Ugh.

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Induced apathy: cover mechanics in video games

Over on Gamers With Jobs, Rob Zacny posted an article that offers some well-deserved reprobation of that one dopey artifice that afflicts most third-person shooters:  the cover system.  His focus is on Mass Effect 2, but his criticisms are readily applicable to most other games in the genre. Here's the money quote:

At the heart of every shooter lies a dreary reality: you drop the cursor over a target and push a button until it dies. Good shooters never let you see this to clearly, or feel like it's that simple. They force players to concentrate on other tasks. They emphasize tactics and maneuvers, or weapon characteristics. They introduce enemies designed to counter standard tactics. They change the terrain to handicap some styles of play and promote others. They keep the player from relying exclusively on the same bag of tricks.

Too often, cover excludes these techniques and actually emphasizes the repetitive, mechanical task of point-and-click combat. By its very nature, cover roots combatants in place, so movement becomes a secondary concern. Environments tend to be similar and repetitive, because they have to make room for the large, broken spaces that cover demands. Worse, these spaces telegraph not only that a fight is about to occur, but often the way in which it will occur. Not that it's hard to predict, because cover also creates exposed dead-ground between the fighting positions where nobody can survive. So fights consistently occur at medium range. This in turn makes most weapons interchangeable. Sniper rifles and shotguns become decorative accessories on a character model. They are relegated to carefully controlled situations, like the inevitable sniper sequence.

Many of Zacny's observations apply equally well to some first-person shooters: games that generally lack a scripted cover mechanic (I'm thinking in particular of the SP portion of Black Ops).  An endless stream of enemies popping out from behind crates at regular intervals is a poor excuse for AI no matter what game you're playing.  The problems he outlines, however, are almost universally endemic to third-person shooters.  That's not to say they're inherently bad games -- Mass Effect 2 is still absolutely worth playing, for example -- but predictable, repetitive combat is the bane of any shooter.

I'd take Rob's criticisms a step further.  By the very nature of the perspective, third-person shooters are always going to suffer from these mechanical contrivances, and they're always going to be less immersive than their first-person counterparts.  The detachment between player and avatar turns combat sequences into micro-RTS experiences that force gamers into the role of puppet-master.  In Mass Effect, you're never going to be in Commander Shepherd's head; you only get to be the camera floating several feet away.

In a third-person game, you're never allowed the personal (albeit simulated) experience of recoil, or of getting shot, or of getting whacked with a crowbar.  That Krogan isn't getting uncomfortably close to you, it's getting close to him.  That mercenary isn't lobbing blobs of deadly energetic shit at you, she's lobbing them at him.  There's no need to wonder what the enemy is doing while you're cowering behind a chest-high wall, waiting for your health to regenerate, because your line of sight isn't limited to what the avatar can see from his perch.

I realize that a large part of what I've said here is a statement of my own preferences, but I suspect it goes a long way toward explaining the dominance of the FPS among the genres.  For my money, the third-person perspective is a lazy way to instantiate combat, and a developer touting a game's cover system as some kind of innovation is a dead giveaway that the shooting is going to suck.  There will always be a ceiling to the quality of combat in any TPS, and that limitation-by-design will always be a source of annoyance to players that want to love a game completely.

Gamasutra's Top 5 PC Games of 2010

The full article is here.

The (predictable) Winners:

5.  Stalker:  Call of Pripyat

4.  Amnesia:  The Dark Descent

3.  Mass Effect 2

2.  Civilization V

1.  StarCraft II

Honorable Mentions:

ArmA 2
Supreme Commander 2
Call of Duty: Black Ops
Fallout: New Vegas
RUSE
Super Meat Boy
Bejeweled 3
Battlefield:  Bad Company 2
DeathSpank

Black Ops "First Strike" DLC

Treyarch's Dan Bunting dished the news to Major Nelson (podcast):


Multiplayer maps:

• Berlin Wall ("Checkpoint Charlie," between East and West Berlin)
• Discovery (Antarctic research station)
• Kowloon (rainy roof top map, apparently adapted the single-player version)
• Stadium (a hockey rink in Northeastern US)

Zombies map:

• Ascension

The Xbox guys get it first, on 2-1-2011.  No word yet on a release date or pricing for the PC.

Cry "HACKER," and let slip the dregs of war