StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I was playing FC2 the other day (no I won't stop saying that) and the FPS staple happened; I ran out of bullets at close range to a guy with a shotgun. I'm used to Gears, so I pulled right and pressed A... but it was just a stupid bunnyhop.

So do any first person games have evasive moves? In this situation, a sideways dive (as is common in third person) woudl have put me behind cover where I could have reloaded in safety, instead of being shot twince in the face (which left me pulling a piece of wire out of my knee). I imagine this sort of thing would make all the motion-sickness guys really upset, however.

Vegas has some, although it's a 1st/3rd hybrid (more games should do this, btw).

There's Mirror's Edge, I guess, not that I played it enough to say if they were effective or not.

Also, for lulz: GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, using the ol' "aim and side step" trick.

EDIT: America's Army has/had some degree of rolling about.

FC2 is a good example of a game that should be 1st/3rd toggleable, since it's chockers with body awareness anyway.

FC2 does have the Gears 'slide to cover' thing when sprinting... I wish they just used the same control to do other such rapid moves. I think it's an artefact of FPS evolution - in oldschool twitch shooters, such moves are useless because you can glide sideways or bunnyhop just fine. In the more 'tacticool' games people probably think OMG U SHOULD HAVE PLANNED BETTER or something. It's just daft that your options at close range in most games are a) walk slowly to one side or b) get shot directly in the face. In this situation, I would have been fine taking damage to evade/losing stamina/etc.

Actually, using the game's pre-existing blurred vision/eye adjustment shit could allow them to have crazy action-movie moves without pissing off the simhard idiots too much.

In Star Wars Battlefront 2 you can roll in any direction you're moving in. So sidestepping into a sideroll is quite possible. Other than that I haven't played anything else that has it.

They're 3rd person games, right? I remember playing one on PS2 with Maul running around??

You can toggle between first and third when you're a mooktrooper, just not when you're a hero.

In GRAW on the PC you had some dives and slides you could use and that was an FPS game. Actually very useful when you are sprinting and really, really want to get into cover right now.

UT2k3 and 2k4 had the dodge move (double tap in a direction to leap or something that way).

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:There's Mirror's Edge, I guess, not that I played it enough to say if they were effective or not.

From memory, I don't think it has anything quite like what Stark is suggesting. However, the game is mostly an avoid getting shot simulator, so ...

Jedi Knight and Jedi Academy had a roll move too.

Zixinus wrote:Jedi Knight and Jedi Academy had a roll move too.

Again, those are 3rd person shooters at their core. The first person mode was fundamentally useless with the only weapon worth using.

I think theres a reason we're not really finding many FPSes using dodge moves is because it's very hard to communicate the results of a dodge from a first person viewpoint.

Let me try and explain by using UT's dodge moves as an example. When I hit double-left on my keyboard, my character usually leaps sideways, vaults, swivels, anything. But I have no idea, because all I know is my camera moved 2 units to the left instead of one. Why not? Well, motion sickness is one thing. Can you imagine seeing your viewpoint swivel on a screen at high speed multiple times in a minute? I'm fairly immune to motion sickness and I think that'd be problematic.

You can also see this with the high amount of people I've encountered who left Half Life 2 at the air-boat sequence due to high percentage of motion sickness. The camera was not stable and had no other reference points and therefore it left quite a few people feeling bad.

Theres also a question of what information it would impart and how it would do it. When you play GoW (or so I assume, having never played it), you can still see the world despite your character being crouched near a concrete barrier. You can swivel the camera without moving the character. In an FP viewpoint, you can't easily do it, nor is it really helpful. I'm hiding behind something, if I take a peek, I've moved myself and exposed myself to fire. It would also involve a novel control scheme to let yourself take a look without using the body movement keys.

I'm not really sure what the conclusion is, is the FP viewpoint incapable of demonstrating these moves and therefore abstracts them? Or are we just dumb and can't think up of a way to do it that is natural?

Stark wrote:I was playing FC2 the other day (no I won't stop saying that) and the FPS staple happened; I ran out of bullets at close range to a guy with a shotgun. I'm used to Gears, so I pulled right and pressed A... but it was just a stupid bunnyhop.

So do any first person games have evasive moves? In this situation, a sideways dive (as is common in third person) woudl have put me behind cover where I could have reloaded in safety, instead of being shot twince in the face (which left me pulling a piece of wire out of my knee). I imagine this sort of thing would make all the motion-sickness guys really upset, however.

unreal tournament GOTYE has commando rolls if I remember correctly. The XBOX unreal tournament i=only has "Lie on the ground dead". Which is actually kind of useful as it conffuses AIs

If MODs count, there's Action Half-Life and The Specialists.

What does 'MOD' stand for?

Stark wrote:What does 'MOD' stand for?

Mods, shorthand for Modification. A popular PC game only activity of taking the base game and modifying it in various ways. The Specialists was FUN, pure fun as it was made during the height of the Matrix movie popularizations and it had all those sorts of crazy dodges, dives and lunges and "slow-mo" except you only got about three second worth and it put everyone near you into slow mo not just yourself, and it recharged so slowly it could not be abused. Being HL1 they both looked uglier than hell but damn if they were not just old fashion fun random FPS shoot em ups.

