With the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 now nearly two weeks ago, I decided to put together the facets which determine the quality of a first-person shooter (FPS). Please note there is no direct order to importance here. I am sure I have missed some key aspects, but this is a good starting list.
Lag
If it exists in great quantities, the game will fail. There are no if’s, and’s, or but’s about this. No other feature matters if the game lags. If there are not going to be dedicated servers hosting the games, then there needs to be a quality host selection process. There also needs to be a process to transfer hosts when dedicated servers do not exist so hosts can not kill games because they are getting dominated and want to go cry to their mothers. In other words, when Papasmurf786′s “mother resets his router.” I still say that was exceptionally convenient timing.
Weapon Balance
One weapon cannot dominate all other guns or the vast majority of guns. This will ruin any game before most of the other facets have a chance to come into play. However, it is not a mere matter of allowing one gun to be equal to another overall. The character of a map must also be taken into account. While a deadly shotgun may be weakened by its short range, a map composed of multiple buildings with small rooms and short hallways will be dominated by the shotgun. The result is those without said gun will be at a major disadvantage. This comes into play in games where guns are picked up after spawning such as Resistance: Fall of Man as well as when guns are chosen before spawn such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The reason is that not every player may have a shotgun class to begin the match and asking them to do something like set it before the match starts can be a bit much.
To accompany this, when a game requires most guns to use several bullets to kill an enemy, but allows some guns to kill with a single shot, particularly a poorly aimed one, the game will be out of balance. Think grenade launchers and rocket launchers with this one. The key quickly becomes to guard acquisition of the “golden gun” rather than to work towards the primary objectives of the game. If you wanted Capture the Flag to become King of the Hill, maybe you should have just made a King of the Hill game mode.
Firepower
How much damage does a gun do? While sniper rifles, shotguns, and others of a similar variety tend to garner special exceptions, the firepower of guns must be reasonable. The key is to allow a person to kill an enemy quick enough, and with enough ammo left, that he might be able to take on one or two more enemies at the same time if he is skilled enough to do so. If it takes an entire clip for a person to kill another, numbers will win nearly every time. While it can be nice to force teamwork, it takes away the fun for a person with less of a team. However, go too far in the other direction and people always die with one bullet. This results in mass camping. The goal becomes simply to get the first shot off. In my opinion, this may be the most difficult one to judge and often seems to experience the widest diversity between games.
Upgrades
Do not reward players for playing the game by giving them new equipment. The reason is that the players with the most time get an upper hand simply because they do not work for a living or go to class. I should not be punished for the fact I try to live a life outside of your game. I do not live in my parent’s basement. You should not encourage society to do so.
Pwnage Benefits
Pwnage benefits are things which reward a player for dominating in the game by granting them additional tools to increase their domination. This results in the first moments of a game becoming critical while the latter portions of the game result in people hiding in a corner crying to their mothers. In other words, a game becomes much shorter than it is in reality. Some may like going against the flow. If you do, I have several guns. How about you try to run across a field at me with a pencil while I see if I can shoot you before you get to me.
Maps
While seemingly in the background, the maps in a game can play an important role. A good map goes unnoticed. A bad map ruins the game. So what makes a good or bad map? Glitches have to obsolete, but that is the case with all bugs. A map cannot favor a particular team. When playing objective-based games, which side a team is on should not matter. This requires lots of play testing and thought to do right if a map is not made symmetrical. Also, there must not be too many paths through the map than a team can possibly watch. This seems like it lends itself to camping, but it actually prevents it if the rest of the gameplay is done right. It is counterintuitive. In chaotic maps where an enemy come from any direction, people will back themselves into a corner and force the opposition to come from a particular direction. However, if the map lends itself to a quality team being able to watch all paths, they can easily push through those paths with the right amount of skill. This does require the game to have other facets preventing the defender from having the upper hand. See firepower for more details on such a facet.
Player Types
Some games like to have different races or types of forces for one team than another. This is very dangerous. If they are going to have different skill sets, it must be made sure one team is not favored in any game type over the other team. Even if the skill sets are the same, make sure the character design does not give an advantage to one team or the other. Giving one team’s snipers ghillie suits while the other team’s snipers get bright red hats is a bad idea. This is not deer hunting. One team should not be made to stand out against the background to prevent them from being shot by their teammates.
Game Size
Why am I talking about this? Put everybody logged into a particular FPS into one game and see. Huge games reduce the impact any single player can have on the game. If a player does not feel they are influencing the outcome, they will lose interest. However, there is something to be said for teamwork. In general, it seems teams ranging between 5-20 seem to be ideal. There are lots of people who like to have parties larger than six people. If your game does not support this, pretending to but having horrible lag does not count, you will lose big groups of people. Smaller games tend to be really slow-paced and less action-packed. If I wanted to sit there and eat my sandwich, I would do so outside of the game.
Chat Capability
This is a personal one probably more particular to me than most people. I do not like games where people can talk to the opposition. The world is full of stupid, rude people. Why do we feel the need to encourage it? Gamers will not be polite to each other. There are the occasional rarities, but they are far from the norm. By allowing players to talk to the opposition, you are asking for your game to breakdown into trash talking. However, by only allowing talking to teammates, less trash talking ensues. It is kind of nice. The result from less trash talking is that more people spend their time working as a team. I understand that it is nice to meet new people. You will meet more cool people by working with your teammates than by telling random people to shut up as they come into your game.
Random Fragging
If I do this will I get a kill every time? Some games allow players to chuck grenades completely across the map. Then they give them several of them. The result is lots of random grenade chucking to see if a crappy player can get lucky and get a kill. It is stupid. It holds no value to the game other than the crappy player feels like his life holds value for the three seconds before he gets shot in the back. Some games like to make guns do variable amount of damage as if it is realistic because the bullets missed any vital organs. I am willing to shoot any developer of such games, after a properly signed waiver, to see how they react to being shot by an assault rifle. Guns may indeed not always kill their target with one shot. Sometimes they may even barely slow them down. However, upon being shot twice by an assault rifle, I highly doubt anyone is going to remain standing, running, and shooting the person who shot them except for in the rarest of cases. If, in one night of playing a game, I repeatedly see a weak gun kill people in one or two chest shots, I expect a more powerful gun to kill a player in at most the same number of shots. If, however, this more powerful gun repeatedly takes more shots, potentially ranging from 1-3, maybe more, there is a problem. Especially if a shot to the foot kills the person. Do not claim multiple bullets passed harmlessly through a person’s chest if I can kill them with a single shot to the foot.
Stats
Players like to see how they stack up against the world. Leaderboards are cool. However, while total kills and wins are nice, kill:death (k/d) ratios and win:loss (w/l) ratios are better. I do not care if the fat kid who dropped out of school has five million kills in the first week the game has released. I care about the fact that I have a 2.0 k/d and he has a 1.3 k/d. Being able to filter that list down to only my friends is an added bonus. Being able to sort that list on any stat is great. Being able access said list via a web browser is totally awesome. Having it presented as an xml file or other easily-parsed format is even nicer. Why? Because there are some geeks out there who play videogames and would love to do cool things with those statistics. In the end, stats are just the icing on the cake. If the game sucks, stats do not matter because no one has played enough to have any.