Mark Brown's GMTK video is here: ua-cam.com/video/yuOObGjCA7Q/v-deo.html And Chris at Errant Signal talked about DOOM here: ua-cam.com/video/TyOF2RsO3ck/v-deo.html ...and also here: ua-cam.com/video/4DT7xa-G9bA/v-deo.html ...and also here: ua-cam.com/video/NtRKUsuE-m4/v-deo.html
Aesthetics are why I absolutely LOVED Halo 2's Needler. Almost no one else I saw at the time liked it. Weak, inferior, always throwing it aside the moment they got something stronger. But I found it just an AMAZING feeling to take two Needlers, turn an enemy into a pincushion, then watch them explode. I started getting a really good feel for exactly how much of my ammo I needed to put into a foe before the blast would finish them off, to conserve ammo and keep using my Needlers for longer. Though I won't deny that their homing effect making my precision better was a factor. :p
Same here The fact that it homed, had a consistent execute feature and was aesthetically pleasing made it my favourite. But sometimes it felt like the game itself didn't want me to have it.
It has to be mentioned that arena shooters like Diabotical/Quake/Unreal Tournament all have arsenals, but they're also mainly multiplayer. People have used keybinds for each individual weapon, so they switch to the appropriate weapon faster, rather than having to scroll through them. Also, it's because of a pro player's keybinds in Quake 2 that we all use WASD today.
@@excelatbiting1980 I found out about quake's 24 year old community history last year, and man it gets deep, especially if you include the other arena fps - warsow pickup is like a whole other planet
The WASD binds came before quake 2, but yeah... it's a strong point about the binds. I recently went back to playing HL2DM and after a while I realised everyone had interesting key set ups for their binds. I was getting absolutely murdered until I realized I could have my keys set up so I could shoot someone with the Magnum, switch to shotgun, and finish them off. It would take 4 hits with the shotgun, (4*25%) or two hits with the magnum (2*75%), but the shotgun has spread, so hits more. If I used just the shotgun, they'd always kill me with the Xbow, or head shot with the pistol, while I chipped away with the shotgun. but, if I hit with the pistol, I'd not have much time to line up the next shot (recoil, player dodging), so I'd bound a spare button to switch to shotgun, fire the shotgun and the spread on that would mean I wouldn't need to aim. Now they could still head shot me in that time, as their aim was just better than mine, and they're better at dodging. but I went from 1:10 K:D ratio to 4:5 K:D pretty much overnight, just by changing my key binds so I could change weapons faster than default. Then I spent the some time improving my aim, and now I'm no longer Terrible, just Not Great.
As I like to say. When it comes to shooters, guns are the main character. They are how you interact with the world. If you don't nail your weapons, you don't have a good shooter.
@JarekTheGamingDragon Based on the video's taxonomy and design analysis, I just came up with a hypothesis: In Resistance: Fall Of Man, you only have a handful of weapons you need: The Carbine, Bullseye, Rossmore, and Auger. Am I off?
A friend linked this on social media and on a whim I clicked it. I gotta say, you had me hooked from the opening slide. For that alone, you have my respect. ...And then you started talking and... I was enthralled. I am *so* glad I randomly clicked on this. I look forward to exploring your other videos!
Based on the original title (What Makes a Good Shooter Arsenal?), I thought it would be a satirical look at the loadout of like a school shooter, and... Yeah, the change was a good call.
I was just thinking about all the weapons I know, and man, Unreal does a lot with its ten slots. Everything has an alt fire (which gives a different damage/rate/consumption tradeoff, or activates a special trait), and a third of them have another add-on feature besides (to wit: ASMD's combo shot, eightball's homing, bio rifle's exploding residue). And then the sniper rifle and minigun perfectly minimax the rubric in the video: extremely BFGey, the sniper having rare ammo while the minigun reuses otherwise-useless pistol ammo to vicious effect!
@@T3sl4 Oh man, also the pulse rifle's beam I think could be chained together via multiple people to increase damage, was that in UT or was that only in UT2003 and later ones?
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which Ion Fury does, atleast for me. The game encourages a run and gun glass cannon style of play and the level design is made for that, the weapons are built for that too. A lot of his complaints are preferences that the game doesn't fit his playstyle, so I have to hard disagree with the creator of this video.
This is bigger than shooters too! I was having exactly these thoughts when shifting back and forth between InFamous and Assassin's Creed 2. AC2 has way more stuff that Ezio can do in a fight, and shit tons of weapon options, but InFamous's attacks all have a really clear tactical purpose that's really intuitive while in AC2 there's not really much difference between collectible weapons aside from aesthetics, and a lot of attacks outside the basic just really don't have much function.
