Brothers.

The first thing you'll notice is that Mario just stands there, and you never get a prompt for a QTE. The thing is though, the QTE prompts are hidden. That's right! The game never tells you when a QTE is available to undertake. So how do you know what to do?

Well, it doesn't tell you because there are multiple QTE events happening all the time! In fact, the game processes QTEs 60 times a second! Each button or combination of buttons is a valid QTE, so that means that you have to choose between 40320 QTEs every 60th of a second!

Interestingly, you can fail most of these QTEs and not fail the mission or die. In fact, the vast majority do not result in death, and most actually are beneficial to fail! Let's say a koopa is flying overhead. If I choose to activate the 'mario jumps' QTE, then I will hit the koopa and die. So the way to do it is to NOT activate this QTE, to prevent death.

Additionally, your choices between QTEs can make a big difference. Activate 'mario runs right and jumps' QTE and you jump into a pit, but wait 20 frames and activate the new 'mario runs to the right and jumps' QTE, and you will jump over the pit!

In fact, there are a practically infinite number of QTE combinations you can pass / fail that result in a game win!

So how do you decide which QTEs to pass, and which to fail, especially when there are a mind bogglingly huge number of them? Play the game for 5 minutes, and more QTEs have been available than are atoms in the universe. It seems impossible! It's hard enough just to get the timing right on the one to kill the Didact!

Well, when you play you'll discover that most humans have a remarkable ability to recognize patterns, and you will quickly discover which QTEs to activate and when. It might take practice, but tons of gamers already do it when they play most games!

So, imagine you replace your shitty QTEs with good ones like Mario. So the Didact runs at you to throw you off. I might choose to activate the 'MC moves his reticule to the left' QTE for a few frames to line up my shot. If I activate this QTE too many times, I will go past my target and miss. Then, I decide to activate the 'MC Shoots' QTE. If I've done everything right and chosen just the right frames for the QTEs, I'll shoot the Didact in the head. All without button prompts!

What makes this so inexplicable, is that 343 does it properly for 99.99% of the game! Most of the time the game is, like Mario, running thousands of QTEs every frame without any button prompts!

Halo 4 is just a case of 7 or so bad QTEs out of 10^9999383732762362837623846239469123649218364923

Seems easy enough to fix the 7!