Iron sights add a very important dynamic to the games they are in; it means that you must make a choice between firing effectively and moving effectively. This is not to say that iron sights > not iron sights or vis versa, but rather that they are not simply realism for it's own sake. When you pause to aim, you must sacrifice mobility, which is often your best defense. That dynamic forces players to find something to hide in or behind in order to stay secure while aiming, which forces players to think about terrain not only in terms of movement but in terms of lines of sight and protection. This was all known stuff with the early Call of Duties. What Bad Company did was further stir up that formula by making the terrain dynamic with the destructablity, which means you always have to stay on your feet.
Player skill is not limited to "quickest snap aim". It can also be your ability to think on your feet, to move around the map in ways that minimalize how much of a target you are, to reconize when you need to get a friend with a bigger gun involved, to adapt to changing situations, and to make the odds play in your favour.
See, I don't understand why Counter-Strike needs to have all these maps and guns. They just add randomness to the game. What they should do is simply place the two teams 20 feet apart and the first to place his mouse cursor over the other guy's head wins.
Iron sights add a very important dynamic to the games they are in; it means that you must make a choice between firing effectively and moving effectively. This is not to say that iron sights > not iron sights or vis versa, but rather that they are not simply realism for it's own sake. When you pause to aim, you must sacrifice mobility, which is often your best defense.
Counter Strike does the exact same thing without the visual mechanic of "iron sights."
Not agreeing with Scott, so don't conflate my opinion with his, but your description of what an "iron sights" mechanic specifically entails doesn't require actual iron sights, and is implemented in MANY game. Fucking Action Quake 2 forced you to slow down and take aim if you wanted to shoot accurately.
There is more to the Iron Sight mechanic than this. Iron sights narrow your field of vision, force you down to walking pace, often slows your turning, games with depth of field have that kick in. It makes aiming a seperate function rather than a result of not moving, and increases the relative importance of being still in the mobility verus movement game. Which is how it makes cover more important, which is how it changes the dynamic of shooter gameplay from the quake-like snap shooters to the modern tactical shooter. Again, not iron sights > not iron sights, but they do have a real function by placing a real, tangible divide between aiming and full mobility.
Not to say it always works. Modern Warfare ironsights are pointless because MW is just bad twichy Quake with fancy graphics. But there are games which have made good use of iron sights in concert with other features to flavour the gameplay and BC2 is one of them.
I sorta remember strafe jumping while zooming in with a sniper rifle in Action Quake 2.....
Accuracy went down. I would run, suddenly stop, set, and shoot, then run again. I'd also slowly walk-strafe enemy positions with accurate suppressing fire while my team rushed forward.
Counter Strike did it much better. Crouching, Standing, Walking, Running, and Jumping all present different modifiers to accuracy depending on the weapon.
What I dislike about Counter-strike is the visual way it's represented. Human beings are not optimal targets, and why does there need to be "guns" and "reloading"? Lets just make it an abstract representation of spherical targets tagging each other with lines.
Seriously, that is a pretty arbitrary line you're drawing. Some people just like the line draw farther away from stylized representation. As long as it still has a gameplay function, making the zoom feature look like iron sights doesn't detract from the game in a real way, and may enhance it by adding to the level of immersion.
The problem with the counter strike style is that instead of moving your aim point in the direction of your weapon modifier strafe, they would just increase the spread and made it shoot more randomly. At least with iron sights, you have your sight picture and can modify your aiming as your weapon pulls up due to recoil. Besides, it's not like you are forced to use them. Don't like them? Then don't use them.
Making the player's aim intentionally wobbly like that just removes player skill in favor of what is effectively randomness.
This is a different issue from iron sights and is actually done in pretty much every game (even NS and CS).
What I dislike about the mechanic is the visual way it's represented. It's a 2D display: analogize and abstract that shit.
Many new games are actually providing true 3-D sights.
TL;DR ITT Scott talks shit about stuff he's never tried. Again.
At least with iron sights, you have your sight picture and can modify your aiming as your weapon pulls up due to recoil.
This is exactly what makes it so frustrating. In Counter-Strike, the crosshair flexes to represent the innacuracy. If you run with the para almost none of the bullets are going to actually go straight, like they do in Quake.
They could make it iron-sight style, where instead of just visually representing the scatter they actually move your crosshair around so that each bullet does go exactly straight, but straight keeps changing. Why is that frustrating? How would you like it if you are playing a game and I come over and move your mouse or hit your hand that's on the gamepad? That pisses you off right?
