How cover system ruined third person shooters

[B-Cell_v1legacy]

Just find out fantastic video that sum up everything wrong with cover system. except he praise vanquish which imo a terrible game.

even games like max payne has cover system now. its such a lazy design. theres the reason why third person genre is not strong today.

what are your thoughs?

discuss

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

This is one of the reasons why having difficulty settings is important in games. Mass Effect 2 is one of my all time favorite games, but on higher difficulties all you do is sit in cover. On lower difficulties you're free to run and gun like a madman and it is glorious. Especially if you play with vanguard class. Mass Effect 3 fixed a lot of the issues by making levels more open and changing the way that health and armor works compared to ME2. Even with cover system in place, ME3 is a really great third person shooter/RPG hybrid.

For FPS games, difficulty settings are important because PC gamers get to benefit from having a mouse instead of an analog stick and vice versa for consoles. Playing on a higher difficulty setting shouldn't be some kind of achievement and it shouldn't reward you with special unlocks. It should just exist to tailor gameplay according to your skill or device that you use for controlling your character.

 

[B-Cell_v1legacy]

Vanquish is boring, though. It has its moments, but mostly it's boring. I don't know why people complain about it being too short. I want it to end.

If he didn't sully his argument by lumping Max Payne 3 in, this would be a video I'd share. He says you can only run and gun in that game once you've memorized the enemy positions, which is false. Dead Men Walking proves it.

max payne 3 is not even a shadow of original max payne. so he have a point. max payne 1 is still hold up and is masterpiece.

its a good game on its own.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Cover is fine when it can be used to increase movement like the Gears wall-bounce or the GRFS cover swap. Just like any other mechanic or game element, it will be used poorly more often than not. Look at how over and poorly used open worlds are.

Vanquish is boring, though. It has its moments, but mostly it's boring.

You know what ruined shooters? Consoles... With a cover system, you could finally take your time and push the dot towards the target with the imprecise stick.

A game is boring if you choose to play it in a boring manner. You go on and on about how shooters should be about movement and how cover sucks yet you go and play Vanquish as a cover shooter and complain it's boring. You even use the most boring weapons to boot. Just think about it, you're in agreement with IGN, which automatically means you're wrong.

The MMS ruined shooters. Will you ever get off your prejudice against controllers? They work perfectly fine in fast-paced twitchy shooters. And shooters emphasizing movement are doing just fine on consoles.

Mass Effect 3 fixed a lot of the issues by making levels more open and changing the way that health and armor works compared to ME2.

ME3 reduced cooldowns pretty majorly, especially with the weight system that allowed you to lower the already faster cooldown times even more. The ME3 MP was a blast to play, plus there were so many classes that played so differently like the Geth Infiltrator who probably was the best melee class in the game, phantoms would melt before me.

---

And about 5 years from now, everyone is going to realize the Souls series ruined action games. That's not saying the Souls games suck but there's so many games copying them now and possibly even creating a "Souls-like" genre god forbid. Action games are losing their fast-pace, fast movement, combos, and technical mastery because devs are copying the Souls formula just like what happened to shooters and open world games.

 

[Saelune]

This is one of the reasons why having difficulty settings is important in games. Mass Effect 2 is one of my all time favorite games, but on higher difficulties all you do is sit in cover. On lower difficulties you're free to run and gun like a madman and it is glorious. Especially if you play with vanguard class. Mass Effect 3 fixed a lot of the issues by making levels more open and changing the way that health and armor works compared to ME2. Even with cover system in place, ME3 is a really great third person shooter/RPG hybrid.

For FPS games, difficulty settings are important because PC gamers get to benefit from having a mouse instead of an analog stick and vice versa for consoles. Playing on a higher difficulty setting shouldn't be some kind of achievement and it shouldn't reward you with special unlocks. It should just exist to tailor gameplay according to your skill or device that you use for controlling your character.

I liked being a Sentinel in ME1. A shield to protect myself, and lots of abilities to stop the enemy from shooting. Whether its dampening their weapons, stunning them, or flinging them around the ceiling.

 

[DefunctTheory]

Don't be ridiculous, cover didn't ruin shooters.

Walls and terrain did.

Remember in the original Doom, where you didn't have line of sight on every monster in the level right from the get go? What kind of developer makes a game like that? All those stupid corridors, dragging out fights and blocking movement and bullets.

The only good shooter, third or otherwise, is one that takes place on a completely flat surface with no blocking features, where only speed, twitches and pure ADHD matters.

 

[Smithnikov_v1legacy]

Don't be ridiculous, cover didn't ruin shooters.

Walls and terrain did.

Remember in the original Doom, where you didn't have line of sight on every monster in the level right from the get go? What kind of developer makes a game like that? All those stupid corridors, dragging out fights and blocking movement and bullets.

The only good shooter, third or otherwise, is one that takes place on a completely flat surface with no blocking features, where only speed, twitches and pure ADHD matters.

Robotron 2084 in other words?

 

[votemarvel]

ME3 reduced cooldowns pretty majorly, especially with the weight system that allowed you to lower the already faster cooldown times even more. The ME3 MP was a blast to play, plus there were so many classes that played so differently like the Geth Infiltrator who probably was the best melee class in the game, phantoms would melt before me.

I loathed the weight system in ME3 as it pushed the balance even further in favour of the gun based classes. As an Adept I found myself having to choose between good weapons or good cooldowns.

