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.

Why Can't I Carry More Than Two Guns?

Call of Duty was the third first-person shooter I owned back when it came out in 2003. The game was a big shift from previous FPS games in that you fought alongside other soldiers instead of being a lone wolf the entire time. The Russian campaign was particularly exciting as the developers didn't seem to care if dozens of them were slaughtered next to you. The first portion was based off the film Enemy At the Gates-crossing the river into Stalingrad while boats were being sunk and strafed by the German Luftwaffe all around you. Then you were issued five rounds for a rifle that you were supposed to take off one of your comrades after they were slaughtered by entrenched German MG-42s.


At least you finally got a weapon by the second level.

Anyway, it was an exciting game and I didn't resent a restriction in the series that continues to this day-you can only carry two weapons at a time.

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was the second FPS I owned back in 2001 and part of its appeal was that you could switch between sub-machine guns, shotguns, sniper rifles, the BAR, and the rest of the World War II arsenal. The campaign wasn't quite as exciting, but it was fun to be able to switch weapons based on the circumstances. You could grab a sniper rifle for some situations, whip out a shotgun if you had to enter a house, or pull out whatever you wanted for when you had to hide from the MG-42s in Normandy.


Obligatory D-Day level. It's mandated to be in every WWII game.

Multiplayer for Allied Assault was similarly varied. You could pick whatever weapon you wanted and keep picking them up off the corpses of your enemies until you died.


You could also choose to play as a mad scientist, among other ridiculous costume choices.

Unfortunately, most games chose to follow Call of Duty's example in order to be more "realistic" instead of opting for the fun of being able to carry around a backpack full of assorted weapons. I can understand why restrictions exist in multiplayer, as it may affect game balance if one player is able to have every weapon at once. But why does this limitation exist in the single player game? Part of the fun is switching between different weapons.

This was particularly infuriating in the British campaign in Call of Duty 2. The first problem was that instead of giving you a Sten SMG or a Bren LMG, the unique British weapons, you were given the same Thompson that you were issued for all of the American missions.


Get used to looking at this for 75% of Call of Duty 2's single player campaign.

The second problem that occurred in both the first and second Call of Duty games was that it was easy to run out of ammunition for your starting weapons. This meant that you could either try and get through the game by using melee attacks or you had to pick up the German weapons. The first option is ridiculous and the latter option means that you're stuck using nothing but the MP40 and Kar-98K rifle for the entire goddamn game whether you're playing as Russia, America, or Britain. This was a significant factor behind why I never finished Call of Duty 2's campaign.

In 2007, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare came out. Surely the huge variety of weapons in the game means that the campaign will be diverse now, right? After all, you have American weapons, European weapons, Soviet bloc weapons, surely they'll let you use all of that? Well, no. You're still limited to just two guns. Usually you get issued an American weapon with more attachments than you're allowed to use in multiplayer and a pistol or SMG as your second weapon.


If you want to pick a gun up off the enemy, it's just a question of which AK-47 variant you want to use.

Although the graphical improvements were enough to get me to the end of Modern Warfare, along with the one really fun level in Pripyat where you got to sneak around in a ghillie suit, it's not a game that's worth playing twice because of the weapon limitation. Even worse, there are some parts of the game where you have to pick up a Javelin or other anti-tank or anti-aircraft weapon. This necessitates swapping one of your two weapons with the missile launcher. I always end up accidentally swapping the weapon I want to keep so I have to stand there for ten seconds or so until I can get to the right gun. This will end with me getting killed because they never place them behind cover; they're always set out where all the enemies are shooting.


Fortunately it locks on automatically so I don't have to figure out how to use that complicated sight.

Even games that shouldn't have to worry about seeming realistic have decided to limit the player to two guns. Army of Two, for instance, limits the player to either two or three weapons, (I forget which). This is despite the fact that they could easily haul around a few more if they just ditched some of their extraneous body armor.


Or if they put a backpack on...

Duke Nukem Forever, which tries to poke fun at current games, decides to follow the same convention for some bizarre reason. I've never actually played any games in the series, but I thought that part of its appeal was that it was just trying to be fun with no pretensions of seriousness. Why would you limit Duke's arsenal?


I guess the advertisements for previous games in the series were prophetic.

Why is this Problematic?
Let's go back to the first FPS I owned, Chex Quest. This was easily the best prize to come with a box of cereal ever. It was a modified version of Doom where you zorch green Flemoids with a wide variety of weapons.

You could:

Shoot them at long range with the Zorch Propulsor, although this risked causing damage to you if you were too close.


