Iron sights - the bane of modern fps. Discuss!

(Apples) #21

Yeah idtech4 was all but smooth I’ll agree with that, I hope Unreal engine will fix that, but staying on IS I still feel that etqw nailed it, weapons were accurate enough at close range to be a beast against IS, and it just give you the little boost (one headshot) in advance in middle to long range, I’m by far a good player at etqw but it is my feeling

(kilL_888) #22

[QUOTE=warbie;413015]
I’m not on a nostalgia trip btw - I honestly find games like Bf3, CoD: MW etc to be more basic and with less depth in pretty much every regard compared to RTCW and ET.[/QUOTE]

totally agree. there’s natural selection 2 for instance that does not use ads. instead you can use the right mouse button to melee with your gun. for me personally this was very intentional, even though i never put melee on right mouse button in any first person shooter before.

i don’t know if i can take tribes ascend as a good comparison. there is a zoom feature and most guns can fire when zoomed but most of the time you aim and shoot from the hip. and i need to break it to you guys here but these two titles are actual pc first person shooters. two of the last few pc shooters.

current ads shooters on the market are either extremely core (blacklight retribution) or ported from consoles (cod).

when i read comments about etqw i think people have very different opinions on why it didn’t do too well. i can tell you that i personally wasn’t a fan of the ironsights back then either. it was even worse because you could only toggle the ads which takes away a bit of the fluidity of the gameplay imho. i tried to avoid using the classes that use weapons with ironsights. i played mostly strogg… they didn’t have that “issue”. :wink:

(Rex) #23

I didn’t read anything here, because I’m fed up with the same discussion over and over again.
Play ETQW and you will see how good they can work in game. They neither slow down the gameplay nor do anything else worse.
Try QW, get over the past and accept some changes in new games or just stick with RTCW or ET! Seriously.

(.Chris.) #24

Yeah, they play COD or something and think all ironsights in all games are automatically like that…

(tokamak) #25

In COD they’re pretty much compulsory, I dont mind but it does take the variety out of the game. You basically want to have 30% scoped 30% hipfire 30% pistol and 10% knife kill give or take 10% between the groups.

Its far more fun if you constantly need to asses which aproach is the best, preferably in such a hectic fashion that you dont have time to truly think about it but just intuitively grab the best tool for the job.

(warbie) #26

[QUOTE=Rex;413119]I didn’t read anything here, because I’m fed up with the same discussion over and over again.
Play ETQW and you will see how good they can work in game. They neither slow down the gameplay nor do anything else worse.
Try QW, get over the past and accept some changes in new games or just stick with RTCW or ET! Seriously.[/QUOTE]

To be fair - if only one game has done it right (and one that I didn’t play due to the engine being rather dodgy), then all I have to go on is every other fps that has iron sights. In these games it does break the flow - or what flow there is after movement has been gimped to make iron sights viable. They’re a great mechanic for console fps, though - where slow movement and spammy aiming suits the limitations of a joypad. Infact, the rise in popularity of iron sights seems to run in parallel with the rise in popularity of console fps. Not a coincidence me thinks.

(tokamak) #27

To be fair - if only one game has done it right (and one that I didn’t play due to the engine being rather dodgy), then all I have to go on is every other fps that has iron sights.

Ignoring the best example of a system because it’s convenient to your case is pretty lousy reasoning.

(warbie) #28

Fair enough. I didn’t play ETQW much and what I did play was all hip firing. It sounds like it was used as an addition to hip firing rather than being the only way to aim with accuracy? That seems fine. A bolt on extra. This isn’t the case with virtually every other multiplayer fps that uses iron sights, though. Regardless, you must be able to see my point. Take an extreme example:

This is pretty much the pinnacle of fps gunplay. Twitching, tracking, movement skill, situational awareness, knowledge of the map. This level of play simply wouldn’t be possible with iron sights.

(tokamak) #29

FPS is a broad genre. Twitch tracking with pure accuracy and acrobatics is great for duel arenas, it’s indeed the pinnacle of arena play. In a class based objective shooter there are different factors that start to matter and when you’re putting everything down on how good a player can do all that quake stuff you’re taking the wind of of many other mechanics (flanking,cover, exposure, backing fire, ambushing) that make tactical shooters so good.

(warbie) #30

Agreed. And I wouldn’t suggest Quake style gameplay in a team/objective based shooter - but I would like to retain as much of it as possible. This is why RTCW and ET were so popular - marrying much of the core gameplay from the vid above with the mechanics you mentioned.

(tokamak) #31

Ironsights simply weren´t really a thing back then. To say that the lack of them is the reason why the games were popular is doing them a disservice. I personally would love to see how W:ET would’ve functioned with ironsights.

(kilL_888) #32

[QUOTE=Rex;413119]I didn’t read anything here, because I’m fed up with the same discussion over and over again.
Play ETQW and you will see how good they can work in game. They neither slow down the gameplay nor do anything else worse.
Try QW, get over the past and accept some changes in new games or just stick with RTCW or ET! Seriously.[/QUOTE]

sry guys but i find this a bit ignorant. ads isn’t a evolution, it’s just a different style of gameplay. you either like it or you don’t. what game did it the “best”, is personal preference. i say cod does it the “best”. you may disagree and that’s fine. cod is designed around using ads. it’s very helpful for console players. you can still hipfire at close distance though.

in all fairness, i don’t think this will be a thing that will “break” the game. but what i really don’t want to see is another cod copy with 99% hitscan automatic rifles. i want grenade launchers, rocket launchers and all that good stuff. i can’t stand it running around with a machine gun variant that doesn’t feel any different than another machine gun variant.

