Recently I was looking at my old WoAP post and thinking about how the fundamentals of creating a good, solid-feeling weapon are evolving, and which basics are the same as they were 15 years ago.  Developers are definitely better at these things, but experiences are still all over the board.

I gathered more footage from games released in the last year in preparation of a WoAP section on this site (which is still locked for now), but I fell behind in capturing the newest of the new.  While that certainly won’t deter me, I did realize that I did have one source of state-of-the-art titles with readily-prepared footage…  E3 2010!  Sure the games are in-progress and the available footage varies in quality, but I thought it would be fun to see what the next year could be like in terms of nice, beefy implements of destruction.

As usual, I examined a number of elements to consider whether they contribute to a sense of power.  Check out the original article if you wonder, for example, why a real-world weapon still needs to follow these rules:

• Gun Visuals: The visual effect of the weapon’s muzzle flash and bullet trail, and the animation of the weapon itself firing. It’s the first thing people think of when they consider how the gun looks and feels.
• Sound Effects: How’s the audio, from the firing to the impact sounds?  This can be one of the hardest to get right, because the sound has to bear repetition thousands of times, and it has to compliment the rest of the arsenal.
• Effect on Environment: Here we look at the visual impact of the bullet on a wall or floor, as well as environmental shifts such as lighting. We need these because the results of stray bullets give the player a sense of affecting their environment and with a potent weapon.
• Effect on Opponent: This refers to the visual impact on an enemy, and how the enemy reacts to being shot, which is critical to give the player feedback that he is successfully damaging the foe.
• Combat Effectiveness: I’m completely subjective here, which can be unfair when taken out of context, but it’s worth talking about. If I see a weapon limply pile bullets into an enemy with little sense of accomplishment, that weapon doesn’t get high marks.  Maybe it’s designed to be a pathetic weapon, I don’t know.

Each weapon is grouped with its general type:  They aren’t all identical models, weights or even technology, but each group of weapons fills a general role for players.  I found as much unadulterated footage as I could…  nothing from trailers or anything less than the game being played.  This is obviously not final weaponry, and I had to make adjustments for the situations where the audio or visual quality wasn’t the best.  Suffice it to say, they previewed their games to us and basically I’m previewing the weapons right back.  Wah.

I didn’t get footage from everyone I wanted (technical issues denied me Brink and Killzone 3), but there was plenty of material (in unbiased alphabetical order of course):

• The Agency, Sony Online Entertainment
• Blacklight: Tango Down, Zombie
• Bodycount, Codemasters
• Breach, Atomic Games
• Bulletstorm, People Can Fly
• Call of Duty: Black Ops, Activision
• Crysis 2, Crytek
• Halo: Reach, Bungie
• Medal of Honor, Electronic Arts
• Rage, id Software
• Vanquish, SEGA

(Too many one-word titles that start with “B” this year…)

And away we go.  Watch the footage and check out the results:

Pistols

Almost 10 years ago Halo and Counterstrike created the first pistols that we actually wanted to use, and more recently Call of Duty cemented the concept of pistols as a quick-draw backup weapon.  This trend continues, although video is hard to find because these weapons aren’t “sexy” enough to appear in E3 demos.

Call of Duty: Black Ops

This pistol is a backup weapon in the Call of Duty world.  As such, this revolver is serviceable, but not flashy enough to encourage you to use it when you aren’t forced to (like this claustrophobic tunnel).  It’s hard to say much from two bullets, but the muzzle flash was nearly invisible and it didn’t light up the surroundings as much as I’d might expect in a dark tunnel.  The audio was also very basic, a clip we’ve heard many times in the last 10 years…  I hope by ship they can get some reverb to make it as deafening as I might expect gunshots to be in a space like that.

The effect on the enemy is hard to gauge since this was really a set-piece.  There was a reasonable bit of impact blood and a reasonable hit reaction, which hopefully will be true in all combat situations.

Medal of Honor

This footage is from DICE’s multiplayer mode, so it leans closer to Bad Company 2 in overall feel.  Compared to COD:BO’s period-authentic revolver, it has the advantage…  semi-automatic so that the player can unload quickly and go for a headshot, so its effectiveness appears pretty high.  The bulk of the muzzle flash is a classic single frame but it does the job, mainly because it is coupled with a satisfyingly “crunchy” sound effect…  not unlike Indy’s awesome pistol in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Stray bullets create a subtle puff of smoke with environment impact, but there was little impact on the character himself visible beyond the view-obscuring muzzle flash sprite.  This is often okay with pistols, as long as they have their role.

The Agency

The Agency pistol is pretty good, although it’s hard to judge it completely fairly because it appears that the game view appears a bit stretched, making the pistol stubby and awkward-looking in the player’s hands.  (I double-checked the footage to verify that this was the way it showed.)

The muzzle flash is very red, just a couple of sprites…  it’s got an okay punch to it, but red doesn’t get it looking “hot”, and the sprite never reaches full opacity, giving it a “flat” feel.  Perhaps it is an art style choice… this game is more colorful than most.  The weapon seemed somewhat effective, but during recoil, the weapon obscured the target denying me the ability to see what happened.  On the other side, the sound effect has a nice report and trail-off.

Rage

Rage‘s pistol has an okay muzzle flash, although its edges are fuzzy that looks a little “old school”.  In this environment the world lights up well in response.  From the audio present in this footage, sounds “crashy” and needs punch, but it’s hard to judge because it was not recorded direct-feed.

The biggest disappointment I felt was the weak sense of stopping power with this weapon.  The interview toted the enemies’ ability to react to shots realistically, but I think it could still benefit from a more prominent effect on impact.  In addition, the pistol just didn’t seem to be taking down that enemy effectively.  Bungie was the first to more or less prove that longer-lived enemies appear more intelligent, but I hope they can use their hit-reaction tech to give you a better sense of doing something to your foe by ship-time.

Shotguns

To me, shotguns are the most satisfying weapons to use.  They have a strong, easy-to-grasp tactical role (lotsa damage when close), but they also can deliver great pyrotechnics in the process.  I only found a couple at E3.

Crysis 2

It’s difficult to get a true sense of the Crysis 2 shotgun in the midst of all the chaos in this demo, but I do like the strong, directional array of “hit spangs” rising off the surface from impact.  That really speaks “multiple pellets” to me.  The muzzle flash is nice and hot with a one-frame “punch” to it with just a wisp of smoke after.  The audio was pretty boomy, but it was hard to single out in the footage.

I can’t figure out what’s going on with the shotgun against the enemies here.  Perhaps that is because of the situation, but the effect of weaponry should stand out in the chaos of combat (that’s the point).  I hope the weapon does more to the enemies than it appeared to there.

Medal of Honor

This shotgun is a big guy, serious business…  its size might set it apart from models in other games, but I’ll say that it looked menacing in the player’s hands, and had a satisfying muzzle flash and “booming” sound to it.

It also looked like it did a number on the enemy, sprouting multiple bloody impacts, and they didn’t get lost behind the muzzle.  I would have liked to see more of what happened when a surface was struck, however, it seemed fairly subtle.

Machineguns

Now we’re down to business.  Just about every game has one of these, and I define them loosely:  “automatic medium-damage weapons”.  They may be assault rifles or heavy submachineguns…  subtle variations on a theme, so hardware-heads shouldn’t get their panties in a bunch about terminology.

