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.

Making Survival-Horror Games Scary: Part Two

Click here to view Part One

The first part of this series covered areas that could have been more frightening in Resident Evil 4, this final segment will elaborate more on what it did well.

Strengths of the game
1. Enemies become progressively more abnormal
Resident Evil 4 begins with Leon searching a Spanish peasant village. Unfortunately, the villagers are hostile to Leon and the first part of the game is a frenzied battle against the entire town. However, they still appear human. The only thing that's odd at this point is that they take an alarming number of bullets from your pistol to kill, coming back at you after being shot several times in the head.


A typical welcoming committee for government agents in the village of Pueblo

As you progress through the village area, you run into a much stronger enemy, a guy with a sack on his head and a huge chainsaw. He takes a remarkable amount of ammunition to put down and the concealment of his humanity with the sack over his face makes him more intimidating than the rest of the villagers.


The village theater must have had a Texas Chainsaw Massacre screening the day before Leon showed up.

After night falls the village becomes truly terrifying. The villagers are harder to see and now some of them turn into much more powerful enemies when killed. Their head explodes and in its place comes a twirling blade tentacle that can quickly kill Leon in a few hits.


On the positive side, the blade tentacle does actually improve this woman's appearance.

Later in the game different things spawn out of their heads, such as this thing that can lunge forward and chomp Leon's head off in one gulp.

What the hell!

Headshots were previously the most effective way to kill the villagers. Now they become risky as that makes it more likely that these dangerous tentacles are going to come out of their corpse.

An enemy that arrives much later in the game, called a regenerator, is one of the creepiest I have seen in any game.


This picture doesn't do it justice.

If you shoot it, you blow parts of its body off, but that only delays it for a few seconds as it regrows that part. If you blow a leg off, it will flop toward you on the ground like a fish. It can then leap up at Leon from the ground and start biting his face off.


Ouch!

The game does a great job of keeping the enemies from becoming stale, every time you think you know what you'll be facing their appearance is changed, they gain a new ability, or become less human. This keeps the player uncertain about his opposition, keeping the atmosphere frightening.

Sound Effects
One of the highlights of the game is the quality of its sound effects. All of Leon's various firearms make satisfying retorts when fired. Human enemies scream pitifully when shot in the head or leg.


An unusual squishy sound is made when their head gets blown off as well.

However the highlight for me are the calls of the humanoid enemies. Whenever one of the villagers spots Leon they point dramatically at him and call their buddies for help. This usually comes out of complete silence beforehand as well, making it a dramatic moment.

One of the later groups of enemies is a bunch of monks. They chant throughout the entire time they're trying to kill Leon, a sinister background noise to combat. When they are ready to attack with their scythes, flails, or other weapons they will yell something right in Leon's ear. When they manage to sneak up behind you this is quite terrifying, as you know you're going to get hit by something painful.


They also need to get outside of the castle a bit more often.

The regenerator is a star performer in this category. It has a weird wet raspy breath that it makes as it shuffles toward you. When you shoot it, it grunts strangely. It's limbs explode wetly when shot off. The flopping sound it makes as it hops toward you along the ground if you blow off one of its legs is just like a wet fish.

Any horror games needs to put a lot of effort into its sound effects if it wants to fully involve the player. Vision and hearing are the two main senses stimulated by games, you can't afford to neglect one of them.

Player Deaths
One important aspect of a survival-horror game is that there should be a fear of death. If the player does not have to worry about being killed, a great deal of tension is lost. There are many horrific ways Leon Kennedy can die in Resident Evil 4. He can be blown up by dynamite, be disemboweled by a peasant with a pitchfork, get hit by crossbow bolts that are lit on fire, get crushed by a rolling boulder, and many other options.


My personal favorite is head lopped off by chainsaw.

It's important that a horror game show the player character dying. If this part is skipped over then the reality of failure isn't shown to the player. It also makes the enemies less frightening if their ability to cut off your character's head isn't displayed.

Solve a puzzle? Something bad is probably going to happen.
Solving a puzzle is one of the riskiest actions you can take in Resident Evil 4. Virtually every time, it will cause a boss battle against some terrifying enemy, a horde of villagers to come howling at you, or other bad things to happen. The same is true for entering any area that was initially devoid of enemies. If nothing hostile is immediately visible, it's safe to bet that won't last much longer. Any horror game that manages to make the player dread progressing through it is doing a great job.

Background Details
A final important touch that some games neglect is to make sure that the scenery you're moving through is suitable to the game's atmosphere. In Silent Hill 2, the game takes place with an eerie fog throughout the entire town, which blocks off most of the player's vision. This was actually a mechanism to allow the game to work with the PS2's graphical capabilities, but in does double duty by also helping to terrify the player. Enemies are present in this fog and may come at the main character with little to no warning. It's difficult to prepare for a foe that you can't see at range.


