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Comment by ivl | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad the article mentioned movement. Games today make so many decisions when it comes to movement where the goal is to make it feel 'realistic', with sprinting, ducking and the like, but they end up feeling like they don't have any depth. An average player will have fairly similar movement to a fairly good one, with incremental differences on small things, and a player with amazing movement won't hugely stand out. In Quake 3? A player with amazing movement could do way more to control the map. Quake 3 really mastered that depth, especially with how much there was to learn between the two physics rule-sets (with CPM allowing for a bit more than VQ3). And the reason I say that is because the classic arena shooters (Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc) had their movement systems as a key part of the game. It's why Defrag became such a (relatively) big thing. And it's why Overwatch just doesn't feel as fun as it could, to me at least. For a game to look like that, but to leave out bunny hopping? Disappointing.

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I felt the same way when grenades were removed from TF2. In TFC they were hard to learn, but very rewarding to players who did. Conc-jumping was severely OP and fun. I guess they remove advanced gameplay mechanics to make the games more appealing to noobs and lower-skilled players.

I think one of the reasons for CS' enduring popularity is even noobs can get lucky or trick a better player and kill them. In Q3? Nope.

I have a friend who played Q3 for 6 years in a hardcore manner. I have played fps games for like 10 years but when we fought the result was 50 to -1 in his favor. (I managed to kill him once but I landed in lava 2 times) 4 years later we played again (he was not playing Q3 for 4 years) the result was 50 to 2 in h is favor. The skill cap in Q3 is just so damn high but it is also a rewarding experience.

> I think one of the reasons for CS' enduring popularity is even noobs can get lucky or trick a better player and kill them.

It's probably better for the better player as well. No matter how good you are, a stray bullet or two could take you out. There was no relaxing, and the game promoted caution enough that if you felt unchallenged, there were risks to take.

>No matter how good you are, a stray bullet or two could take you out.

And this is why I never really liked this game: it takes the control out of the hands of the player and gives it to a random number generator. If I'm good at the game, I should be the one who is in control, not RNG.

I think this is one of those situations where most people don't really know why they like what they like, or at least have a hard time comparing between two things. People like winning, but people like challenge. In a game where the more skilled or already winning player continues to win, that's enjoyable for them short term until it gets boring, but importantly it's often not enjoyable for the other players. In a game where some randomness is introduced (and/or other mechanisms to reduce the advantage of an already winning player) which prevents a single person from completely controlling the board/map, that person may feel it's less fun than situations where that is allowed, but I think that level of less fun (but still fun!) may last much longer, since challenge remains. In fact, to remain consistently at the top actually requires more skill, IMO.

Personally, I never liked Quake deathmatch (all the way back to the original). To me it seemed to reward prior map knowledge too much, and allowed someone with a known path that optimized item respawns to deny pickups to other users. Anything that makes the game easier for the person in the lead in a multiplayer game is a net negative IMO, as much fun as it feels to be that person.

It took me a while to really _get_ the difference in mentality between different types of gamers and this difference would go a long way to explain what one person finds enjoyable vs another - of course everyone wants to win but if you didn't have to put in any real effort to win then it's not going to be as rewarding.

In a nutshell there are two types of gamers: 1) casual and 2) serious

FWIW (which may not be all that much), certain games cater more to casual players by having a shallow learning curve and a low skill ceiling while others are more favourable towards serious players by providing a steep learning curve and a surprising amount of depth.

I'd compare games that have a steep curve and skill depth to real sports, like tennis or golf. If you've never played tennis and you go up against an enthusiast player who's played a few hundred hours of tennis, guess who's not going to be having much fun? How long will it take you to catch up if you both continue to practice the same amount from this point onwards? You'll probably always feel that the other guy has a certain edge over you even once you catch up to where he originally was.

If you're serious about wanting to get better then you'll keep practising until you reach a point where you become competitive against players of a given level and things get a whole lot more rewarding and fun then. This is actually the main reason why I loved playing Quake and Starcraft so much (there are many other games, but these are the two I was most involved with), It's also the reason why they were (and still are) great competitive platforms.

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I agree with what you are saying, but it's somewhat different to what I was explaining. Beyond learning curve and skill there are the mechanics of the game itself. These can affect not only the learning curve and the skill, but also provide positive and negative feedback loops, which can completely ruin the experience for many not because of a disparity of skill, but because of poor forethought of the designers.

