Assault rifles killed shooters

[Darth Roxor]

That's right. Assault rifles. Not popamole tactics, those came later as a logical extension of the whole idea.

Allow me to elaborate.

I've just finished Blood for the nth time. And while stompin' through various cultists with my sawn-off, a thought suddenly struck me. 'There's no 'all-purpose gun' in this game'. Yup, you need to keep shuffling your guns all the time to adapt to various situations (the only gun that could be considered the 'ultimate' one is the tesla cannon, but ammo for it is scarce, and it comes fairly late): napalm cannon is great for blowing stuff up, but using it in close quarters is suicide. The tommy gun is good for clearing rooms, but has very low long-range accuracy. Sawn-off packs a huge punch up close, but is worthless at range. Etc, etc, etc.

And that was the case in most old shooters. But then came the assault rifle...

And by assault rifle, I mean an all-around, all purpose gun that you can pretty much get through the whole game with, without changing to anything else. The assault rifle has everything: good damage, good range, good accuracy at range, autofire, and you usually get it as quickly as at the start. Bonus points if it also has some sort of underslung grenade launcher for anti-armour purposes.

With the assault rifle, you no longer need to come face enemies up close with your sawn-off. Because why should you? You can just stand 5km away, hidden behind a rock, sniping them with your super-accurate rifle (bonus points if it has a mounted scope), while their dumb AI/aiming can't harm you because you're too far. This would lead to actual cover-based popamole tactics later.

And you can now notice that in just about every single modern shooter. Sure, they might have some auxiliary (useless) guns like pistols or shotguns, but it's all about the machine gun, and hiding somewhere with it to shoot from perfect safety.

 

[Haba]

Wannabe "realism" killed FPS, not assault rifle. It is just another manifestation of the sickness itself.

Assault rifles are pretty good in real life as well. Though I wouldn't want to shoot an assault rifle in small, enclosed space.

 

[Tycn]

Chaingun in DOOM matches your conception of an assault rifle yet it isn't gamebreaking as you suggest.

 

[Konjad]

OFP, ArmA, RO and some other games have assault rifles and they don't suck.

In OFP and ArmA they're used nearly in the whole game and the games still don't suck. Sure you can kill enemies with them from kilometer but so you can be killed.

Left 4 Dead series has assault rifles yet they're not superior to other weapons.

Your statement is false.

 

[Twinkle]

Ass. rifles are fine. Sniper rifles in vidyagames are, however, utter pieces of imbalanced shit.

 

[MetalCraze]

Assault rifles didn't kill shooters. Shitty game designers did.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Chaingun in DOOM matches your conception of an assault rifle yet it isn't gamebreaking as you suggest.

That's because the damage from Doom's chaingun's isn't that great.

I wouldn't say it's "assault rifles" per se that are killing shooters, but a term more closely related to "all-purpose weapon".

I say this because one of Serious Sam 2's major flaws was how the shotgun-thingie was good for almost every circumstance. It had a decent rate of fire, did good damage and was accurate at long range to the point of being silly. If you needed to do more damage quickly, you just pressed FIRE2 to lob a grenade at the target.

When I think about it, I haven't played a single game that has a modern assault rifle as part of its arsenal. Except System Shock 2. And to me that's pretty much an end-game weapon that I use when I enter the last level.

 

[DraQ]

I'm with Haba on this one.

It's every shooter trying to be the same pseudorealistic modern military action fest that is killing shooters, not ARs.

There are almost no games with wider, weirder and more diverse selection of equipment that was a hallmark of old shooters. But even going semirealism and making ARs dominate doesn't necessarily cripple the gameplay - in STALKER you had huge selection of of weapons, most of them were ARs, yet they were quite diverse in terms of strengths and weaknesses, allowing one to pick something fitting their needs. The game also had a wide selection of pistols, which were also dismissed as useless, but I found them invaluable in certain situation, although obviously as backup weapons. Then, there were shotguns, in SoC you actually only got anything better then shitty sawn-off late in game and against mutants it was a godsend.