It would be more tolerable if it were a physical interface with some sort of force feedback. Ever play a racing game without a force feedback steering wheel? Your car just flies off the track even though you were turning very hard. WTF?! You couldn't feel the force pushing you, just like you can't feel the gun attached to your mouse. But once you get a force feedback wheel, this mechanic is no longer frustrating at all. You feel the wheel turning in the opposite direction and your touch reflex is much faster than your hand-eye coordination. You can respond and make it around the track even though the game is the same.
The mechanic you are speaking of moves the entire crosshair without having the physical mouse move in a corresponding fashion. That is the source of suckiness. The other source of suckiness is the lack of crosshair appearing on the screen, which we already discussed.
You know what would be a much better way of resolving this than Scott telling us that playing the way we do is the same as having somebody hit our mouse while we are playing a game he's never played in his life? Scott playing some Battlefield. I've played Counter-Strike, I've played a lot of Counter-Strike. I enjoy it, but I do find it frustrating that the entire game comes down to who can shove their mouse over the other person's head faster. I prefer a game where the path to my objective has not been decided by rote and thinking has as much effect on the outcome as reflexes. I wonder if Scott would ever give our point of view a chance.
Of course, that would require Scott to admit that his particular abstraction of gunplay is not so superior to our abstraction of gunplay to make what we play completely worthless and us bad people for liking it, which he can clearly determine by a verbal discription of a small portion of the game's mechanics.
Where I disagree with Scott is that he assumes all of these games are a particular form of stateless competition. There is also a place for simulation, which often introduces sub-optimal game mechanics that hinder aspects of competition for the benefit of other factors.
While I personally don't prefer those games, they're equally valid.
In Counter-Strike, the crosshair flexes to represent the innacuracy.
Why represent inaccuracy when you can actually model it? That is what is happening. For me, it's for more frustrating to have some random facsimile of recoil which I can't compensate for with skill.
They could make it iron-sight style, where instead of just visually representing the scatter they actually move your crosshair around so that each bullet does go exactly straight, but straight keeps changing. Why is that frustrating? How would you like it if you are playing a game and I come over and move your mouse or hit your hand that's on the gamepad? That pisses you off right?
Ignoring your obviously ignorant example, part of why I appreciate ironsights psychically moving instead just a random spread is that I can physically counteract the recoil with skill. Usually when I fire long bursts I'll very, very slowly pull my mouse down while simultaneously shooting to stay dead on target. What can I do counteract the random spread of counter strike with the para? Nothing.
It would be more tolerable if it were a physical interface with some sort of force feedback. Ever play a racing game without a force feedback steering wheel? Your car just flies off the track even though you were turning very hard. WTF?! You couldn't feel the force pushing you, just like you can't feel the gun attached to your mouse. But once you get a force feedback wheel, this mechanic is no longer frustrating at all. You feel the wheel turning in the opposite direction and your touch reflex is much faster than your hand-eye coordination. You can respond and make it around the track even though the game is the same.
This is exactly why you have iron sights. They provide visual feedback regarding your weapon's recoil relative to your target. You are just getting way to stuck up on "eww millitary fanbois, hate hate hate hate" rather than actually looking at the mechanic. Look at the gameplay, not the theme Scott.
The other source of suckiness is the lack of crosshair appearing on the screen, which we already discussed.
I don't know what you are talking about, but BC2 has a cross hair on your screen when you are not in iron-sight mode. It's the default aiming mechanism.
Where I disagree with Scott is that he assumes all of these games are a particular form of stateless competition. There is also a place for simulation, which often introduces sub-optimal game mechanics that hinder aspects of competition for the benefit of other factors.
While I personally don't prefer those games, they're equally valid.
But sometimes those other factors are themselves new avenues for competition. Yes, your twitch reflexes don't mean as much, and yes, there is more randomness involved over the course of the game (Actually, that is debatable. There is more emergent factors over a longer time period, but I wouldn't really say it's much more random, really). However, as the game is still fundamentally determined by the skill of it's participants, it's silly to say Battlefield suffers from sub-optimal game mechanics because the exact same can be said about Counter-Strikes aim drift. Again, why isn't "pure" Counter-Strike just a little Wario Ware sort of thing where two players attempt to get the mouse inside a circle before the other guy? Because Counter-Strike also has the movement game, the economy game, the limits of clip sizes. If these are sub-optimal, why haven't they been modded out yet?
There is also a place for simulation, which often introduces sub-optimal game mechanics that hinder aspects of competition for the benefit of other factors.
They don't hinder competition, they change it to a different sort of competition.
A well-implemented iron sight mechanic is testing your reflexes, your accuracy, and your precision, all at once. It's actually significantly harder than a simple crosshair with increasingly large random scatter when implemented correctly.