For example, in games where there are relatively few spawn points, spawn points are enemy accessible, and you can respawn multiple times per round, you might have a negative feedback loop on death through the camping of enemy spawn points. If this isn't mitigated in some way, such as through removing one of the prerequisites or making it fairly dangerous to attempt, it can turn into a situation where once this tactic is successfully employed, skill becomes much less important, and you may not be able to escape.

In the original Quake/Quakeworld, there were routes around some maps where you could run the route, and things would spawn almost immediately prior to your arrival. For a person who knew this and traveled that route, not only would it allow them to effectively travel a large portion of the map to look for opponents while keeping themselves in good health with good ammo, and denying their opponents resources. This is a positive feedback loop on a successful player, and also reduces the effectiveness of skill.

In the end, games that have easily implemented tactics (that is, they don't require a lot of skill) that nullify the impact of opponent skill and don't have tactical answers to those situations are not good vehicles for competition. A good competitive game is one where skill (speed, accuracy, knowledge, prediction, etc) is often the deciding factor, and tactics employed can be countered by a skilled opponent that is prepared for them.

I think I agree with your point in general, but it doesn't sound like you played much Quakeworld or Quake 3. Spawn times on all items are on a fixed timer, and a large part of the game dynamic is, when you're behind, knowing when the opponent picked them up and knowing when to contest them. And obviously being skilled enough to do so. Variants of Quake 3 (and Quakeworld for that matter) are still played competitively, and the skill ceiling is extremely high.

Your suggestion is that these games would allow a weaker player to win because of lucky spawn or item pickups early in the game, but this never happens.

In all games (Tennis, chess, whatever) one player very often has to play from behind -- whether you agree this is a good thing or not I'm not sure, but it is one way to design a game, and the way many many competitive games well before video games work. If you play better you gain an advantage, otherwise what is the point of playing better until the last moments?

> it doesn't sound like you played much Quakeworld or Quake 3

You're right. There were multiple factors that made it less fun than the alternatives I had at the time.

> Spawn times on all items are on a fixed timer, and a large part of the game dynamic is, when you're behind, knowing when the opponent picked them up and knowing when to contest them.

> Your suggestion is that these games would allow a weaker player to win because of lucky spawn or item pickups early in the game

That's not sufficient for the scenario I described. It's not just that you get specific items early, it's that some maps supported specific routes you could traverse that allowed monopolization of those item drops. Now, my point isn't that this is necessarily bad, but that without effective tactics to combat this (which may exist, I was by no means a pro), then it's possible it may boost the ability of a player over someone who might be considered somewhat more skilled at that game. Based on how good my recollection of the situation (from almost a decade and a half ago) was and how well I was able to ascertain methods to counter it (possibly very poor), it may not be a good example.

> In all games (Tennis, chess, whatever) one player very often has to play from behind -- whether you agree this is a good thing or not I'm not sure ...

I think it is a good thing (thus my original point, a few comments up-thread). I also think a game that's meant to be competitive and skill based that it should be possible for a more skilled player to outplay a less skilled player, given enough time. Any situation which allows the lead player to maintain a lead regardless of skill (or even just ignoring everything but great skill differences) is a poor game of skill, and not really fit for competitive play.

And let us consider the infamous Mario Kart blue shell, a weapon that specifically targets the player in first place. Still, for all the complaining about it making races random, the better players still seem to win most of the time.

In some iterations you can avoid the blue shell. IIRC the 3ds one shows you what items the others are holding and if you see a blue shell pop up, just move behind the guy in second place. Even if the blue shell is fired, it makes a distinct noise and if you aren't too far ahead, you can duck behind the second place guy and let him take the hit.

I feel i must ask, define "in control"?

It feels like people here talk about control and skill as some kind of Neo like ability to dodge bullets.

This rather than the tactical control of deciding when to engage, withdraw or anything like that.

Counter-Strike has very little actual randomness. Bullet recoil follows a fixed pattern which only appears random. (See http://twowordbird.com/articles/csgo-recoil-mechanics/ for example.)

Expert players can (and do) learn to compensate for better accuracy.

An RNG is not a bad thing, if the rest of the game is designed to compensate for it. In FPS, such random mechanics tends to make solo gameplay less dependent on skill, but rewards team effort, insofar as coordination can minimize such random chance affecting the outcome.