Wade into melee with the Super Bootspork!


Use the Rapid Zorcher for intense firefights.

All these different weapons led to a lot of strategy. If ammo for a staple weapon like the Rapid Zorcher was running low, you could use the Super Bootspork to save a few rounds. It also allows for more specialization of weapons, with some being useful for long range, some for short range, and some that you should only use against large groups or in desperate situations, like the Zorch Propulsor that also hurts you a significant amount. In comparison, if you only have two weapons the game can't fairly limit your ammunition supply as you don't have a lot of backup choices.

Bioshock was another game that gained a lot from allowing the player to hold an entire arsenal in their inventory. In addition to different guns you could also use different types of ammunition, each of which makes the weapon more effective against different enemies.


For example, antipersonnel rounds are great for blowing holes in splicers.

Max Payne also had a lot of different weapons to pick from, ranging from handguns to assault rifles. In many cases, this would require the player to decide whether they should stick to handguns and shotguns for single encounters early on to save more powerful ammunition for larger fights later in the level.


Fortunately the game was also much better than the movie.

Conclusion
I don't care if it's not realistic for the main character to have two handguns, three assault rifles, two sub-machine guns, a sniper rifle, and four different kinds of grenades. It's fun and that's what games are supposed to be about.


Max Payne doesn't like it when his weapon choices are restricted.

The Best Way to Make a Game Fun? Do Something New.

The worst thing a game can do is bore the player. The easiest way to bore a player is to be repetitive. Whether it be reusing a puzzle, using endless waves of the same enemy, or the same game mechanic for every fight, it gradually will annoy me until I stop playing.


The first apple was great. The second was okay. The third was tolerable. The fourth made me vomit.

At that point, I'm unlikely to buy other games by that developer. So here's a few ways for a few of my favorite genres to avoid being dull.

Real Time Strategy
RTS titles have actually come a long way in avoiding becoming stale. In part, this is due to a lack of new releases in recent years, with only Starcraft II coming to mind as a major title this year. However, a much larger reason is that developers have shifted from a focus on starting with a small base, gathering resources to make your base larger, training and upgrading an army, and then advancing to destroy the enemy base. If you screw up somehow it means that you're set back a good half hour or more of playtime as you have to redo all these steps to try again.


It's a lot easier to blow up a house than to build a new one.

To evade this endless cycle, developers have added more creative objectives, optional side objectives that can make it easier to continue, and more personality to the game's storyline. For an example of the latter, Warcraft III featured an engaging storyline where you played with a Prince through his attempt to seek vengeance for an attack on his people by the undead. He then became corrupted and turned to the dead himself. In the next campaign you played him returning to attack his own people. Starcraft II included a number of missions where you were required to defend civilian populations, rescue prisoners, and perform other tasks that generally made the campaign stay fresh throughout the whole experience. A number of other games allow the player to pick different areas to attack, giving some interesting choices to spice up gameplay. Any new RTS game would be well advised to include these features if they want their game to impress anyone.

Unfortunately, there are still some weaknesses. In some cases, the campaign missions are just too long. For instance, there's one in Starcraft II where you are required to destroy a settlement that has been infested by the Zerg.


Infesting things always involves tentacles!


That sounds well enough, but there's something like 400 buildings you have to destroy, most of which take a long time to blow up. Additionally, you can usually only destroy them during the day because at night the buildings spawn large numbers of enemies that move toward your base. These enemies aren't THAT much of a threat but they do make it difficult to continue your offensive during the night. Even worse, the enemies are all of one type, a bunch of zombie-like foes who shamble without any strategy or tactics toward your main base. As the planet shifts between day and night every five minutes, you're left with having to spend somewhere around 40 minutes destroying enemies and buildings that aren't particularly engaging or interesting.

The original Starcraft campaign featured a similar problem in that the game featured three races, Terran, Protoss, and Zerg, but frequently in each campaign you would only fight one or those for the vast majority of it. This would get somewhat boring fairly quickly as you would keep having to kill the same types of enemy units. In the Terran campaign, you only got to fight against the Protoss once in the entire 10 mission campaign! If you go to the trouble of making multiple races for your game, you should at least allow the player to fight against each of them a few times.

Multiplayer games tend to avoid the problem of repetition because humans are far superior to the AI in their ability to use creative strategies with the tools at their disposal.


Although playing online does pose some other problems.

