Friday, January 30, 2009

don't ignore player success

In the Call of Duty: World at War single-player/co-op campaign, enemies spawn in an infinite stream until the player pushes forward to seize the objective. That means that how many you kill is irrelevant. They keep coming until your player stands in the targeted location.

Medal of Honor: Airborne does it differently. If you stand in one place and keep shooting enemies, they'll continue to spawn for a while, prolonging the experience. But the game eventually rewards you for your kills by ceasing to spawn new enemies for that location.

These are different kinds of games -- one involves pushing forward on a linear path, while the other lets the player parachute onto any location of the battlefield and approach objectives from many angles. But regardless of that difference, I'd say Airborne's spawn method is better. Even if reaching locations or destroying AA guns (or whatever) is the main goal, kills should be rewarded.

Every activity central to gameplay should be rewarded. No accomplishment should be completed overshadowed by another.

2 comments:

  1. I keep seeing you playing WaW but honestly I just prefer Infinity Ward's games over Treyarch's.

    That and I think I've had it up to here *hand gesture over head* with WWII shooters.

    I don't like the idea of infinite respawning mobs though unless it makes sense. I've been playing a ton of Frontlines and I can't honestly tell if they have infinite respawns or not. If I capture a point, most of the enemy soldiers will try to run to fortify the next point I'm headed to. It's entirely possible they're continuing to respawn to the next point as well, but if they do, they're respawning away from it and have to actually run there to fight me just like I had to run there to fight them. In that case, it makes perfect sense that the enemy would call for backup.

    But just sending Serious Sam numbers of troops at me for no other reason than I haven't yet stepped across the Magical Line in the Sand is just stupid.

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  2. So far, I'm liking the WaW multiplayer about as much as I liked Modern Warfare's. CoD4 came up with most of the ideas, but why should I care as a gamer? I plan on keeping both games so I can alternate between the two.

    I don't play that many war games, so the WWII repeat doesn't bother me that much. And the campaign does a good job of showing the Pacific theater as a different sort of battle, with kamikaze charges and soldiers hiding in the grass and trees.

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