what modern shooters are missing
- Thread starter shootthebandit
- Start date
Recommended Videos
I liked the soundtrack from ODST. In any case, I'll keep MOH in mind. In fact one of my dorm mates actually owns it so I may ask to borrow it when he gets back.Sarge034 said:
Non-regenerating health, if you ask me. Many hours of TF2 has taught me that those moments where you only have a tiny sliver of health left a) make for good tension as you try to find the nearest health kit before some Scout chases you down and b) make you really appreciate your medic. EDIT: BUT ONLY if you design your levels so you're not stuck with a sliver of health left and no way to proceed. That's a real challenge in single player games, but you somehow have to place enough health around the place so it's enough to keep the player going but not enough to keep them constantly at 100%.
Since we're talking about hitscans vs. projectiles, I feel like we should specifically talk about one thing: the ubiquitous iron-sight high-accuracy every-range assault rifle in most shooters these days. There's always a weapon somewhere in the game (particularly in CoD) that turns the game into mouse-2-mouse-1-mouse-2, that lets you pick off anyone in a very short time from almost anywhere. It effectively turns the game into a question of who spots who first. If you see someone and they don't know you're there, they will die faster than they can turn around and sight in themselves. It's a good way of making the game accessible since you can use surprise to your advantage much, much more easily, but it makes death a little random and compresses the skill gap.
Speaking of TF2 again, the lack of any direct, constant DPS weapons like that is arguably one of its most significant design choices, and a lot of the reason I've come to like that game so much. You get 9 individual classes with a wide variety or weapons, but their design coupled with the relatively severe ranged damage drop-off means you don't get any extremely versatile weapons and so you don't get fast, unpredictable deaths. You get tight brawls up close and personal that involve good aim and decent dodging that last a few seconds at least, rather than the half-second long distance shoot-outs you find in CoD. And of course there's a much bigger focus on projectile weapons (including one whole class who has no hitscan weapons at all) that brings prediction skills into the game. I hate to sound like I'm advertising here, but the game just has so many design choices unique to today's games that I feel it really gets right.
So long story short, I argue we should be designing game weapons with much higher times-to-kill (TTK). When you reduce the TTK of any given hitscan weapon to something less than a second, you lose the tension and the skill that would play out from a slightly longer skirmish and end up with many more 'surprise' kills. It places so much emphasis and power on reaction-based shooting that positioning, dodging and other tactics become almost irrelevant.
I won't go too much into it, but obviously modern sprint-style movement mechanics haven't helped. By demobilising your players so much that they have to walk for most of the time and save the sprint for escape moments (and notably, can't use the sprint for actually skirmishing since you're usually limited to only forward movement and not allowed to fire), hitscan weapons suddenly get even more powerful since aiming becomes easier.
I suppose a lot of these choices are made under the assumption that you want to make your game more accessible, but you should really act under the assumption that you're going to end up with an interested and skilled player base, or else you're not rewarding players for persistence and improvement.
Since we're talking about hitscans vs. projectiles, I feel like we should specifically talk about one thing: the ubiquitous iron-sight high-accuracy every-range assault rifle in most shooters these days. There's always a weapon somewhere in the game (particularly in CoD) that turns the game into mouse-2-mouse-1-mouse-2, that lets you pick off anyone in a very short time from almost anywhere. It effectively turns the game into a question of who spots who first. If you see someone and they don't know you're there, they will die faster than they can turn around and sight in themselves. It's a good way of making the game accessible since you can use surprise to your advantage much, much more easily, but it makes death a little random and compresses the skill gap.
Speaking of TF2 again, the lack of any direct, constant DPS weapons like that is arguably one of its most significant design choices, and a lot of the reason I've come to like that game so much. You get 9 individual classes with a wide variety or weapons, but their design coupled with the relatively severe ranged damage drop-off means you don't get any extremely versatile weapons and so you don't get fast, unpredictable deaths. You get tight brawls up close and personal that involve good aim and decent dodging that last a few seconds at least, rather than the half-second long distance shoot-outs you find in CoD. And of course there's a much bigger focus on projectile weapons (including one whole class who has no hitscan weapons at all) that brings prediction skills into the game. I hate to sound like I'm advertising here, but the game just has so many design choices unique to today's games that I feel it really gets right.
