What counters a sniper in the end is good map design. Basically, no matter where the sniper is, there has to be route that allows reaching him without him seeing you before you get into close enough to shoot him.
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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I feel like "just design the rest of the game around it, dude!" is as much a condemnation as it is a solution. Imagine if chess needed a big wall halfway through to block the queen.
It’s more like, you wouldn’t put guns in a sword fighting game unless you disadvantage them in a way to still be fair. That’s just balancing. And balancing can have a lot of different shapes and forms. Speed is one way. Works for guns in sword games (flintlock guns are naturally slow to reload so you can believably do that in a period setting) and to some extent for snipers.
Map design would just be another way of balancing. Games are always designed around their mechanics (or at least good ones are). Super Mario wouldn’t be fun if you could just fly to the end of the level. If you put obstacles in the air as well though it’s balanced again. You change the design of the level to fit the gameplay. And in a game that has a somewhat powerful sniper, you don’t design a map with an impenetrable sniper nest that can overlook the whole map.
That’s kinda what the pawns are tho
I... I really can't argue with that I guess.
Chess needed several things basically like that, though. It's why you can castle, move pawns once or twice on their opening move, and en passant.
Is advocating for good map design about designing the whole game around it, or is it just balancing the game?
Plus, game developers should be designing their entire game around what’s in it, that leads to balanced, cohesive games. A shooter with bad maps is a bad shooter.
This is true, but then you run into the old competitive FPS problems of usually very limited numbers of fair/good map design, and then the game becoming almost as much about perfect map knowledge as about actually being able to move around and shoot.
This problem is somewhat alleviated, but not solved by having much larger maps.
Theoretically if someone could figure out how to make a procedural map generation aglo for a fast paced competitive shooter, this would solve the map memorization problem, but this would likely be extremely difficult to pull off.
I'm no developer or programmer of any kind but wouldn't it be a simple fix by creating percentile ranges in the hitbox of the players? Headshot 100% damage, foot is 25% damage etc. etc.
That's definitely already a thing in most games. Sometimes sniper rifles do so much damage that even 50% is enough to OHKO though. Not sure what game specifically this is referencing
CS:GO/CS2, AWP, leg shot deals 75 damage, body and head instakill
Presumably Counterstrike. That's an AWP.
Quite literally this very observation/argument has been going on since the original CS, and critiques along these lines have more or less led to mods/games like Insurgency, Project Reality/Squad, Red Orchestra 1/2 and many other less well known mods.
Basically, the conclusion was... you actually can make viable games out of more realistic versions of firearms, and a lot of people (though nowhere near as many) find them enjoyable.
You can keep a sniper rifle massively damaging but also gameplay negate this massive damage by further emulating other real world drawbacks of a sniper rifle: its actually quite difficult / essentially impossible both in the real and in a game to basically quickdraw and quick scope a sniper rifle after hopping around a corner if you emulate the process of sighting a scoped rifle and punishing or limiting some of the unrealistic physical capabilities of the fps player's avatar.
You could make the reloading process more involved or time consuming for the player, or design other game mechanics that allow for and incentivize firing from a supported position such as prone, or using a bipod or a window sill or ledge.
This approach does work, but creates a different kind of gameplay. More complicated, Less rewarding to those with pure tactile control mechanism proficiency and less tactical awareness.
Anyway, ita funny to see this still going on. Maybe try out some milsims or tactical squad based shooters of yore, or some of the games/mods I mentioned if you wanna see how those games feel.
I would like to think that at this point the 'CS gameplay /is/ realistic' crowd has finally given up and realized they actually just like old school fps combat with realistic looking settings and weapons, but not actually realistic gameplay mechanics.
Note: None of this is to say that any of these kinds of gameplay are inherently better or worse, but it would be nice if gamers were even kind of capable of actually accurately describing the games they enjoy without saying obviously false things about how they work or function.
