Going to be one of those Nifty! bits where I’m in the minority this time, I think. The Age of Conan approacheth, and all up and down the Interwebs, fierce battles are being waged as we speak, with the Fanbois and Haters out in full force, all pitching in with their “Reasons Why I Think You Should/Shouldn’t Buy Age of Conan”, come May 20th. Quite emotive stuff in many cases, and Crom would be proud of the verbal bloodshed being carried out in his name. Me? I’m more ambivalent, and anyway, as a mater of principle, never touch any MMO, no matter how good or bad, until at least four months have passed since launch-day. Listeners to the podcast will have already heard me rambling about why that is, so I’ll say no more.
But the debates and viewpoints themselves are fascinating, even if I have no first-hand experience of the matters of which they speak. One particular battleground upon which many mighty posting and commenting deeds are carried out, appears to be the matter of multiple-key combos, and their importance to the game, and the basic business of actually swinging an axe at some poor monster’s head, which sounds like its to be something a little more than merely standing next to the monster, pressing ‘A’ and watching your little Barbarian wave his arms up and down until the nemesis dies from deadly mime skills.
The matter of Player Skill looks to be being tested again with AoC’s new approach to MMO Melee; Lern2Play indeed. How much skill should be expected of us in our pastimes? How much do we want to have to put in? Questions with as many answers as there are MMO gamers, I expect. My own answer is probably something like “A different amount, and different type, in every game I play,” (only less pretentious!) After all, it would be a poor state of affairs if all the games I play asked exactly the same things from me; I’d only ever need one game! One game in particular I remember with fondness, for the sheer uniqueness of the demands it placed on me:
Nifty! #8; Planetside’s Cone of Fire System
Launching in 2003, Planetside was, and indeed still is, an odd duck. It was a brave attempt to bring the fast-paced action gameplay of the traditional single-player and LAN-Deathmatch First Person Shooter, and the large-scale community and persistence of the MMO, together in one single game. So quirky was this concept that even today, Planetside exists in its own genre, (of one); the ‘MMOFPS’. A rather experimental game, the above merging of concepts must have presented a number of technical challenges, sufficient to have put anyone else off trying a similar endeavour since, with any real enthusiasm.
It also presented us, the players, with a much more gritty, and perhaps fairer, approach to the traditional Deathmatch. I remember a brief spell of office-based LAN gaming, back in the day, and Alien Vs Predator 2 became our game of choice for a while. In that game, like many others of its type, the guns were just point and click, and I spent quite a while doing much better than I ought, by the simple expedient of using the sniper rifle as a shotgun, only with a vast range and insta-kill hits. Literally running around, firing from the hip and not even bothering with the scope, one-shoting humans, aliens and predators alike. I’m not bragging, you understand – it was cheap, easy-mode and almost entirely not how I imagine a real sniper rifle would work.
Most FPS games have a similar weapon; some kind of rifle, laser, railgun, or other high-powered, very low rate-of-fire, but very high damage-per-shot type of weapon, usually with a near-instant travel-time and flat trajectory, whose only real balancing factor is that if you miss with the first shot, you’re in trouble while it reloads. If then, you never miss, you become invincible, and to be seen at all, is to die instantly.
I’ve no problem with that as a gamestyle, of course. If that’s you, well done! But it is quite ruthlessly Darwinian, and eventually, it becomes a game only about the sniper rifle, and that was clearly not what SOE had in mind for Planetside; a large-scale combined arms war, rather than the “blink and you’ll die” four-player duelling in an abandoned warehouse somewhere, of the FPS that had gone before.
So to help inject a touch of realism to it all, and at the same time, give us MMO Munckins, who aren’t Counterstrike Grandmasters a fighting chance, they went with their Cone of Fire System.
With a gun equipped, the HUD reticule gains a crosshair. The outer marks of this move in and out in response to various conditions, actions, and equipped weapon types, and these mark out the edges of a cone. When the shot is fired, it will fly out randomly somewhere inside that cone. If part the enemy is inside that cone, (which looks like a circle to you), it might hit him. If the entire circle is filled with the enemy’s body, you will hit him for sure. Things like taking damage and being on the move made the circle larger, and things like using a rifle instead of a shotgun, standing still, or crouching, made the circle smaller, effectively simulating things like concentration, stability and helping make the weapons all quite situationally different to each other.
