Tripwire president says Call of Duty has ruined shooters

[Commissar MercZ]

Or more specifically, a "generation of shooters", ie players. I've only played RO1 but the article below details their frustration in making game modes accessible to the kind of fast and quick gameplay that FPS's like CoD have encouraged.

Call of Duty "has almost ruined a generation of shooter players," says Tripwire Interactive | Interviews, News | PC Gamer

The interview was with John Gibson, the president of tripwire. This is the part I am referring to specifically, but the whole interview is worth a read. Interestingly he feels that single player shooters have been moving in a promising direction with more RPG and adventure elements worked in (contrary to what Crytek feels on the matter), but criticizes multiplayer trends.

On the flip side, I’m really discouraged by the current state of multiplayer shooters. I think that, and I hate to mention names, because it sounds like ‘I’m just jealous of their success,’ but I’m really, I feel like Call of Duty has almost ruined a generation of FPS players. I know that’s a bold statement, but I won’t just throw stones without backing it up. When I was developing Action Mode [for RO2], I got a group of people that I know that are pretty hardcore Call of Duty players. And my goal was to create something that was accessible enough for them to enjoy the game—not turn it into Call of Duty, but try to make something that I thought was casual enough but with the Red Orchestra gameplay style that they would enjoy. And we iterated on it a lot. And just listening to all the niggling, pedantic things that they would complain about, that made them not want to play the game, I just thought, “I give up. Call of Duty has ruined this whole generation of gamers.”

...

What did they complain about?

Gibson: It’s the gameplay mechanics that they become used to. The way that players instantly accelerate when they move, they don’t build up speed. “The weapons really don’t have a lot of power” [in RO2]. They’re all very weak. The way they handle… They’re like: “I hate Red Orchestra, I can’t play it.” Well, why? “Because the guy doesn’t move like he does in Call of Duty. Call of Duty has great movement.” Why is it great? “Because it just is, I just like the way it works.” So you don’t like the momentum system in Red Orchestra? “Yeah, it sucks, it’s clunky, it’s terrible.” Well, why? “It’s just because I’m used to this.”

I make it sound like there was a combative conversation, probably because I get a little emotional when I think about it. But it was really a calm discussion of, “What don’t you like?” and “It doesn’t feel like Call of Duty.” Almost every element boiled down to “it doesn’t feel like Call of Duty.” And really, watching some of these guys play… 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. I’m looking at you, Dota.

[laughs] Sorry.

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.” And sometimes as designers, it is our game. Sometimes we screw up, sometimes we design something that’s not accesible enough, they can’t figure it out, we didn’t give them enough information to figure out where to go… but more often than not, it’s because Call of Duty compressed their skill gap so much that these guys never needed to get good at a shooter. They never needed to get good at their twitch skills with a mouse.

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.”

[D3matt]

Call of duty has great movement? What? I HATE the way movement works in call of duty.

[Supa]

Sprint, jump, dolphin dive, spray and pray. Watdafuq is so hard about that? I guess that's the appeal, but did they really have to make 7 of the same game? I haven't bought a Call of Duty game on release since Modern Warfare in 2006. I would if they offered an upgrade deal on the next game coming out like Adobe does with their releases, but lets get real, if it gets to that point I'd probably just call it quits.

[D3matt]

Call of Duty movement feels so clunky. It's like my camera is attached to one of those dashboard dancers on top of a wobbly old shopping cart. It just feels bad. Why can't my camera just stay in one spot like the rest of my body?

[Commissar MercZ]

Originally Posted by D3matt

Call of duty has great movement? What? I HATE the way movement works in call of duty.

Apparently the tripwire president does too, but he seems to think that most players are so used to that kind of movement they can't adjust to other styles of movement.

[Foehunter82]

You see, I'd be willing to play a different kind of FPS if the gameplay was good. Frankly, I'm just not crazy about most modern FPS games. I want cross-genre games that require some thought and effort in them. The current catalogue of FPS games is more or less repetitious dolphin-diving, grenade spamming games that aren't really worth playing. There's no thought, no strategic or tactical planning, nothing worthwhile at all.