F.E.A.R. had the slide-kick which I used to travel from cover to cover on occasion. Definitely not deliberate on the part of the developers, but the only example I can think of.

Mr Bean wrote:

Stark wrote:What does 'MOD' stand for?

Mods, shorthand for Modification. A popular PC game only activity of taking the base game and modifying it in various ways. The Specialists was FUN, pure fun as it was made during the height of the Matrix movie popularizations and it had all those sorts of crazy dodges, dives and lunges and "slow-mo" except you only got about three second worth and it put everyone near you into slow mo not just yourself, and it recharged so slowly it could not be abused. Being HL1 they both looked uglier than hell but damn if they were not just old fashion fun random FPS shoot em ups.

no shit. The point is that capitalising 'mod' is stupid. And Specialists has sucked since 2.0 sadly.

Stark wrote: no shit. The point is that capitalising 'mod' is stupid. And Specialists has sucked since 2.0 sadly.

Blaim the press then it's either MOD's or Mod's. It's always capitalized one way or the other and I've seen it both in "Mod Community" or "Player made MOD" in various video game publications. MOD is MoD. The fact you asked indicates your lack of contact with the community.

Also yes, after 2.0 it got all wonky and to fluid and was less fun to play then Acton. But by then it was Natural Selection or Counter-Strike for good HL-1 mods. Ah Natural selection(No dodge moves there thank you)

Also as for game don't forget the Maxy Payne series and the MOD's for both games which made the dodging even more insane. MX-2 toned down the John Woo-ness the first had. The first mod out toned it back up.

Before Stark points it out, Max Payne is 3rd person really, but both installments had a very good dodge/stunt system. I think Remedy missed an oppoortunity there by not adding a multiplayer component, Max Payne 2 could've had a sweet coop mode too.

Are there any multiplayer games out there with similar gameplay to both Max Payne or Action Half-Life /The Specialists?

Perfect Dark Zero had dodge-roll moves, and in relation to what Ace Pace was saying the camera pulls out to a third-person view during the roll to let you see what you're doing.

Unfortunately the distance you moved was so small as the make the move almost totally useless. Oh well.

The Metroid Prime series has a first-person mode dodge move.

Ace Pace wrote:I'm not really sure what the conclusion is, is the FP viewpoint incapable of demonstrating these moves and therefore abstracts them? Or are we just dumb and can't think up of a way to do it that is natural?

Just a though, in an FPS, whenever the hypothetical dodge button is invoked, the camera can zoom out to 3rd person for a brief moment, then come back in. I'm not sure I can convey this in words properly but you should get the gist in your mind's eye, I hope.

This would balance the dodge button too: by removing the 1st-person perspective for a moment, it's simulating the fact that you probably just took a bullet-like trajectory to the ground and can't yet pick up your weapon to fire down the sights. Similar to how you cannot fire and sprint in CoD, for example. The biggest problem I can think of is the camera going through walls in tight places and in buildings, but maybe a sufficiently skilled programmer team could get around that.

Or you stay 1st person the whole time and maybe you see your arms brace yourself to the ground for an instance as you scramble to get back on your feet. I suppose this is where motion-sickness occurs? I'm not familiar with a game that does this so I don't know how bad it looks.

Mad wrote:The Metroid Prime series has a first-person mode dodge move.

Yeah, the lock on-sidestep. Works well, but gets prioritized over jump at times, which isn't always a good thing.

It also sends you into 3rd person mode for bits where 1st would be impractical or disorienting, like Morphball and Screw attack.

SPC Brungardt wrote:Just a though, in an FPS, whenever the hypothetical dodge button is invoked, the camera can zoom out to 3rd person for a brief moment, then come back in. I'm not sure I can convey this in words properly but you should get the gist in your mind's eye, I hope.

This would balance the dodge button too: by removing the 1st-person perspective for a moment, it's simulating the fact that you probably just took a bullet-like trajectory to the ground and can't yet pick up your weapon to fire down the sights. Similar to how you cannot fire and sprint in CoD, for example. The biggest problem I can think of is the camera going through walls in tight places and in buildings, but maybe a sufficiently skilled programmer team could get around that.

Why is this necessary? Every FPS that isn't shit already restricts actions depending on movement, and constantly changing cameras are arguably going to disorient people more than just rolling the camera or whatever. I think dodge moves are a great way to demonstrate body awareness; I love all that shit in Far Cry 2, and flying through the air and crashing your shoulder into a box and having to pick yourself up/go into a crouch is good stuff. I can't imagine the thought process behind allowing people to shoot while doing (outside TS-style stuff anyway).

SPC Brungardt wrote:Or you stay 1st person the whole time and maybe you see your arms brace yourself to the ground for an instance as you scramble to get back on your feet. I suppose this is where motion-sickness occurs? I'm not familiar with a game that does this so I don't know how bad it looks.

I get the impression you almost exclusively play competitive twitch shooters. It is true that people seem to dislike anything that isn't 'camera on a stick' Doom-style viewpoint, but I love games with body awareness that do cool things with your viewpoint.

Actually, Ace's post makes me think this comes back to the same reason most games don't have climbing - people are just too used to camera on a stick. People complain that reversing is hard in FC2 because you have to look out the back window of your car... just like when you actually reverse.