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Gaming and Cinema Modern Gaming Top 5 Best and Worse Multiplayer Gaming Clichés
Gaming and Cinema Modern Gaming Top 5 Best and Worse Multiplayer Gaming Clichés
| Top 5 Best and Worse Multiplayer Gaming Clichés |
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| Saturday, 13 February 2010 01:11 |
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I spend most of my online gaming time on First Person Shooters, but most of these clichés should be multi-genre. We all know games take cues from other successful games. Eventually these cues become clichés. Some we grow to love, others we grow to hate. Here’s what I think are the best and worst clichés for multiplayer games.
Let’s start with the worst. Number Five, Censors This usually applies to free games that make some effort to be “family friendly”, ie lots of blood and gore is ok as long as long as no curses are muttered. Every time though censors can be defeated by adding simple spaces to the obscene words, so what’s the fu cking point? Oh and if the game has a voice chat option text censors seem even more stupid. They often end up teaching kids new bad words by censoring things like snipe. Then they ask, “Why is that bad?” Thank you parental substitute for f ucking up our kids! Number Four, Pump Action Shotguns I swear, in shooters shotguns are never balanced. You rarely see semi-auto or full auto shotguns in multiplayer shooters. They’re always pump action and pretty much all the same. Semi-auto shotguns have been around since the early 1900s. It pisses me off when I’m playing a futuristic shooter that has a pump action shotgun! What the hell? Modern day armies are already phasing out pump action shottys, so why would we see them in the future? Why not just lower their damage and range? It’s really starting to get ridicules with recent shooters still following this cliché. Number Three, Too Many Weapons This one is definitely multi-genre. Developers often think “the more the merrier” when it comes to weapons. That’s hardly the case. In shooters and RPGs alike when there’s a ton of weapons they’re never balanced, ie one pistol is better than the other etc. So you have to waste time trying to figure out which is the best pistol, the best sword, the best assault rifle, etc. The shooters that get it right have one machine gun, one pistol, one rocket launcher, etc. One exception is Kill Zone 2 which has two distinctly different assault rifles, but even that game fucked up by having two indistinguishable rocket launchers. It’s understandable in MMORPGs to have different weapons for different levels, but there’s always way too many to find and you spend lots of hours saving cash only to buy a weapon that totally blows. Different weapons tailored to different styles can work, but rarely does. Developers should take notes on how the shooters and RPGs back in the day did it. Number Two, Oversized HUDs This happens more often in MMORPGs than any other online game. Even recent FPSs have this problem. Kill Zone 2 was so bad that I actually had to turn it off! That made playing a medic real hard but I was suddenly able to appreciate the games awesome graphics. Why spend millions on the visuals just to obstruct them? To top it off you usually can’t disable parts of the HUD in FPSs. I don’t want to see every kill someone makes! All I need to know is who’s winning and where are the bad guys. Don’t even get me started on MMOs. An intuitive GUI is almost too much to ask for. If you’re going to play an MMO prepare for a lot of unnecessary clicking and looking at useless information. Number One, Shitty Starter Guns Seriously, why does the assault rifle suck so bad in Unreal Tournament 2004? How about the pistol in Quake II? That thing was a joke! This issue has only been recently remedied with loadouts becoming more popular or having the player start out with better weapons. In Kill Zone 2 the M82 is one of the best guns in the game, why can’t all starter guns be like that? It’s almost like a sick joke the developers play on newbs and veteran players alike. If you try to kill anybody with a starter gun who has something other than the same thing, you’re hosed. Now that we have the bad ones out of the way let’s move on to the clichés I love. Number Five, Loadouts I don’t know about you guys, but I hate scavenging the field for a weapon I’m good with. We all know campers love to stake out next to the really good stuff and they know we won’t get far with the starter guns (see above). I was pretty pissed when Uncharted 2 didn’t have loadouts. I seriously hate the AK-47, why the hell do I have to fight my way towards an M4 or a pump shotty (augh!)? I can do so much more damage when I start off with a gun I’m good with. This setup also forces the developers to make the weapons more balanced and remove the “god guns” that we all love to hate. Even twitch shooters are starting to do this, giving me a reason to get back into that subgenre. Number Four, Class System This has been a standard for RPGs, but it isn’t seen too often in FPSs. It all started in the FPS genre with the Team Fortress mod for Quake. It’s just now starting to see a resurgence since Team Fortress 2. This is in my opinion the only way to make tactical shooters… tactical. If we’re all just mindless grunts than anybody can be the hero and the game becomes a twitch shooter. Give someone a specific job and now you have an incentive to cooperate. I honestly don’t understand why this isn’t a standard for tactical shooters. However it’s been a commonplace for RPGs for so long that it’s anything but a cliché, but it’s a damned good one. Number Three, Headshot Announcements One of the steeples of Unreal Tournament was the announcers, and the thing we loved to hear them announce was HEADSHOT! Nowadays games seem to be making a gory splatter sound instead. I don’t want that! I want some dude with a badass voice announcing every shot that goes through the skull. Remember, you’re only a badass when someone else announces you’re a badass, and headshots are the epitome of badassedness. I wish someone would announce headshots in paintball, and I would prefer the guy that played Duke Nukem to do it. Headshot baby! Number Two, Ranking and Match Making System I can’t stand being stuck in a match where I just mow over newbs for ten minutes; I also can’t stand having my ass handed to me every 3.5 seconds. How do we solve this? Put in a freaking ranking system! Of course the ranking system is flat out useless if there isn’t a system to sort out the newbs from the pros. Bring in the Match Making system! Seriously why did the creators of Resistance 2 put in a ranking system, but no system to separate the ranks? This drove me up the wall! This is really what made me abandon older online shooters so I could play the latest and greatest. Of course MMORPG players are probably laughing at this as they’ve known this secret for years, hence it being dubbed a cliché. Number One, Dismemberment Dismemberment should be a commonplace even in racing games! Teabagging is for tweens. If you really want to humiliate someone in an FPS blow their arm off with a Gatling gun! Or better yet, gib the bastard. Decapitations are so 90s, slice your enemy in half with a sword and watch the entrails fly every where! Games are really getting pussified these days. UT3 had no full body dismemberment, more and more FPSs are getting a Teen rating, and Dark Fantasy MMOs are an obscurity. What the fuck? Are online games losing their edge? Excessive gore is better than none at all. Regardless of the genre nothing makes giggle like a little girl more so than hacking my opponents up into little pieces. You know how to spot a newb (or me) in AVP2? They’re usually a xenomorph hacking up the body of a Marine. So what if gore is cliché, we love it! Since the days of Quake gibbing your opponent was the ultimate in satisfaction. F uck this childish teabagging. I want watch the dumbstruck looks from those kids as I gib their characters in Quake III.
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| Last Updated on Saturday, 13 February 2010 01:17 |