Halo: Reach

This one felt a little silly to preview since the beta has been available for a while, but nonetheless I wanted to compare it with other upcoming titles.  I was not a fan of the original Halo assault rifle because of its anemic audio and flash, but with this new version I’m feeling it more.  The “teletype” sound effect now has more rumble to it, and the muzzle flash has less of a cartoony feel to its “star shape”, and looks reasonably hot.

The weapon is still of the “hold down the trigger until the enemy soaks up enough bullets” variety, so in multiplayer it helps to have XP popping up to know that you did something.  Luckily with their newest animations, the enemy reacts more satisfyingly to the impact, even though there really isn’t much of an effect.  The world impacts are unfortunately subtle for this weapon, basically invisible from a distance…  It’s hard to be objective because historically this rifle deliberately lacked punch as a common weapon, but as one of the first things in the player’s hands it’s pretty important to feel good.  Luckily, it now seems to have evolved to no longer feeling like a second fiddle.

Medal of Honor

A typical sighted assault rifle, this weapon has a great “train chug” sound to it, and it does some nice damage, throwing dusty impacts all over the environment and struck enemies.  It definitely looks like an effective weapon.

The muzzle flash is nearly invisible however (doubtless matching the real-world weapon?)…  the in-view weapon’s subtle shake is the main visual cue that something is happening with it at all.  More importantly, the animation result on the enemy is still poor.  It can be hard to play proper hit animations while an enemy also is moving, but here it felt like they kept running until they died with a minor twitch.  This is a common challenge when shooting at multiplayer opponents, since they continue to run at full speed while taking damage.

Breach

What a difference from the previous MOH footage… without the background din of combat, Breach seems silent by comparison.  As for the weapon itself, it has a “tiktiktik” sound that makes me think of a biplane’s machine gun.  You still hear it sometimes in WWII games, but it sounds archaic because of its low rate of fire.  I believe this is supposed to be a modern assault rifle, so there are definitely options that could be used to punch it up.

There’s lots to do here, in muzzle flash, enemy and world impact…  I’m even not sure how effective the weapon was against the enemy given the feedback.  Also, I appreciate the trade-off offered when zooming the weapon obscures a lot of the view, but thanks to the Call of Duty series, so many people play this way that it seems ridiculously punishing.  This game could just get a bit more lively in ambience.

Blacklight: Tango Down

Another lesser-known title, Blacklight has a bit more tightness to its machinegun.  It’s still a light weapon, with a fairly teletype-sounding audio report, but the very high rate of fire (with a nice envelope as a burst is fired off) definitely makes me feel better about it.  The environment lights up well enough when firing, but the muzzle flash (from the footage) seemed very static and soft.  The tracers flying out to the target could have looked good but these are thin and hard-edged… making them look like a rendering artifact beneath the sights.  The big impacts (see below) helped a bit, but the weapon could use even a little bit more of a sense of danger.

The game seems to have a fictional dressing that allows for some sci-fi-looking elements sprinkled into the realistic environs…  They used it well with the strong blue hit impacts when an enemy is struck, but they are also very big and distracting…  you can only tell that you hit “something”.  I could an impact that big for a sniper rifle, but for a bullet-spewing weapon like that, I’d dial it down.

The Agency

Once again, the weapon appeared a bit stubby because of the odd aspect ratio, but in general it hit the Call of Duty mark pretty well.  Audio-wise, they went for a strong gunshot for each individual bullet along with a lower fire rate.  It makes the weapon seem heavy and mechanical (good), but over the course of a burst it grows pretty monotonous, like the old Doom minigun that just played the pistol sound over and over.  I’d love to hear a more defined start and end to the bursts.

The weapon itself could use a bit of shake or something to tell me that its doing something.  From first-person I can’t see the muzzle flash and it appears like the player is just holding down the weapon on its target.  It does do the job functionally, as an effective weapon.  Also, the environment impacts are nice and sparky…  a bit random but I did get a sense of the player tracking their target with successive shots.

Rage

The muzzle flash in Rage’s assault rifle looks okay, but the old practice of fading out “star” flash sprites reduces the feeling of a “fiery” effect, and I see it here as I did in the pistol.  Unfortunately, the audio from this footage is poor making the assault rifle sound “crashy”, but I’m sure it’s got the “pop” in person.

The weapon does light up the environment, but in this environment it can only be seen at a very close range, so I didn’t see it much. The weapon recoiled well with nice shells being thrown up visibly… However, I still wanted to see more feedback to where I was shooting.  The video quality makes some of these effects darker than they really are, but given that this is a dark-looking place it could be a general issue.  I wanted to see the results of my gunshots on the walls, and the floor.  Finally, I also didn’t see a real threat to the mutant again…  it’s like the pistol.  No stopping power visible.  Crank up the reactions with that reaction tech…  make sure the impacts are visible.

Bulletstorm

These guys are obviously about showing off as much as their game is, and I feel it here.  The rifle here felt dangerous, with a bright, fiery, and non-repetitive muzzle flash.  The gunfire audio is has a crunchy mechanical sound to it, and that worked great (unsurprisingly similar to Gears of War‘s).

The weapon’s seems very functional and effective in taking out enemies.  It was interesting to see the cartoony projectiles, almost like a scrolling shooter’s round bullets.  On issue was that there was so much going on at my muzzle and with the bullets traveling outwards (this is an unapologetically noisy game) that I wasn’t always clear on what was being hit.  I also didn’t see much in the way of impacts at a distance, although there was other footage against a close-up boss that was more tangible.  The game’s about chaos, and I imagine it’s a lot of work to make sure the player knows what is being done to whom, and where.

Bodycount

This footage isn’t great (to be fair, the video is wayyyy oversaturated), but I wanted to include it because of the blinding amount of feedback from the rifle.  The weapon has a huge star-shaped muzzle flash, which probably looks good in screenshots, but doesn’t have a lot of variance to make it vary over a sustained burst.  It also manages to cover up a ton of what is going on at the impact site.

The game shows a Crackdown level of feedback, with orbs flying out whenever an enemy dies…  The world impacts are also flamboyant at times, with some crazy cascading sparks.  Unfortunately the chaos meant that once again I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on when I hit an enemy.  I like “cartoony” as much as I do realism, so I’d have to reserve judgment until I get to see it without blurry footage.

Vanquish

Vanquish is clearly not a traditional FPS, but I wanted to include it anyway for contrast.  This machinegun has an extremely high rate of fire, with a somewhat “lighter” sound effect than blends into the background din.  This is the sort of machinegun that Japanese sci-fi games have exhibited for the last 10 years or more.  Whereas western games put the machinegun in a place of honor as a powerful workhorse, Japan casts them as easy-to-target weapons that chip away health slowly.

The muzzle flash and impacts flamboyantly throw around sparks, but this is still a backup weapon, like the MG on a tank or jet fighter.  They leave room for the more “cinematic weapon”, which may be a large explosive or melee attack.   I love these sorts of games to death, but it’s interesting to see how very different the influences are.

