Usually a shooter environment is pretty much hostile, and overcrowded with enemies with an intention to kill the main character. Anyway, at some point game designers started to feel the need to give a more subtle and character-friendly role to the environment. Let’s see how this goal has been achieved.

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Take cover!

Another step on the path of evolution of the genre (but in this case I am just talking about 3rd person shooters) was the implementation of a cover system integrated into the game controls. I don’t mean that players used to blindly run in front of the enemies before this feature was added to games: no news in covering between a pillar. But this outcome is achieved, so to say, “hand made”, crouching behind walls or taking advantage of a barrel.

With Perfect Dark in the beginning, and once and for all with Gears of War, the addition of a cover system in the game controls became a must-have. In Gears to send the character into cover you simply get him close to a vertical surface and press the designated button, and Marcus “magnetically” attaches to the surface, shielding himself from enemy bullets.

Once the character is attached to a cover, several options unfold: to move along the cover, to lean out to shoot precisely or to shoot without aiming, and without exposing, too. Or even to dash towards a different cover.

Tactical movements to approach and flank the enemies transform into well-coordinated dances from one cover to the next. Although this actions once in a while can result frustrating, when everything works fine the game provides good satisfaction.

This way the environment is more than just the “box” where the character moves: it is a mean of survival for the player, which implies an increase of the gameplay space.

The following chart shows the improvement of the gameplay extension field on the ENVIRONMENT axis achieved by Gears compared to Doom.

Gears‘ cover system is so much appreciated by players, that when a game is released, and it is a third person shooter, if it does not implement a cover system, one of the first things that will be said about that game is that “…it doesn’t implement a cover system…”

Integrated cover systems offer 2 kinds of benefits to designers: first is that players are provided with more refined controls for the character movements, so that their actions result more efficient, and thus satisfying.

The second benefit is that, besides the 3rd person camera, players get far more involved into the action represented on screen, which results more “real”.

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Men at work

An interesting feature that allows players to take advantage of the environment in a different way is displayed in Fracture, by Lucas. The gameplay in Fracture is wrapped around the ability of the main character to modify the environment geometries to fight the enemies and overcome the game “puzzles”.

Weapons allow in fact to create pits, raise hills (that can be used to smash enemies on the ceiling, for example), make tunnels o create singularities that suck enemies in on a given spot. This system, working with realistic physics, gives the players a completely different and innovative way to relate to the game environment. Players are requested to not only “read” the level design, but also to “make” it: emergent level design, we could say.

Another way to to operate on this field is to have a “destructible” environment, as it happens in Red Faction: Guerrilla. In this game the player has several ways at his disposal to crush buildings, open breaches, destroy bridges and trigger any kind of wrecking; obviously involving the enemies too.

This system, sometimes incredibly satisfying and powerful, provides creative and not-so-common ways to get rid of the enemies, and accomplish the different game assignments.

We don't need no water let the motherfucker burn! Red Faction Guerrilla.

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CHAPTER 5 ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

By the end of the analysis, i’ll try to spot some alternate routes to convey our game design efforts. Is there anything else a weapon can do, besides shooting?

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ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

So far we focused on what was already done. This a necessary starting point, but more important is what can still be done, how to innovate and be original. Even if originality in videogames is a tricky demon, that broke the dreams of many, those in particular who wanted to innovate too much. Let’s say then that the best option is to try to be “mildly” innovative.

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Please don’t shoot

An option to be original while developing 3D shooters, in my opinion, is to change the relation between enemies and the weapons at player’s disposal. In a field where realism of the action is a dominant aspect of gameplay, if you act like a mercenary and shoot in the face of a regular soldier with a AK-47, you cannot expect that the soldier starts talking another language, or shape-shifts into a penguin. You shot him in the face, and he has to die, better writhing in pain and blood.

If we switch the regular soldier with a alien\demon\zombie\robot\mythical creature, “the song remains the same”: we shot, he\it dies!

Sometimes the killing dynamic is a little more complex than “i shoot, you die”, but the aim (to kill) is basically always the same.

For example in Dead Space (that we will welcome in the shooters genre for less than a minute) weapons’ purpose is to kill enemies, but to achieve that you have to dismember your enemies piece by piece. The fact that the game clearly declares that shooting the head won’t affect very much you enemies proves how much the killing attitude is linked to the idea of 3D shooters gaming in the player’s mind.

The request to hit specific locations in order to expose the real critical spots, hitting which you can deal real damage to the enemy (typical final boss mechanic) doesn’t change very much the axiom.

In Dead Space, to kill the bad guys you have to dismember them.

Let’s try then to think of a multiplayer shooter with all the features that today’s games have: realistic physics, realistic weapons with realistic feeling, and a well varied arsenal like Call of Duty 4 or Far Cry 2.

Now, let’s imagine that the effects of the bullets on the enemies, on the other hand, are not realistic at all.

In an arena players are challenged to shoot puppets 4 meters big , each player having his own puppet to hit. When you hit “your” puppet it halves its dimensions. If you hit a player’s character you don’t cause him any harm, but if he was about to shoot, then he looses the aim, and maybe gets paralyzed for a few seconds. If you hit the puppet belonging to another player, it doubles its dimensions.

Puppets are as agile as a ninja who goes into amphetamine, jumping all over the place.

The goal of the game is to make your designated puppet fall into small pits that somehow cover the floor of the arena. To achieve that you need the skill to hit your own puppet in order to half its dimensions, until it is small enough to fall into a pit. At the same time, you have to avoid that the other players achieve the same goal. How? Shooting at them and at their puppets.

How much room for innovation to extend the gameplay field opens up, when you give up on realism? Does the lack of realism damage the fun factor of a game?

I’ve always been thinking that the best thing in videogames is that they allow you to temporarily detach from everyday reality, and act in a simpler world, where you do little to achieve much. But many (maybe too many!) games today move towards a manic representation of realism.

To me the search for realism in videogames looks like a little bit hypocrite: imagine an iper-realistic platform where the character, right before a difficult leap, turns to the player saying “I’m not gonna jump. I could fall and hurt myself!”.

Let's be serious for a second: if you were Altair, would you leap?

If fun doesn’t belong to a specific genre, why realism should? So, if platform games can be non-realistic, could 3D shooters be non-realistic, and still fun to play?

Let’s try now to draw a last chart to represent the gameplay extension field of a non-realistic shooter.

Which direction the new axis, the one that estimates the non-realism of the game, goes? My impression is that it goes “up”, on the third dimension, for it is orthogonal to the other 4 axis. In fact non-realism is not a feature for itself, but it is an entire macro-area that contains thousands of unexplored (yet!) other features.

In other words, the non-realism axis is on a higher conceptual level compared to the others, because all the features that are on the 4 axis can be expressed in the sphere of non-realism.

The result is that we have an alternative path to follow to expand the gameplay extension field of 3D shooters; a path that can hold everything (almost) that was done so far, and that can open new gameplay frontiers.

Someone interested to venture?

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Disclaimer: all pictures belong to their rightful owners.

Claudio Scolastici is a skater-psycologist who's completely into videogames. He is a member of Noname Creative Team at Palzoun.

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