So long story short, I argue we should be designing game weapons with much higher times-to-kill (TTK). When you reduce the TTK of any given hitscan weapon to something less than a second, you lose the tension and the skill that would play out from a slightly longer skirmish and end up with many more 'surprise' kills. It places so much emphasis and power on reaction-based shooting that positioning, dodging and other tactics become almost irrelevant.
I won't go too much into it, but obviously modern sprint-style movement mechanics haven't helped. By demobilising your players so much that they have to walk for most of the time and save the sprint for escape moments (and notably, can't use the sprint for actually skirmishing since you're usually limited to only forward movement and not allowed to fire), hitscan weapons suddenly get even more powerful since aiming becomes easier.
I suppose a lot of these choices are made under the assumption that you want to make your game more accessible, but you should really act under the assumption that you're going to end up with an interested and skilled player base, or else you're not rewarding players for persistence and improvement.
I see another discussion of regen health vs medpacks in the sub texts of this thread, and that is something I had alot more to think about. There are three games I remember playing that I liked the health systems.
-Halo:CE - not much needed to say really...
-Rage - You had regen health, but it took a bit of time to actually start up, so you had bandages to heal you quickly.
-Pahria - Had a segmented health bar. Health would regen for one segment, but if you lose all of that segment, you had to use a health device to restore that lost segment. Its appearently the same in FarCry 2 and War for Cybertron, but I dont know as I never played those games.
-Halo:CE - not much needed to say really...
-Rage - You had regen health, but it took a bit of time to actually start up, so you had bandages to heal you quickly.
-Pahria - Had a segmented health bar. Health would regen for one segment, but if you lose all of that segment, you had to use a health device to restore that lost segment. Its appearently the same in FarCry 2 and War for Cybertron, but I dont know as I never played those games.
While I agree having too many weapons/items can become convoluted in terms of switching "on the fly", and a two weapon limit is too restricting, I must disagree on one thing. Half-Life and other games like it, at least on PC, found a happy medium. You have the extensive weapon selection, but it's married with a quick-switch key. You have all the weapons you need for any given moment at your disposal, but you can also very quickly switch back and forth between two of them during a fight.SirBryghtside said:
This is a system that, in my opinion, needs to be used more often. Especially in multi-player shooters. I'm not entirely sure how effective this sort of system would be on a gamepad, but it's worth exploring.
I don't know about you, but my fingers can muscle memory Half Life 2's weapons. Stick to 3, 3-twice or 2, and if shit really goes down hit 4 to kill the zombies or 2 twice to kill anything else that's not directly in your face.SirBryghtside said:
EDIT: That often comes down to control issues. HL2 just used the 1-6 keys since that's easy and fast to hit. Zelda has always had the messy 3-item inventory system that guaranteed you'd be back on the inventory screen swapping around items every second minute.
The regenerating health king. Before, shooters were all about trying to take as little damage as possible before searching desperately and essentially wasting your time trying to find a medkit ("but that promotes exploration" scream the thoughts of a million nerds). Halo made melee an actual option as opposed to the mandatory first level weapon. You could take a shitload of damage and play to your style, but it also punished you by having a health bar, in which medkits were few are far between. This especially makes it a meaty challenge in higher levels.WanderingFool said:
Oh, the exploration thing? A good game does not force you to explore in order to keep playing. A good game makes you want to explore, just to see what can be done. For example, trying to reach the top of Silent Cartographer, or reaching the bottom of The Maw. There is nothing there for you, but the action of trying to find ways there and achieving it made it awesome. Not walking through dank, dark corridor #562 to try and find a medkit because your on a slither of health and you don't want to revert back to your last save because it was a shitty boring and difficult fight.
Note: As much as I am taking the piss out of non-regenerating health, I also think that purely regenerating health also sucks balls ala Halo 2/3. Halo:CE was the one game that did it just right, and it fit the game perfectly.