Scoped Rifles

I don’t generally include sniper rifles, but this time I figured I would.  The category includes bolt-action or single-shot automatic scoped rifles, so I didn’t want to get the hardware nuts mad.

Halo: Reach

This particular weapon is Halo‘s marksman or battle rifle, rather than their sniper rifle, but aside from stats they seem similar.  I’m surprised at how little feedback you get when firing while zoomed…  there is a tiny recoil in the view, but aide from that, the sound and the reaction of the enemy is about the only result.  The sound, however, is sharp with a great decay and the hit reactions are great.

The muzzle flash isn’t too important, but I would love to see something in the world.  A faint tracer, or a more clearly visible impact effect.  While there are caveats to this (too much pyrotechnics will render snipers too visible), it could use a bit of punch.

Blacklight: Tango Down

Blacklight‘s modern-seeming game goes far further in the “spacey” effects sometimes than the far-future Halo…  Their sniper rifle fires what appears to be a solid laser, with a large blue impact on the enemy.  This is fine for their vibe, but given that capability (freedom from “realism”!), I’m surprised to not see something more “impactful” going on.  The blue flash is a round cloud of sparks, and enemies more or less fall down in response to being killed.  The “laser” projectile could benefit from variance over its lifetime like a “railgun”, and the impacts are crying out for some sort of directional component, ricocheting away from the surface, or piercing the enemy somehow.

The audio is fine, but has less of a punch than Halo’s seems to.  A gunshot from a sniper rifle is never, ever work being subtle about.

The Agency

The sniper rifle in The Agency has gunshot audio that is slightly muffled for some reason…  it has a punch, but the decay is perhaps a bit less satisfying than Halo’s “throatier” sound.  The weapon itself does not move when fired, which is a disappointment, since there is no muzzle flash to see.  Since the zoomed view appears sensitive to control, it is even more important to deflect or disrupt the player’s aiming since the overall vibe is that the weapon is “light” and can get jarred more easily.

I found their distinct tracer interesting, but unfortunately the effect is so solid that some rendering artifacts (resulting from rendering it as a flat polygon) appear when shooting.  I like the idea of a tracer, especially for the “James Bond modern fantasy” world like this one, but work needs to be done to break up the line and make it seem less like a laser beam.  In addition, I didn’t feel like I saw the result of my gunshot on the surface or person being targeted, because the tracer obscured it entirely.

Caveat!

This is E3, and anyone who has prepared something for E3 knows that someone picking it apart can be infuriating.  Worse yet, the quality of E3 footage varies, so my comments may be influenced by lighting, background noise, or bad focus.

Not all the weapons or features or effects I’ve examined here may be final, but on the upside, just about everything I mention is remediable with a small amount of audio, art or balance work.  You can disagree with me too, that’s what comments are for.  The same goes if you are working on one of these.

It’s fun to look at these items regardless…  I think I got bit by the bug again.  In the coming weeks I’ll take another stab at getting that Weapons of Awesome Power section at the top going, and we’ll see where things go.

It was a fairly addicting experience, as I pushed to each successive level like I might grind an MMO.  The matches themselves were entertaining on their own, with tangible sense of achievement every few rounds.  Unfortunately, I eventually ran out of gas, not because the game itself wasn’t fun enough…  but rather because each creature had 5-10 times the health of their single-player counterparts.  The campaign was a well-balanced shooter with crisp control aim and a great sense of power, but coop had me holding my machinegun on what should have been “popcorn” enemies for several seconds, watching XP pile up as I waited for each bag of hit points to fall down.  Quite simply, it didn’t feel at all like the shooter than I played when not online.

I cannot fault the concept of jacking up the time to kill each enemy…  it’s a time-honored tradition from many classic games.  In Resistance 2, it was clear that they needed to extend the experience and increase the effort required to bring each one down.  It’s probably a useful excercise to discuss why this might be.

The Numbers Game

One reason for enemies to soak up bullets in coop is to match the level of difficulty to the number of players.  If 10 players entered a level that was intended for just one, they would slaughter everything with their added firepower.  Some games ship this way, whether due to limited resources or to reward the effort that used to be involved to connect multiple PC’s for a coop session in the first place.   These days most do their best to notch up the challenge when new players join a session, and sometimes this is done by increasing the enemy toughness.   Diablo did this in the most overt fashion, by reporting to the player that “the enemy forces have grown stronger” when each additional player joins the game.  Behind the scenes it was increasing the experience level equivalent of all the enemies in the world.

Another reason for enemies feeling more invulnerable are in games with a progression track…  ones that reward the player for each hour of play with upgrades in ability and potency (like Resistance 2 does).  Unfortunately it’s easy to forget that in order to build a game where the player feels more powerful over time, you must hold back some of the most potent player abilities at the start of the game.  The player certainly feels a sense of achievement as he gains all the new kick-ass stuff over the course of the game, but sometimes that means he also feels anemic at the very beginning, where he has the least capability.  The damage potential for his weapons are less, his health is less.  His weapons aren’t as flamboyant.  Even the most basic enemies might take far longer to kill than they will later on.  This is a dangerous practice that must be handled with care…  these are the crucial early hours where a player should be falling in love with the product rather than feeling emasculated.

Somehow this is an acceptable practice in RPG’s…  Those games are almost entirely about progression and acquisition, so it is expected that the player will evolve tremendously over hundreds of play hours (or thousands in an MMO).  But because of these incredible progression arcs, most RPG’s play what I call The Numbers Game.  You’ve doubtless seen it…  when players start off their game doing tiny amounts of damage to wimpy rats, but eventually grow to deal thousands of points while fighting giant dragons.  In these situations there is a continual arms race between the damage you deal and the health of your enemies.

For example:  I’m playing an MMO and start with a character who can deal an average of 20 points of damage to an enemy who has about 100 health. About 5 hits will take him down.   After some play time, I level my character to level 20, and can now deal 100 points of damage. Good for me! …except now most of the enemies have around 500 health. I guess it’s still 5 hits to kill one.  Finally, after months of investment I reach the coveted level 50, and I’m clobbering opponents with 1000 points per hit. Of course, you guessed it, my enemies have 5000 HP (or more).

This shouldn’t be a big surprise, because as you gain power, it would be anticlimactic to see a lessening difficulty…  we all want to grow up to finally beat that huge, scary thing that we fled from many hours of play ago.  Keep in mind what this means, however:  In a combat-centric game, a player’s primary metric of power is the number of hits per kill. (This abstracts to “the ratio of time investment per reward”… but that’s fodder for a later post).   But when I play the Numbers Game, do I really feel better about taking down a Level 50 Hoary Drake with my Level 50 character than I did taking down the Level 1 Scrawny Rat with my Noob?  The answer in RPG’s is often “yes”, but in shooters you can get in a lot more trouble.

The difference is in the essences of the genres…  RPG’s deal with skill advancement primarily on the character itself, as he “levels up” and increases his capability through higher numerical stats.   The player himself has less pressure to hone his actual playing skill, aside from juggling the new options presented to him when new abilities are unlocked.   He makes choices about how he wishes to advance, working with figures like “strength”, “speed” and “willpower”, even though they often just present different ways of hurting an enemy.  These various axes of advancement give the player something to aim for, a vast possibility space that he can explore and achieve in.