This makes sure that the game is always a challenge. However, if certain strategies are far superior to all of the other ones, the game quickly devolves in depth to become a matter of execution as opposed to strategy. This is why it is important for developers to continue to support their game through patching after it has been released. The balance problems, where certain units or strategies are far too strong or too weak, need to be addressed to keep the game interesting. With support, an online community can exist for years to come. People still play Warcraft II online and it came out in 1995!


And still features realistic explosions!

First Person Shooters

I addressed this a bit in my article about creating challenging enemies, so I won't add too much more here. Basically, avoid making the game into a series of identical firefights. Add something to spice it up. Make enemies be more intelligent, force the player to use more strategy, add some interesting set-piece events. A great example of this was in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, where for one mission you were shifted out of the action entirely to be the gunnery officer on an AC-130 gunship.


It's a nice change of pace to be able to point and click to blow up the enemy. Leaves a hand free for a beer.

Another instance in the sequel to Modern Warfare was when you had to use a shield to repel enemy gunfire while advancing through a prison against the guards. The enemy bullets make huge divots on the shield and a loud thump as they ricochet off. It really is quite terrifying at first.


It takes balls to want the enemy to shoot at you.

Role-playing games
One thing many RPGs do is reusing the same model of an enemy for much of the game. Sometimes they color them green or red or something to try and trick my brain, but it doesn't work.


No, sticking a couple arrows in its head doesn't make it a new enemy type.

I want to see a progression of different enemy types throughout the entire game. I also want them to use different abilities and attack types. It's much more fun to play against a group of enemies that uses magic, ranged attacks, and melee attacks instead of just one of those three.

The best example I can think of for a game series that has done this consistently well is the Final Fantasy series. Throughout the entire game you face an ever changing mix of enemy models with different creative abilities that you have to prepare for. Almost every boss fight against stronger enemies has some unique elements as well, such as a specific weakness or a powerful attack that you have to prepare for in order to survive.

I would also add that RPGs that choose to use a leveling system need to have choices available when your character gains levels. If you don't have any options as your character becomes more powerful, the game becomes dull much faster. Ideally, these will make your character somewhat unique so that the game can feel fresh each time you play it.

One game that did this well was Dragon Age: Origins. For instance, if you played as a warrior, you could choose to use two handed weapons to deal high damage. You could use a sword and shield to absorb damage for your group. You could also use two different one handed weapons to deal high damage. If you were a mage, you could pick between a number of different types of magic to specialize in healing and support magic for your party, dealing damage to the enemy, or other options. Finally, you could pick two of four specializations for each of the three classes, allowing you to have access to different abilities. This level of customization helped keep the game fresh throughout, as you could choose to make your character whatever you wanted to be.


I chose to make my character show off his pecs.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games
I'll preface this by saying that the only MMO I play is World of Warcraft. However, any MMO that features RPG elements needs to feature all of the above RPG features as well as a few more. The only big annoyance I have with WoW is when the drop rates for items for quests are abysmally low. For instance, if you have a quest that requires you to hack off heads to return to a NPC, you can almost guarantee that half the enemies you find will inexplicably not have a head.


Even when you can clearly see a head on the ground with your knife sticking out of it.

Simply put, if you're going to have a quest that requires items to be found from an enemy, have the drop rate be reasonably high. It should not take fifteen minutes to collect items. That's not fun.

Travel time is also a big nuisance in some cases. Many times, a quest would have you go out and kill an enemy, go back to town to turn in the quest, whereupon you would get a new quest to kill a different enemy at the place you just visited. Why didn't they just tell you to kill all of the guys there at the same time!? Fortunately, the new expansion, Cataclysm, has pretty much removed this problem, but it's important to make sure that it doesn't come back.

A final complaint is when you have quests that demand that you kill one kind of enemy, but that enemy is nowhere to be found. For example, if you have a quest to kill 8 Scourge Siege Engineers at this one location, you may find that out of all the monsters at that place there are only 1-2 Siege Engineers.


But don't worry, there's at least fifty mindless zombies to kill in the meantime.

This means you have to wait for them to respawn, which takes quite a while. This is silly design and shouldn't be done. There should always be enough enemies to fulfill the number you have to kill.

Downloadable Content

Remember when you could download patches for the game that included new content and it was free? Those were good days. I remember when new maps came out for the first Call of Duty and how much fun it was to get more playtime out of it for FREE! Now you have to pay money for new maps in Modern Warfare 2 and almost every big new release comes with DLC on release that you have to pay for.