The challenge is now to manage pinpoint shooting with reflexes. You need very fine muscle control to be able to shoot accurately, and you need to get there faster than the other guy. I've been in many iron sight standoffs, with two players taking shots at each other while also trying to outmaneuver at a distance. It's difficult and tense, and makes for a very different kind of experience.
So really, you have to consider the parameters you're trying to test. Saying that you're testing "FPS skill" isn't quite enough. Which aspects of FPS skill are you testing? Some games are better tests of twitch reflex - Quake 3 is probably the best current game to test whole-spectrum reflexes. But testing fine control is just a different sort of test, one which is still important in any FPS. We all know that twitch reflexes are worthless without the ability to stop on a dime, so a game that separately tests and enhances your fine control is every bit as useful.
tl;dr: Iron sights can give a very focused test in an FPS. It's not testing your all-around FPS "goodness;" it's providing a much more rigorous test of a single aspect (or confluence of aspects) of FPS skill.
Poorly implemented iron sights wreck a game.
EDIT: Think about the biatholon. You do cross-country skiing followed by shooting. You might think that's stupid - why not do something more challenging? Why not do harder shooting, or harder skiing, or just do a marathon? Those are all "better" tests of athleticism. The biatholon is specifically testing your ability to change gears rapidly - this is very similar to an action game with iron sights; you need to be able to go from rapid maneuvering to careful shooting and back again, faster than anyone else.
They don't hinder competition, they change it to a different sort of competition.
Exactly. They in particular prevent optimization in one arena of conflict (e.g., perfect aim) from heavily affecting other arenas (e.g., tactical stance). They allow for sub-optimal play in areas where their effect is intended to be minimized.
tl;dr: Iron sights can give a very focused test in an FPS. It's not testing your all-around FPS "goodness;" it's providing a much more rigorous test of a single aspect (or confluence of aspects) of FPS skill.
Having ACTUALLY played BF2, I can say that it was, in it's day, a really solid shooter. Again, I like the big, expansive shooters that require teamwork and organization to win so BF2 was pretty much right up my ally. I reinstalled it recently and the game didn't have the same feel as I remembered, so I'm not playing it. I will admit, BF3 has me intrigued.
Exactly. They in particular prevent optimization in one arena of conflict (e.g., perfect aim) from heavily affecting other arenas (e.g., tactical stance). They allow for sub-optimal play in areas where their effect is intended to be minimized.
One could argue that perfect aim allows for sub-optimal play in other realms (tactical maneuvering, teamwork, suppressing fire, etc.). I think it's a balancing act with no one particular focus being the "best".
Having ACTUALLY played BF2, I can say that it was, in it's day, a really solid shooter. Again, I like the big, expansive shooters that require teamwork and organization to win so BF2 was pretty much right up my ally. I reinstalled it recently and the game didn't have the same feel as I remembered, so I'm not playing it.
I'd wager he did, but the point does still stand for both games.
And while we often differ in opinion, I pretty much agree with everything you said here. < trollin' > TL:DR for the last 20 or so posts - Scott's a Pissweak FPS player, but is good at trying to make intelligent arguments for why every FPS that isn't the one of the tiny few FPSs he's any good at Sucks.< /trollin' >
but is good at trying to make intelligent arguments for why every FPS that isn't the one of the tiny few FPSs he's any good at Sucks.< /trollin' >
Except I'm not really all that good. I'm pretty much in the 75% range when it comes to Counter-Strike or NS or whatever. I can own most of the nubs, but the really good players I have no chance of touching.
Except I'm not really all that good. I'm pretty much in the 75% range when it comes to Counter-Strike or NS or whatever. I can own most of the nubs, but the really good players I have no chance of touching.
I'm having a playful jab at you, not being serious - I do actually think you're better than that(argumentatively, of course, I can't gauge your CS or NS skills, having not played against you), even if I don't agree with you on this. Thus, the whited-out trollin' tags.
Darksiders is a mediocre Zelda clone that had a baby with God of War. It's okay, but I'm glad I didn't spend $60 on it. I hope the game will get more exciting when I get more weapons/items.
I actually took the time to play through Clash of Heroes: Might and Magic on the Xbox 360 again to earn all the achievements and artifacts for multiplayer.
F.E.A.R. is better than Metro 2033. Take the parts of Half-Life where you fight soldiers and hunt for ammo/life caches and combine it with Solider of Fortune's enemy AI, leaning mechanics, and dismemberment graphics. The horror part is just kinda bleh. Typical jump out and go "BOO" surprises instead of actually instilling any of its namesake fear. Even so, I'll probably beat it and keep playing expansions if it doesn't go downhill.
