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.

Developer Focus: Single Player or Multi Player

After playing through the single player campaign of Starcraft II, one of the best RTS campaigns I've ever played, I had to think about whether it's worth it for developers to invest so much energy into the single player components of their games. All of the cut scenes, movies, voice actors, different maps, special units, and other material that's needed can eat up a huge portion of development time and money for a project. In a developer that isn't Blizzard, this may lead to an issue where there isn't sufficient time spent on the multi player and single player portions of the game to make them both enjoyable for players.

The problem is usually most obvious in the multi player portion of the game, as the single player is the most played part of a game, with only a small portion of the community continuing to play online. There may be gigantic balance issues in the game where one faction or strategy is basically impossible to beat. Support to fix these problems is also frequently lacking. Many developers take months to put out a balance patch, and even when it comes it may not be tested properly, causing more problems than it solves. This leads to an irate community and a hemorrhage of players until the problems are fixed, assuming they are at some point.

The problem is certainly not limited to RTS games, FPS titles and any other game that includes a online component as well. Many feature a superficial online system that minimal effort was put into, including a couple popular modes like team deathmatch and free for all, and that's about it. The real development effort was put into the game's single player mode. Sadly, in many cases the single player mode is also forgettable. I haven't finished a single player campaign for a FPS in an extremely long time and I have never played them more than once.

This begs the question, should developers continue to funnel ever larger amounts of money into creating a single player experience that most players will only complete maybe once or should it instead be invested into the multi player component, which may build a community that lasts for years, building a loyal community to the title?

The biggest barrier to the creation of games that focus exclusively on the multi player content is that most people who buy games do so for the single player. Many players simply don't feel comfortable with playing online because of many factors. They don't like to lose, the rudeness of other members of the community, latency issues, poor interface design of the online features, etc. Most players are unwilling to get their ass kicked by better players for the required number of games to develop enough talent to win.

Fortunately, many of these barriers are not insurmountable. Starcraft II introduced a lot of features that could potentially make new online players feel comfortable playing. There is the option to play a number of unranked games before diving into ranked play using special maps. These maps feature rock barriers at the ramps to the base, allowing a player to have some protection from attack so that they can develop some comfort with how the game works and how to build their army. Additionally, the first 5 games are played in a placement mode, placing the player in a league appropriate to their skill level. The interface is well designed to make it easy to figure out how to start games and get into the action. The map editor is great, giving mapmakers a lot of options for creating unique scenarios, such as tower defenses, adding custom maps to the community. In Warcraft III these custom maps became a large part of the online population, especially Defense of the Ancients, a custom map that developed its own tournaments! Lastly, the addition of achievements to the game allows players, even bad players, to feel that they are accomplishing something when they get new portraits they can use in multi player.

Although it is still unfeasible to expect developers to be able to focus exclusively on multi player content, if steps are taken to make the online experience more friendly to new players, it may be possible in the future. It will be interesting to see the data on the online player base for Starcraft II to see if these steps encouraged more people to play online or not. If they did, it seems like every developer who wants an online component should take similar initiative to get more people playing the multi player part of the game.

Competitive Game Balance-unlockables

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.

Item Enhancement/Customization-Irritating and Unnecessary

I remember games like Shining Force and Final Fantasy III where all you had to do to pick equipment for your characters was to visit the weapon and armor stores in each town and buy the new gear. There was no confusion or additional complexity-just hand over some money and get items that did more damage or added more armor. Games like Baldur's Gate took it a step further by adding additional effects to weapons, such as fire damage or the infliction of poison. However, it was still pretty easy to figure out if the new sword you found was better or not.

I began replaying Final Fantasy X last week and what a difference. Items by themselves don't add anything, instead they have slots where they can be upgraded. So, for instance, you can get a sword that has four slots for potential upgrades and fill each of them with various abilities. These can range from adding bonuses to magic damage and healing, physical damage, armor values, immunities to certain damage types, and a slew of much more confusing abilities like SOS Nulfrost, which gives character protection from frost damage if their health drops low enough. This may not sound that confusing in this format, but then consider that many fights with bosses and other enemies in the game cause items to drop with various combinations of these abilities. Additionally, you can add them yourself to items by using various ingredients found in the game. So, toward the end of the game you may end up with around 10 weapons to pick from and it becomes incredibly difficult to figure out which one is best out of the list.

I usually end up ignoring the gear entirely because it doesn't make much of a difference anyway-but it's the idea itself that infuriates me. Since when is it fun to have to spend 15 minutes browsing through all the possible enhancements for items? You need a strategy guide to figure out the optimal choices and it's just a needless complication to my fun.

World of Warcraft is another game with many options for upgrading equipment. You can enchant many of your items with different boosts, add gems to items that improve them, and make other upgrades as well. This makes acquiring a new weapon or piece of armor, which used to be a joy for me in games like Baldur's Gate, a pain because I now need to go find out what items I have to dredge up in order to enchant and gem them to make them more powerful. Unlike Final Fantasy X, you actually do have to do this too, don't think you can skip out of enchanting and gemming your gear. You'll get kicked out of groups if your gear doesn't have every possible buff.

This concept is progressing beyond RPGs to other types of games, like FPS. Every single weapon in Call of Duty can have attachments added to them, ranging from different weapon sights to grenade launchers to an underslung shotgun. At least these are easier to figure out what they do, but I still don't like to see this trend spreading to more and more games. Do we really need every games for every genre to have a ton of customization options?

Keep things simple. It's fine to have new items, everyone loves getting rewards for beating bosses. But make them easy to figure out and for god sakes, stop adding complex systems that require collecting 50,000 insect wings from around the world to marginally boost their effectiveness. It makes it a lot easier for game balance if you don't have to account for all of the buffs that players will add to their items in addition to the item's regular statistics.

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.