FPS by degrees

I won't name names, but I've recently played a few shooters with some friends and in every game outperformed them by leaps and bounds. In fact, in Modern Warfare 2, my friends simply couldn't perform well enough to enjoy the game. While I was sniping this player and stabbing that one, my friends were dying and dying some more. At the end of a five-minute match, they had racked up only a few kills each, whereas I had twenty or thirty.

My point is not that I'm that good. At times, other players mop the floor with me, and I'm not playing in the elite matches.

No, my point is that a wide variety of gamers enjoy shooters, but their shorter histories with shooters, lesser skill and different playstyles are rarely acknowledged in gameplay design.

I'm not asking for flag football here. But how about some more games that don't pretend everyone wants to be a pro? Some people just want to blow stuff up and shoot each other in the face.

combos with guns

Could a combo system somewhat similar to Arkham Asylum's be designed for a shooter game? Is it impossible to mix combos into FPS games?

I think it's possible, though a solution isn't obvious. Nothing comes immediately to mind, so I'm going to leave the question out there while I think of how to do it. Any ideas?

false positives

I recently watched a submarine movie called Grey Lady Down. In one part, radar is disrupted by canyon walls, making everything a blur. Sonar similarly returns much information that must be filtered out and many false positives.



Could this sort of scenario be made fun with FPS radar?

What if some parts of a map were radar dead zones? What if certain objects on some maps appear as false positives on radar, requiring familiarity for players to know the static dots aren't poachers?

know thy enemy

Sometime tomorrow, I'll pick up my pre-order of Culdcept Saga. One interesting feature of that board-card game is that you're able to see your opponent's cards. You know every card they draw and even get a glimpse of their entire hand each turn.

Some reviewers complained about this, because it definitely goes against expectations. But it's an interesting twist, I enjoy it in the CS demo, and I've been thinking how it might open up a new style of gameplay for many genres.

RTS games, for example. Imagine knowing at all times what your enemy is doing. What would it be like if the element of surprise was not present?

It's a little more common in mono-a-mono games. If an enemy spell takes 3 seconds to cast, the player might be able to recognize it in the first second and cast a 2-second counterspell. In Sid Meier's Pirates!, the same is possible in dueling.

Anyway, how do y'all feel about some games including complete transparency?

Tactics versus Strategy

On the Isotx forums, there's an interesting debate between two developers about MMO design and which (if any) MMO elements require a qualitatively different production process than when producing a game of smaller scale and fewer players.

I'll be posting some of my thoughts about that on Write the Game tomorrow, but here's a copy of my response to a side-discussion which arose. What is the difference between strategy and tactics? Is one a subset of the other?


There is a difference between tactics and strategy, and it isn't scale; it's spontaneity.

A strategy is planned primarily before the encounter. A tactic is planned primarily during the encounter. The emphasis in strategy is preparation. The emphasis in tactics is reaction. A general can use tactics and a footsoldier can use strategies, though each profession generally requires more of one method than the other.

Say my football lands in my neighbor's fenced yard with his unfriendly Rottweiler. I might devise a strategy to distract him by throwing a nice, juicy bone across the yard... just enough time for me to hop the fence, grab my ball, and hop back over. So I throw the bone and the beast of a dog starts to run after it... but he stops and turns around when he notices me hop the fence. Uh oh. Whereas I could have taken hours to plan my strategy, I now have only seconds to decide how I'm going to reach that ball... or if I should just forget the ball and run for my life. That's tactics.

I might have anticipated this possibility in my strategizing, but the circumstances I now find myself in were not entirely predictable: How far is the dog from me? How far am I from the ball? How accurate was my throw of the bone? Why, oh why, did I not notice the second Rottweiler lying in shade behind a bush?! Because I am having to process new information and plan my response within an immediate timeframe, this might still be tactical situation, despite my planning previous to the encounter.

Strategy and tactics certainly exist along a continuum, but they are distinguishable from one another... just as there is no definite border between the colors blue and green, but that does not prevent us from recognizing the two as usefully separate terms.

Kane & Lynch multiplayer

This sounds like the most innovative multiplayer mode for an FPS in some time.

It's too bad Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect are all I'm going to be able to afford this year.