Fantasies For Future FPSes
Posted in CS ProMod News, Call of Duty 2 News, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare News, Call of Duty 5: World At War, Call of Duty News, Call of Duty: United Offensive News, Counter-Strike: 1.6 News, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero News, Counter-Strike: Insurgency Mod News, Counter-Strike: Source News, Halo News, Team Fortress 2 News, Unreal Tournament 3 News
Video games have come a long way in forty years - the average controller has more buttons than the first computers, and the internet connects you to so many people Nintendo are terrified to let you do anything but press “A”. But what does the future hold for those of us who live in online game servers? What do we want from future technology?
1. A wargame where jumping like a tazed rabbit doesn’t confer a tactical advantage
The Call of Duty series creates an incredibly realistic environment, equips you with authentic weapons, has graphics so advanced that ghillie suits work, and then prances all over that with players leaping like turbo-boosted kangaroos. The only way a marine could jump that high in full kit is by standing on a claymore, and in real life, a terrorist whose panic reaction to an MP5 is jumping? He’ll be that soldier’s “funniest confirmed kill I ever had”.
On CoD4 servers you can be killed by expert players who bounce and crouch like fast-forwarded gymnasts. An amphetamined-Mario couldn’t keep up with them. You’re pouring machine gun fire right into them, and when they land behind your corpse after a triple inversion somersault you expect them to score 6.0 for Grace, 5.9 Agility, and 0.0 in Realities of War. Halo servers technically suffer this problem even worse, with ten-tonne armored space marines leaping like they have trampoline-simulators in their futuristic space boots, but the great thing about cyborg soldiers fighting a race of space-mushrooms is that it never claimed to be realistic.
2. Mice which administer electrical shocks to people who miss five times in a row but still play Sniper
It’s not hard - if you can’t hit things, don’t choose a class whose entire function is “Hit things with high accuracy”. Especially when it’s a class useless for anything else, and double-especially-with-electrodes-in-you when it’s a class where more than one is useless even if you don’t suck.
Voice recognition isn’t quite at the “Computer: Tea, Earl Grey, Hot” stage, but we’re fairly sure we can get the “Computer: Kick Whining Asshole” circuits working. This might be a technical challenge given the immense range of screeching, wind-tunnel distorted voices you hear on Counter-Strike servers (due to poor quality microphones, puberty, genetics, or all three) but the only thing we need to detect is the word “Camping.”
What else would you like to see?