5punk

A bit of a sensationalist headline, and the announcer - the president of Tripwire, they of Red Orchestra 2 and Killing Floor - obviously is at the other end of the market, but he makes some very interesting points about why the general 'casual' population lap up COD-a-likes and why most of us don't like them.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/13/call- ... interview/

TL;DR, it's about the lack of a skill gap and the high level of random kills (kill streak bonuses, easy control mechanics, easy to aim weapons) which make it a low skill requirement. You could of course argue that that's the reason it's so popular, that most people don't want to have to learn how to play a game. He likens it to a slot machine though. Personally I've not played one of those games since COD4, but based on that I'd say the analogy goes too far - if that was the case people wouldn't be able to consistently be at the top of the scoreboard. I don't know if that's the case now, though, and he certainly makes some points that ring true to me.

"Your heart rate goes up, you’re freaking out, like “I can actually lose this shooter.” And if there’s no fear, there’s no tension, the victory is shallow. We want there to be some fear."

Fucking this! Koa (my boss) said the same today about wow, the new raid bosses were difficult, loads of people whined so they nerfed them mere days after the update went live, suddenly the bosses were falling like flies. What's the fucking point of an achievement if it isn't ground out and takes a few tears and a bit of frustration before you get it right? I totally get that if it's too hardcore people will give in, but I've always seen it as taking an easy win removes the sense of accomplishment. There has to be risk for reward otherwise it's meaningless.

In my opinion it's just as you state in you tl;dr - the general gaming public buy the cod games in their millions because it's another form of fast gratification and that's what the majority seem to want. They don't want to get better by persevering, they want to be instant badasses. So we're lucky that we have long terms gamers here at 5punk who want to get punished for fucking up and who like a challenge, even if we're shit at it and will never get the win we'll have a damn good try before we tell a game to get to fuck.

And yeah, I thought the slot machine analogy took it too far until I googled strategy on how to maximise slot winnings. Seems that he might have a fairly good analogy as a lot of sites list tips and tricks to up your chances of leaving with a profit, the margins are small but they make the difference.

There is something to the argument, but I think being good at the newer COD-like games doesn't so much require a lesser skillset, but a different one.

I used to be pretty good at older FPS games, particularly ones born from Quake mods like CounterStrike, TeamFortress and Action. I did okay at Unreal games, but they always felt a bit less tight, if you know what I mean - you didn't have to be as precise. With later COD titles and their ilk, I'm just not very good at all.

I think it started with Day of Defeat to a degree - they began introducing a cone of fire to supposedly introduce realism (people can't really shoot perfectly straight, every time, while running around and whatnot), but what it actually did was introduce an element of luck while making your precision skill less important. Further moves towards a more realistic effect introduced crouching and going prone to improve accuracy - which actually meant that it just artificially made you less accurate when standing up or on the run. The crosshair became just an estimate of where you were aiming.
The only time this actually made any sense to me was when they removed the crosshairs entirely, such as in COD4 hardcore mode - where I had a modicum of success without the basically false crosshair to distract me.

I've never favoured automatic weapons in games unless they had a single-fire mode, and my some of my favourite guns in FPS games are as follows:

The Railgun from Quake2 was an early love. With almost only a single, often brown pixel as a crosshair, it was tough to use accurately in the frenzy of the cramped Quake 2 corridors, but oh-so-satisfying when you nailed a kill. Unlike sniper rifles are now, though - it was far from the most hated weapon, nor was it the go-to gun for campers. People understood it took skill to operate and being reliably able to shoot people in mid-air with one gave one an almost godlike status, but most importantly it traced a great big glowing blue wiggly line back to where you'd fired it from, so hiding away with one simply wasn't an option as everyone knew how long it would take you to reload. The Unreal instagib shock rifle and subsequent Quake 3 railgun pale in comparision to the (admittedly nicked straight out of Eraser) spectacle of a Q2 railgun firing across a map.

The Desert Eagle in CounterStrike is another highly-accurate, potent weapon - when fired at the head and in single, spaced shots. I guess most of you knew that I liked it already, given I always select it over any other weapon in the game. Its power is compensated for by the need to fire slowly to remain accurate, and its small clip size.

I don't normally like sniper rifles, but the one in Action HalfLife was a firm favourite - when used unzoomed. The Desert Eagle is ubiquitous in AHL, so any advantage of surprise (like that gained in CS) by using one is nullified, but the sniper rifle is different. People expect snipers to hide somewhere and take zoomed-in shots, but the AHL version can be used very effectively unzoomed as a sort of long-range shotgun - the most obvious disadvantage being that you don't get any crosshair at all.

It seems I do rather like guns which nerf me somewhat, while rewarding practice and accuracy.


Back to the post DoD/CoD world though, and those skills are much less useful. I might be able to draw a CDC spunking bullet-holes into your arse in CS, but in games which use a randomised cone of fire I cannot reliably put a bullet where my crosshairs are when standing directly in front of a wall.

That's not to say that luck is the only factor though - as DP noted, people who are good at them, are consistently good at them - they can't be just waving their gun around and getting lucky all the time. The skill must be there in those expert players, but they're not doing the same things I am. They're not trying to be super-precise with every shot, perhaps they're not necessarily always aiming for the head - they're doing some sort of instinctive calculation of the law of averages of where their shots will land, which they're learned through hours of play.

Maybe.


I'm not sure how any of this applies to Red Orchestra though. I didn't play much of the original which hints that I was pretty terrible at it and from what I recall it had a lot more in common with Day of Defeat than Quake. Killing Floor does feel much more old-school, however.

