How to: Fix Modern Shooters

I'm not the kind of person who will pose problems without providing an answer.  As noted in my previous post, modern shooters are suffering from a major deficit in gameplay, mainly due to campers in multiplayer modes.  Shooters used to be my favorite genre, but with the ever growing camper problem, it simply wasn't fun anymore.  This is the simple in concept but somewhat difficult to execute solution to the problem.

The arcade shooters of old, most notably Quake, really didn't have issues with campers.  This is for two reasons.  First of all, you spawned with very little in terms of equipment, while the map was littered with gear.  This forced players to move about the map to pick up essentials like armor, ammo, health, and weapons, not to mention things like quad-damage super powerups.  Modern shooters frequently spawn players with all of their gear for a chosen role (snipers with rifles, heavy assaults with machineguns, etc.) meaning from the second you drop in the level you are capable of gunning down foes.  This means that you can pick a dark corner, hide, and crush people that stray into your crosshairs.  This wouldn't work in Quake.  Your starting weapons aren't sufficient.  Even when you picked up decent firepower, if you hide in a room without going out to get armor and other gear, your shots will fail to one-hit kill (if you had armor and full health in the Quake series, you wouldn't get gibbed unless an enemy had a temporary quad-damage powerup).  This will allow your opponent with superior armor and weapons to turn around and melt your face. 

This brought on the important concept of controlling the map.  Having several important pieces of equipment on the map made players want to control areas, and try to deny other people items by keeping track of respawn timers and recollecting the item again right once it spawns.  This means players need to move to try to prevent other players from obtaining powerful weapons, and making sure they are able to get sufficient gear to battle their enemies.  If you camped, you would be surrendering too many resources to the enemy, and you would die an awful death when the player you let gear out to the max finds your dark corner.  This concept of controlling spawn points of powerful weapons is completely absent in many modern shooters simply because they drop you in the map completely ready to go, with only a few (if any) smaller powerups on the map.

The second way to build a camper-resistant shooter is simply the quality of level design.  Map designers need to be more and more aware of the current trends in shooters, and build their levels around preventing these cheap tactics.  They need to be aware of sniper locations, blind corners, and rooms with only one entrance.  I'm not saying these elements can't be present in a level, but if you throw too much of this in one package (or just one incredibly good sniper spot) it becomes a camper's game.  Levels need multiple paths to the same location, and while cover is necessary in shooters there can't be so much that any idiot with a shotgun can camp a well traveled corner and pick up cheap frags.  Halo is a prime example of a game with lackluster map design.  Halo has weapons (not really health and armor like Quake) and vehicles to get by moving about the map, but many of the levels I played on had wicked spots for snipers and blind corner shotgun campers. 

Promoting movement through essential equipment pickups and ensuring maps don't have too many (or too good) camper spots would increase the entertainment value of shooters by a massive margin.  We can hope someone (I'm looking at you Id Software, super awesome multiplayer Quake 5 next please!) will release a shooter to teach this younger generation of gamers what a real shooter experience should feel like.  Movement, map control. Lets put those 1-hit kills and sniper nests aside people, and pick up our nailguns, rocket launchers, and plasma rifles.