- Twisted4293
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- Honorable Member
Posted by: DusK
This is it. After derailing of other discussions to determine whether or not Halo 2 takes skill , be it the Xbox version or its identical-in-terms-of-gameplay PC port, this is it. This is the throwdown. Once and for all, we'll put this issue to rest.
Marksmanship: The defining factor of competitive FPS
Competitive multiplayer FPS games, since their conception, have always revolved around a single concept. This concept is shared with other competitive types of games: The best man wins. In competitive FPS, it's the person who knows the map well, knows where to find those situational weapons, knows where his opponents will most likely move, knows where his teammates should go, knows where to fix himself up after he's been wounded, knows how to approach objectives, and knows how to do it better than his opponents.
But one thing has always separated the good from the bad and determined victory: Marksmanship. The one who has the better hand-eye coordination, reflexes, shot pacing -essentially, the guy who lands the shot better than his opponent- takes the win. And rightfully so. Marksmanship is the quintessential demonstration of FPS gaming skill, wrapping everything that could be applied to other areas of FPS gaming into a single idea. It's a winning formula, and basing your game around it always means one thing definitively: Players that are good will top the scoreboard, and players that suck will ride the bottom until they can get better.
If you enter a game like this, such as Unreal Tournament, Quake, Team Fortress 2, or Counter-Strike, you'll find a similarity between all of them. All of them have objective gametypes, some more focused on them than others, but they all require you to have better marksmanship than your opponent to defeat them. As a result, the better players consistently achieve victory, and the worse players have to stick it out until they learn the ropes. Nobody's place on the scoreboard is ever (or rarely) questioned.
Noobification: Changing the formula to pander to people that suck
In Halo CE, marksmanship was important. Not as important as in other games, such as those listed above, but still enough so. If you couldn't get aim, if you couldn't place your shots, you couldn't win. If you tried to go up against someone who could aim better than you, even with a power weapon, they could take you out simply because they held a counter that only good players could use effectively: The pistol.
The came Halo 2, which changed the winning formula that makes FPS games so great into something... else. This change applied to marksmanship in two ways.
1. The aim assist was boosted dramatically from the previous game. Essentially, it was boosted to the point where the game did most of the aiming for you. If a player ran by your screen, you didn't have to track him like other games; the game held your hand and made sure that your oh-so-difficult job of keeping your reticule over your opponent was made as ridiculously easy as simply staring at the screen. This allowed bad players that didn't know how to aim well at all match up against players that did.
2. The vector assist, or bullet magnetism as many like to call it, was dramatically boosted from the previous game. This allowed players who were so bad at aiming that they still missed their shots to hit their opponent anyway. The easiest example could be seen in the swipe snipe, which could yield a headshot even if you missed by a yard. Rockets became homing weapons, and hitting with the BR was essentially as easy as keeping your reticule within 3 feet of the opponent's player model.
When all was said and done, these two "features" allowed people who had never even touched an FPS game before to aim just as well as a seasoned pro. And just like that, bad players started topping the scoreboard.
The power weapon concept: Compensation for sucking
Imagine that there was an opponent that you couldn't possibly beat. He lands his shots much better than you ever could, dodges far too unpredictably for your tiny brain to react. Then imagine that there was a weapon that could nullify all of that and allow you to kill that player who you would otherwise lose against in a truly level playing field. Halo 2 gave bad players that option. The power weapon concept could easily be one of the worst things to ever happen to FPS gaming.
In other games, weapons were equal but situational. Nothing was "OP." Everything had its proper place, but no weapon could give a significant advantage over another. The flak cannon in UT was a great close-range weapon. However, if a player using a flak cannon went up against a better player in close range holding a sniper rifle, the advantage wouldn't be enough. The flak cannon guy might chip away a bit more of his superior opponent's health than if he was holding the sniper rifle, but he will still lose simply because that player is better.
In Halo 2 and beyond, that changed. If a terrible FPS player was holding a rocket launcher, and ran across a significantly better player holding a BR, the better player was more often than not as good as dead in less than a second. The same could be applied to every other power weapon. This mechanic allowed bad players to climb the scoreboards where they'd otherwise cradle the bottom, and pushed better players below them.
To allow bad players to beat good players simply by holding a weapon that gives a ridiculous advantage is simply absurd to have in a game where skill should be blatantly evident between players.
First-person cowardice: The frail argument that shooting shouldn't be important
In a recent thread, a point was attempted that would make any decent FPS player laugh so hard it hurt his sides. I did just that.
Essentially, it was argued that Halo 2 was a skill-based FPS despite marksmanship not being important. What was deemed "skillful" in this game was "using cramped maps to your advantage" and "waiting for a weapon respawn". Both of these are not only not skill-based at all, but are instead aspects of the game that remove skill from its gameplay.
Using a cramped area to your advantage is essentially choke point watching. You're slimming down the area that you need to aim at in order to make your shot count, solely because you wouldn't otherwise be able to aim at your opponent correctly if he were able to move around effectively. No skill-based game facilitates this mechanic because good aim by a player defines the skill-gap in FPS games.
Waiting for a weapon respawn would be pointless unless it was a weapon that gave you an advantage over players that are better than you. In the section above, it's clearly explained how the power weapon concept caters to the unskilled. Therefore, depending on these weapons to respawn to the point where they become critical to your success denotes that you have zero skill and wouldn't be able to win if the playing field was even among players.
These are but two examples. The point remains the same: if a game allows cheap tactics that anyone can do effectively to trump raw skill, the game takes no skill to play. In Halo 2, contrast to true competitive FPS games, marksmanship isn't even required to win the game. Marksmanship should never take a backseat to cheap tricks like camping, "map control", or power weapon whoring in a first-person shooter. When it does, it's no longer a first-person shooter, but a first-person battle to see who the biggest coward is.
Sooooooo who actually read the whining kids whole post? (Not me LOL)