The best players always play defensively and to stay alive more so than to get kills in FPS games. Almost all games reward staying alive much more so than getting kills. By staying alive you usually deny your opponents scoring and increase your own chances at scoring. It is all about efficiency and net scoring.
I’m with pg, good players are not running off to die. It is all about staying alive, and controlling the level.
The only time I played as a death bomb is when I’m playing defense in CTF and need to slow down a flag runner, I’ll attack him as aggressively as possible, even if it means my death, hoping my team will catch up to him.
In team-based shooters, getting yourself killed is useful for the team in many situations (honest, I am not just saying this to justify my kills:deaths ratio!). I’ll sacrifice myself if it helps - (TF2) trying to get your team past a sentry gun bottleneck for instance and you don’t have übercharges ready. Playing spy just start sapping like crazy - you’re going to get noticed and get plastered, but the few seconds of downtime the SGs will have because they’re being sapped before the engineer can clear them, can make all the difference for soldiers or demomen to get in position to take them down. Else dropping in the middle of an enemy zerg heading for the cap - I am guaranteed to get killed but can take down 3 or more with rocket spam (soldier) before they get me. The math works out in favor of the team.
I tend to have a fair amount more deaths than kills, but points-wise I still usually end up in the top third of the scoring board.
I fully agree, but I prefer a middle ground myself whereby individual madskills are still a determining factor in a lot of fights, but ultimately teamplay wins out. I think it’s why QuakeWorld (and Quake 2/3 actually, minus the damn railgun) hit the nail on the head as far as deathmatch teamplay goes.
The same applies to CTF as well, although I will acknowledge that a very skilled capper can totally wreck the opposing team without any support from his side. That was ultimately what put me off QuakeWorld CTF, along with the grapple which only amplifies the problem.
Incidentally you should see Warsow CTF; it’s bananas on fruitcake in a bag of kittens mad.
Yes, control is huge, very underrated. When you put fear into the enemy so they stop coming to that part of the map, they will get funneled to the areas where the rest of your team is, and your boys will have a good advantage because they’d already be engaged and aware of the situation as the enemy comes onto the scene.
HERESY! I loved the grapple and who doesn’t love the railgun circle strafe dance?
I hate instant death, since I feel it turns the game into whack a mole (see them, kill them instantly). Maybe it’s fine for team play, but I don’t care much for organized team play, so it’s definitely worse for me. In Quake 2 you could get the health power up + heavy armor and actually take a few rail gun shots to the head, even.
I don’t think I ever had as much fun in online shooters as I did in UT + Instagib + CTF + Facing Worlds.
Yes “Face” was / is amazing. So many fun things to do like shooting your team mate from the top of the enemy base to “push” the flag to your side.
This shows the basic idea but they use low grav so the player way farther than on standard settings. You could shoot a bit less than the middle so your defending team had to leave the base and pick up the flag before it spawned back in the enemy base / some member of the other team could bring the flag back to their base (the player shot usually died because of the fall).
I also loved “Niven”.
-> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nWoLEgSQhI
The Instagib frag fests in those tunnels were crazy and it was always a matter of a second whether you toasted the flag defenders or they did toast you. The one that saw the other first usually won that duel.
Another amazing UT map was “Morpheus” though not CTF.
While browing Youtube I found a UT2k4 map that rocked and I had forgotten about: CTF_Hall of Giants
It was a HUGE low gravity map and people could get shot from insane distances if a skilled player aimed. You were NEVER safe in that map regardless where you would be.
Rainbow Six. 1998. One-shot kills, no respawn, slow and tactical movement.
Oh god, Niven. The middle of that map was knee deep in the dead.
I liked Novembermyself. Asymmetrical maps always award the veterans.
Also Operation: Flashpoint from 1999 (iirc), and ArmA/ ArmA 2 today.
Important distinction - while snipers will camp, camping itself has been as (un)popular as ever long before the railgun. Let’s not blame everything on one weapon.
Yeah, camping was a big issue back in Quake 1 where there was no railgun, only the mighty rocket launcher.
Oh wow November!
That map could take hours upon hours if you had good people.
It was almost impossible to come to the subway with the enemy flag let alone cross it!
Yep, that map was all about relay racing the flag.
I agree. Every class but the scientist seems quite durable to me. I am able to get away from many scrapes to go find a healer or energon cube. That’s actually why I like Transformers so much - it’s finally a game where I feel more durable than I do in Halo or Gears. The only exception is that I feel the power of the null ray (sniper rifle) is quite high, but once you learn maps you learn to stay out of the common sniper killzones.
I liked how quake 3 had you start with 125 health and tick down to 100 so the highest damage weapons (that did 100 damage) wouldn’t outright kill you, except for a point blank shotgun blast - and that’s fairly risky to do anyway. Conversely I hated how unreal tournament was the opposite - pretty much every weapon was able to kill a superhealth + armor player extremely quickly if not instantly (full slime gun shot, shock combo, rocket/grenade cluster, even multiple quick pistol headshots or the melee piston thingy).
And don’t get me started on instagib. I hated that phase. I used to go to a ton of lanparties and I hated when I’d show up and that’s all everyone wanted to play.
I’m all about context… I’m perfectly happy to die in one burst if it’s dudes with guns… it’s how the real world works, after all. I don’t miss the super twitchy bounding around mayhem of the Quakes, the setting was bizarre and silly and yet too defined to be something abstract enough to allow for such inane physics.
I do miss the grinding damage of the mechwarrior games, where you had time to react and possibly take out an aggressor, but still took penalties to control and function if you let them beat on you too long. It compared well enough to old style tank battles that it felt right.