Comments
Player skill is not limited to "quickest snap aim". It can also be your ability to think on your feet, to move around the map in ways that minimalize how much of a target you are, to reconize when you need to get a friend with a bigger gun involved, to adapt to changing situations, and to make the odds play in your favour.
See, I don't understand why Counter-Strike needs to have all these maps and guns. They just add randomness to the game. What they should do is simply place the two teams 20 feet apart and the first to place his mouse cursor over the other guy's head wins.
Not agreeing with Scott, so don't conflate my opinion with his, but your description of what an "iron sights" mechanic specifically entails doesn't require actual iron sights, and is implemented in MANY game. Fucking Action Quake 2 forced you to slow down and take aim if you wanted to shoot accurately.
Not to say it always works. Modern Warfare ironsights are pointless because MW is just bad twichy Quake with fancy graphics. But there are games which have made good use of iron sights in concert with other features to flavour the gameplay and BC2 is one of them.
Counter Strike did it much better. Crouching, Standing, Walking, Running, and Jumping all present different modifiers to accuracy depending on the weapon.
What I dislike about the mechanic is the visual way it's represented. It's a 2D display: analogize and abstract that shit.
Seriously, that is a pretty arbitrary line you're drawing. Some people just like the line draw farther away from stylized representation. As long as it still has a gameplay function, making the zoom feature look like iron sights doesn't detract from the game in a real way, and may enhance it by adding to the level of immersion.
TL;DR ITT Scott talks shit about stuff he's never tried. Again.
They could make it iron-sight style, where instead of just visually representing the scatter they actually move your crosshair around so that each bullet does go exactly straight, but straight keeps changing. Why is that frustrating? How would you like it if you are playing a game and I come over and move your mouse or hit your hand that's on the gamepad? That pisses you off right?
It would be more tolerable if it were a physical interface with some sort of force feedback. Ever play a racing game without a force feedback steering wheel? Your car just flies off the track even though you were turning very hard. WTF?! You couldn't feel the force pushing you, just like you can't feel the gun attached to your mouse. But once you get a force feedback wheel, this mechanic is no longer frustrating at all. You feel the wheel turning in the opposite direction and your touch reflex is much faster than your hand-eye coordination. You can respond and make it around the track even though the game is the same.
The mechanic you are speaking of moves the entire crosshair without having the physical mouse move in a corresponding fashion. That is the source of suckiness. The other source of suckiness is the lack of crosshair appearing on the screen, which we already discussed.
Of course, that would require Scott to admit that his particular abstraction of gunplay is not so superior to our abstraction of gunplay to make what we play completely worthless and us bad people for liking it, which he can clearly determine by a verbal discription of a small portion of the game's mechanics.
While I personally don't prefer those games, they're equally valid.
A well-implemented iron sight mechanic is testing your reflexes, your accuracy, and your precision, all at once. It's actually significantly harder than a simple crosshair with increasingly large random scatter when implemented correctly.
The challenge is now to manage pinpoint shooting with reflexes. You need very fine muscle control to be able to shoot accurately, and you need to get there faster than the other guy. I've been in many iron sight standoffs, with two players taking shots at each other while also trying to outmaneuver at a distance. It's difficult and tense, and makes for a very different kind of experience.
So really, you have to consider the parameters you're trying to test. Saying that you're testing "FPS skill" isn't quite enough. Which aspects of FPS skill are you testing? Some games are better tests of twitch reflex - Quake 3 is probably the best current game to test whole-spectrum reflexes. But testing fine control is just a different sort of test, one which is still important in any FPS. We all know that twitch reflexes are worthless without the ability to stop on a dime, so a game that separately tests and enhances your fine control is every bit as useful.
tl;dr: Iron sights can give a very focused test in an FPS. It's not testing your all-around FPS "goodness;" it's providing a much more rigorous test of a single aspect (or confluence of aspects) of FPS skill.
Poorly implemented iron sights wreck a game.
EDIT: Think about the biatholon. You do cross-country skiing followed by shooting. You might think that's stupid - why not do something more challenging? Why not do harder shooting, or harder skiing, or just do a marathon? Those are all "better" tests of athleticism. The biatholon is specifically testing your ability to change gears rapidly - this is very similar to an action game with iron sights; you need to be able to go from rapid maneuvering to careful shooting and back again, faster than anyone else.
And while we often differ in opinion, I pretty much agree with everything you said here.
< trollin' >
TL:DR for the last 20 or so posts - Scott's a Pissweak FPS player, but is good at trying to make intelligent arguments for why every FPS that isn't the one of the tiny few FPSs he's any good at Sucks.< /trollin' >
The game is that good.