Ultratwinkie said:
the only way to learn is the hard way. the ONLY way Mp can be designed for noobs is making an incredible AI that fights for you so you don't need skill, but then it would be boring. so you need to do trial and error, and try to get better. you dont need to be the best off the bat, just ease into the mp gradually.
There are two points I feel I should make.
First, GoW 1/2 show many ways in which it's possible to make the early hours
enjoyable (not necessarily easy) and to keep a rookie player feeling like they'd achieved something.
There's the chainsaw for one. A cosmetic addition if it were simply thrown into any game, but nonetheless, there's a weapon that isn't actually unbalanced yet still allows noobs to get kills even before they can aim well.
Then there's the cover mechanism. Cover in GoW (in theory) means that skill disparity isn't so pronounced in a dogfight; one-on-one fights are rarely resolved if one player knows he's outmatched and refuses to reveal himself too much. This places the onus of the game on forcing enemies out of cover. Doing this takes a minimum of "skill" in the sense of hand-eye coordination and intimate weapon familiarity (all integral to skill, but daunting to the new player) so it's an area in which rookies can feel they've helped. But how to flush someone out of cover? For starters, there's flanking. So long as a new player understands basic tactics and in-game navigation, flanking is something they can do decently; all it takes is circling the combat to a ninety degree angle. Then there's grenades. Nothin' better to flush 'em out. And what do we see here? GoW has a targeting system for its grenades. Unlike all other games I've seen it blatantly tells you where your grenades will go.* With that one feature grenades went from being a weapon for the good-to-pro (as they usually are, IME) to being a weapon for everyone, with the question being when, how and where to place them, not whether your dexterity and memorisation of the grenade arc can place the grenade where you want it. As you can see, GoW 2 makes concessions to new players while still keeping skill part of the equation. That's in theory: on Live it could very well be terribly balanced - I don't know. Still that would be a problem of execution, not conception.
And the second point, which I've been touching on here, isn't that devs have to take skill out of the equation, just that they can make games in which skillful play doesn't exclude mechanics that even new players can grasp quickly and use effectively. Nine times out of ten I still wiped the floor with my friend. But if he was smart, or he got the drop on me, he could place a grenade, or rev his chainsaw, or flank me, and I'd be fishfood. Most other games I've played, even when this friend of mine gets the jump he goes home packing.
*And I remember one hardcore nutter for whom this was a concession too far: You can't tell people where their grenades will
go! That takes all the
skill out of it!
