Overall, even though I do like First Person Shooters, I’m not a big FPS guy. Â 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. Â It’s okay to lose more than you win, as long as it doesn’t “feel” like you are losing. Â If I get a kill for every 2 to 4 deaths, I feel fine. Â 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. Â 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. Â The first thing I thought of was light. Â 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. Â 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. Â 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). Â 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. Â Are there any games out there where weapon choice is more than just a choice of weapon?