Why do games have friendly fire?

[Snotnarok]

I love having friendly fire on, it makes the game more interesting. Except when you run into that asshole that will shoot but otherwise it works REALLY well.

 

[Xanadu84]

It makes the game less automatic. If you're moving along, you can't take the mental shortcut of, "If it moves, mouse cursor over it, fire until it stops moving". You have to constantly be paying attention to where your teammates are, and make judgment calls in a split second. Friendly Fire sacrifices Flow for Engagement. In some circumstances, for certain people, it's a good design choice.

 

[DustyDrB]

It wouldn't be so annoying if the friendly AI didn't walk right in your line of sight.

 

[noobium]

friendly fire is there to add more realism to the game but i did get spawn killed by an RPG more times than i would like to count.

MW2 tried to fix friendly spawn killers with ricochet fire but sometimes you end up getting screwed over by it

 

[Jamieson 90]

Because it would be unbalanced without it, Take games with air strikes, I could run through that area and complete the objective, I know the airstike will kill the enemy and not hurt me because FF is turned off.

Same for shooting people in firefights, its not fair because you don't have to worry about your teammate just fire a rocket or a grenade and they are fine yet the enemy dies.

FF is annoying when people abuse it but it would be even more unfair/annoying if it was not on all together.

 

[oppp7]

It's another example of realism taking priority over FUN.

 

[Cid Silverwing]

realism and forces team tactics to avoid getting FF'ed

It doesn't do shit to prevent dickheads from teamkilling, in fact it encourages it.

 

[Yumi_and_Erea]

Because without it, everyone would just randomly be firing the heaviest guns at whatever moved, rather than try and employ actual strategy and tactics. Friendly fire is what happens in real-life, and removing it from shooters drastically cuts back on realism and immersion.

 

[slipknot4]

Friendly fire, encourages aiming since 1985. [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OlderThanTheNES]

 

[TimeLord]

To teach 10 year old that you have to be careful if they grow up to join the army

 

[Lexodus]

For all the people that want to find out what it's like to be American, I guess?

 

[Teddy Roosevelt]

For people to not complain about it. Basically, yeah, realism. That's perfectly fine to have in a game.

 

[MR T3D]

realism and forces team tactics to avoid getting FF'ed

It doesn't do shit to prevent dickheads from teamkilling, in fact it encourages it.

Exactly this, try playing any FPS in "realism/hardcore/hard" mode, with one prick, and you will hate the game for life, unless you get kicked after a certain amount of kills like Battlefield and Counter Strike...though i dont believe there is anymore f.f on C.S

heh, bitches don't know about mah project reality.
almost perfect amount of lots of realism.

 

[Ymbirtt]

It's to encourage a bit more thinking before you shoot, and make zerging less effective, and also to allow panic to be used as a weapon. It's nice to have a bit of psychology in a game, and games like Dystopia have funky little features where they short out most of your heads up display under certain situations, basically meaning that you're fighting blind. Those times, when your vision is filled with EMP noise, and when there's an invisible man running around your allies, they wouldn't work unless FF was on forcing you to think rationally through all this.

Of course, a lot of games work better without FF, but there are situations where it's an absolute godsend.