hanselthecaretaker said:
One could easily get the impression that ADS is unplayable to you from the above comments; at least in the same way 30fps is unplayable to a lot of people.
Right, I can see you're really struggling with this so I'll do you a solid and spell it out in no uncertain terms:
ADS- not unplayable. I use it myself on occasion. As I explained here:
Don't get me wrong, Operation Flashpoint is one of my all time favourite first person shooters, and it offered both a roving, zoomable crosshair -and- Ironsights. I found myself using ADS in that game quite a lot, since engagement distance is often 200 meters or more and you want your shot to be *just so.* But even in a game tailored for long range firefights, I still appreciated and used crosshairs a lot.
What I just don't get is why ADS automatically has to be bad.
My beef with ADS is that it has grown to replace a system that worked better without it. Crosshairs allowed better visibility, more information about how your bullet spread was expected to perform, sometimes even changed colour depending on whether your target was friend or foe. They also got to show off the guns doing what they do best- blasting off rounds through an impressive gunflash as the slide whips back, while spitting those empty shell casings dramatically out to the side. You see barely any of that in ironsights.
it seems you want crosshairs to be accepted as the be-all, end-all of shooter game design
Nope. Never said that. I said that crosshairs just do the job
better, as illustrated here:
If a multiplayer shooter came out with both ADS and crosshair hip firing and gave them both the same accuracy, all the ADS players would cry about the crosshair players having an advantage in multiplayer. Perhaps that shows that crosshairs are just... better
A big reason there wasn't ADS in early shooters aside from arcade focus is because it was a lot simpler to just put a cross hair icon on screen than to create a whole new viewpoint and smooth animation transitions for ADS.
No, they just hadn't thought of it yet, and ironsights started out as simple as it gets- a black image with a blurred edge, that jerks bigger and smaller with each shot fired. Peanuts compared to the older way of polishing up all your gun firing animations knowing they'd always be on full display, and working out an alternative spot for the 3D gun model to sit and fire from when you right click to do your mini-zoom in. With early ADS they could get away with removing the whole gun model entirely and you wouldn't even know thanks to the bottom of the screen being blocked off
The downsides you mention don't have to be so pronounced that it hampers gameplay, view, speed, etc.
And yet, if they're in the game, then they are hampering the gameplay. You can't dive into the pool, without also getting wet.
Shooter gameplay is already as simple as hell with mere pointing and shooting, and ADS when done well only adds a tactical, immersive layer onto it. It should be there as a tool when hip fire isn't accurate enough past a certain range.
You're forgetting that literally everything in a game is there by design. The mere existence of a 'certain range' hipfire is ineffective beyond, is only there because someone made it that way. And in general, it's done to force you into using the ironsights: the tool there specifically to solve a problem that's only there to make you use the tool. You could just as well get rid of the problem so that you don't need the tool in the first place. Also you personally might find a giant black blurry chunk of dead space on your monitor immersive, but as someone who has two eyes, one of which I can open at any time to see what's going on below the target I'm aiming down the sights of my weapon at in real life, I can't really say I share your enthusiasm for an aiming system that blocks visibility from the edge of the screen right up to my target pixel, often from 3 sides.
[sub]See how this guy has two eyes? With ADS, one of those eyes doesn't even exist. Yep, real immersive...[/sub]
Guns have sights for a reason, and shooters are largely considered the most immersive genre for the same one.
Have you got a citation for that one? Or did you just mean first person perspective games in general? Bit of a difference there. Also guns have safety catches and hold bullets in the chamber, but you don't see that pop up in these 'realistic' games too often.
Some people enjoy the act of firing a virtual weapon, how it behaves according to style, caliber, the ballistics of how the enemies and objects react to getting shot, how it sounds, etc.
So what? It's been that way ever since Wolfenstein first appeared. Games addressed all of that for
years without ADS having anything remotely to do with it. Ironsights are a gimmick that pretend to make the gameplay more realistic, when they don't at all. Hell if they really wanted to make it realistic they'd start by rotating your whole view by about 30 degrees as you tilted your head over the gun to line your right eye up with the sights, while keeping your movement controls parallel with the ground.
And if you think that's a bit counter-intuitive and limits the player's ability to get on with the task at hand of finding, lining up and picking off targets efficiently, then hey- now you're beginning to see what I'm getting at with ironsights in general