Even IRL snipers are hated. Part of their training is to pretend to be a regular soldier if captured to avoid being tortured. Turns out people don't like being shot at by someone a mile away who immediately runs and hides after taking the shot.
IRL real snipers do not generally run away and hide after taking a shot.
They nearly always engage from either a distance that the enemy cannot directly engage with without either their own sniper or air support or mortars or artillery, and/or from a position of concealment and/or cover, so you generally do not have any real certain idea of where they are.
CS GO maps are on average something like 1 tenth to 1 twentieth the distance that an actual sniper usually engages from.
Snipers generally remain concealed as long as possible, and only relocate if they believe their position is compromised, and even then, do their best to remain concealed as they withdraw.
The actual behavior you are describing is more common to say basically these days any infantryman with a scoped rifle, or a DMR.
While its common parlance to say that someone in window or nook or cranny of a dense, often urban combat setting is 'sniping'... they almost always are not, unless they are engaging a target something like 2km+ away.
There are recorded instances of this, but they're definitely not the common kind of mission an actual sniper team is usually deployed for, more often happening in 'shit has already unbelievably hit the fan' scenarios.
Or, as was seen in Iraq, basically an individual or sniper team as part of a well orchestrated ambush or taking shots at a static FOB. This works because on average most cities in Iraq do not contain too many skyscraper tall buildings, and the cities are usually built on pretty flat terrain, thus there can actually be some decent sight line.
They usually run afterward because they know they are at an absurd technological and force disadvantage, that if their position is discovered, it wont be long until the entire building they are in explodes, and also because running away and hiding is far, far easier in an urban environment than the vast majority of battlefields militaries typically engage each other in/on.
Except that if you miss your shot you are left exposed for 2 seconds. That's the whole point, high risk high reward (also costs a fuckton of money so even higher risk and the enemy team can get it) It's genius game design
So then you upgrade to SCAR and hold down the mouse button as you spray like an AK47 but from a map away. No risk all reward.
Scar is way worse than people make it look like. Costs more than awp for less damage, and most maps have no good spots for it. Also with the new cs it requires you to remove another weapon from your loadout, and all of the others are way better choices for 99% of rounds.
It has biiiiiig utility that people overlook for the AWP “1 click = 1 kill”
- Get the first so-so hit on body for the ‘tag’ slowdown, then hit the follow-up while their movements are slowed
- Chained headshots against groups that’d overwhelm an AWP
- Low hit% shots and firing through smoke/light cover that you’d hold firing & bolt animation cycle when using AWP
You risk losing duels against very good opponents who can click on your head faster than your 2nd shot, but it has a purpose. Unlike the M249 🤢
Skill issue, through and through in CS
AWP outside of top-tier pro & ladder play, is a lane-area denial tool, anyone with the skill to quick scope IS playing pro.
Learn the maps & timings
Know the lanes and angles
Use your goddamn smokes and flashes to move on those angles, shorten the engagement range, and either the sniper moves off or you get an easy kill
No no, the other players should simply be worse than me. I shouldn't have to practice, I am simply better. I'm better!
Doesn’t play battlefield. Can hit someone 2-4 times with a sniper rifle and not get the kill unless you manage to headshot every time or use the anti-material rifle, and even then that’s no guarantee. Meanwhile, someone farts in your general direction with an SMG at 50 yards and drops you.
Fair to say these games really pander to certain weapons, and “realistic” shouldn’t be uttered in the same sentence with them.
This sort of dissonance happens in battlefield games because of how basically the games are torn between being marketed as generally realistic, include realistic graphics, but also want to encourage various viable forms of gameplay styles.
The basically nerfing of snipers in more modern BF games happens because, while one shot one killing someone is fun for a mass audience, /being/ one shot one killed, is not.
The actual mechanics of combat are not really realistic at all. But everything else in your brain is telling you they should be.
But if they were, half of the gameplay would not actually work.
That is, unless you seriously rework a lot of the gameplay, as Squad has.