Since advancement is so tied to how the player’s capabilities are represented, the player keeps a much greater awareness of the numbers and how they affect him.  He understands and accepts that an enemy that is 5 levels above him is extremely dangerous, because the numbers say so.  This is totally fine, because most RPG’s are not about combat…  they’re about advancement, acquisition, and a bit of exploration.   (If you really believe that you played Diablo for the click-and-kill combat, I think I have some real estate you might be interested in…)

Shooters by comparison leave skill advancement largely to the player’s mind and body.  Your manual aiming ability is your primary “accuracy stat”, and timing, dodging and area management are all critical traits that don’t live in the game itself.   In most shooters the player’s character is just as effective with a pistol at the beginning of the game as he is at the end…  even though the game progressively demands more of the player himself with larger groups of foes and challenging level layouts.

Shooters also are tuned for action experience, living and dying by their weapon balance and ammunition management…  Killing one enemy is usually 1-3 shots, and an FPS starts to instinctively know which weapon is best for each situation.   This is the biggest reason that shooters are so seriously wounded by the Numbers Game. By increasing enemy health arbitrarily, the choice of weapon eventually becomes less important. Enemies that used to be demolished by a shotgun blast take several hits, causing players to switch from surprise or flanking maneuvers to attrition tactics. Pistols go from being the standby for taking out weak enemies with minimal ammo investment to becoming basically useless. Different skills and sometimes abhorrent tactics are adopted in order to succeed because the game becomes increasingly “unfair”.  Players might even start to think in terms of DPS (Damage per Second), a major metric in MMO’s and a strong symptom of the Numbers Game.

More Than Just Digits

So this argument does nothing to help out the intrepid FPS designer, who still needs to solve these difficulty issues…  He’s willing to do anything to make the game as fun for 10 players as it is for one, and to make gamers feel increasingly awesome for each hour he plays.  I don’t blame folks for falling back on the numbers when they need to; Diablo II is still my favorite game of all time, and when working X-Men Legends I personally applied the Numbers Game to near-excess (more on that another day).  

Solving this problem through other means is really hard, but going the Bags o’ HP route should be a last resort.  I’ll see if I can scrape up some alternatives in the next post.

As I played through the first few levels, I got reminded of weird thing that always bothered me with the Halo series. The weapon you start with, the Assault Rifle, always starts the game on the wrong foot for me.  It always felt anemic and ineffective against enemies, and the third installment wasn’t a whole lot better.  I have no doubt that some of this might be a design choice, since it would be foolish to give the player a powerful weapon at the start of the game.  Of course you need a lot of room for growth so that the player feels a sense of achievement as he/she finds new weaponry. However, for a weapon so obviously inspired by the Pulse Rifle from Aliens (one of the coolest movie guns ever), it’s always been tremendously disappointing to have my anticipation dashed…  The gun looked and sounded so subdued, and had little apparent effect on my opponents.

C’mon, watch this and tell me that you don’t want that rifle to be this badass sounding.

While I got past it and am now churning through Halo 3, the experience got me thinking about what elements make up a weapon that is satisfying to wield. Sure, making a weapon do more damage is what you’d expect, but there are a large number of intangibles that can add to the player’s shooter experience without disrupting the balance of the game.

Most of my roots are from Raven Software, where shooters are (mostly) a way of life. If there’s one thing that members of the studio preached constantly, most particularly my boss Brian Raffel, was that “the player must feel powerful”. It seems obvious, but a lot of times games don’t do enough to make the player feel like the gun in his/her hand is an unstoppable tool of destruction. This is about gratification and player expectation… Movies have trained audiences to expect that guns shoot massive plumes of flame and sparks and are accompanied by tremendous booming sound. In comparison, the sharp, loud crack or pop of a real gun can be a disappointment (although obviously they are intimidating nonetheless in person). Usually just modeling the audio and visual reality of a weapon isn’t quite enough.

Most games that have contemporary-style guns have a few standbys in their arsenal … the pistol, the machinegun or automatic rifle, and the shotgun. As an exercise, I cracked out a bunch of different first-person shooters and captured their weapons on video for the purposes of comparison. These games were:

• Halo 3 (Xbox 360, 2007)
• Resistance: Fall of Man (Playstation 3, 2006)
• Half Life 2 (PC, 2004)
• Quake 4 (PC, 2005)
• Doom (PC, 1993)
• Deus Ex (PC , 2000)
• Bioshock (Xbox 360, 2007)

In each, I took shots of the weapon firing at a surface, and follow with shooting at a “common” opponent. The choice of a “common” opponent is arbitrary (and sometimes driven by convenience when I was capturing footage), but suffice it to say that I wanted to choose an enemy that the player was going to face frequently with a given weapon. A few of these weapons also have “upgrades” that make them more effective, but I wanted to provide feedback on how the weapon would be seen upon first picking it up… will the player be glad he did? Will he or she keep using it because it’s just awesome?

The quality of some of the footage isn’t awesome because of some incredibly dark areas in some of these games, but you should get the idea. If I get a chance I’ll capture some cleaned-up versions of the footage and link ‘em up. Each of the three weapon types has its own video sequence, and for each weapon, I examined several different elements that contribute to a sense of power:

• Gun Visuals: This refers to the visual effect of the weapon’s muzzle flash and bullet trail, and the animation of the weapon itself firing. It is the first thing people think of when they consider how the gun looks and feels.
• Sound Effects: Obviously this refers to the audio of the weapon, from the firing to the impact sounds, if appropriate. It can be tough to balance a sense of “power” in the sound without overdoing it, since the player may hear this same sound thousands of times… if it sounds like Zeus himself leveling mountains, you’ll quickly feel like you’re playing a cartoon.
• Effect on Environment: This includes the visual impact of the bullet on a wall or floor, as well as environmental shifts such as lighting. It is important because the results of stray bullets reinforce the player’s sense of having an impact on their environment and that they have a potent weapon.
• Effect on Opponent: A very important category, this refers to the visual impact on an enemy, and how the enemy reacts to being shot. This is critical to give the player feedback that he is successfully damaging the foe.
• Combat Effectiveness: This is a highly subjective category that is mostly driven by the overarching goals of the game’s arsenal, but worth mentioning. When a weapon is inaccurate or ineffective, it may be such because of an overabundance of ammunition for it, or perhaps the fact that it is designed for certain situations or opponents. It doesn’t change the fact that a wussy weapon can be irritating and simply avoided by frustrated players.

I’m not out to make a stink and necessarily rank these weapons (hey, I know some of the people who made these games) but there are certainly specific guns that do the job better than others. If I wanted to rate a weapon, I’d have to consider its effectiveness and how appropriately it fits into the game’s fiction, which means I’d have to take the entire arsenal into account (and be more fair to tech capabilities) instead of just looking at three weapons. Instead, I’ll talk about their choices and speak briefly about whether they aid or hamper a sense of power.

Pistols

Pistols are a mainstay of shooters because they are the most common type of firearm and most familiar to the audience.  Since Wolfentein 3D it has been put in the hands of new players to give them a taste of gunplay, while still giving them plenty of room to grow into more formidable weaponry.  Quake 2 started the short-lived trend of giving the pistol unlimited ammo so that the player does not have to fall back to melee attacks, but that was quickly eclipsed by the idea of the pistol being a low-powered precision weapon.  Counterstrike in 1999 cemented the concept that a highly skilled player could be incredibly deadly if they could manage the head shots required to get a pistol kill. 