I can't speak for CS, not having experience there. But in Red Orchestra, where weapons are even more instakill, and there's even more randomness (with things such as artillery strikes, that have unpredictable patterns on terrain - you can be in a trench, and if you're unlucky, a shell can land inside and kill you), good team commander and squad leaders are absolutely necessary to win, and a team with better leadership will run circles around the one that doesn't, even if the latter has better players, for this exact reason.

There seems to be several versions of Red Orchestra. Do you have a particular one in mind?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Orchestra

All of them, really (that are video games). It's a single series.

I would say that the most recent incarnation is the most tactical - ironically, largely because it disposes with some of the first game's realism, and makes squad leaders into moving spawn points for the rest of the squad. This means that squad leaders need to balance staying alive (to provide better spawns) versus the need to keep advancing (to provide spawns closer to important objectives); and squad members, on the other hand, need to protect their leader even at great personal risk to themselves.

It also makes flanking and other maneuvers that much more worthwhile, because the payoff for having your entire squad spawn on you near a gap in the enemy's defense line (or, better yet, behind it) is immense, and can make for a very rapid takeover of the objective, or deny the enemy reinforcements and allow the gap to grow faster than the other team can plug it.

So the team that provides the best collective cover for their squad leaders' advance is more likely to win compared to the team that just goes for kills, even if the latter is noticeably better at the run-and-gun mechanics.

This. Overwatch is fun, but Weapons Factory Arena was much more so, esp with half of the classes (including the sniper, engineer, and some of the attack classes) given off-hand grapple, which could be used to "grapple jump" and massively increase the movement speed and agility of a skilled player. Here's a video showing some fairly high-level play: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3UW7eCYqGpQ

More: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-IDF_wWPUME

IMO it's a massively more fun game than Overwatch, but it no longer has an active player community. The best shot I have at playing with others is QuakeCon, but there used to be a few servers with 32 player limits, and I can tell you that anything beyond about 8x8 was just stupid fun. I've played hundreds or thousands of hours of this and it was amazing. I've never found another game which did it for me quite like WFA did. As the cherry on top, it runs great on a Pentium 3 500 with a Voodoo 3 MP on 56K at 1024x768 on a CRT. It also runs fine with 60fps constant on the original Motorola Droid.

Better graphics and loot boxes don't make a game fun IMO. Great mechanics and an awesome tight-knit community do.

I abstain from rocket jumping in TF2 because I feel it's such an outrageously unrealistic thing that it shouldn't be there in the first place.

I also don't use anything but the default equipment, because I feel everything else gives an unfair advantage to players who hace played a lot and thereby gained items. I mean, what is this? Play to win?!

>> where the goal is to make it feel 'realistic', with sprinting

Calculations to figure out that doomguy ran ~ 55mph:

https://www.doomworld.com/vb/doom-general/56505-trying-to-ca...

Ludicrous speed is good, the "hold down a button to temporarily run a tiny bit faster until your stamina bar runs out" mechanic is what sucks.

Some of these decisions (slower speeds and cover mechanics in particular) are driven by the need to make the games playable on consoles with handheld controllers.

Yet Doom plays great on a console in terms of movement...

The article addresses this - Doom is 'first person Robotron' and it was designed without 'mouselook' absolute positioning control in mind. I don't think it's an all-encompassing explanation (tastes and fashions drive change too) but the fact that designers have to accommodate two fundamentally different control schemes in the same game has had a very big impact on the way FPS games are designed.

True, but I'd say the larger impact is in how levels are designed and the aesthetics - not so much the platform.

I think it's broader than just "designed for easy control on a console". There were other factors at play.

I think what actually set this type of design in motion can be traced back to that point in time when Half-Life came out and all of a sudden everybody seemed to criticize Quake (and indeed id Software in general) because their shooters lacked a story (actually, my recollection is a little fuzzy - games like Thief and System Shock were certainly exploring the 'story' space as well, I'm just not sure off the top of my head in what order the games arrived on the scene).

The realistic movement (head-bobbing, slowness, inertia, etc) seems like it's meant to convey a vague sense of what the physical impact of running would be, in the same way that camera shake is used to accentuate punches in a fighting game or a movie with fighting scenes. It's something that conveys momentum and mass.