But then that means you need actual teamwork, and battlefield players still seem to be mostly in it for their KDR, very rarely engaging in actually useful team work.
Basically I suggest you try out some other less popular shooters that certainly do have much more realistic firearms related gameplay, though that necessarily means said gameplay is fundamentally different.
I've got thousands of hours in the BF franchise, easily 10k+, so I'd call myself more than just a little familiar with the gameplay. It's wannabe CoD at this point with big maps...the "little" guns overpower LMG, automatic fire is far too accurate at distance for small guns and far far too shitty close up for big guns. Basically they've reduced hp to bullets on target in the shortest time with complete disregard for caliber or energy. You can get the drop on and be face f***ing someone with an LCMG and they burst with an AC9 and win the fight. Can't stand that. Might as well remove 90% of the guns, people only use a 6-8 of them regularly.
Yeah, it is a big FPS, so that still means most players are lone-wolfing for KDR, being useless and hanging back sniping instead of playing the objective, or avoiding supporting other players for self-preservation purposes. Too many players working game mechanics to their advantage...but that's how it goes.
Got any suggestions for shooters that maintain a level of action not disrupted by too much by overrealism?
Edit: went and clicked thru Steam for FPS shooters, filtered for "realistic" and CoD was in the list, along with "Obama Boss Fight", whatever that is. Useless filters. SMH.
Well... I have no idea what you mean by overrealism.
Off the top of my head, the most comparable in scope to Battlefield, in that they include vehicles and larger numbers of players than say 16 v 16, are Squad and Arma 2/3.
Arma 3 still has fairly clunky controls compared to basically every other FPS, though its far improved from Arma 1 and 2 days. Theres also lots of mods and communities that do organized events, as in general random public play does not really work.
Arma Reforger is the hot new Arma, but as far as I can tell its basically still an early release / alpha / ironing out the core engine bugs.
Squad I find to be basically the best currently existing middle ground between the silly problems of the BF series, without going as full bore on realism that Arma does, and generally has much better handling, less clunky controls, far less needing to learn and customize a wide variety of keyboard commands.
You may find either one or both of these as over realistic, again im not sure exactly what that means.
Theres also Hell Let Loose and a few other decently popular WW1/WW2 shooters that are more or less similar to HLL, but I have not played it, only heard about it, so I may be totally off base there.
Other than that... while tactical squad based shooters such as Ready Or Not are certainly more realistic than say BF in certain respects, there is not a wide variety of gameplay, and i wouldnt really say theres a similar level of action.
Theres a high degree of /tension/ from not knowing when the actual high stakes action can occur, but the action itself generally comes in extremely intense bursts.
And if you wanna go full bore into that route you can play Escape From Tarkov until you discover the only way to actually be able to have any BF style action is to pub stomp with friends you have outside of the game.
EDIT: Yeah, its a huge shame what happened between COD and BF. To a large extent BF started trying to win over COD players by implementing more and more features from COD, resulting in a lot of what made BF work become pointless. COD series has done a bit of emulating BF style stuff, but it generally hasnt been as impactful on the core gameplay of COD multiplayer.
That being said, Ive never been a fan of COD multiplayer. The community is among the worst in videogaming, still to this day.
Overrealism like forcing real life mechanics to get in the way of the fact that it’s a game. Things like waiting for engines to start properly or being locked into tedious animations for reloads or clearing jams. Played a couple mods like that and it steals some of the fun. I know it sounds like I’m straddling the fence wanting a both game and realism, I just figure there ought to be a good balance instead of complete disregard for capability and physics of the tools you use in game.
Arma for sure is clunky, I’ve avoided that one for a long while after playing the early versions.
I have HLL but I’ve outgrown the WW2 shooter genre and haven’t played it in years, the development was painfully slow and I got it in the super-early stages. It was really hard to find any group to play with, too.