Although you can at least have a big stick ready to hit something with.

It's also important to have additional details that reflect what happened to the victims of the tragedy before the player showed up. For instance, if most of a town was murdered there needs to be corpses, blood smears, and other such evidence present.


Bodies stuck on sticks are popular as well.

If, like most horror plots, some sort of medical experiments were being done, have some evidence of the victims around.


Here the scientists were trying to discover what happens when you stick sharp spider legs through someone's back.

Conclusion
Fear is one of the emotions that is hardest to evoke in videogames. This is principally because all the details have to be correct for it to work. If the game is too well lit, if the enemies look silly, if the sound effects are poorly done, any little thing being badly done can ruin the effect. The most important part of a successful horror game is to get these elements done right. Otherwise it's just a joke.

Making Survival-Horror Games Scary: Part One

Many recent survival-horror games like Dead Space succeed in creating some frightening moments, but they don't maintain that environment throughout the entire experience. Part of this is because many survival-horror games are now basically action games that replace enemy soldiers with enemy monsters. A monster becomes much less scary when you can focus your mind on how you're going to be killing it with a pistol or shotgun as opposed to how you're going to survive the next few minutes. However, it's still possible to create a frightening experience with a well-armed player. Even Resident Evil 4, one of the best recent titles I can think of, could be greatly improved with a few changes.

Areas for improvement

1. Don't turn off the scary music after all the enemies are dead.
Whenever an enemy appears, some tension building background music turns on. Unfortunately, as soon as you kill the last enemy in the area it immediately turns off. This lets you know you are safe. This is a problem when you're trying to make a player feel frightened through your game. It would have been better to keep that music going so that the player still has to keep looking around, not knowing if there are more enemies in the area. For a really clever move, perhaps one or two enemies have one of their legs injured so they show up after the player thinks all the enemies are dead. Then they stab him in the back while they're distracted picking up all the items off the ground from the dead foes.

2. The scariest enemy is the one you don't see
Resident Evil 4 does do a better job with this than some games. There are a couple of boss fights where you have to run through an area completing a puzzle while dodging an enemy who attacks from the shadows. However, in later parts of the game many enemies stand right out in an open, well-lit area like the game changed into Call of Duty.


Such as this fellow who shoots at you with a humongous Gatling gun.

Ideally, you want the player to be dreading moving forward in the game. If they don't know where an enemy is attacking them from, that will certainly limit their desire to keep advancing. In comparison, if you know there's an enemy right behind that barrel up ahead, you can form a strategy of how to deal with him. When you don't know if he's behind the barrel, in the dumpster, behind the creates, or right behind you, uncertainty is added, creating tension.

One of the most frightening parts of Resident Evil 4 was when nightfall came in the village. During the day, it wasn't that hard to see the villagers. Once night falls, you're defending yourself from more indistinct shapes.

Although the ones holding torches give their position away.

Additionally, if the enemies are concealed and come out of nowhere you get the additional benefit of startling the player. Even things that aren't frightening at all become scary when they come out of nowhere. When I saw Avatar in 3D the first few ashes from the big tree burning down certainly startled me when they came out of the corner of my vision.


AAAAHHHH! Oh that's part of the movie.

3. Cut out the exposition on the origin of the monsters
One reason many people hated the prequels to the Star Wars series was that it offered an unnecessary explanation for how the Force worked that seemed ridiculous.


You're not really special Anakin, it's just the midichlorians in your blood.

A large part of the appeal for the first three films to be released was that the Force was mysterious and you felt like Luke Skywalker was figuring it out himself as the series progressed. When the mystery was ruined in the prequels, many people were upset.

Similarly, Resident Evil 4 offers an unnecessary and somewhat ridiculous explanation for why all the villagers and mutated monsters have been created. Oh, some weird fossils they found in the village ended up infecting everyone and making them into mindless slaves of Lord Sadler, their leader.


The source of all evil.

Just as concealing the physical form of monsters from the player's view increases the tension and atmosphere of a game significantly, avoiding an explanation of the source of the monsters helps a lot as well. It's similar to how the Black Death worked in Europe. Everyone was scared out of their minds because they had no idea why half their village was dying every day. If they had known that it was caused by bacteria, they probably would not have been as frightened. Even if nothing can be done about a problem, knowing the cause of it reduces the fear of it dramatically. Especially when you have to contort the nature of reality to a ludicrous extent for your explanation.

With these three additions to gameplay and story, most horror games should easily succeed in increasing their effect on the player's psyche. In the next section of this bit I will mention what Resident Evil 4 does well, items that should also be featured in every horror game.

