Tag: FPS games

Strafing to Victory!

Gaming

Over at Horriftic Intentions, brannagar has posted a bit about what he thinks the community wants.  My first mistake in getting involved in that discussion was that I was sent a link to the post and didn’t pay attention to the fact that the blog is a Rift fanboy site.  I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense like some people might.  I just mean that the author is clearly excited for the game, has already taken the stance that Trion (the makers of Rift) knows all (and agrees with him).  Had I known, I probably would never have commented there at all and instead come straight here to talk about the issues at hand.

Essentially, of the four points he makes, I completely agree with three of them.  Two, flying mounts and arenas, on the grounds that just because one game (and for most people that one game is WoW) has them that every game should have them.  The third, the random dungeon finder, because while I’m certain it leads to more progress in games like WoW, I ultimately feel that the implementation destroys community.  Why bother meeting people and making connections when you can just use the tool, get a group, and then never play with those people again?

The fourth point of his, the one I disagree with, is that some people are asking for an Auto-Face or Stick function for PvP.  As you can see from the comments once I stuck my nose in and the two of us bantered back and forth, clearly brannagar likes circle strafing.  I’ve mentioned my views on circle strafing on here before.  And if you dig around you’ll find a few more times I’ve brought it up, especially where I say that Fallen Earth actually does it well in that you actually move slower while strafing.

Upon reflection, I see that I was actually mistaken.  There shouldn’t be accuracy and damage penalties for movement.  Yes, it is more realistic, but it would serve mainly to irritate players.  Looking back at my old posts, I do think a speed penalty should apply for various reasons, but even so there are much better ways to handle this.

You see, circle strafing has plagued FPS games for a long, long time.  The solution on the PC where people use a keyboard and mouse was for players to crank up the sensitivity of their mouse so that small twitches left and right would rotate their character through wider arcs more quickly and allow them to keep the strafing player in sight.  However, when FPS games became more popular on consoles, and especially after the introduction of the double stick controller which allowed for much better circle strafing, asking people to crank up the sensitivity of their controllers actually had an adverse affect on the rest of game play.  So, FPS games innovated by adding in the ability for players to perform a 180 degree turn with a single button.  While not completely nullifying circle strafing as a tactic, it allowed the target player a fighting chance to catch their attacker on the flip side.

This is what MMOs need for PvP.  A 180 degree flip would do wonders to level the playing field as immobile casters have to deal with highly mobile melee characters while still allowing attentive melees to change direction of movement and not giving the immobile players automated assistance.

In the end though, while I’m glad for the outcome in that it let me realize what is really missing from MMO PvP combat, I was also reminded how annoying it is to argue with the faithful.  It’s possible that brannagar could read this (that’s the downside to linking to things, the authors can find out you are talking about them), and he might even come here to tell me how wrong I am and that a 180 flip would be stupid or game breaking and how Trion is luckily smart enough to never consider putting something like it in.  And that’s a shame, because I’d much rather discuss how to make PvP fun for everyone without breaking it for anyone, and as it stands, circle strafing makes the game broken for people who can’t defend against it.

And that doesn’t even begin to touch on collision detection and line of sight issues.  Being able to break a caster’s spell by stepping through the caster is totally broken design, and yet is the way most games work.  Maybe we’ll cover that in another post.

Choices That Matter

Gaming

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?

Combat Skills

Gaming

One thing I feel is really lacking in pretty much all MMORPGs is actual player skill. With their simplistic auto-attack or even button/click feat based scenarios there is very little room for the player to really control how good their character is at fighting. Even in games like City of Heroes where there isn’t really an auto-attack, your skill is hamstrung by the limitations of the game mechanics, which in CoH is the recharge time and choice/placement of expansion slots.

FPS games are all about skill. Well, except when the game allows scripting/macroing. People who used the rocket-jump scripts in Quake were cheaters in my book, people who did it without a script were talented. But that aside, every player runs the same speed and has access to the same weapons, and what separates the players is how well they use the guns and know the maps.

However, in making combat more skill based, I don’t want to lose the players who actually prefer auto-attack. So consider this…

The default configuration is auto-attack. You equip a sword and run up to the monster and hit attack. Your weapon will do average damage, perhaps with a random chance to score a critical hit and do double damage. This model is enough to play the game. You won’t be the best in the world, but you will do alright. Then, on an option screen, you are able to select several levels of skill based control. For example, you can choose the “fighting style” method which presents your character with a list of pre-set sword grip and fighting styles. Each style has advantages and disadvantages, base-lined on the auto-attack, and you select them and use them. Then on the furthest end of the scale is “complete control” where your joystick controls your sword arm and your keyboard moves your feet, you gain the ability to move the sword in whatever way you choose to hamstring opponents or stab at the eyes, but you also have your damage affected by your movement because “strafing” around a target you’ll have much less power than if you plant your feet and put your whole body into the swing.

It would obviously take alot of effort to work out all the details, but the gist is that you allow the player to decide how much skill they want to use in the game. The less skill they use, the move “average” their character is; the more skill, the more chances for heroics.