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On FPS Sniping And The Ruination Of Gameplay
An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad has a great article today which puts forth the claim that sniper rifles in multiplayer FPS games have made the genre infinitely worse. They take the time to explain why, and what improvements need to be made. It's definitely not the standard 'I hate campers' article." The editorial argues: "Every... 'reason' for the existence of sniper rifles - realism, historical accuracy, weapon diversity, giving players identifiable roles - is a lie", concluding that "...in games, snipers are given a ludicrous advantage over everyone else."
AA (america's army) does a very good job at making the sniper have a real disadvantage. You cant hold the gun straight while standing up, only when your lying on the ground can you get the gun to be steady. While crouched its less steady, but can be used. To get the scope to almost stop, you have to put down the bipod on the gun, and that takes even more time. The other thing it does well, is it takes a couple of seconds to reload the gun. If you find yourself in close combat (guy runs up behind you), it takes several seconds to switch to a pistol or a machine gun. But of course, the one big advantage is you can kill someone with one shot from very far away
I think the author of the article is a pissy CS player. CS has a poor implimentation of the AWP, you can shoot the gun and IMMEDIATELY switch to your pistol. You can even switch back right away and your rifle is reloaded. You can run around and when you stop moving, you have instant accuracy.
I totally agree with the one shot one kill for a sniper in FPS's, but you have to give big disadvantages at close range and while moving. The role of the sniper is not to run around. You set up somewhere far away. They even have spotters there for close combat situations.
I agree. I know the movie Enemy at the Gates was an awful, awful movie, historically speaking, but snipers were one of the reasons the Germans got bogged down in Stalingrad.
I do agree, however, that the bolt-action rifle should take time to load. That being said, I personally love the snipers' abilities. I think it'll be much more interesting when 3-D graphics make sniper rifles shine at distances to signal their presence, too, and make them vulnerable to things like RPGs once graphics will include things like walls that can be blown up.
In other words, I think the problem is not the guns, but the fact that they are treated just like any other gun, which they are NOT. Fixing that would probably make things better, but it wouldn't be that fun so why include a sniper rifle at all.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
What I know about snipers comes primarily from experimenting with Half-Life/CS. Snipers (and especially cheaters) make the game is unplayable because I cannot survive long enough to learn how to play.
First round, I walk out of a building and BAM! I'm dead -- one shot from about 200m away.
I wait until next round, walk out of the start zone and BAM! I'm dead again. This time I got to return fire before dropping.
Next round, I actually saw him first and hit him three times including a head shot (hey, I'm getting the hang of this!) but he doesn't fall. He spins, looks at me funny and BAM! I die again.
So, I don't play anymore. The lousy, cheating wannabe jerks can have their stupid game. I'm just glad I didn't pay for it.(*) (if I had, I'd have returned it with extreme predjudice.)
[(*) Just to clarify: by "didn't pay for it", I mean that I **PURCHASED** Half-Life single-player and **DOWNLOADED** CS for free instead of paying for the CS retail version. I don't want anyone mad at me!]
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Thank you sir, you saved me the effort of typing out a post like yours. I remember when my dad first taught me to shoot at 13 (Im 17 now). I thought it would be like videogames. How wrong I was.
I learned that a scope only makes shooting more difficult. It does not make it possible to knock quarters at 100 yards (without practice, that is). Iron sights own, espescially if you are one of those freaks who does that 1000yards/iron sights tournament in Ohio.
I learned that outside of point blank range, firing a pistol/smg quickly will do nothing but hit air. 4 years later, and I finally got as good as my dad at pistol shooting at 25 yards. That's how long it takes before you really start learning.
I knew a guy who was a sniper in Vietnam. One of his favorite stories involved him taking out a few people during a field promotion ceremony. A Major was giving an award to a Vietnamese soldier. He waited until he pinned it on the soldier and they saluted each other before he took out the newly promoted soldier. Then then immediately took out the Major.
He could have taken them out at any time, but chose his moment to send a message to the rest of the people present. Like most snipers, he was so far away that the bullet hit before the sound of the rifle so his targets didn't have a chance.
Having spent a chunk of my 20's crawling around in a gilly suit with a hideously expensive rifle with an even more hideously expensive targeting system strapped to the top, I feel its fair to say that snipers *DO* have a huge advantage.
A huge ammount of training goes into teaching you to correctly use your firearm, that is assuming you have the raw skill to use one in the first place. Targets are engaged down range with insanely accurate weaponry without the pressure and uncertainty of direct engagement.
Of course, sniper vs. squad with assault weapons at close range is one very, very costly and difficult to replace corpse.
Whilst realism dictates the use of snipers; they will always destroy game balance. Just as including the M214 (The Amazing Rotary Machinegun As Used So Effectively By Blain In Predator, to quote the literature) would unbalance gameplay.
However, if your team works as a team and employs effective counter sniper tactics; fps games such as counter-strike are still fun and, in tactical terms, a realistic experience. Unfortunately smoke grenades in such games are simulated far too poorly; a single smoke grenade should create larger, thicker clouds of smoke much more rapidly; and without microwave radar (requiring a non-man portable emmiter), a sniper cant see you through a cloud of smoke.
just my $0.02AUD
err!
jak.
The army snipers are the uber elite. Have you ever played with some guy on server who is amazing and isn't hacking? He is equal to the elite skill of snipers. Games should be made so that only the best of the best can use sniper rifles. Include: Posture, WInd (w/ variable wind zones), Bullet lag, bullet drop, breathing, scope focus, take away non scop crosshair and health. Give the ability if supported to look around. If it was hard enough, only one or two guys could snipe well.
The sniper rifle would be the finger of god. But you would have to be god to use it well.
Mod Wisely.
I'd say that the reverse is true in BF1942. The sniper is very hard to get many kills with, but many people seem to like playing as a sniper. As long as you don't run in a straight line in the open for too long (which is pretty stupid), you're a pretty hard target to hit.
So you get lots of snipers sitting around doing bugger all for the team, wildly shooting rounds in the vague direction of the enemy team. In the meantime the enemy storms in with assaults and captures all the flags.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
But in real life, killing isn't that important - hit someone pretty much anywhere and they're unable to continue fighting. Games don't have such accurate damage modelling, so you compensate by killing players that would "only" be seriously wounded in reality.