FPS Grenade Design

No, not this kind of grenade.

Grenades are present in almost every first or third person shooter. Most feature fragmentation grenades, which should be effective against crowds of enemies. Some also feature additional types, such as incendiary grenades, smoke grenades, sticky grenades, and flash grenades. Unfortunately, many games have ineffectual grenades that end up not being particularly useful, at least in single player. I should note that the focus of this is NOT on multiplayer segments of games. This is because it is good for balance reasons for grenades to be limited in effectiveness, as killing one person can be critical in a game.


Call of Duty's multiplayer deserves this title to some extent.

However, including the same restrictions needed for proper multiplayer balance frequently make them useless for single-player. So how do some single-player shooters mess this up? Well, grenades may not do much damage and have a poor blast radius-which makes them ineffectual at killing more than one guy at a time. Many cover-based shooters also have foes split up behind different walls and barricades so that it's almost impossible to hit more than one person at a time with them.


May as well throw one of these plush grenades instead.

Other games feature smart enemies that run from grenades or hurl them back. Although this does make the game more challenging, it also reduces the effectiveness of grenades dramatically.


Although I suppose it is fair for the AI to be able to see this icon just like the player can finally.

Other games reduce the effectiveness of grenades by making them far too rare and precious to be used. For instance, the FPS Area 51 limits you to eight grenades total at any one time, four of each of the two types found in the game. These restrictions are reasonable to a point, as you don't want someone to just hide behind a wall and throw eight hundred grenades at every enemy position. The problem is that there frequently aren't sufficient opportunities to replace these grenades, making it so that even in situations where a grenade would seem to be a good choice you may not want to use them as there may be a more difficult fight coming up.

A final problem comes when games have respawning enemies or just too many foes for your limited supply of explosives. Large numbers of enemies are great for grenades, but there's a point when it's still too many. Some levels in the Call of Duty series have been horrendous for this. You end up stuck crouched behind a wall for a good five minutes or so spraying at the hundreds of guys who just keep coming. You may have ten grenade launcher rounds and four or so frag grenades, but you'll run out of nades before they run out of troops.


Scheisse!

So does one create a useful grenade for a single-player game?

1. Give frag grenades good single-target and splash damage.
The biggest problem with grenades is when they just don't do enough damage to be useful. Except against bosses or armored enemies they should be one-shot kills if they are thrown or launched close to an enemy. Usually throwing a grenade requires the player to leave cover, change from their primary weapon to a grenade, and hurl it the appropriate arc and distance to land near an enemy position. This risk needs a corresponding reward or there's no reason for the player to switch from spraying rounds with their rifle or machine gun.

Max Payne is an example of a game that did a pretty good job with this. Regular grenades and the grenade launcher were both one shot kills on almost every enemy as well as on Max Payne himself. This made them an appropriately frightening increase in lethality from the pump-action shotgun, desert eagle, and 9mm pistol featured at the beginning of the game.


Max Payne spraying a mobster grenade launcher team with dual Ingrams before they can kill him in one hit.

2. Make scenarios where each grenade type is useful.
In games that feature several types of grenades, it's important for each type to be useful throughout the campaign. This needn't be done by forcing the player to use them in certain battles, but instead can be accomplished by making each type extremely useful for certain situations.

An example of doing this wrong would be Call of Duty Modern Warfare's campaign. The game features smoke grenades, but they aren't particularly useful except for one or two missions where you're instructed to use them to block the vision of an armored vehicle spraying heavy machine gun fire at you. This basically renders them equivalent to the frequent provision of C4 or some other explosive just to blow up a door to progress further in a level-the modern version of collecting keycards.

A much more interesting way to implement smoke grenades was used in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. Weapons that have thermal sights can see through smoke to find the outlines of enemy soldiers-so smoke works to obscure their aim while still allowing the player to fire with complete accuracy.


I see you!

Unfortunately this was only used once in the game and was never allowed as an option for the player again. If done properly, this would just be an available technique for the player to use in any engagement where they happened to have smoke grenades in their inventory.

Another interesting possibility would have been to have a few machine positions in each level that the player could choose to suppress with gunfire, neutralize with a well placed grenade launcher round, or render helpless through a few smoke grenade tosses. Games need to give the player a bag of tricks for each enemy and let them choose the most appropriate one for each situation, not shoehorn them into one approach due to limited resources.


Although if you're going to a force a player to pick one option, everyone loves grenade launchers!

I'd have to say that the game that uses multiple grenade types with the greatest success is Resident Evil 4. The frag grenade can clear out an entire group of enemies with a simple toss but is appropriately limited in supply to ensure that you only use it when really necessary. The incendiary grenade doesn't do quite as much damage but is much more common and is a great way to delay enemies, as anyone who walks through it stumbles around in fiery agony for a few moments.


AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!

Finally the flash grenade stuns enemies for a few moments but has one additional unique effect that makes it valuable. It instantly kills any of the Plagas parasites that occasionally pop out of the heads of slain enemies. These are fairly resistant to normal ammunition and inflict extremely powerful damage to the player, so flash grenades are great to have for big fights with lots of Plagas parasites.

3. Provide enough grenades to let the player use them when needed.
So now you have a few different kinds of grenades that are useful throughout the game. Now make sure there's enough of them so that the player can actually use them! In Call of Duty I frequently ran out of grenades because there were just too many enemies in certain parts of the game for the supply available to be sufficient. It's true that the regular weapon worked well enough, but why limit the strategy of the game to nothing more than popping in and out of cover to spray a few rounds at the enemy soldiers?


Sometimes it seems like cover based shooting was based off of whack-a-mole. Shoot the guy who jumps out of cover, then the one to his left, repeat until it stops. Grenades help mix it up a little bit.

Resident Evil 5 seemed to forget why the grenades from Resident Evil 4 were useful. They were a relatively small item to keep in the inventory and were great for sticky situations against hordes of enemies. Unfortunately, RE5 decided to limit the player to only being able to hold eight items at a time, of which each weapon and ammunition amount took up a slot, along with healing items and armor. This left the grenade in a sad spot. Although they were roughly as useful as the grenades in RE4, they just weren't as consistently useful as ammunition or healing items are. This forced me to leave many grenades lying around for poor African children to discover in the future, an unhappy outcome.

Conclusion
Too many single-player campaigns neglect to make grenades useful enough to be a core part of gameplay. They need to be powerful, have many opportunities for appropriate use, and be plentiful enough that the player is willing to utilize them in regular combat.