I know, it's the moment you've all been waiting for. The single greatest thing your eyes will ever witness. The one thing you know you can't live without...
THE FIRST ARTICLE.
I'll let that sink in for a moment.
Seriously, enjoy it. I know the site is coming along slowly, I have yet to even begin working on the photoshop element of it, but it'll pick up. In the meantime, enjoy a nice, meaty article. I should probably mention (from the feedback I've gotten so far) that this article is based in opinion. I will be more objective when it comes to the real reviews of any game I do =).
"WHERE DID HE COME FROM!?!?"
A Look Into how FPS Multiplayer Maps have Become Too Complex
I don’t know where everyone’s FPS history started, but mine started way back in 1999 with Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition. The halcylon days of FPS gaming, these were the years of Quake LAN parties and the beginnings of the online gaming revolution. However, I was stuck with dial-up, and never really got to experience the online potential of many old-school FPSs. But that didn’t stop me from playing. I faced off against bots until my eyes bled. I memorized every multiplayer arena in Unreal Tournament down to the last detail. It probably helped that I was only about 9 years old at the time, and some of my most frequently typed phrases were “god”, “allammo”, “loaded”, and “fly” (Any old UT players will immediately recognize these console commands =P).
But regardless of my naturally cheap nature as a child, Unreal Tournament fostered my love for FPS games. The maps were beautiful and diverse, and when I did play legitimately, the game was challenging. You can only begin to imagine when my brain hit Halo...However, my personal history of FPS games is not the subject of this article. What I wanted to glean from this travel back in time is how the classic maps from 1999 compare to most multiplayer maps in the year 2010. It is my personal belief (and the opinion of quite a few gamers I’ve played with), that FPS multiplayer game arenas are simply becoming too complex. Whether you agree or disagree, this is something that game developers need to start looking at.
Stepping back in time again for a moment, lets examine a classic Unreal Tournament map that any old FPS player should recognize: Facing Worlds. This was practically a staple of the series; It was Unreal Tournament’s Blood Gulch. It was miraculously simple, because you could literally draw the entire map in about five minutes on a piece of paper. It had two bases on either side, connected simply by 2 arcing walkways that met in a bit of a hill at the center, kinda like a giant eye. The bases were equally as simple: Bottom floor with the flag, a 2nd floor perch, and a top with armor and a sniper. This basic construction served as THE CTF arena to play in for most of UT’s durration. And for me, it never got old.
The point in all that was to point out one fact: Facing Worlds (and many other early FPS maps), were SIMPLE. They were easy to understand, easy to memorize, and fun to play on. No better example of this exists than the most well known of all the early FPS maps, Halo’s Blood Gulch. There is no explanation needed here, because we all know exactly what that map looks and plays like.
(2 bases, box canyon, some cliffs and hills. Done)
I mention Halo because it set a standard for multiplayer games on the Xbox. Every game wanted to be like it, and the maps became the stuff of legend. That design even carried over into Halo 2, where the multiplayer maps became more complex, but kept a similar feel of Halo 1’s simplistic, easy to memorize maps. Not to say that the two games played alike, because they were different in a million ways, but I still remember the layout of almost every Halo 1 and 2 map to this day. That’s gotta count for something. Halo 2 continued to bust balls and stay on the top of the original Xbox Live charts all the way until Halo 3 hit the shelves. Halo 3 then took over as top dog. Halo was still king, and it didn’t look like it was ever going to slow down.
However, one year later, Infinity Ward shocked the world and flipped a giant bird to Bungie with the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. People finally had an alternative to Halo, and an alternative that packed a punch. The gameplay for CoD4 was different than what most people had ever seen. It combined a lot of what old school gamers loved in Ghost Recon, and mixed that in with the regenerative health system similar to Halo’s shields. Couple that with modern guns and realistic graphics, and you had a blockbuster title that became a big threat to Halo’s dominance. One of the biggest things that CoD4 did, however, was in the area of their multiplayer maps. The maps in CoD4 were some of the most complex maps the gaming world had ever seen before. They were pulled straight out of CoD4’s campaign, and boy were they a hit. People loved the complexities of the maps, making good sniping points and stealthy movement actually matter for the first time in an FPS game. CoD4 seemed to have a perfect balance between complexity and playability.
And then along came Modern Warfare 2.
We’re again skipping a few years ahead here, but Modern Warfare 2 is really where things started to get bad. When I saw CoD4, I knew that we were reaching the limit of how complex multiplayer maps could get before they started becoming nearly unplayable. Little did I know that Modern Warfare 2 would push that limit WAY too far.
And here is where we get to the core of the issue. Even since the days of Halo 2, I’ve been wondering just how long it would take detail to overpower gameplay. Halo 3 was really pushing my limit on detail vs. gameplay. I remember getting frustrated because my foot would snag on a overly-modeled corner, stopping my character and resulting in my death. I remember cursing the game for putting a bump on a walkway, making me miss that last shot to kill my foe. It was all these little things that made me angry in Halo 2 and 3. Modern Warfare 2 took those frustrations and made them seem trivial.
