I've been really unhappy with the state of online multiplayer shooters in the last, oh, five or six years, and I've had a really hard time putting my finger on it. At first I thought it was the constant aping of the modern military shooter sub-sub genre but, while it certainly plays apart, it is not the focal point of my unhappiness. However, I finally realized it tonight.
Its fully customizable loadouts. Its a feature that has destroyed everything about multiplayer. It had good intentions, the theory behind its implementation being that giving the player more control over their individual characters could only enhance the experience. However, in their quest to explore new avenues to take gaming, they unintentionally destroyed two of the four core values that hold up the multiplayer table.
See, the result of an engagement in a game of deathmatch can be influenced by four things (or the core values, as I like to call them). In order of importance, they are positioning, player skill, weapon quality, and Sheer Dumb Luck (SDL for short).
Broken down, positioning refers to where the players are positioned during the engagement. As a simple example, if you are facing the back of your enemy, than you have the positioning advantage. A player with an explosive weapon usually wants some distance from their enemy, as well as to fire at them from above.
Player skill is the easiest of the four to understand, as well as the most obvious. The player who is better at the game has the advantage. Someone who's played the game for six months is going to have an advantage over the player who just picked the game up yesterday.
Weapon Quality refers to the weapon you are carrying. A player with an assault rifle is going to have the advantage over a player with a pistol (unless this is Halo: Combat Evolved).
SDL simply accounts for Murphy's Law in an engagement; your grenade didn't bounce different then you expected and you end up blowing yourself up. Your auto aim catches an enemy in the background and pulls your shot off. Basically, deathmatch is chaotic, and random things will happen.
Of course, the four feed off each other. The weapon quality of a shotgun is decreased if your opponent is across the room. A player may be skillful with a rifle, but is bad with the rocket launcher. A player who is brand new to the game will have a chance if they're better positioned than the veteran. The table of the multiplayer experience will collapse if all four legs aren't more or less balanced.
Customizable loadouts destroy this balance by completely eliminating the weapon quality leg of the table.
See, in the days of Doom II, Unreal Tournament, and Halo, every player spawned with the same weapon at the beginning of the game, and would respawn with that weapon when they were killed. The good weapons, or "power" weapons, had to found and picked up from around the map (as well as replenishing ammo for them). Killer a player who held an advantage in weapon quality would reward the player by allowing them to improve their weapon quality.
With Customizable Loadouts, a player can choose the quality of the weapons they spawn with. While this sounds good in theory, in practice its actually damaging to that particular leg of the core values. See, may sound simple in theory (in a rock-beats-scissors sort of way), but there's actually a lot of depth to it. Because weapons had to be picked up from the map, a players weapon quality would reset upon every death. Upon spawning, you would then have to choose whether to try and find a better weapon than what you currently have. Not only that, but by having weapons spawn on the map, level designers could control how many players at one time could hold the weapon. In a game of Halo, the Rocket Launcher usually only had one or two spawn points, depending on the size of the map. To go along with this, level designers could also control what kind of weapons would spawn in a map; a cramped, small level probably isn't going to have a sniper rifle spawning in it.
All of this went out the window with customizable loadouts. A player no longer had to worry about improving their weapon quality, since they could control what they spawned with throughout the entirety of the game. Level designers had the ability to control what appeared on their maps taken away, which I can't help but feel has led to the decline of the quality of map design. Gamers, with our burning desire to win at all costs, would find the one thing that worked and abuse it, which has lead to such tragedies as the infamous "noob-tubes" of the Modern Warfare series. The weapon quality core value had been effectively ground into saw-dust, completely upsetting the balance of the table.
Since each core value is effected by the others, the destruction of the weapon quality value severely altered the other three. Most notable would have to be the most important; positioning, as positioning has become more and more on the hated "camping" aspect.
Camping has always been a problem with multiplayer games, but nowadays has reached pandemic proportions. Before, steps had to be taken before a player could camp; they would have to spawn, track down a weapon that would go well with where you plan to camp, and then make it to that area, hoping that you weren't killed along the way. If you were killed, then you'd have to start the whole process again. Even if you made it, you would have no choice but to abandon that position when you eventually ran out of ammo for your weapon. Going further, if you were killed while trying to camp, you would, again, have to go through the long process of gathering the necessary resources to camp.
Nowadays, you can choose to spawn with the perfect camping kit immediately following death. Which of course means you can proceed directly to a camping position. Because of the unbalancing of the weapon quality value, positioning has been reduced to simple camping, as it has never been easier to do so. Since camping isn't that hard of a thing to do, Player Skill becomes less relevant, and, since camping is a repetitive behavior, SDL has also been effectively reduced, turning a game of deathmatch into a repetitive slog. While its true that there are always players that choose not to camp, there will always be a substantial portion of the community that will do it, a larger number than normal since its incredibly easy and effective to do now.
I could go on about some of the other things that go into this argument, about how its promoted lone wolfing in a team game to a ridiculous degree, how weapon selection has become more and more samish despite an ever expanding arsenal to choose from, or about how the unbalanced table means that it would be next to impossible to learn how to properly play the game since it would be so emphasized on player skill, thus creating a toxic unaccessible environment for new players. But I won't.
There you have it. Its my firm belief that customizable loadouts have been nothing but bad news for the state of shooters and, with Halo 4 adopting it on a limited bases (I'm also predicting that Halo 5 will completely implement it), I don't see things getting better anytime soon, especially not with this broken industry that insists on soullessly copying whatever is selling at the moment.