Can also be traced back to each game's roots. The Sly Cooper trilogy was a pretty focused set of stealth action games that saw stealing and sneaking as the game's most engaging mechanic while combat was pretty secondary, to be avoided. Prince Of Persia tended to get way into the weeds with combat when the most enjoyable thing, at least to me, was scaling some insane environments and using parkour and a dagger that rewinds time as the bedrock of its traversal. Infamous kept the gamey but fluid movement that made Sly enjoyable while the Assassin's Creed games doubled down on some annoying combat. Infamous also built a tight combat loop to compensate for the stealth elements it didn't inherit from Sly, whereas AC couldn't really let go of the platforming so they made this parkour system which is both contextual and unengaging. I think Batman is kind of what the Assassin's Creed games never were, a legacy that then got passed on to the Middle Earth games. The combat is crunchier, the stealth more engaging, movement that was perhaps not more complex but added enough to turn routine and unremarkable towers into genuine thrills and rewards.
I feel like one of the more interesting marks of whether media succeeded is whether those with no nostalgia for it are able to make it just as good or better than those who do.
I don't know if the kids making Doom and Quake style games in the modern Era don't have nostalgia for those games. I was born in 1995, so by most reasonable standards my nostalgia period is the mid to late 2000s, not the late 90s. More Halo, COD, and GTA, not Ocarina of Time and Mario 64. However, I didn't have a lot of money as a kid, but also started gaming _very_ young. As such, my first FPS wasn't Halo 3 like you might expect, but Perfect Dark, because we couldn't afford an Xbox or gaming PC for Halo CE or Counterstrike respectively. My nostalgia games largely came out in the 90s despite me being too young to remember them coming out - stuff like Mario 64, N64 Zelda, the aforementioned Perfect Dark. The PC I eventually got wasn't very good, so I played older PC games like C&C Renegade (mostly played in 2008 to 2010, game released in 2000) or Freelancer. I didn't really upgrade to mostly playing newer stuff until 2010, when I got Modern Warfare 2 and a PC which could actually handle it.
I find that Halo is somewhere in between arsenal and loadout. Weapon and ammo availability tend to line up with enemies in ways that make it feel more like an arsenal, but not completely. Also it has two types of grenades, being able to melee with any gun, and most areas having 1-2 nearly omnipresent weapons around in addition to other weapons makes it feel like you have 4-7 weapons most of the time. And it doesn't have all those extra aspects of a loadout that you mentioned beyond only being able to carry so many weapons at once, unlike CoD (haven't played Halo 5 yet so maybe it has some now). To me Halo uses a lot of the best elements of both systems and occasionally steps outside either of them as well (vehicles, boss fights, turrets, ect.) and that's a big part of what I love about it. Thanks for the great video.
I agree, at least in Halo 1. Later halo games move away from the arsenal a bit in favor of providing covenant "equivilants" of human guns and lots of guns that do the same thing... Especially 4 and 5. Halo 4 literally has five guns that basically do the same thing (DMR, battle rifle, pistol, light rifle and carbine)
I love Halo, but I wish it had 3 weapon slots. Halo specifically has the problem that you get stuck with 1 efficient weapon (BR/carbine/magnum...) and 1 power weapon (rocket/fuel rod...). This is a real problem for the medium-high power weapons (shotgun, beam rifle, needler, energy sword, brute shot...) because they're not powerful enough to replace the power weapon _and_ they don't have enough ammo to replace the go-to weapon. The result is the most interesting weapons get ignored 90% of the time. Just 1 extra weapon slot would solve this and encourage more experimentation.
I've recently been fascinated by how period pieces struggle with the arsenal and the weapon categories that players are used to. For example, Battlefield One doled out machine guns and submachine guns in ways no WWI soldier would have been familiar with so they can retain the fast paced running combat, while Red Dead Redemption 2 quite effectively uses the repeater carbines as the rapid fire weapon on offer while using a more cover based combat system to make the overall slower rate of fire more comfortable.
Meanwhile, Red Orchestra makes the standard weapon for all classes a bolt action rifle, fitting the WWII setting perfectly, and they manage to make it work wonderfully. Looking back, I'm surprised that machine guns are so prevalent in WWII shooters when the Red Orchestra games show how much fun cycling a bolt action can be.
@@Ninjat126 Right? The second after you miss your shot and have to operate the bolt lock before your enemy gets you is the longest, most thrilling second there is in gaming. I think part of the problem is that studios are afraid to depart from the style of combat that their brands are famous for. When you have to constantly reload and thus line up every shot with more care, that necessarily makes for a bit slower tempo fire fight, but it's no less exciting for it. Not to mention the audio aesthetic of a bolt action rifle with all the click-click-click-click BANG! is just so satisfying when well executed.
@@Oxtocoatl13 the animation and sound team on RO2 deserve medals. The combination of bleedout mechanics and a delayed killfeed really bring it all together, there's always that little moment of anticipation and the clinking of metal between every shot. Rising Storm 2 and Insurgency manage to nail the bolt-action feeling really well, but those games are all about the automatics. Missing a shot with your bolt-action in those is less "tension as you prepare for a second shot" and more "you're instantly torn to shreds by half a magazine of 7.62, serves you right for bringing a 19th century rifle to a 21st century conflict."