When playing Modern Warfare 2, have you ever been overwhelmed by just how may places you can go? Have you ever been looking out into a seeminly blank playspace, only to be sniped from somewhere you SWEAR you just checked? This kind of thing happens to me all the time in this game. I will turn a corner, and before I can even assess my situation, I’m murdered from some area I failed to look at. Let me tell you, I don’t have a problem with detail. I’ve been playing FPSs for years, and logged a lot of hours into CoD4. But I have NEVER encountered as many problems with an FPS as I have with MW2. There are so MANY problems with this game, but today we are focusing on but one of its glaring deformities:
There are just too many places to look!
When you round a corner into an area in MW2, there are probably around 10 to 20 different spots an enemy can hide in. It could be behind a barrel, or up in a sniping spot, or prone in the grass, or in the window, or in the other window, or above you, or next to you, or in front of you, or behind you! There’s just too many to check! Unless you want to creep around the map, frantically swinging your head around to check all possible locations, you’re going to die a lot in MW2. The alternative to doing this is to camp (which most people do in some way or another), which is only helped by the complexity problem. Complex maps are a camper’s paradise. When there are a thousand places to be, there is a lower chance that you’ll be seen if you stay perfectly still and don’t move around. Odds are that your enemy will be busy checking every other spot except the one you’re in, and boom, free kill. So you want an answer to why MW2 is so camp happy? There it is: The maps are too complex to facilitate a smooth FPS experience.
Now you’re probably thinking “That’s just one game dude! You can’t judge the trend of all FPS titles based on one game!!!” However, this problem isn’t just localized to one game. The problem is growing. The Modern Warfare franchise not only set a lot of records, but it also set a new bar for FPS developers. Just like Halo did way back in the day, Modern Warfare has sealed the deal for modern military shooters. Don’t want to believe me? Battlefield Bad Company 2. I played the demo, and while it still feels like a Battlefield game, it also feels a hell of a lot like Modern Warfare 2. The maps may be bigger, but when it came down to player vs player combat (no vehicles) in a playspace littered with cover and buildings, I could swear I heard “OUR UAV IS ONLINE!”.
The problem is that having complex maps makes seeing your enemy very, very hard. It promotes camping, and leads to a confusing and frustrating experience for any gamer who’s trying to play competitively. Back in the day, you could ususally predict where your enemy was coming from, because there were only a few places they could be at any given time. If you check these places, you’re good to go, and if you see an enemy, you get to fight. In games like Modern Warfare 2, not only do you have a very low chance to fight back (due to low health), but visibility of the enemy is so minimal, they can blend right into the environment.
So how do we compensate for this problem? For the answer, we turn to Halo 3. Halo 3 introduced very, very complex maps to the multiplayer arena. Load up almost any map, and you’ll see what I mean. The environments on bigger team maps are expansive and vast, and if it weren’t for some brilliant design elements, Halo 3 would suffer the same fate as Modern Warfare 2.
What Halo does to compensate for its complexity is make health high, and visibility even higher. Not only do the bipeds in Halo’s multiplayer stick out like sore thumbs, but the colors are bright and vivid. Also, when you look at an enemy, even from far away, their name will quikly pop up in red in your HUD. Compare this to Modern Warfare 2, where the color pallet on most maps is minimal, mostly consisting of greys, browns, whites, and blacks. The players in MW2 seem to be built to blend in, and it takes a second or two for you to see an enemy’s name pop up (If they don’t have Cold Blooded Pro on, which negates this entirely). Most of the time when you shoot at something in Halo, you can see it clearly and you know where it’s going and what it’s doing. In Modern Warfare 2, I find myself shooting at blurs and whisps of movement that might or might not be a person. Many times I have shot a tree stump thinking it might be a crouching sniper in a ghillie suit, or shot at a shadow in a window because it looked vaguely like the outline of an upper body and head. Later on, I learned to watch for the idle animations of a charater to give him away, but should it really come to that? Should I really have to wait and watch to see if my target scratches his balls before I know if its an enemy or a bush?
Developers need to get their heads on straight and start thinking about the multiplayer maps they make. Modern Warfare 2 would have been a much less flawed game had their map design not been so horrendous and complex. Even games that do complexity right, like Battlefield and Halo 3 still have their problems. I STILL get hung up on little pieces of geometry in Halo 3, and I’ll still sometimes get confused as to where someone is shooting me from. Did that little bump really need to be modeled in there instead of a texture? Did that corner have to extend that far on the bottom just to hang me up while I’m trying to run away? Did they really have to put so many damned windows on that building?
The answer is no. The problem is real, and if multiplayer spaces keep getting more and more complex, the modern FPS will soon be little more than a camp-happy random slew of gunfire. I don’t want to see that happen to the genre, and I’m pretty sure you don’t either.
Until next time, keep it real.