It's an element to convey story and immersion. I feel like there's probably an axis here, where you have pure arcade games like Geometry Wars on one end and ultra-cinematic shooters like Battlefield 4 on the other. I'm really guessing here but I imagine Battlefield 4 (or let's say even the original Call of Duty, though I've only heard/read about it and never actually sat down to play it) wants you to actually feel the things that the soldier in the story is feeling. In some sense, it wants to be an interactive movie experience. As opposed to Geometry Wars and Doom, where the gameplay comes first and the story is nearly non-existent or very secondary.

I remember one of the biggest praises given to Call of Duty (EDIT: actually, reading further down, I think it was Soldier of Fortune that I was thinking of!) that it felt like you were in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. I can't help but think that must have been a huge contributor to the tone of console shooters that came afterwards.

actually, my recollection is a little fuzzy - games like Thief and System Shock

I think it might be, Ultima Underworld, Dark Forces, Marathon, many others were story-driven well before Half Life. So I don't think it's story that did it. The console aspect is something several designers have written about, including Romero, I just couldn't google my way back to the references.

I remember one of the biggest praises given to Call of Duty (EDIT: actually, reading further down, I think it was Soldier of Fortune that I was thinking of!)

MOHAA, I think not COD or SoF.

CoD got MASSIVE praise for it's first 2 games though. They were genuinely atmospheric WW2 shooting games (and, IMO, a whole lot better than the dreck that followed).

So it could be both (MoH was also praised a LOT).

Soldier of Fortune was praised mostly for it's "gritty" story and the "realistic" bullet damage (shooting different areas of a character had different visual wound results and reactions).

Pretty sure the OP was talking about the Normandy beach landing bit. That was in MoHAA.

Yep, it was a long time ago now :)

Dark Forces is one I haven't thought of in awhile - such a great story-based FPS.

I probably didn't make it as clear as I meant to - I wasn't so much referring to "when story-based first-person games started being made" as much as I was meaning to refer to "that point in time when people started criticizing games like Quake for not having a story".

Well, the point is Doom's levels and controls are designed for the constraints of a 1992-ish pc. It's not too surprising it worked on consoles as well. Quake on consoles was, predictably, poop.

I couldn't disagree with that more - I am so glad they kept bunnyhopping out of overwatch and instead focused on adding depth and skill to the actual game itself.

There's enough high skill floor things to master in Overwatch that there doesn't need to be a gimmicky movement system to separate the good from the bad. The games intended and obvious mechanics leave plenty to be mastered.

What bhopping would add to Overwatch is a huge increase in pacing and aim and prediction needed. I don't think it would really take away from the rest of the game, as it's not like bhopping and shooting at the same time has to be viable. The huge number of movement abilities wouldn't lose anything because of it. The skill ceiling would go up, but the skill floor wouldn't.

I' will concede that the number of movement abilities, and how they're trying to balance the game, bhopping might feel gimmicky in the case of Overwatch. I don't believe it's gimmicky in general. It certainly didn't feel that way for Quake. Or in a more recent case, Reflex.

Bunny hopping adds a skill floor to the game competitively because everyone who can't do it simply gets blown out. You cannot compete without being able to master this skill. That's a skill floor.

Competitively, sure. But there are always people who can't do certain things in games.

That's very interesting. In competitive SSBM (smash bros melee), movement is one of the integral parts of the game that give it its depth. Top player's movements can differ greatly from each other.

What is good about bunny hopping? It raises the skill ceiling, but it doesn't do so in an interesting or challenging way. It's basically just a "rub your head and pat your belly" test, what TVTropes calls "fake difficulty." It doesn't test your tactics or your aim or your situational awareness; it just tests your ability to stay focused while hammering the spacebar continuously.

Because it completely opens up map geometry. New paths open up, and it makes landing shots on you harder. It lets you put yourself in an advantageous situation. Aim and situational awareness aren't the only aspects that matter in a 1v1 game. Because of that, I'd say it raises the skill ceiling in a very meaningful way. It can be hard to master, and it's not critical to understanding the map, but if you want to have real success, you need to be able to take advantage of the new paths that open up to you with bhopping.

It raises the amount of aim and situational awareness needed. And I'd say it does so in a fun way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMEQp5BZHO8

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