bombadilillo said:
1. Health. Vs Regen. I really hate regen. No matter what game it is all strategy goes out the window and becomes POP UP take out 1 or more baddies while taking damage POP DOWN and wait, repeat. Health makes you accountable for your actions, tense, and makes you think. I am all for hybrid systems. Have a shield that protects a few shots with a nonregen health below. Or health regens to a certain level so your never near zero. Awesome, go for it, but regen still turns all game play into a boring popup cover shooter.
Health regeneration means that combat in the game is primarily a game of resource management. While this is all well and good it
forces a very conservative style of play that is anathema to high action. In order to get around this for epic set piece battles, game designers are forced to drop huge caches of health and ammunition. This effectively means you are using health regeneration but adding an unnecessary step to the process. The bottom line is if you want an "adrenaline fueled action game" you cannot have players constantly rooting around in corners looking for scraps of health. More importantly, you cannot have a game design that fundamentally forces players to play as slowly and carefully as possible.
Thus regenerating health is not, itself, a problem. It is simply indicative of a trend in modern video games where the focus is on the moment to moment action rather than on exploration and puzzle solving. If a game is going to use non regenerating health, the basic design of the game must encourage exploration. For an example, note that the best examples of the "old style" approached level design not as a well disguised corridor but rather as a maze.
bombadilillo said:
2. Length, games are too freaking short. I look forward to the day when COD does not have a single player campaign. When they finally drop the pretext and token effort and just make a multiplayer game, put in some bots and challenges for singleplayers if you must. This worked with unreal tournament 10 years ago, its a viable strategy. I personally like single player campaigns more and would LOVE a distinct split. Make multi only games and single only games and put your effort into that. I want a 20 hour campaign. Keep the 5 hour crap. If it was 20 hours with replay value and multiple play style options I might just buy it instead of gamefly.
Modern games require a much greater investment to produce any given segment of gameplay. Games are short not because they
hate the player but rather because they want to ship the game in a reasonable span of time at a cost that can be overcome and a profit turned. If you want to complain about this, then complain about the fact that gamers have two desires that directly conflict: that a game look great and that a game be incredibly long and deep.
bombadilillo said:
3. Story, Im going to skirt tenuously close to the Half life debate here so bear with me. Spoiler alert as well. In half life near the start you have spent hours trying to get to the surface. The scientists have been talking about rumors of the military coming to rescue you all in your fight against mysterious aliens. You enter a room on a catwalk and see 2 soldiers! You are saved! A scientist yells ?Thank God youre here!? and the soldiers brutally gun him down. Thats it. You can surmise that its cover up time and your about to be covered up. Theres no cut scene spelling it out in detail the decisions back in Washington, you know what your character knows, nothing more. Later in the game black ops assassins show up and start taking out the soldiers! Height of irony, now their being covered up too. How much worse have things gotten? Someone high up is freaking out to the point that they dont trust the regular military! Compare this to a recent story telling event in COD:BO. I torture a person violently till they give me some bullet points for the plot, hand them a gun and their on my side now, the guy I just tortured, WTF. WTF, well glad hes not made about the whole insane pain thing. Now its not always necessary to keep just your characters perspective, and knowing plot beyond them can be good, but the modern fps isnt really doing a great job here.
Telling a story is a difficult thing especially when your primary mechanism of interaction with the world is "shooting stuff". One could build the story into the world in subtle ways but this often means players can completely miss the fact that there even was a story. They can be more direct but this is only useful if the game is designed to encourage exploration. Or they can rely on cutscenes which keep exposition happily divorced from gameplay. The latter is, by far, the simplest way to present a story.
bombadilillo said:
4. Smart AI. A lot of review laud the smart AI in fpss like ?they use grenades to flush you out, they flank you?. I think this is a growing symptom of the health regen reducing things to cover/popup shooters. Smart AI really means, you have to switch cover occasionally or theyll get you. 12+ years ago there were smart enemies, they never stayed in the same cover, they flanked you, if you stay in same place they grenade launch your ass. On that point, they like you had grenade launchers on their rifles AND THEY USED THEM. This is all probably a problem with the idea of smart AI. We want challenging enemies not smart. Imagine a game with you vs 100+ actual players coordinating with each other in a single player setting. You would stand no chance at all and it wouldnt be fun.
Smart AI is both incredibly difficult to develop and exceedingly expensive in terms of computations. Thus why most games rely on a combination of scripting and deterministic AI. It isn't any smarter than the designer who built the map. Better AI is always possible, but no one wants to sacrifice all that computing power to do so. Beyond that there is often a question of if better AI would solve a problem and the answer in most cases is no. AI is suited for games like Halo which is built as a linear sandbox. Most modern FPS are carefully crafted and controlled and thus better AI simply serves no purpose.
bombadilillo said:
5. Carrying 2 weapons. So you can carry only 2 pistols, but you can carry a m60 with ammo and a rocket launcher. I call shenanigans. Especially when my character model has a FREAKING PISTOL HOLSTER ON IT. At least have pistol +2 others?.This is a weird contention point because I know its silly to carry 12 different guns. Grid based and weight based are good systems but take away from the fps experience with the management factor. I kinda like the one of each style, one long gun one rocket/special one pistol one smg sized. I dont know what I like best here, but its defiantly not 2 guns PERIOD. I wanna save my shotty for when I need it dammit. Having different guns for different situations is fun. A lot of 2 gun games know this and but areas with a bunch of guns before big fights so you can choose. Why not just let me take more then game?
This is never really been a problem of realism so much as a limitation of the controller. Simply put there is no
good way to switch between a large number of weapons. The difficulty of performing a simple weapon swap increases as the number of weapons a player can carry at any given moment increases.
bombadilillo said:
6. Varied gameplay. Fighting of zombies for a few hours with limited ammo and a crowbar, fighting soldiers and aliens, fighting just aliens in another dimension, occasional puzzle, pseudo stealth section, exploration, platforming. Dont get me wrong I like the token stealth level in COD, though its getting more ?follow some dude while he talks? unchallenging with each game. Otherwise shooters are just firefight, walk firefight. There has to be something fun to do between fights that developers can think of.
Again, this isn't a question of what
can be done. It is simply that people have overwhelmingly demonstrated that they
love linear FPS games that are packed with action. Most of the problems on your list are the result of simply giving people something, noticing that they bought it and giving them an iteration of the same in the future.
you will see.