The statement stemmed from the guy saying that they had tried to make RO2 more accessible (and it is pretty hardcore) by - I think - adding a more COD-like game mode. Then they got a load of COD players in to test it and they really disappointed him by pretty much saying "it's not COD, it sucks." He doesn't put it quite like that, but the impression I got, to some extent, was why did you ask a load of people who only play one game? You ask someone who only ever plays Warcraft if they like Guild Wars 2 and they'll more often that not hate it because it isn't WoW. Hence every new MMO's chat channels having people in them saying the game isn't as good as WoW.

Interesting point about the cones actually making things easier, which I didn't pick up from the interview. Thing is though, most games have that now and you can't argue they're all like that. Battlefields have all had it, Planetside 2 has it, and I'm pretty sure Red Orchestra 2 has it, otherwise every weapon would be a railgun (incidentally the railgun from Q2 coined that now common gaming term, but you guys already knew that). You have to manage your spread in modern games. If I just trigger-lock my LMG in PS2, which I do too often, I lose the fight because the recoil makes it so inaccurate - by increasing the spread. Twitch skill is still there, but to a far lesser degree. It's more about reading a situation on a larger scale, being aware of enemy and friendly horses, where might give you a better angle of attack. I never liked the deathmatch twitch shooters, I always prefered a slower pace and an emphasis on tactics. I played Delta horse multiplayer rather than Quake 2 or Counter-Strike. So yeah FJ, I think you're right. The twitch gamers of old are a rare thing now, but maybe it's just because not many people liked them that much.

He makes a few good points in there, as does FJ.

I think we can all agree that cod 4 is where it started going wrong for cod, but equally that was possibly 5punks most popular shooter by a fair margin going off time played and ownership levels.

The earlier cods relied heavily on skill, teamwork and blue suede geese, often you'd be playing hunt the pixel at 500 yards because the sway on the snipers was close to unmanageable and the automatic weapons got you looking at the sky faster than moving your mouse.

I think cod4 made the game accessible with its dumb luck rewards (airstrike on bog, that'll be a win then) but still at least rewarded skill to a degree, but teamwork went away and the skills stopped involving accuracy on a whole, and went more to speed and aggression, some maps encouraged stalemates and the newer generation of gamers didn't have the wherewithal to work as a team to break it.

Nowadays I see cod as a variation on quake/unreal, run in guns blazing, die, respawn, repeat until round end.

That's not a bad thing, but I think the appearance of the game confuses people into thinking it's meant to be realistic, so cod players think they like realistic shooters but find them all lacking like RO, maybe it'd be better to throw them at UT3 than a relatively realistic, unforgiving shooter.

Don't forget that ability to shoot straight isnt the only skill in shooters. Knowledge of the maps gives you an advantage in knowing where you should/should not go, with some places being a death trap where everyone can see you but you can't see shit, and other places giving a great view of everywhere whilst being relatively covered (but not backing you into a corner). Knowing this kind of thing means you get more opportunities to shoot at other people whilst giving them less opportunities to shoot back.

I would imagine if you got one player who is a crack shot but doesn't know the map at all and another player who is slightly less accurate but knows the map like the back of his hand, the second player would kick the first players ass. Because the cone of fire nature of the modern shooter acts as a bit of a leveller of shooty skills, all the other skills involved in an FPS become more important.

There are other skills too. One thing I often find when I first start playing a new FPS is that I am always in the bit of the map where everyone else isn't. Although this tends to mean I don't get killed very often I also don't get any kills. I don't know why this is exactly but it's certainly a skill which, if I could improve, would increase my average score. On the flip side, when I used to play UT a bunch at uni, my housemate (who was very good at UT) would often complain that I "moved weird". My unpredictable movement meant that he had a hard time getting a hit on me, which compensated a little for my lack of accuracy. Interestingly, my other housemate (who was not so great a shot) had less of a problem compensating for my wiggly routefinding.

On the mention of skill weapons used in FPSes, Sniper Rifle on UT1's Facing Worlds map. Aw yis.

Grimmie wrote:On the mention of skill weapons used in FPSes, Sniper Rifle on UT1's Facing Worlds map. Aw yis.

I made my mate's brother storm off in a rage at a lan party with that. Very satisfying, because he was a dick.

Oh god, I dread to think how the RO2 forums have reacted to this interview.
It's pretty much the accepted opinion over there that RO2 is a shade of the game it could be because he (John Gibson) decided to go after the CoD players by taking some of their mechanics, the only problem which he avoids mentioning in the interview is that he applied it to all the modes, not just Action.

I also like him talking about how people didn't like the RO2 movement system because it felt clunky due to inertia. It is clunky because it's rubbish, and while inertia is good, it's been badly handled. "Can't prone here" is a great example, especially when it happens in open fields. Other related things like cancelling reloads with sprint causing you to lose bullets even when they're individually loaded etc...

Now, I could continue ranting about RO2, but other than the direct link to that game, the rest of his comments are spot on. People have got used to easy rides and developers targetting the lowest common denominator.
Hence the reason why 5punkers always do well in games like CoD, simply because we've played and can play the harder stuff and dare I say it, actually have skill.

buzzmong wrote: dare I say it, actually have skill.

How dare you!

Pnut wrote:

buzzmong wrote: dare I say it, actually have skill.

How dare you!

Sniper on facing worlds, hours of fun and/or pain! I have HEADSHOT! on my phone as the alert tone. And of course MMMMONSTER KILL set for text messages.