Halo 3

The Halo pistol is a fun one to start with because it is everything Halo’s Assault Rifle isn’t. The visual effects has a nice white-hot flame and a bit of smoke that covers a good chunk of the screen but disappears quickly. The audio is punchy but has a little throaty-ness to it. The effect on the environment is slight, with only a small spark on the walls however. When firing at an opponent, there isn’t a whole lot of feedback because there is little impact and they don’t always seem to hit react, unless you hit them in the head. In gameplay it has a steady rate of fire and reasonable stopping power that makes it fine for a skilled player.

Resistance: Fall of Man

Resistance’s arsenal had a lot of special-function weapons (being from the Ratchet and Clank folk), so they skipped the pistol in this game. Being a fan of every weapon having a “raison d’etre“, I certainly don’t mind that they didn’t just throw in a pistol for extra quantity.

Half-Life 2

The Half-Life pistol is fairly unique in its semi-auto capability, which allows it to shoot as fast as you can hammer the trigger… making it extra-deadly in the hands of the skilled. The weapons in Half-Life tend to go a bit light on the pyrotechnics of the muzzle flash (which is more subtle and realistic), but the sharp crack and echo of the pistol audio makes it pretty dangerous-sounding. The environment impact effects are fairly small and smoky, but the bullet holes and tiny bouncing chunks coming off the wall add a nice sense of the physicality of the environment. When striking an opponent, the bloody impact is small unless there is a wall behind to show the blowthrough, but the nice part is the fact that humanoid enemies do twitch their body parts a bit upon impact, even if they are returning fire at the moment.

Quake 4

Considering it comes from my Alma Mater, I expected some meaty weapons from Quake 4 on par with the macho ones found in the Soldier of Fortune series… However, the pistol’s definitely a bit player in the game, doubtless because of the fact that it does not consume ammo. Its conical muzzle flash is subtle, and the bullet trail doesn’t add much to the gravity of your projectile. The “spacey” firing sound with an incredibly short envelope makes it seem more like air pistol, but again it’s probably on purpose to give more value to the weapons that aren’t “free”. The impact effects are nearly invisible, but at least the weapon has a nice light source when fired in a dark area. The impact on enemies is very slight as well, with only the occasional hit reaction until the enemy goes down.

Doom

Perhaps it’s unfair to use a 15-year-old game in comparison with so many modern titles, but Doom accomplished so much for its time, and some of its fantastic gunfights have only rarely been matched in current games. The pistol from Doom is a bit timid these days, with its red-tinged hand-drawn muzzle flash and staccato “pow” sound effect… The impact effect on the walls is nice and visible, though the smoke rises too quickly taking the attention away from the point of impact. The slight “light” from the muzzle flash does well considering how old the tech is. The effect from striking the opponent is a nice red “flower” of blood, and the sprite enemies play jerky “hit” animation frames enough to get the point across so that you definitely feel like you’re hurting your foe. Finally, the pistol was a solid weapon for base enemies, taking them out in 3 or so shots, unlike pistols from many of the other games.

Deus Ex

This game was not really known for its fast-action gameplay, but it provides an interesting comparison with other FPS weaponry. The muzzle flash is big, but it clearly was mostly a single flat polygon that doesn’t look white hot like its competitors do. The sound effect is certainly not timid, with a big “crashy” gunshot with a long, loud echo. The most disappointing part of this weapon is how little result you see on the environment, spouting only a tiny speck of wall from an impact. Enemies do not fare much better, with almost no effect appearing on a target when hit, and no hit reaction animation. Finally, since the game is extensively skill-based, the player’s accuracy with guns at the beginning of the game is ridiculously low, leading to many impotent-feeling shots.

Bioshock

When I started this exercise, I almost forgot to include Bioshock, but I’m glad it made the list. Its pistol has a bright, large muzzle flash and cascading sparks, including from the hammer, as well as some nice lighting on the dark surroundings. The gunshot sound is a bit deeper than most of the others, but it has a fairly good echo after the initial crack. The surface impacts are the most impressive of this set, with lots of dust and sparks blooming from the point of impact, along with a chunk or two of the impacted surface. The impact on enemies is extremely rewarding, paying successful hits with glistening gouts of blood that nearly rival the excess and stylishness of Gears of War. Finally, the weapon’s fairly effective in combat and can be used as a staple weapon, as long as you can deal with the 6-shot reload cycle. The only unfortunately thing is animation of the weapon itself… Its placement onscreen evokes someone holding the weapon as far to the right of their head as possible, giving the overall firing and reloading actions a sort of weird “gangly” look. Compare this to most games that anchor the weapons about 1/3 from the bottom right corner.

Machineguns

I had to be a bit looser in my definition of “machineguns”, drawing from everything from heavy MG’s to submachine guns to assault rifles to miniguns.  In general, these are the common weapons that people use to mow down opponents.  It also goes all the way back to Wolfenstein 3D (with both the SMG and the gatling), and generally grants a nice sense of power from holding down the trigger to unleash hundreds of bullets.  The application of this weapon varies from game to game, sometimes as a long-range spray weapon for very light enemies, to a closer-range “panic” weapon (see Aliens again) to being a precision implement for rewarding accuracy by putting many bullets in one enemy.  For the purposes of this article I will mostly consider whether it feels freakin’ cool to use. (How’s that for scientific?)

Halo 3

When I break down the Assault Rifle in Halo (which we’ve already discussed as “missing something” for me), I find the muzzle flash itself to be fairly fine. The weapon has a fairly large bulk that covers a chunk of the screen, so the bright, star-shaped muzzle flash does the job well. The muted firing sound is a disappointment however, evoking more of an electric typewriter than Hicks and Vasquez cutting loose. The environment impact effects are very small pockmarks and tiny sparks, although kudos to them for portraying bullets ricochet in random directions afterwards. The enemy impacts are nearly nonexistent, however. The opponents do have a satisfying animated hit reaction when struck, but rarely do I see where I hit them. In general, the Assault Rifle is more effective than it was in previous Halo installments, it still is almost useless unless you are fairly close to your opponent and tends to be skipped over when choosing a weapon loadout.

Resistance: Fall of Man

The M5A2 Carbine in Resistance is the player’s starting weapon, and definitely sees more use than the Halo rifle over the course of the game. This weapon has a nice, bright muzzle flash and a distinct screen shake when the weapon is fired. The sound effect is sharp with a nice echo and seems nicely realistic (in a “WWII movie” sort of way) to contrast with some of the more unusual weapons provided later on in the game. The environment impacts are certainly more prominent than Halo’s, with a high, vertical gout of dirt, although it’s pretty subtle when striking harder surfaces. When hitting an enemy, the dark sprays of blood provide okay feedback, although sometimes it’s hard to tell if you are significantly damaging one of the grunts. This can be a pain because the weapon seems volatile in its effectiveness. Sometimes a few shots do the trick and cut a hose on a foe, but sometimes they just won’t freakin’ die. Perhaps this is to cement the fact that the soldiers are vastly outgunned in this war, but there are too few weapons (and the Carbine shows up too often) to make this point at the cost of fun gameplay.

