Choices That Matter

Overall, even though I do like First Person Shooters, I’m not a big FPS guy.  Mostly this is because I’m not a savant at deathmatch, and so when I go online and hop in random games I lose significantly more than I win.  It’s okay to lose more than you win, as long as it doesn’t “feel” like you are losing.  If I get a kill for every 2 to 4 deaths, I feel fine.  When I’m only getting a kill for every 10 deaths, I don’t want to play anymore.

One of the things I don’t like so much about FPS games is that weapon choices are specifically just weapon choices.  Changing from one gun to another changes the damage, the field of fire, the rate of fire, reload rates, etc.

I’d love to see a game that took things a step further and tied other game elements into weapon choices.  The first thing I thought of was light.  Imagine a horror game like Dead Space, or Left 4 Dead, where if you are holding a pistol it allows you to hold a lantern in your off hand, giving you light in a 360 degree radius for 30 feet.  If you switch to the shotgun or machine gun, a two handed weapon, you can’t carry the lantern, but you have a flashlight attached to the barrel, allowing you to have light in a typical flashlight cone in a narrow arc, but it goes 100 feet.  In both cases you can always switch off the light, and use Nightvision goggles, giving you a green tinted low light in all directions, but would react to light sources badly (people could actually hide from you in a pool light much the way they would hide in a shadow from a player without nightvision, and a flashlight shined in your face would cause temporary blindness).  Throughout the course of the game, both solo or in multiplayer, choosing a weapon and a kind of light source could be made very important.

Maybe someone has already done this.  Are there any games out there where weapon choice is more than just a choice of weapon?

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