Its fully customizable loadouts. Its a feature that has destroyed everything about multiplayer. It had good intentions, the theory behind its implementation being that giving the player more control over their individual characters could only enhance the experience. However, in their quest to explore new avenues to take gaming, they unintentionally destroyed two of the four core values that hold up the multiplayer table.
See, the result of an engagement in a game of deathmatch can be influenced by four things (or the core values, as I like to call them). In order of importance, they are positioning, player skill, weapon quality, and Sheer Dumb Luck (SDL for short).
Broken down, positioning refers to where the players are positioned during the engagement. As a simple example, if you are facing the back of your enemy, than you have the positioning advantage. A player with an explosive weapon usually wants some distance from their enemy, as well as to fire at them from above.
Player skill is the easiest of the four to understand, as well as the most obvious. The player who is better at the game has the advantage. Someone who's played the game for six months is going to have an advantage over the player who just picked the game up yesterday.
Weapon Quality refers to the weapon you are carrying. A player with an assault rifle is going to have the advantage over a player with a pistol (unless this is Halo: Combat Evolved).
SDL simply accounts for Murphy's Law in an engagement; your grenade didn't bounce different then you expected and you end up blowing yourself up. Your auto aim catches an enemy in the background and pulls your shot off. Basically, deathmatch is chaotic, and random things will happen.
Of course, the four feed off each other. The weapon quality of a shotgun is decreased if your opponent is across the room. A player may be skillful with a rifle, but is bad with the rocket launcher. A player who is brand new to the game will have a chance if they're better positioned than the veteran. The table of the multiplayer experience will collapse if all four legs aren't more or less balanced.
Customizable loadouts destroy this balance by completely eliminating the weapon quality leg of the table.
See, in the days of Doom II, Unreal Tournament, and Halo, every player spawned with the same weapon at the beginning of the game, and would respawn with that weapon when they were killed. The good weapons, or "power" weapons, had to found and picked up from around the map (as well as replenishing ammo for them). Killer a player who held an advantage in weapon quality would reward the player by allowing them to improve their weapon quality.
With Customizable Loadouts, a player can choose the quality of the weapons they spawn with. While this sounds good in theory, in practice its actually damaging to that particular leg of the core values. See, may sound simple in theory (in a rock-beats-scissors sort of way), but there's actually a lot of depth to it. Because weapons had to be picked up from the map, a players weapon quality would reset upon every death. Upon spawning, you would then have to choose whether to try and find a better weapon than what you currently have. Not only that, but by having weapons spawn on the map, level designers could control how many players at one time could hold the weapon. In a game of Halo, the Rocket Launcher usually only had one or two spawn points, depending on the size of the map. To go along with this, level designers could also control what kind of weapons would spawn in a map; a cramped, small level probably isn't going to have a sniper rifle spawning in it.
All of this went out the window with customizable loadouts. A player no longer had to worry about improving their weapon quality, since they could control what they spawned with throughout the entirety of the game. Level designers had the ability to control what appeared on their maps taken away, which I can't help but feel has led to the decline of the quality of map design. Gamers, with our burning desire to win at all costs, would find the one thing that worked and abuse it, which has lead to such tragedies as the infamous "noob-tubes" of the Modern Warfare series. The weapon quality core value had been effectively ground into saw-dust, completely upsetting the balance of the table.
Since each core value is effected by the others, the destruction of the weapon quality value severely altered the other three. Most notable would have to be the most important; positioning, as positioning has become more and more on the hated "camping" aspect.
Camping has always been a problem with multiplayer games, but nowadays has reached pandemic proportions. Before, steps had to be taken before a player could camp; they would have to spawn, track down a weapon that would go well with where you plan to camp, and then make it to that area, hoping that you weren't killed along the way. If you were killed, then you'd have to start the whole process again. Even if you made it, you would have no choice but to abandon that position when you eventually ran out of ammo for your weapon. Going further, if you were killed while trying to camp, you would, again, have to go through the long process of gathering the necessary resources to camp.
Nowadays, you can choose to spawn with the perfect camping kit immediately following death. Which of course means you can proceed directly to a camping position. Because of the unbalancing of the weapon quality value, positioning has been reduced to simple camping, as it has never been easier to do so. Since camping isn't that hard of a thing to do, Player Skill becomes less relevant, and, since camping is a repetitive behavior, SDL has also been effectively reduced, turning a game of deathmatch into a repetitive slog. While its true that there are always players that choose not to camp, there will always be a substantial portion of the community that will do it, a larger number than normal since its incredibly easy and effective to do now.
I could go on about some of the other things that go into this argument, about how its promoted lone wolfing in a team game to a ridiculous degree, how weapon selection has become more and more samish despite an ever expanding arsenal to choose from, or about how the unbalanced table means that it would be next to impossible to learn how to properly play the game since it would be so emphasized on player skill, thus creating a toxic unaccessible environment for new players. But I won't.
There you have it. Its my firm belief that customizable loadouts have been nothing but bad news for the state of shooters and, with Halo 4 adopting it on a limited bases (I'm also predicting that Halo 5 will completely implement it), I don't see things getting better anytime soon, especially not with this broken industry that insists on soullessly copying whatever is selling at the moment.
*looks up* Fuck, I didn't mean to write an article. Lemme... lemme put it in spoiler tags so it doesn't immediately look like a massive, unreadable wall-o-text. I also might be coming off as a bit of an insane person. Its just that this has bothered me for a long time, and I'm just sick of it. This is not good for gaming. Its just not.
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