Half-Life 2

For an automatic weapon, the SMG from Half-Life 2 is a bit different than the others but it fits the bill because it is so frequently used. Once again, the weapon has a fairly subtle muzzle flash that isn’t the white hot light of a dozen suns, but it lets the firing rate and the vibration of the weapon do the talking. It unloads a ton of bullets, more than any other gun on this list, with a throaty chattering sound that blends individual shots into an intimidating roar. The impacts are once again dusty with little physics-driven wall “bits”, but the sheer quantity generated by the rate of fire of this weapon makes it fairly impressive and not too over-the-top. The blood spray from impacts is subtle again, although Valve made the blow-through extremely visible if the enemy is against a wall. The enemies don’t twitch too much when hit by this weapon, but this definitely feels like a precision weapon, so perhaps I don’t feel the need for as much validation of my hits. Overall it feels and plays like a deadly implement.

Quake 4

This weapon is a workhorse in Q4’s arsenal. Its firing effects aren’t too prominent, with the muzzle flash lasting only a frame or two, making individual shots more of a flicker or flash and making the weapon vibration and environment lighting carry the sense of power. The sound is extremely staccato, like the “realistic” Carbine in Resistance, but even more “nail-gun-like” because it is clearly made up of individual short gunshot sounds, unlike the Half-Life 2 SMG that blends them together. The impact effects are good, however, with large sparks cascading from the point of impact. Since the environment is mostly metal, the impact decals are fairly small and don’t leave a lot of evidence of the player’s action. Hitting an enemy spouts a misty spray of blood that is sometimes visible but can be missed, and as with many other games, the opponents don’t always hit react… This is generally for gameplay purposes so that the player does not excessive interrupt the enemy’s ability to fight back, but it definitely can lead to weaker feedback.

Doom

The minigun in Doom is the closest comparison to an automatic rifle for this category. The firing effects are fairly simple again with a hand-drawn flare and a slight environment lighting flicker. Otherwise, this weapon is basically a fast-firing pistol. Actually it literally is, using the same sound, impact, damage effects, and (if I recall correctly) the exact same projectile code as the pistol, so most of the pistol feedback applies. In terms of effectiveness, the weapon is all about peppering your enemies with dozens of pistol shots, making it effective at killing the masses of low-level enemies that is a staple of Doom gameplay.  In addition, it carries a second role is locking down more beefy enemies like the Cacodemon, who gets caught in a “dance” of hit reaction animations while the player keeps firing.

Deus Ex

As with the pistol in Deus Ex, the muzzle flash for the assault rifle is a simple flat sprite that doesn’t have much motion and is slightly transparent, meaning that it doesn’t look “hot” enough. The firing sound effects are also fairly low-key, leading to less of a sense of power, which is surprising given the massive sounds generated from the pistol and shotgun. There is nearly no impact effect from using this weapon, on either the environment or an opponent… the enemies in particular do not hit react much at all from impacts. This is likely to avoid the “hit react dance” that lock down opponents in games like Doom, but the weapon is generally inaccurate enough at the start of the game that players can get frustrated after acquiring what they thought would be an awesome weapon. Early in the game, the best way to get kills is to fire up the body and go for the headshot.

Bioshock

With the Thompson SMG, Bioshock once again delivers a nice sense of power in their weapon effects. The weapon’s muzzle flash is white-hot and the gun’s high rate-of-fire as well as the huge shells ejecting in all directions provides some very gratifying feedback. The sound is nice and staccato, but it also has a verylong echo that helps blend the individual shots together, although a bit less than Half Life 2′s SMG.  Each bullet’s impact on the environment is again very good, spouting an excessive amount of dust and sparks, and hits on enemies once again presents a prominent splash of blood that gives a tremendous sense of reward for being on target.  Overall this weapon feels very good to wield.

Shotguns

The shotgun is an incredibly fun weapon to use in just about any game, being introduced so dramatically in Doom.  Generally it’s a close-range weapon only, scoring almost certain kills within 5-10 feet, but reducing to near ineffectiveness once the enemy is very distant.  Some games rely on the shotgun to be easy to use and allow the player to fire fairly quickly, but in general games limit their rate of fire with extensive recoil or reload times.  However limited it is, the shotgun is nearly always one of the most satisfying weapons to use, from the sound to the effect it has on opponents.  Few gamers don’t crack a smile when they find the very first shotgun in a new game.

Halo 3

When it comes to ferocity, the Halo shotgun is a standout. Its huge muzzle flash covers almost a quarter of the screen with fire, sparks and smoke, and the sound is beefy with a very long echo trailing off. The impact effects are unfortunately very small, although there are enough pellets that it leaves a satisfying number of divots in the terrain afterwards. The impact on enemies is again fairly subtle, although the enemies will almost certainly play a hit reaction… if they survive the gunshot at all.  If they do die, the enemies topple backwards with a nice sense of force. In the video, the brute shows off another nice bit of design.  While they are tough enough that they can’t be flattened with a single shotgun blast, their armor generally gets knocked off with the first shot, giving the player a sense that he accomplished something rather than is continuously piling bullets into a relentless pile of meat.  

Resistance: Fall of Man

Compared with Halo, Resistance’s shotgun is a bit more subdued. Its muzzle flash is softer and less “hot” looking, and the weapon jerks back far enough that it appears to be firing towards the ceiling. Its sound effect is also a little hollower and lacks some of the “boom” of other shotguns. The world impacts are nice however, with the pellets causing many prominent sparks or sprays depending on the surface. The impacts on enemies, again, is mainly shown in their reactions, from hit animations to being thrown backwards as a corpse. It is another classic shotgun in that it is quite effective at taking enemies out in 1-2 hits, but in general it requires a very solid bead on the opponent to score an instant kill.

Half-Life 2

Living up to their precision credo in weaponry, the Half-Life shotgun is different in that its spray is much tighter than other game shotguns, perhaps being tuned for more realism or longer-range shootouts. In terms of visuals, the muzzle flash is 1-2 frames but is conical and meshes well with the nicely-animated weapon recoil. The sound effect is dramatic, but doesn’t rely on echo as much as other shotguns. The world impacts are once again dust and tiny bits, but come in a quantity that is satisfying in a “realistic” fashion. The impact on enemies again will come from the blood seen on the wall behind the enemy rather than the impact itself.  In general, this weapon feels very satisfying without being overly “big”, with its tight shot spread making it deadly at a longer distance with only the six shot capacity as a weakness.

Quake 4

This shotgun has a softer muzzle flash that is a bit difficult to see, mainly because it is attached to the barrel of the gun after it recoils upwards. Since the fiery “action” is pulled towards the upper right of the player view, this shotgun’s impact effects provide most of the visual “punch” of this weapon. Unfortunately, the impact sparks are much less prominent than they were with Quake 4’s machinegun, perhaps due to performance reasons with the number of particles generated. The sound effect is a nice combination of “punchy” and “crunchy” without having to rely on a long echo… The impact on an enemy can be a mixed bag. The standard misty spray of blood is generated when a character is hit, but it doesn’t always animate in response. However, if the enemy is killed, it flies back very far (which can be quite satisfying). This weapon is a good member of the Q4 arsenal, except for its criminally long reload time.