Regarding your edit, agreed. However I’ll offer that I think CoD is the more honest of the two, it never tried to be anything other than what it is while battlefield has slid back from a do everything game towards CoD gameplay. I don’t think there’s a major FPS games’ community that isn’t toxic.
Well, Squad does have those two things you specifically mention:
Generally speaking, reload animations take roughly the amount of time seen in actual combat footage and reported by various available US and UK publicly available military studies.
It also has delays for starting up vehicles, although this is essentially near 0 for most light vehicles, long for APCs and Tanks, and quite long for helicopters.
These mechanics you say are overrealistic, I say actually work to promote team based tactics, squad communication, ultimately more realistic tactics in general, in addition to being at least 'realistic'.
For weapons, a whole lot of effort has gone into fine tuning especially sniper rifles and squad automatic weapons, to represent them reasonably accurately, allowing for highly skilled players to do things with them which, while rare and often generally officially discouraged, absolutely have been used and are effective in extremely niche or desperate scenarios.
Basically what this means is you cannot run around with a sniper rifle and quickly no scope or scope in and take out a target without basically both significant luck and skill. Likewise for running and gunning with a squad automatic weapon, or in general moving and blasting at full auto with anything but roughly a submachine gun.
The code side of it is interesting, basically recoil becomes cumulatively more extreme with each uncontrolled shot.
What this allows for is ok, point blank range? Full auto can certainly still be effective, but it is not as effective as calmly placed single shots or bursts.
But as you say COD has a toxic community and youve never found an FPS without one?
Squad is actually shockingly refreshing on that, when compared to basically every other competitive shooter game that you can generally play by just dropping into a random server, and is also realistically themed.
To the extent that its not uncommon to find on a random public server a squad leader who is advertising that they enjoy teaching newbies the ropes, and they genuinely do enjoy this. There is of course some toxicity in general, but it is orders of magnitude less than COD.
You will be flamed though if you do exceptionally dumb things to do in Squad, like try to fly the one helicopter your team gets on a map and use it as your own personal transit to be almost certainly blown up and killed upon arriving deep in enemy lines. Or just taking an APC for yourself, leaving half your team to walk, or trying to solo crewman a tank.
Basically, in addition to being more realistic, Squad actually encourages actual cooperation, instead of competition, between players on the same team.
Nearly no one who plays Squad is in it for their personal KDR.
Playing solo is nearly guaranteed to result in you having a bad time, even if you are playing as a sniper, its still usually good practice to either be in communication with other squad leads, be embedded in a squad, or at best be a two man sniper/spotter pair.
Having competent medics and engineers, who do not excel at battle compared to other classes, absolutely can make or break battles.
Squad is about enjoying tense action in a realistic-enough depiction of real world military combat situation, where cooperation is actually quite vital.
At this point its probably clear I am quite the fan of Squad, so at this point I'll let you know that as a one of the earliest beta testers for Project Reality, as well as one of the most prolific posters on the forum, a whole lot of ideas I came up with, or ideas I was very involved in discussing, became many of the core and ancillary gameplay aspects of Project Reality, and nearly all of those have translated over to Squad, and been improved by doing things we dreamed of being able to do but couldn't due to the limitations of the BF2 engine.
So, sure, you can say I am biased, and youre not wrong, but I do also genuinely believe the things I am saying.
Thanks for the lengthy description. Sold. I’m downloading the game.
Good luck soldier!
Anon doesn't know how to use smoke grenades.
Actually got me thinking about how people whine about campers. Like... They're just sitting there. In the same spot. If they kill you more than twice, that's on you since after the first two times you should know they are there and be able to get the drop on them. First time, maybe they just happen to be moving through. Second time, you now know they are camping. Toss grenades in, sneak up on them, etc.
Some maps are designed where certain camping spots are nearly impossible to approach without being in their firing zone.