Planetside’s sniper rifle; the Bolt Driver, had the most floatey circle in the game, requiring you to be crouched, zoomed in, and not to move at all, to get the best accuracy. Even something like turning a few degrees left to follow a target in the scope, would cause the circle to flare up and require utter stillness for it to settle again. And even after all that, it still took two shots to kill a full health enemy outright. Instakill Distance Weapons are especially galling in PvP, I think, as they offer no positive action for the victim. In other words, you’re being punished simply for being there at all, and not provided any opportunity to exercise any kind of personal skills of your own in your own defence. With PS’s two-shot sniper rifle, you at least get the chance to leg it for cover after the first one hits, and with the floatey reticule, above, being on the run makes it very hard for the distant speck of a sniper to actually make that second shot land.
Skill still plays a significant part, of course, and the really good snipers understand their weapon enough to be able to still land that second hit on a wounded enemy going sideways at a sprint. I used to be able to do it myself, once, but it took a while to learn, and I doubt I could do it anymore. Meanwhile, I’ve often been killed by standard rifle users because of the Cone of Fire. I’d land the first hit, and then while reloading and waiting for the circle to contract a second time, their shorter range and less powerful gun has zeroed-in much faster and now they’re hitting me; not for a lot per shot, but enough to make my own accuracy fly out the window, and while my desperate shots are going all over the place, he’s steadily whittling me away and kills me.
I liked it, but I’m not sure a vast number of other people did, and I suspect one of the reasons for Planetside’s lack of huge success is a result of trying to please too many people. On the one hand, the traditional MMO player is just not used to dying that much, which can be dispiriting. They’re also not used to having so much dexterity based learning put in front of them, coming from a genre which is generally a lot more about Theorycraft and Timers. It can be a lot to learn, and requires a lot more practice than most MMOs to get good at, and stay good at. On the other hand, the FPS crowd must have found the Cone of Fire quite hobbling; an artificial mechanism aimed at clipping their rocket-jumping head-shotting wings somewhat. (Also, $X/month, when Counterstrike is free? WTF!?)
I was perhaps one of the few people who found it a good compromise between the genres, and a way to make various different guns useful for various different situations. Specialising in a particular weapon helped dictate where I should be in the overall engagements in progress, and helped me find a useful purpose in the average base assault or defence. Seeing a massive push on a base, with air, tanks, power armours, and scores of troopers all moving in, was a heady sight, but often a confusing one, and knowing my own gun, and how it worked differently to others, helped me find a place in it all. (Typically, hiding behind a rock on a ridge, half a mile away!)
Other MMOs continually flirt with the addition of twitch-based skills to the more traditional dice-rolling of our genre, and it sometimes seems that a move to something more Planetside-like is an eventual inevitability for our MMO future, and perhaps when people talk of ‘Evolution in MMOs’, it is exactly this kind of thing that they mean? If so, that does make Planetside extremely ahead of it’s time, for a 2003 game. It does seem quite a difficult thing to make stick though, to gain acceptance.
Neocron and Tabula Rasa both require some degree FPS skills to do well at, although neither is quite the roaring success of the more usual mainstays of MMO; the WoWs, the EQs, the LotRs, and there will always be popular and successful MMOs of the more recognised sort, with their stats and dicerolls and timers. A fair bit of the current AoC fuss seems to be about this very thing, but I think there is room for both types of game.
As for the Cone of Fire itself, I’ve no idea if this kind of mechanic exists in the modern day Offline/Peer-to-Peer FPS PC or Console title as well, but Tabula Rasa has a limited similar kind of thing, which is very noticeable with the Rocket Launcher in particular. Upon targeting a monster, you do need to hold your horses until the little reticule closes in fully, for best damage, while a Rifle does this much quicker, and a Shotgun doesn’t need to do it at all. The upcoming Huxley seems to be a game designed along similar lines to the mechanics of Planetside, so perhaps the Cone will live on there too. Neocron also requires a bit of patience to get the best shot, in a similar manner, and perhaps this kind of implementation is about the only way FPS can be made to work with 200+ players all going at it at once in close proximity?
So anyway, for levelling the playing-field a bit by making everyone Lern2Play again, and adding a touch of realism to our rocket launchers, Planetside’s Cone of Fire; Nifty!
Planetside is still going, just about, although is far from a massive success at present (see previous post). It doesn’t seem to be offering any free trials in the accepted sense just now, but apparently, if you just download the thing and install anyway, it’ll give you the option of a 14-day trial, during signup. It will want to see some Credit Card details though!
Past players can currently play for free, until May 21st – just reinstall and go, although you’re likely to already know about the Cone of Fire thing by now!
The Cone of Fire system is evident throughout the game, in almost all the weapons, although for an exaggerated look at what it does and how it works, I’d recommend certing Medium Assault, and then Sniping, and the comparing how your Empire’s MA Weapon (Cycler/Gauss/Pulsar) and the Sweeper shotgun handle in comparison to the Bolt Driver. Use the VR shooting range for this!
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