Doom

Every first person shooter owes the Doom shotgun a great debt… When it came out it was the coolest damn weapon players had ever wielded, unmatched for years for its raw sense of power as well the satisfying recoil-and-cock animation after the shot. The hand-drawn muzzle flash itself of course looks dated these days, but the cocking motion up and left still provides a nice perspective view of a weapon that otherwise is only seen from an extreme back angle. The sound is throaty and dangerous-sounding even now, and the environment impacts provide a fairly good cloud of dust. Best of all, when hitting a grunt enemy, from a soldier to an imp, Doom’s shotgun doesn’t disappoint. Most baseline foes perish in one hit, flying backwards in a bloody arc that still grants a satisfying experience.

Deus Ex

The sawed-off shotgun is one of two in Deus Ex, but I used it because it is more “typical” than the game’s semi-auto shotgun.  The muzzle flash sprite, like the other Deus Ex weapons, was again very hard-edged with not enough brightness to make it look “hot” (likely due to using alpha instead of additive transparency for the sprite). Since the gun recoils far up and to the right, your eye focuses more on the impact of your shot, which is marked by only a few bits of wall flung about. Similarly, only a few tiny bits of blood are visible when striking an opponent although a hit reaction animation was nicely more common.  This weapon has a “boomy” sound is as similarly overstated as the pistol, feeling a bit too cartoony to listen to over the course of an entire game.  Finally, since I wanted to compare weapons at a skill level more suitable to first impressions, so once again Deus Ex’s skill system gave me a very low accuracy with this gun.  For a weapon that I pick up and expect to be satisfying, this might have higher realism, but it felt the most impotent of the shotguns. 

Bioshock

Nice to end on a high note…  The Bioshock shotgun was truly a surprise to me when I filmed it, even though I had already played a fair amount of the game.  The muzzle flash is large and is accompanied by a nice satisfying cocking animation that evokes Doom’s. Unfortunately the recoil brings the weapon far to the right like the pistol, which provides the awkward-looking arm positioning seen in the pistol as well. The firing sound effect has a nice “crack” with a long echo trailing off, but the best part are the world impacts, which stir up huge chunks of the ground, leaving dust, sparks, and huge divots. When striking an enemy, the big ol’ blood splash comes through for us again, giving us juicy feedback that we just hurt someone bad.  Overall this is a good weapon that can take an enemy down in a couple of hits, and makes you feel good whether you hit or not… everything a shotgun should be.

More Power, Mister Scott!

To summarize, if you to give me that awesome feeling when I pick up a weapon in a shooter, these are the things I look for:

• A nice sized, white-hot muzzle flash effect, with a small amount of lingering smoke.  Not so much as to obscure what I’m shooting at, though. 
• Good localized world lighting eminating from my weapon.
• A recoil animation that pulls back significantly, but doesn’t pull back so far that the muzzle flash isn’t pointed at the target.
• A bit of screen shake for more powerful weapons.
• Sound effects with a sharp attack and a nice tail (“echo”).  If the weapon is automatic, make the tail enough that they blend the various shots together into a “growl”.
• Wall impacts that impart a lot of dust (or sparks vs. metal) and loose nice, visible, unrealistic chunks of wall.
• Impact decals that are at least the size of a fist, and more specifically can be seen up to 10 feet.
• Enemy impacts marked with a significant splash of blood, a size that equals perhaps 1/3 of the body.
• Enemy hit reactions whenever possible, and always with a shotgun.  If it is possible to give the enemy’s body a jerk without disrupting his ability to act (see Half Life 2), use that.
• An enemy that dies from a gunshot should not crumple straight to the ground, but be knocked back slightly from a pistol kill, and signficantly from a shotgun kill.
• An enemy’s death should be marked by a distinctive scream or other sound so that they know when the opponent is down, even if he continues to ragdol upright for a period of time.
• The more inaccuracy you impart on your gun, the more important the visibility of your hits need to be, so that the player doesn’t assume they are scoring hits when they are not.  Regardless, avoid excessive inaccuracy in any gun to avoid frustration.

I hope this little tour has been informative in how different weapons can give that ol’ feeling of power. If I have time I may add new games with similar weapons for comparison. However, what might be more useful is undergoing the same exercise for third person weaponry… Compared to first-person, a third-person game has a much more difficult time conveying a sense of power because the action isn’t quite as “in-your-face”. As such, some games like Grand Theft Auto never really achieve the gratifying result of a gunshot that an FPS can. I’ve seen a few that do, but that will wait for another day.

A bit of history on this, I wrote it while I was in the midst of a job search.  They had asked for an analysis of this sort for one of several games, including my fave, Diablo 2.  I was uncomfortable revealing this at post time because it would have been unfair to reveal their hiring practices, but this was for the sadly-departed Iron Lore in Maynard, Massachusetts. 

At the time they were looking for a lead designer for their ultimately entertaining and polished Diablo-like game Titan Quest.  I visited their studios in a cool old New England building, and met with folks like Brian Sullivan and Jeff Goodsill…  It was a nice operation with what seemed like a great culture and feel, and it saddens me that they weren’t able to keep the money flowing.  The public at large (and many developers) seem to forget how hard it is to have an independent studio these days…  New IP is difficult to get attention for, and the game-buying public tends to pool their money on a few selected hits and ignore the rest.

Anyway, back to Diablo…  It was kismet that they had asked me about that game not too long after I finished X-Men Legends.  As you get done developing a game, you mind is filled with the choices you made, and all the things you could have done to make the game better.  Sometimes it’s a struggle to close the book and move on, and it feels important to keep a log of what you’d do different if there was a next time. 

God, my head was filled with stuff like this.  X-Men Legends had an early start conceived as a turn-based RPG ala Final Fantasy before I evolved it into the real-time adventure that got released.  Things get so clear after the fact, but in the midst of it we were struggling to get our new console technology going and iterating on AI.  The XML really wasn’t fully playable (particularly having good companion AI) until pretty near the end of production.  (Although I should say that the unstoppable Simon Parkinson really lived up to the challenge of making that whole package work together well).  But, as even the mighty Penny Arcade has finally begun to understand, sometimes games play like shit until they are fun.  It doesn’t happen with every project, but there are times when you just have to trust your instincts and carry out a plan.

In the case of X-Men, there were a few things that dawned on me too late to really get into the design.  The first was a smaller realization…  For a good chunk of development we were looking for solid gameplay elements that took advantage of the various forms of elemental attacks that the X-Men used…  Typically it was difficult because it was custom-scripted, and generally required one specific hero at the expense of all others in order to enact, which went up against our credo of letting the player choose their favorite X-Men and focus on them.  However, after Harvey and Randy Smith’s excellent talk on emergence at GDC 2004, I came back to work all fired up about the possibilities of the interactions of objects with elemental properties and how they could create some unique gameplay.  Creating more water that could be frozen or barrels that leaked flammable oil would have added a lot of variation to the X-Men’s activities, but the idea really came in too late to really act on.  We were pretty much at alpha at that point and couldn’t take the risk.  Ah well.