While going semirealistic route and making ARs dominate does change the game's dynamics and weapon/ammo management, it isn't necessarily crippling. Neither carrying a ton of diverse, single purpose weapons (Doom, DN3D, Unreal, Half-Life 1), being confined to 2-4 at the time with player having to choose his loadout based on various factors - including which AR should be included in that number (STALKER), nor having preset loadout of four fantastic weapons running on two kinds of mana (Hexen series) is inherently inferior to each other, despite working in a completely different manner and posing different challenges to the player.

The problem is that there is hardly anything other than pseudorealistic shooters with AR pwnage being made any more.

Simply imba ARs are different an much more mundane problem - namely the developers failing to pick and balance (not necessarily power-wise) their arsenals with the game they are going to be included in in mind.

 

[Tycn]

Chaingun in DOOM matches your conception of an assault rifle yet it isn't gamebreaking as you suggest.

That's because the damage from Doom's chaingun's isn't that great.

"You can just stand 5km away, hidden behind a rock, sniping them with your super-accurate rifle"

Would be possible regardless of mediocre damage. Clearly something else has changed. Levels are now shit, movement is no longer a valid defensive strategy and enemy variety is nil.

 

[JarlFrank]

That's probably why I prefer WW2 military shooters to modern military shooters. In modern ones, you usually got one rifle which is an all-rounder and can be used for close combat as well as ranged combat. No need to ever switch to a pistol or a smg, heck it's even useful for long-range sniping since it's very accurate.

In WW2 shooters you got a bolt-action rifle for long and medium range, smgs and pistols for short range, but nothing that is optimal at every range.

Also, what nowadays really fucks up the less realistic doom-ish shooters is that even in those, they want to give you a limit on how many weapons you can carry. ONLY TWO WEAPONS IN MY INVENTORY IN DUKE NUKEM FOREVER? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT

 

[ghostdog]

Wannabe "realism" killed FPS, not assault rifle. It is just another manifestation of the sickness itself.

This.

 

[Joghurt]

Out of "next-gen" shooters I think HL2 did it right with the assault rifles. It only had one assault rifle - the Combine Pulse Rifle thing and it was really well balanced. It was powerful and good at long ranges, but at the same time it had a really severe recoil so you ended up firing it in short bursts. Plus ammo was really hard to come by. HL2's MP7 machine gun doesn't count as an assault rifle because it was useless at longer ranges although it did have a grenade launcher.

HL2 did a good job at balancing weapons. Pistol was used when you run out of ammo. Magnum was a powerful pistol, but didn't have a lot of ammo, had a huge recoil and was really slow. Shotgun was super deadly at close ranges. MP7 was good at close/medium ranges, but did very little damage, but had a grenade launcher to compensate for it. Pulse rifle was good at medium ranges, but had very little ammo and decent recoil. Crossbow was for long range kills. And you had an RPG for big enemies (chopas or striders).

The only weapon that sucked was the hand grenade. I couldn't kill shit with that...well except maybe zombies.

 

[laclongquan]

Assault rifles didn't kill shooters. Shitty game designers did.

If you can use assault rifles at the range of sniper rifles, clearly game designers were watching porn instead of game.

 

[racofer]

Assault rifles are okay. What's wrong is that people aim too good with them and break immershun.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Assault rifles didn't kill shooters. Shitty game designers did.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Wannabe "realism" killed FPS, not assault rifle. It is just another manifestation of the sickness itself.

This.

AKA, Counter-Strike killed FPS.

 

[DraQ]

Assault rifles didn't kill shooters. Shitty game designers did.

If you can use assault rifles at the range of sniper rifles, clearly game designers were watching porn instead of game.

The problem is that in most games you don't really have opportunity to pop heads at the distances where an AR would no longer be effective.