"youtube dot com counter strike two smoke lineup"
Am sniper
Chilling on a hill
Kill like 10 dudes
They're scared haha
Dudes suddenly find the direction of the shot
10 dudes are running towards me
Distance is closing and that was my one advantage
Mfw:
Or the opposite:
I am a sweat.
I don't care about gameplay I want high kd.
I die over and over again
But I get two kills before I die.
I quickly check a third party site to see if my stats are atleast above 2.0
I sigh in relief as I realize I'm comfortably at a 2.1
Rejoin the lobby and blame the dog
i think Kennedy would agree
It is now my sacred duty as an FPS dinosaur to inform you that there is a vaporware game named JFK Reloaded where the goal is to reproduce Oswald's supposed firing sequence.
Its essentially impossible, btw.
Though the game is absurdly unpopular, there at least was a community around it and the game has a complex scoring system based around precise wounds, and no one has ever replicated the Warren Commission's theory.
Basically, the 'magic bullet' shot is impossible to pull off.
Most seasoned FPS players have a pretty hard time even coming close to the 3 supposed shots being fired anywhere near the actual timing and general vicinity of where the shots supposedly landed at the same time.
Normally when the same person replies to every comment on a post, they're arguing some dumb toxic shenanigans. But here you are, teaching me about war, FPS game theory, and JFK Reloaded. Much applause to you, sir.
Thanks! I am bored, without my old PC and waiting for a steam deck to arrive, so ... just shootin the shit, as it were =P
Enjoy your Steam Deck! All my friends who have one love it to death.
I am actually currently idea working out something kind of up my alley as it were:
What if there was a game that allowed for not only generally realistic military style combat... but also enabled highly skilled players, or players who practice a good deal, to be able to pull off some John Wick style bullshit thats always been impossible to do well in a multiplayer game?
My current concept is that through taking advantage of the Steam Deck's unique control scheme, I can essentially more realistically convey both the pros and cons of gunplay and essentially bits of MMA/CQC style stuff from action movies or like MGS cutscenes.
Its likely going to take me a long time to fully attempt a demo of this, and it may not work at all.
But, im currently unemployed, living off of disability, quite fine without much in person social contact and i actually have a lot of experience writing code of all kinds after a decade in the tech industry.
It could absolutely all fail, but even then, I'd just have fun in the attempt.
Bullets do really, REALLY weird things when they are no longer flying through air, but things like people. Documented cases of a bullet piercing someone’s scalp, running between the skin and skull across the top of their head before falling gently out the back. Fired bullets hit a rock, ricochets and “returns to sender”.
But not this kind of weird stuff lol.
Pulling off the correct shots in JFK reloaded is actually not that hard. The issue with getting a perfect 1000/1000 is how stupidly perfect your timing needs to be, down to the exact millisecond. The accuracy and ballistic trajectory of the bullet is easy comparatively.
I straight up do not believe you when you say reproducing the magic bullet shot (ie, the ballistic trajectory) in addition to every thing else, is not that hard.
Sure, its easier to pull off the exact timing and general placement of the shots /after youve practiced many times for that exact timing and placement scenario/, unlike how any actual shooting works.
Also, try giving this game to a more average FPS player and they'll usually just give up, because it is so challenging to get the 3 shots off in the what, 4ish seconds?
Combining this with the actual magic bullet trajectory, is, again, functionally impossible, unless you rehearse hundreds to thousands of times.
Basically the kind of person who dedicates time to perfecting the shot sequence is nearly never an average FPS player, thus those who do dedicate themselves to this both become better FPS players in the process and then also do not realize that most FPS players would consider this actually quite difficult.
Even seasoned FPS players with above average aiming skill take many, many attempts and practice.
Sure it's not easy, but the shots individually arent hard, syncing up all 3 in perfect timing is.
And ya, it's very much unlike actual shooting.
Oswald didn't have the chance to practice over and over, but he also didn't have a set of shots he was trying to match perfectly, so it was much easier for him.
OP has not played TECMO Bowl.