Flip to the opposite side of the Soldier and all I had to do was put the ammo powers on my weapons at the start of the level and I was set. Adrenaline Rush taking a little longer to cooldown was in no way a hindrance when you could have all the best weapons and an ammo power for every situation.

 

[sXeth]

Any tl;dr versions?

I find cover system work pretty well in games like Uncharted where enemies will flank you so you need to constantly change position, but it can be terrible when you're just statically shooting in a corridor just waiting for them to die. So like everything it depends on how well it's used. Not to mention that a shooters always had "cover", just not a dedicated button for it.

Yeah, some do it well. And some you may as well be playing Time Crisis/Area 51. Which for those who didn't have ubiqitous arcades, were arcade machines where you pushed a pedal to pop in and out of cover to plink away at the enemies with your light gun, then the rails just automatically advanced you to the next cover point.

The toss-up on whether cover use is a proper mechanic is pretty ancient. I remember playing Duke Nukem 3d in High School computer class, and people arguing back and forth because someone insisted the football field map (which is entirely open space and flat terrain) was the high skill one and others preferring the tactical play on maps with walls and corridors and stuff.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

The thing I don't get about disliking is controllers is that even if they are harder to master in matter of aiming... doesn't this just add to the difficulty and immersion? Aiming a gun is hard, the surgical precision available with a mouse is sort of ridiculous when you think about it.

Is there that much of an impact of the Souls games on other action games? It seemed to be mostly focused on creating clones or higher difficulty.

I agree about everything with your controller assessment. I actually do like the fact that they don't have that surgical accuracy as you say because it makes gunfights last longer especially with how popular low-health MMSs became. Even with a controller, I don't get why anyone wants a game with realistic bullet damage when the time-to-kill in a game is far less than real life because controllers and obviously KB/M are so much more accurate than any human marksman. How is a shooter realistic if aiming is so easy and fast? I prefer high-health multiplayer shooters as they emphasize skill a lot more as it's easy to spray with an automatic and land 2-3 bullets but up that to just 5-6 bullets and the skill required for a kill goes up quite a bit.

It's early with regards to Souls clones and whatnot. I'm more so "calling" that Souls games will end up ruining action games like how MMSs ruined shooters for awhile. We've already got Lords of the Fallen, The Surge, Nioh, and a few 2D Souls-like games. There's at least Code Vein on the way that I know of. There's a great video by Mark Brown in his Game Maker's Toolkit series [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx7BWayWu08Mark] on the subject of how a Souls-like genre is a bad idea. Even if Souls-like doesn't become a genre, I think the slower paced nature of the Souls games is going to take over most action games regardless if the devs are going for a straight clone or not. God of War looks to definitely play slower for example.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

ME3 reduced cooldowns pretty majorly, especially with the weight system that allowed you to lower the already faster cooldown times even more. The ME3 MP was a blast to play, plus there were so many classes that played so differently like the Geth Infiltrator who probably was the best melee class in the game, phantoms would melt before me.

I loathed the weight system in ME3 as it pushed the balance even further in favour of the gun based classes. As an Adept I found myself having to choose between good weapons or good cooldowns.

Flip to the opposite side of the Soldier and all I had to do was put the ammo powers on my weapons at the start of the level and I was set. Adrenaline Rush taking a little longer to cooldown was in no way a hindrance when you could have all the best weapons and an ammo power for every situation.

Huh? The biotic classes were so awesome because of the biotic explosions. The Asari Adept was ridiculous in the MP because they have Stasis, and warp + throw. They could not only "freeze" enemies like phantoms but they could make their own biotic explosions with warp then throw. All you needed to equip as a weapon in ME3 as a non-weapon class was the Carnifex.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

No, it's boring because it's a flashy Platinum game with a bland, generic story, blander characters, bland music and setting. I've shown that I can play levels by sliding around like a retard. It doesn't suddenly make the game awesome. Get off your high horse.

I don't know what MMS stands for. It's not prejudice. Controller HAVE made shooters worse. Controllers ARE pretty flawed. If I was prejudiced against controllers, I wouldn't be using them.

Edit: Oh, I forgot auto-aim. Controllers are also to blame for auto-aim being in shooters that shouldn't have it.

You slid around with just bog-standard automatic guns. MMS = Modern Military Shooter. Console players aren't having trouble with the new wave of shooters that emphasize movement. Console players don't like auto-aim or aim-assist. Rockstar is still using auto-aim, which only was necessary back in the PS1 and early PS2 days before shooter controls got good. Even casual shooters like Uncharted don't have auto-aim.

And about 5 years from now, everyone is going to realize the Souls series ruined action games. That's not saying the Souls games suck but there's so many games copying them now and possibly even creating a "Souls-like" genre god forbid. Action games are losing their fast-pace, fast movement, combos, and technical mastery because devs are copying the Souls formula just like what happened to shooters and open world games.

Hack and slash games killed themselves with disappointing releases like DMC4, DmC, Bayonetta, Metal Gear Rising and Ninja Gaiden 3. The cost of developing for the PS3 and Xbox 360 was another factor. Japanese devs had trouble keeping up.

Huh? DMC4 is considered the best battle system in DMC and Bayonetta is considered the best spectacle fighter ever.

Maybe change the analog stick sensitivity? In Uncharted I didn't have any problem popping headshots late in the game once I acclimated with the controls

I beat the first two on Crushing.

Beating Uncharted on Crushing isn't a test of skill, it's just tedium and patience (as the video in the opening post states). Why would you even play the games on Crushing if you don't like that type of playstyle?