I recently started working part-time teaching an after school program, so my blog hasn't gotten a lot of love lately. but on the bright side I will be shifting more time back here.
Now I got some time so I'm gonna write a post breaking down guns in first person shooters (mostly because I really have enjoyed action games over the years, and it's something I've been chatting about with my designer friends lately).
So to keep things simple, I've found that guns in a first person shooter essentially grind down to one core concept. 'This gun' is better/worse based on the 'relative terrain' the opponent is in. So what does that mean? Essentially each gun has a role or optimal relative terrain. For example in most first person shooters if you have a shotgun its going to be good if your opponent is close to you, and bad (less effective) if they are far away. That seems pretty obvious. It's easy to see how shotguns, sniper rifles, assault rifles all sort of fall on this line of distance vs effectiveness. In a sense 'distance from the player' is the relative terrain (relative terrain is the answer to the question, 'where is the target in relation to the player?').
But you can take the idea farther than just distance, for instance take a throw-able grenade. Where does a grenade fall on the distance chart? It kinda doesn't, a grenade is best when your target is behind cover or you have a group of targets together. Or think about the Bioshock's Electro-Shock plasmid, it's great when your opponents are in standing water or you surprise a single opponent. Or think about the myriad of games that include a sort of 'area denial' or a trap weapon (like land mines or remote detonated bombs). Those weapons are great when you know your opponent has to move through a specific area.
You'll also notice that the roles guns have often overlap, or in some cases multiple guns will share the same role. This is about creating an interesting choice for the player in what weapon they want to use or feel is the most powerful (the Borderlands series is all about finding the overpowered gun). The guns should feel overpowered for their role. Players then have to evaluate the map and the objectives and their play-style to determine which guns they want to use.
A lot of flack gets thrown around about guns all being the same in first person shooters and how creativity is gone. In reality this isn't so much the case, it's just that the roles of guns are figured out and defined and new guns aren't needed. However by defining guns as having a 'role' based on 'relative terrain' I think we can open up a new perspective on guns in first person shooters. For instance focusing less on distance and more on other environmental factors would be an interesting way to change how the guns in shooters or create new weapons while still retaining the essence of what makes a shooter fun.
* Also I know that I make a lot of assumptions here. Mostly this is in regards to new first person shooter titles and not certain indie games. Lots of really good first person games like Thirty Flights of Loving, Kairo, Jazzpunk, Lovely Planet, and Receiver just plain don't follow this. Also older styles of games like Half-life and arena shooters like Quake and Unreal Tournament are working on a different set of assumptions so these ideas don't transfer as perfectly