I'm not a big Halo fan but I do agree with you, Halo used its regen system right for the game but then it didn't promote the idea that you should jurt sit behind one box/crate and only pop up in 3 second intervals. A lot of modern shooters have you doing that and it's boring, I don't think it's the exploration thing that makes health bars better but the tension and how the game forces you to keep moving to get your health up rather than sitting behind one piece of cover, quite frankly it's boring to not get moving around. Halo:CE Still had the player doing a lot of running and gunning and on co-op you could have some pretty fun room clearance situations.Skin said:
on the health-regen front... THE favourite argument of regen-supporters is always "have to scrounge around on 7 health". I would really like to know how often that actually happened to anyone. Yes, sometimes you're on very low health, but any decently-designed shooter will stock you up before any significant encounter. If one straggler gets you, you just didn't do well enough - no difference to dying on HRegen.
And on that note... Health Regen is married to my biggest actual pet peeve of modern shooters: Checkpoint-only save systems. With a quicksave you can redo that last straggler before the health pack - which is a bit frustrating, but pure heaven in contrast to redoing an entire fucking section because of one dick with a shotgun 2 meters before the next checkpoint.
Which is all why Hard Reset baffled me. Checkpoints, but on a hitpoints system.
I read the devs saying quicksave is hell for level design. I... have no idea why that would be. It might be hell for your carefully designed difficulty (which is bullshit, HR's Giant Statue Boss) so preventing save-scrubbing maintains your carefully planned rollercoaster ride... but I don't think it's worth it. They gain too little and sacrifice too much fun - by introducing more artificial frustration.
Both those things, to me, never felt as anything but padding. "8 hours of pure action!" (3 of which behind walls, and 4 repeating That One Level...)
And on that note... Health Regen is married to my biggest actual pet peeve of modern shooters: Checkpoint-only save systems. With a quicksave you can redo that last straggler before the health pack - which is a bit frustrating, but pure heaven in contrast to redoing an entire fucking section because of one dick with a shotgun 2 meters before the next checkpoint.
Which is all why Hard Reset baffled me. Checkpoints, but on a hitpoints system.
I read the devs saying quicksave is hell for level design. I... have no idea why that would be. It might be hell for your carefully designed difficulty (which is bullshit, HR's Giant Statue Boss) so preventing save-scrubbing maintains your carefully planned rollercoaster ride... but I don't think it's worth it. They gain too little and sacrifice too much fun - by introducing more artificial frustration.Both those things, to me, never felt as anything but padding. "8 hours of pure action!" (3 of which behind walls, and 4 repeating That One Level...)
Well, I agree with most everything you put down. Exspecially the less linear.totally heterosexual said:
The problem is that when people say ''Modern Shooter'' you instantly think of the grey, boring, repetitive games, such as Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc.
Those aren't the only kind of Modern Shooters! I recently bought Rage and it's original, pretty and fun as hell. You can carry a hell of a lot of guns and decapitate people with boomerangs.
Don't just assume every ''Modern Shooter'' is the kind of game that's dull explosive scene after another, there are a ton of great shooters out there. They just don't seem to be recognized as a Modern Shooter.
Those aren't the only kind of Modern Shooters! I recently bought Rage and it's original, pretty and fun as hell. You can carry a hell of a lot of guns and decapitate people with boomerangs.
Don't just assume every ''Modern Shooter'' is the kind of game that's dull explosive scene after another, there are a ton of great shooters out there. They just don't seem to be recognized as a Modern Shooter.
Well, I can't speak to dildo guns, but Tribes: Ascend beta has all the jetpack you could ever want.DragonLord Seth said:
shooters need to stop trying to copy cod, they need to be fun and creative again and they need to be fast paced again!
Yeah, "Modern Shooter" tends to be a bit vague, sometimes broader (everything), sometimes narrower (all the Codlikes).Popadoo said:
"Modern Console Shooter" probably narrows it down a lot - you know, no quicksave, lots of cover, simpler levels, much less prediction-aiming, 2-4 gun limit, etc... things that were invented or became big mainstays because of the goddamn XBox controller.
I know how that sounds, and I don't hate consoles (I want one!) - I just wish the shooter had never become popular on the XBox; or let them have shooters, just don't make them for the XBox and the XBox only.
Serious Sam 3 had more graphics options than I've ever seen in my life, and 3/4ths of them I didn't even understand. I wept tears of joy.
I cried for days upon discovering the "Old School" achievement - no manual reloading, no sprinting and no aiming down the sights. They put those things in there because these days apparently you have to - and then they go and tell the player "You know what, they're irrelevant bullshit, play through it without them, it'll be just as good."
And good it was.