 

[MetalCraze]

Wannabe "realism" killed FPS, not assault rifle. It is just another manifestation of the sickness itself.

This.

AKA, Counter-Strike killed FPS.

He said "wannabe realism". Not a bunnyhopping dual-wielding shooting-from-the-hip arcade.

(Although I don't fully understand what he meant by "wannabe realism", shooters became even less realistic if anything)

 

[Haba]

Wannabe "realism" killed FPS, not assault rifle. It is just another manifestation of the sickness itself.

This.

AKA, Counter-Strike killed FPS.

He said "wannabe realism". Not a bunnyhopping dual-wielding shooting-from-the-hip arcade.

(Although I don't fully understand what he meant by "wannabe realism", shooters became even less realistic if anything)

Counter Strike v.s. Action Half Life.

I'd go with AHL anytime. Sure, assault rifle can shoot through walls and take care of guys with kevlar, but knives combined with acrobatic moves is much more satisfying way to take care of your foes.

 

[DraQ]

AKA, Counter-Strike killed FPS.

He said "wannabe realism". Not a bunnyhopping dual-wielding shooting-from-the-hip arcade.

Hence "wannabe".


BTW:

(picture unrelated)

 

[spectre]

I think that's why he calls it wannabe - the modern shooter really, really likes to pretend its all realistic serious business, but in fact it still has shit like health regen in ww2 setting, while condemning, say, Doom for its health pickups.

Now, realism can only get you this far in alleviating the problem, you can represent various differences in ranges, mobility, stopping power, etc. etc.
I personally think that the assault rifle is little to blame, and indeed, it's more about shitty design.

For one, the assault rifle is a pretty damn effective combat tool, otherwise it wouldn't be so so widely used in the first place. Then you have various weapons: silenced, smoothbore, high caliber, lmg, etc. thing is - they are specialist tools and it actually takes thought in your level design to accomodate the situations where you would use and need them.

And then there are the technical limitations. One example - what distances does a regular fps combat take place? 100? 200 meters? less? more? Whst is the approximate sniping distance in a modern fps?
Now then let's look up what's the effective range for most firearms.
So, it's partially about scale: draw distance and map size but not only that. I'd hazard a guess that for the nex gen popamoler the pixel hunting you'd have to do during a gunfight at around 300 meters would be unbearable (especially with 1x magnification collimator or iron sights).

Now, one thing that bugs me is, is it posible to make a successful shooter in the vein of Doom or Duke Nukem in 2010

 

[poocolator]

Let's talk about realism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj_r_3fU ... re=related

It's starts with the sound...
... and ends with the fear. (i.e. fuck your health-gen; in fact, fuck health. Period.)

 

[Overweight Manatee]

Assault rifles didn't kill shooters. Shitty game designers did.

Indeed. Assault rifles are just an easy way for shitty game designers to force bad game mechanics down the throat of the player.

 

[Metro]

Shooters had nowhere to go but down. They killed themselves.

 

[MetalCraze]

For one, the assault rifle is a pretty damn effective combat tool, otherwise it wouldn't be so so widely used in the first place.

Even more than that. I remember reading in some military-related article that US army sees assault rifle as just an evolution step between usual non-automatic rifles and them giving every soldier some sort of machine gun which will have not 30 bullets which aren't really enough before you reload but 100. See constant development using M249 basis to make it even lighter and cheaper.

Shooters had nowhere to go but down. They killed themselves.

I beg to differ. System Shock 2 is perfectly that kind of shooter that was moving forward. It's just too complex for your average CoD player.

 

[Metro]

I beg to differ. System Shock 2 is perfectly that kind of shooter that was moving forward. It's just too complex for your average CoD player.

I wouldn't really categorize SS2 as a shooter. Obviously the primary mode of combat is FPS but the RPG elements are too pervasive to really call it a pure shooter. I'd limit that to stuff like Doom, Duke Nuke'em, Serious Sam, etc.