My background as a gamer primarily comes from RTS games. One of the first games I played was Warcraft II. I've played Warcraft III, Company of Heroes, Dawn of War II, and Starcraft II on the ranked ladder system, as an above average player of all of those games, though certainly nowhere near the top. However, from a RTS player's perspective, whenever I play a recent first person shooter I have to say that there's one element that turns me off from them as a competitive game-unlockable content.
In a RTS game, you always have access to all of the units of whichever side you command from the start of any multiplayer game. It wouldn't be fair if, say, you had to play 500 games before you were allowed to build siege tanks in Starcraft. This is crucial because building units that counter your opponent is a critical part of any RTS title, it wouldn't make any sense for those units not to be available. Players who played more games than others would have a huge advantage because they had access to more options in gameplay.
I've already talked about this to some extent in my post about FPS weapon choices, but I'm coming at it from a slightly different angle here. These unlockables aren't just annoying to gain access to and frequently duplicates of other weapons, they are clearly detrimental to game balance. In any public server you will have a range of players, from people who are just starting to rank up to players at the top rank. The players at the bottom rank are obviously at a competitive disadvantage because they do not have access to the same tools as those at the top.
In Modern Warfare II, a level 1 player is stuck with one of three default classes available, all of which have somewhat suboptimal equipment. They do not have access to any of the game changing killstreaks, such as calling in assault helicopters. This makes it so public servers are a joke in terms of offering fair competition, the players are obviously not on the same level playing field. There is some compensation for this fact in that the lethality of everything is so high in MWII-so even bad weapons will end up killing enemies in a few hits-but it still is a widespread problem of the game.
There is one RTS game that had a similar phenomenon, Age of Empires III. In that game, your faction had a default set of units, but you also could purchase cards that allowed you to call in special units, upgrades, and buildings from your home city. In order to access these cards, you had to play the game and gain experience to unlock the cards. You could then assemble your deck of cards for a game based on the ones you had earned. The problem is that unless both players had the same home city level, the player with a higher home city had an advantage in that he has access to more powerful cards. For instance, there are cards that allow a player to build a factory that constantly produces resources or heavy artillery units and another to build a powerful defensive fort that can also produce units. If you do not have access to either of those cards, you are at a huge disadvantage against a player whose deck does contain those cards.
I can see why these unlockables are so popular in new games though, simply because of the achievement systems that are running rampant through every game now. The little emotional boosts granted by getting new weapons and equipment help keep players happy and feel like they are progressing in the game, even if they are getting constantly creamed by better players online.
Another important difference between the genres is that FPS games do not typically have a ladder whereas RTS games have one that ranks players worldwide against each other. Therefore, you could treat non-tournament play in a FPS as completely irrelevant and thus there is no need for it to be balanced. After all, in FPS tournaments there are frequently restrictions on what you can use, so the massive number of unlockables are reduced to a few choices that can be considered fair to all teams.
Still, for a game to be taken seriously online every player needs to have access to the same tools and options, meaning they need to have access to everything that is available in the game that affects the outcome. If you want an achievement system in your game, you can still do that without limiting access to weaponry. Starcraft II is an example of a game that does achievements well. The campaign has a ton of achievements for achieving challenging feats and there are a lot of achievements for winning certain numbers of games. If you accomplish these you gain access to new portraits that can be used for your avatar in the loading screen of the game. This still gives that same feeling of accomplishment to players granted by unlockables, but the balance of the game is not affected at all. For FPS games you could add different costumes, emblems, and other such cosmetic changes to players and it would give that distinction between players without requiring the fairness of the game to be changed.
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