The second inspiration I got, however, came nearly at the very end of the game, as we were doing final tuning.  For so long, we had been chasing the dragon of encouraging the player to switch characters.  Ostensibly this was to support the X-Men chestnut of “combo attacks” like the Fastball Special.  These would have, ironically, been a breeze if we had stuck with the turn-based Final Fantasy model, but they were really hard to implement and control in the chaotic environment of a real-time, multiple-enemy brawler.  Anyway, switching characters with the D-Pad was a great combat option that existed, but generally any one character was powerful enough to deal with any challenge.  As it was still a bit disorienting to do a lot in battle (and a bit inconvenient because of the use of the D-pad), the player usually just switched for variety and flavor.

What was apparent to me right at the end of development (not that it was a revelation) is that using powers were always going to be the most exciting thing, because that’s where we lavished the most love and custom effects.  The unique opportunity that existed in X-Men Legends, however, was that there were four characters that were usable most of the time.  So, while in other games you shoot your wad and drain yourself of power, then go off and recharge or drink a potion or something, our players could continually switch characters and use that character’s powers while the drained character was busy recharging.  As such, we could have introduced a mechanic that encouraged the player to keep a power chain going, rewarding them for using power after power, ultimately reinforcing the fun that should exist with all these extravagant powres going off.  I think that would have completely cemented the “team” feel and brought the game beyond just being a multi-character elaboration on Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance (and I make no claims that we don’t owe that game a great debt).

Of course by then the game was nearly out the door, and I was gearing up to move on to new opportunities.  I feel a bit sad that we weren’t able to get that sort of thing in, but since that game has spawned two successful sequels built on the same mechanics, I guess I can’t complain.  It just proves that there is always one more feature, one more bit of polish for every game you work on. You can either kill yourself over it, or just save those ideas for next time…

In contrast, as I’ve stated before, I like to play shooters (starting with Doom and its awesome shotgun) balls-out fearless, working out interesting ways to leap into the fray and rely on guts and skill to get the job done. Sure I like sessions of strategy too, but there are times where I just enjoy acting like a hero and being rewarded as such. I don’t even mind getting mowed down in tragic fashion if it’s due to my bravado. Such an approach does play havoc with my survivability in certain online contests (notably against Mr. Carlson), but I have fun doing it nonetheless.

The classic 100% health model, however, played a bit at odds with my play style. For me, each room or area of Doom is a fairly self-contained challenge, but upon completion I might have lower health than is practical to move onto the next session and still survive… you can’t always rely on the placement of health kits to get you back up to snuff. I’d often load up a save and try to get through that area with more health. This honed my skill and let me practice new ways of clearing a room, but as time went on, I found myself starting to play the game very “safe”… luring enemies around corners, slowly harassing opponents and so on. Doom suddenly became a very slow game to me. I enjoy tactical exercises like Rainbow Six as much as the next guy, but it wasn’t what I was looking for in a classic action shooter.

In 2001, however, that changed with Halo. By introducing shields that recharged once you remove yourself from immediate danger, it made my starting point for each challenge roughly the same. Suddenly, I could be heroic, and as long as I persevered, all was forgiven. Even sudden sneak attacks, where an enemy crammed into some unknowable corner got the drop on me, could be survived without excessive aggravation. I didn’t have to rely on reloads to teach me about each room. I still was “rated” on my progress by how much of my valuable ammo I used up, but by being encouraged to switch weapons on the battlefield quickly, I felt continuously propelled forward, ready to take the next challenge fully replenished.

I would have thought Bungie’s reinvention of the classic health system to be one of the most shrewd, calculated design choices in recent history, but I am told that it was a bit more accidental, borne of the sci-fi setting and the expectations of having a “force field”. This is evidenced by the fact that Halo 1 still had non-regenerating “health” under all those shields, replenished at an incredibly stingy pace. Halo 2 ditched all that and went for a straight regen model, ditching “classic” health altogether and cementing regen as something of an industry-standard model, like WASD and Half-Life’s “directional damage” HUD.

Other shooters adopted health regen in the meantime, like Call of Duty 2, Gears of War, and Blacksite: Area 51. Aside from the pacing differences, it was attractive because it eliminated the need to litter a battlefield with artificial constructs like easily-visible health packs (or worse yet, “food”). One would argue (Peter included) that surviving hundreds of bullets without tangible aid is unrealistic, but the regen model moves the issue behind the scenes, making the immersion a little bit stronger. In addition, health regen has invented a way to take a whole meter off the game interface, helping push forward a new generation of minimal-to-no-HUD games.

I certainly don’t consider the regen health model to be a panacea for all games. Multiplayer games have awesomely tense moments when one individual is reduced to low health and must either tough it out (e.g. in Counterstrike) or find a location or teammate to get healed up (e.g. in Team Fortress 2). You might consider it a bold evolution in shooters, but at minimum I don’t think anyone can argue that it’s not a great new tool for game designers to have in their gameplay toolbox.

Well, there’s my opinion. It’s ironic that I’m defending Halo since I’m not a particularly big fan of it… The second half of the first one was a slog for me, and Halo 2 seemed jumbled and punishing. I haven’t picked up the third one yet, so after I finish Bioshock (which will be after I get my poor, broken Xbox back from Microsoft) I’ll check it out. Perhaps we can get a post from a die-hard Halo fan, like Dan O?

[Ed: Check out Peter's preceding article here.]

I had a brief moment of doubt when the demo came out and I didn’t have as much fun as I did at E3… it seemed to be missing a sense of context, and the frame rate seemed worse. Nonetheless, since I had owned a PS3 for two months and still had no games, I bought it this weekend and cracked it out on Sunday.

I love it. Screw the people that gave it weak reviews. It’s got:

• Dazzling visuals: The game is beautiful from the character to the carnage, and never really breaks the polish.
• Great storytelling: Sure, it’s a beat-em-up, but the story is simple but compelling, and contains some awesome moments.
• Incredible Audio: The voice acting is top-notch, and when I reached one of the bosses and heard her lilting pizzicato theme song, I realized that there was something really inspired going on.



• Memorable characters: Like a cast from Metal Gear Solid, the villains are over-the-top and tinged with humor. And Kai one of the most enjoyable characters I’ve seen in a game.
• Entertaining combat: The combat makes a button-masher look cool doing it, but also has some fine tactical decision-making. However, success does not hinge on memorization of crazy move strings… the actions and responses logically fit into the system of blocking and stances.
• Mass destruction: Anyone that knows me understands how I love Dynasty Warriors and being able to take down thousands. Part of that is the mild strategic decision-making, but the rest is being able to wade into a huge group and mix it up. Heavenly Sword is all about mass carnage, and the ability to ultimately litter the battlefield with corpses.
• “Aftertouch” ranged attacks: Holding the “throw” button after hurling or shooting an object allows you to steer it with the tilt axis, and it works surprisingly well (although it makes it hard as hell to have a cat on your lap as you play). It never gets old, and is a blast.

Six hours of gameplay you say? Well, I’ve never been one to shy away from a great experience because of play time.

It’s clear that Sony put a tremendous amount of money behind this game. Often such flagrant spectacle can be wasted, but all the production values and great voice acting took a very high-quality brawler and turned it into a fantastic package to own. I’m glad my PS3 is finally getting a workout.

Analysis of Diablo 2