'Call of Duty heeft bijna een generatie FPS-spelers verpest.'
In een interview met PC Gamer geeft John Gibson, president van Tripwire Games (bekend van Killing Floor en Red Orchestra 2), zijn visie over de huidige staat van multiplayergames. Volgens Gibson zijn veel mensen die gewend zijn Call of Duty te spelen niet goed 'opgevoed' om FPS-games serieus te spelen.
"One of the things that Call of Duty does, and it’s smart business, to a degree, is they compress the skill gap. And the way you compress the skill gap as a designer is you add a whole bunch of randomness. A whole bunch of weaponry that doesn’t require any skill to get kills. Random spawns, massive cone fire on your weapons. Lots of devices that can get kills with zero skill at all, and you know, it’s kind of smart to compress your skill gap to a degree. You don’t want the elite players to destroy the new players so bad that new players can never get into the game and enjoy it."
Dit is natuurlijk leuk voor de speler die zich meteen vanaf het begin af aan een Chuck Norris-gelijkende Navy Seal voelt, maar je leert door de grote randomness-factor niet de daadwerkelijke skills die nodig zijn om werkelijk goed te worden in FPS-games, vindt Gibson.
"But the skill gap is so compressed, that it’s like a slot machine. You might as well just sit down at a slot machine and have a thing that pops up an says "I got a kill!" They’ve taken individual skill out of the equation so much. So you see these guys—I see it all the time, they come in to play Red Orchestra, and they’re like “This game’s just too hardcore. I’m awesome at Call of Duty, so there’s something wrong with your game. Because I’m not successful at playing this game, so it must suck. I’m not the problem, it’s your game.”
"Players like Elliot [Cannon, Lead Designer] and I, back in the Quake and Unreal days, you know, we had to get good at aiming. These guys don’t have to anymore. The skill gap is so compressed that like, the game makes me feel that I’m awesome. These guys, when I actually watch them play, they’re actually very poor FPS players. And I don’t think it’s because they’re incapable of getting good, I think it’s because they never had to get good. They get enough kills in Call of Duty to feel like they’re awesome, but they never really had to develop their FPS skills beyond that. And it’s a shame because when you do that, when you create a shooter like that, you’re very limited on the amount of depth that you can give the game. It’s all gotta be very surface level, like I’m sitting there eating cotton candy and I never get any meat and potatoes. And it’s frustrating for me as a designer to see players come in and they’re literally like In Call of Duty it takes 0.15 seconds to go into ironsights. In RO2 it takes 0.17 seconds to go into ironsights. I hate this."
Kortom: Call of Duty leert mensen niet de juiste skills aan om ook succesvol te worden in andere shooters, wat wellicht de grootste stroke of genius is die Activision heeft met Call of Duty-games want dat betekent dat de gamers terug zullen blijven komen naar het welvertrouwde moederschip.