Click here to view Part Two

Inventory Systems

A well designed, simple inventory system can greatly improve a player's enjoyment of a game. This is especially true in games where players must frequently change their character's equipment to adapt to situations in the game, such as the Resident Evil series. So why do so many games design their system so poorly?

Here are some requirements for a good inventory system.

1. The inventory must be able to easily hold the items that are needed for regular use in the game. This includes things like weapons, ammunition, healing items, and especially plot items. If you do not have sufficient room for these "must have" items then the player certainly will not have room for other items that are of only situational value. You can certainly have a limit to how much stuff a player can have in their inventory, that limit just needs to be set with a realistic look at how much stuff players HAVE to haul around with them to be able to play the game.

For a game that does this well, look at Baldur's Gate II. You can have a party of up to 6 characters, each holding 12 items, in addition to three slots for weapon ammunition and three quick slot items (which can be magic scrolls, potions, and other consumable items) per character. Additionally, weapons and armor that are equipped on the character are not stored in those slots, they are put on the character's actual body. This system provides easy room for all of the needed items, allowing the player to use the remaining 12 slots per character for situational and plot related items. Additionally, the game offered some items, such as bags of holding, that could hold 20 or so items each, freeing up additional room.


The inventory system of Baldur's Gate

The game frequently requires players to hold on to items for a long time until the party can find a town to sell them at, so all of the inventory space is extremely useful. However, there is still depth to the system because even with all this room there are still many situations where players will need to decide what they want to keep. Additionally, items have weight so players need to balance where they put the suits of plate mail.

A game that executes this extremely poorly is Resident Evil 5. In this game, players have two characters with only 8 slots each that they can put items in. Every weapon takes up a slot, armor takes up a slot, every healing item takes up a slot, ammunition takes up a slot. So, if you want to have armor and three different guns, you only have one slot available for healing items. Additionally, the method for exchanging items between the two characters is extremely cumbersome when both inventories are full. This system makes the player frustrated when trying to strike a balance between necessary healing items and necessary weapons/ammunition.


The ridiculously small inventory of Resident Evil 5

2. Make the inventory easy to organize. In systems where items are stored in a long list, items that are used in combat, such as healing potions, should be at the very top of the list. This makes them easy to access when they are needed in a hurry. Ideally, the system should have options available to have the computer auto-organize the inventory for the player. This minimizes time spent moving items around on various menus to make room for the new sword that the player just found.

3. Pause the game when the player is accessing the inventory screen. There is nothing worse than being killed while trying to find a healing potion that is dug five screens down in a poorly designed interface. One exception to this rule might be that if the player is in active combat then it is fine for the game to keep running, to simulate the problems with trying to grab another weapon or something while you're in a fight. However, if the inventory is cumbersome this is not a good way to add tension to the game, you're only going to make the player mad.

4. Make the inventory menu large enough to easily see what you have access to. All of the Final Fantasy games do this extremely well. You have a lot of items, but the inventory screen fills the entire game screen so you can see everything in a few moments. Resident Evil 4 does this with skill as well. You have an attache case screen that shows all your weapons, ammunition, and such graphically and it only takes up one screen.

King's Bounty is a game that executes this extremely poorly. You have a screen with your character and below him you only have five slots with arrows on both ends to scroll through them. Unfortunately, every single item you pick up in the game, from armor to consumables, goes into this inventory and to use them you have to scroll through them one by one every time. This takes a lot of time and is needless-a separate inventory menu should have been created to ease this for the player.

5. Stop trying to represent item size in inventories by using grid based systems-such as making a battle axe take up 6x4 spaces. This is the method used in almost every action RPG-which is kind of funny because you end up being taken out of the action and trying to rearrange your items so you can pick up that new weapon you just got.

Have fun trying to fit everything in here!

It's much more convenient for the player to have a slot based inventory and let smaller items, like healing potions and magic scrolls, stack. Look at World of Warcraft for a decent system. If you must represent item size, use weight instead of grid hexes, as in Baldur's Gate.

There is one notable exception to this rule and that is in Survival Horror games. In these games, part of the tension is that you have limited resources in a hostile environment. In those cases, organizing your inventory actually adds to the tension because you have to consider whether every item is worth picking up. I'm low on shotgun ammunition, but I have to drop a healing item for it... is that worth it?

Resident Evil 4 had one of the best inventory systems I've seen for a game of this type. You have an attache case that you can spend money to upgrade to hold more items. This adds more strategy to the game because you can buy new weapons or improve those weapons, or you can spend the money to hold more stuff.


I'm not sure how Mr. Kennedy fits a rifle, a shotgun, a machine gun, and a handgun in this box, but it does work quite well with the game

With these five steps, every game should have a reasonably easy to use inventory system that minimizes the burden on the player and keeps the focus on the game, not on organizing your catalog of items.