I've been meaning to post about this for a while, because it really kills a lot of modern shooters for me. Halo and Call of Duty started a trend that is just destroying modern shooters, recharging shields and health. Many people praised this concept as it was brought into popularity, and it is now seen in almost every shooter. Mass Effect, Halo, Call of Duty, Killzone 2, Gears of War, and Bad Company are only a few games that are guilty of this sin.
Why is this such a bad thing? How can so many games with such high praise from reviewers all have it wrong? Many people claim that recharging means the game is faster paced and more intense, however I can't disagree more. Recharging health and shields removes almost ALL of the difficulty from a single player perspective. You are not punished for any of your mistakes. Poke your head out of cover at a bad time and take a few shots? No problem, hide for 10 seconds and you are 100% fine again. Back in the good old days of Quake and Doom, you needed to find first aid kits and such to get you health back after such a mistake. Make too many mistakes and you will run out of health pickups for the level, and you will die. There is no such management of health in new shooters. Just duck down for a few seconds and you are fine. Not punishing mistakes removes almost ALL of the intensity from shooters. I've just started playing Killzone 2 on my PS3 and seeing it frequently mentioned as one of the better shooters on the console. It just doesn't get me going like older shooters did. Taking a few hits means nothing at all, if you aren't gunned down full to dead, you can recover with no consequence. There are no tense moments where you need to enter combat at 50% health because there are no first aid kits nearby.
Now you are probably raging at me for focusing on single player, because nobody but me cares about single player games anymore. Well it sucks for multiplayer too. Recall that a few posts ago I talked about camping in shooters. Recharging shields and health means campers can take a few hits and not need to move around to find health and armor to replenish themselves. Taking a hit or two doesn't phase a camper, because they will simply recharge. A few hits here and there would kill a camper if he didn't recharge between every person that gets a shot in on him. Recharging also means that damage put on any player in general doesn't stick, so there is no difference between a near-kill or getting completely wtf-pwnt by someone. Without recharging, if you almost killed them they need to resupply or you will beat him easily when you find him again.
I don't want people to get me wrong, I have enjoyed some new shooters, I'm not somebody that only likes classic games. But I feel that nearly every shooter would be better off if they went back to an old school static health system, instead of the recharging crap that almost all new shooters are using.
So what happens when recharging stats are introduced is that there are tradeoffs between stats and time. This makes perfect sense in games where time is of the essence... but most shooters don't fall in that category. You just sit and wait and recharge.
ReplyDeleteA good example is auto-doc in the early Quake's CTF. When you got auto-doc, the game became hit-and-run (or, hit-and-recharge), rather than a continuous action sequence.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you don't remember, but Auto-Doc was a free ticket to bowl over entire teams, you didn't need to hit and run. It was totally OP in every way. If it was a time limited thing, like in games with level timers and stuff, yeah there is a trade off racing the clock. There is no clock in shooters. Recharging is lame.
ReplyDeleteYou think autodoc was OP? You must be forgetting about Scout.
ReplyDeletei think they should move to a diablo mass health pot system, cause that was fun
ReplyDeleteOh man I can't wait to play Quake 2
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