(.Chris.) #33

I don’t particularly like them either but what 99.99% of people posting here with their knee jerk reactions don’t realise that ET:QW didn’t require you to use them for close to medium ranges and as such didn’t slow the game down one bit in that regard yet you all bring up COD as some kind of ‘proof’ that adding ironsights will slow the game down whilst blissfully ignoring ET:QW which is funny considering Splash Damage didn’t develop COD yet did develop ET:QW, I wonder which game would be more relevant when discussing ironsights in Splash Damage’s next PC only game?

I’m not mentioning Brink as that was clearly a console centric game and it’s clear they are distancing themselves from Brink as you can tell from the teaser that neglects to mention it.

(tangoliber) #34

I prefer hipfire-only for class based shooters in the Enemy Territory style. I can understand iron sights for a game like BF3, though I don’t personally enjoy that sort of game.
I think a game should know what it is trying to be, and go hardcore in either direction. I don’t think it usually works out well when you try to allow for both old school, and modern playstyles in one game.

(DarkKnightDK) #35

Iron sights attachments are cool thou…If not implementing it at least put the iron sights as mere deceraction :stuck_out_tongue:

(warbie) #36

[QUOTE=tangoliber;413656]I prefer hipfire-only for class based shooters in the Enemy Territory style. I can understand iron sights for a game like BF3, though I don’t personally enjoy that sort of game.
I think a game should know what it is trying to be, and go hardcore in either direction. I don’t think it usually works out well when you try to allow for both old school, and modern playstyles in one game.[/QUOTE]

Reputation added :slight_smile:

(Beermachine) #37

While I wouldn’t call ADS the bane of modern FPS, it’s just a different play style that quite a lot of people prefer, the OP makes a lot of very valid points. Balancing is especially difficult when trying to merge ADS centric and hipfire centric shootings into one, as there will always be an optimal playstyle at various ranges / situations.

Even in RtCW / ET, ADS+crouched was useful, even if it didn’t make a lot of difference to CoF / Deviation (it did make some, allowing longer bursts at pinpoint accuracy), doubling the effective size of the head hitbox was invaluable at long range. ETQW cut the range that hipfire was effective with higher hipfire deviation, and with more open maps made ADS the optimum strategy in a lot more situations, but in CQC and upto short-mid range movement+hipfire was still optimal usually.

[QUOTE=BioSnark;411713]Doubt this forum will have much interesting discussion on the topic since they’ll mainly agree with your premise. However, you actually want discussion? Allow me to DA.
Near perfect template? ET weapons were more than slightly ridiculous. Having two people circling each other holding lmb over each other’s heads is cause for some ridicule. I haven’t even played a CoD since allied assault but ET is at least as ridiculous as the CoD you describe. The bullet sponge nature of it makes weapons feel like characterless pea shooters. Add to that the fact that people here are knee jerk against recoil and you have gameplay without aesthetic or visceral feeling. How did an arcade shooter full of fully automatic hitscan and virtually without projectile weapons ever get a playerbase willing to accept it? Probably because it was free. Enjoy.[/QUOTE]

Not true, RtCW wasn’t free, Tribes wasn’t free, but had very large player bases at the time, even when tactical shooters like CoD (the first one) were becoming popular these games were still being played in large numbers. It’s just apples and oranges, some people prefer arcade shooters where speed, movement, frantic CQC and constant mouse precision are the defining factors, others more tactical ones where flanking, cover, positioning, patience and reactions are. RtCW / ET weren’t really bullet sponge games either, they just emphasised mouse precision with high body to headshot damage differences, and gave the guns the accuracy needed at range so that headshots were precision and not luck based. 3 to the head was all that was needed to kill (2 if they’d already lost their helmet).

Additional edit, missing the DA quote, so I guess that was a pretty pointless paragraph! Still, while tactical shooters are definitely much more popular, I still feel there’s a niche market for people who prefer more arcade ones (especially an infantry centric class based CQC style teamplay one) . As Tangoliber said, if you try to appeal to people who like both styles in one game, chances are that you’ll make no-one happy with the end result.

While ADS doesn’t mean slower gameplay, the way it’s implemented in 95% of FPS does. As soon as being stationary/crouched/ADS is optimal at a certain range (due to massive CoF when moving / hipfiring) then that’s what the players will do. Throw in massive strafe speed decreases while ADS (understandably) and firefights turn into standoffs with everyone hiding behind cover and not moving much at all. When deviation differences between ADS / stationary and moving are minimal (or non-existant), then constant movement is optimal at most ranges except long where the zoom toggle double headshot size usually is, and firefights turn into very hectic affairs (obviously all weapon dependent, FF considerations aside, situation specific and based on movement, weapon accuracy and headshot / bodyshot TtK being comparible to RtCW).

(prophett) #38

I would be happy with iron sights working as they did in qw, but with much tighter hip fire spread for close to mid range shooting.

(jazevec) #39

Oh, come on, you don’t have to look very far to find something very wrong in ET:QW. For example, Icarus was meant to be very powerful but balanced by being easy to notice (orange glow!!) and shoot down. The reality: Icarus is technically a vehicle, and there’s no lag compensation for vehicles, only for troopers. All these people who were telling complainers to shut up and learn to aim were wrong. The net result is Icarus is powerful without a downside. It’s strictly better than Husky.

Ironsights do slow the game when they’re implemented as the default way of shooting. That is, in vast majority of cases.

(BioSnark) #40

Hog is better than armadillo.
Desecrator’s better than trojan.
Titan’s better than cyclops.
Anansi’s better than tormentor.
Bee/plata’s better than nothing.
etc.

Asymmetry.