I can see why publishers do this-it's easy money for them and people are stuck paying for it if they want the full game experience. The other valid reason I can see for DLC is that it helps prevent piracy to SOME extent by forcing people to download the stuff online after buying the game legitimately. I certainly prefer day 1 DLC over DRM software that afflicts my computer.

Still, there are ways to do DLC well and ways that are kind of being an asshole. Here are the ways to do it right:

1. Don't Charge for DLC that's available the first day of release: If you charge DLC day one you're just making people pay for things that are already in the game they just paid full price for. No extra developer effort was put in, you're just removing part of the game and charging more for it. That's just not right.

2. Don't charge for new maps for FPS/RTS games: It's extremely tiring playing on the same old maps game after game, so many players might be willing to pay for new maps, as seen with all the people who bought the map packs for Modern Warfare 2. However, the reason that you shouldn't charge for these is that they help build the online community and also give the developer goodwill. Both of these will help when you release your next game, as you have a solid group of fans who will be looking forward to it. The reason Modern Warfare 2 got away with charging for it was that it already had a well established fan base. If you're a new series, don't try it.

3. Don't provide DLC that gives specific players advantages: I can't actually think of any game that has done this, but I also want it to stay that way. The whole point of a game is that it's on a level playing field at the beginning so the person with more talent wins. If players can pay money for things that give them an advantage, such as units in RTS games or better guns in FPS games, then the balance is completely fucked.

4. DLC you can charge for: Any DLC that is released after the actual game and took actual development work is fine to charge for. This is akin to an expansion pack, which I'm quite happy to pay for. The Mass Effect series is a good example-they added a few new single player missions you could experience and they were reasonably priced.

Overall, I'm not a big fan of DLC, but if it's similar to an expansion pack in design I am OK with it.

FPS Weapon Choices

I've been playing a lot of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 lately, just activated prestige mode for the first time. One aspect of the game that I'm forced to think about is whether all the different firearms available really add to the game's quality. Although I despise Halo, I couldn't help but agree with one point that a Bungie Developer made at the Game Developer's Conference, namely that:

"For a shooter, you should have no more than 1 weapon per role. If you add weapons that satisfy the same role but are different, you’re simply adding complexity and NOT depth."

If you look at any weapon class in Modern Warfare 2, from handguns to assault rifles, you'll find that there are many weapons with similar roles. For instance, there are two 3 round burst fire assault rifles, the Famas and M16A4, three semi-auto sniper rifles, and somewhere around 5-7 fully automatic assault rifles. Worse, from the perspective of one trying to add depth to gameplay, many of the additional weapons are just crappier versions of other weapons. The M16A4 is superior in every way to the Famas, so why is the Famas even in the game? It certainly doesn't fulfill any unique role.

On the other hand, if you look at the game from a cosmetic standpoint, the variety of weapons does add a bit of variety. Every weapon has different iron sights, has a unique sound effect, and looks different. Additionally, the low survivability of players in Modern Warfare 2 helps compensate for the crappiness of some of the weapons. If you hit someone with 4-5 rounds, it's pretty much a kill with any weapon in the game.

There are some functional differences between weapons of the same class as well. For instance, the M104 semi-auto shotgun is great for really close range combat, as you can quickly pump out 4 shells to take out anyone, but it doesn't work well beyond that very limited range. The SPAS-12 pump action shotgun, although much slower firing, can kill players at a much greater range in one hit. The AA-12 is a fully automatic shotgun that can spray out a bunch of rounds to take out almost anyone in a close range firefight, but you run out of ammo extremely quickly. The other shotguns have some different pros and cons as well.

However, does this actually add depth to competition? I don't think so. Halo has certainly been a massive competitive success with a much more limited weapon selection. The first Call of Duty only had 3-6 weapons per side and still worked fine for multiplayer. It would probably be easier to balance the game with a limited selection of weapons that have their role more clearly delineated. After all, given a massive selection of choices, anyone serious about competition will rapidly find whichever option gives the best chance of victory. It's the same issue posed by Magic: The Gathering, there are a lot of cards available, but many are worthless and no competitive player will put them in their deck. The only purpose those cards serve is to screw over players who don't know what else is available to them. The same happens with Call of Duty, some of the weapons are marginally to significantly better than the other choices, so they are used in competition while amateurs try and win with weapons that they don't know are inferior. The ranking system also means that players at the maximum rank have access to better goods than those at the bottom as well.

It may be popular to add a bunch of options that add little to gameplay, but if you're trying to create a competitive game, it's inappropriate. You can get more bang for your development dollar if you focus on a more limited selection of weapons or choices that actually add to depth, as opposed to visual variety.