I think you're being too hard on BF1. Pre some of the more wild DLC guns and a few hard to unlock exceptions you were locked to small magazine machine pistols (assult) or clunky full autos with long reloads. (Support) your two other classes had your single fire rifles and more often then not were better for modes like conquest or operations because of their long stretches of fields where full autos were weak because of their low accuracy. While not particularly historically accurate (to avoid being boring) they did a really great job at balancing the combat to allow your single fire guns a serious competitive niche when compared to the full autos which were plentiful enough to not make single fire rifles the norm. Battlefield 1 had the most unique and well balanced guns in the series when compared to 3 or 4 where most of the guns are functionally identical and you have massive magazines to shread though crowds of guys. Add in the freedom and variety of gadgets and grenades and you'd have lots of variety in combat not just limited to how the maps were designed and the guns were balanced. Personally I think it's the best Battlefield of all time and I've been a fan of the series for a long time.
Comparing RO/RS series with Battlefield games is like comparing apples with oranges. Just admit you prefer a more tactical shooter than an arcade one were it's main focus isn't historical accuracy.
Ultrakill has three weapons: pistol, shotgun, machine gun Every one has a specific use and there is never a moment when i'm thinking "what do i do here" and i never find myself using the same weapon for any longer than a few seconds
maybe when you wrote this there weren't a lot of weapons, but there are now 4 weapons, each of which have at least two different modes, and one of which has an alt version that functions completely differently so depending on how you slice it, there are actually like 11 weapons and all but 3 of those can be used for pretty much any situation it's not that each weapon has a distinct use, it's that they have their own quirks which allow you to create combos with them because of how freely you can use them to be specific, every weapon has something that lets it do high single-target damage and something that lets it do damage to groups of weak enemies the alt pistol pierces enemies and the charge pistol, alt or not, has an ability that pierces enemies the marksman pistol can toss coins to multiply damage all shotgun shots pierce filth enemies, and the pellet system of shotgun damage allows you to both attack large groups and focus one guy with close range burst damage the nailgun can be used with magnets to shred groups, but i find it also to be a great tool at dealing burst damage to one boss or miniboss by sticking a magnet on them and then going buckwild sure the pistol's a little worse at crowd control, or really everything unless you're just using the marksman for coins, but it does pretty much everything equally well and if you're like me and you like beating bosses with nothing but a pistol, then it's great
and now in 2023 the game feels even better, there's even more weapons and arms to use and most of the things available are quite distinct and feel good to use in conjuction with one another, and the game's environment also very much promotes diverse use of arsenal as well as your "tools" (such as whiplash) to make the most out of everything available to you in the most fun way possible. it isn't just the arsenal that's good (though for the record it's a great one, tactial use of throwing fucking COINS is the sickest shit ever too, especially when you throw in punching those coins and shooting them with a railcannon to the mix) it's also what you're using it against that lets that arsenal shine so well. everything feels unique but also like it meshes so well with each other it's simply beautiful, once the game fully releases i'm quite confident all the good things you can say about it will increase too. i kinda expected the video to be about ultrakill but then saw it released a good while ago and also the footage of it that was still shown was definitely at a point where much less time was spent on getting into it so it may not have that same feel as when you're really in the groove with your arsenal and the game in general.
4:35 Demon walks in while Innuendo Studios is showing off weapons 4:36 Fragments of their corpse on the floor I don't know why, but I found this part humorous.
such a perfect outro tune to fit the vibe man. As much as the video made me wanna jump back into some Doom nostalgia, that slowed-down segment made me want to immediately track down that Offspring song and crank it to 11.
I wasn't born until after FPS games had moved away from the arsenal. The arsenal lived on in Ratchet and Clank, and that was where I was introduced to it. Those were my first games, they're absolutely brilliant, and they cemented my love for an arsenal. Though they definitely fall prey to the overlapping use-case issue, which has worsened as the series progressed. They counter that with aesthetics and timing. The mini-nuke and the heavy bouncer do basically the same thing. However you unlock the heavy bouncer much later in the game, by which time the mini-nuke has fallen off in both effectiveness and novelty. Weapons in the arsenal becoming obsolete over time means the designers have to make multiple versions of each archetype so that you always have all the options available.
Ratchet and Clank also counters the overlapping use case problem by making the ammo capacity of the big weapons relatively small and spacing the checkpoints out enough that you probably end up using all the weapons evenly so you can make sure you have some backup ammo for each one, just in case.
Although I think it might have taken until Gladiator for that arsenal to really mature. Funnily enough, Gladiator was also the first to use strafing as the default movement option. Although, play 2 with the extra weapons from Ratchet and Clank 1 and it is still a massive list of weapons.
>Although I think it might have taken until Gladiator for that arsenal to really mature. Eh, not really, at least half the arsenal is only used if you're leveling the weapon, or are forced to use the weapon due to not having better weapons yet or because of a challenge. Oh and the dual vipers/raptors become useless right out the gate, and because of how the game handles ammo pickups, it's a really bad weapon. And don't get me started on how bad the B6/B11 is.
Great video, but I think you missed one very important and completely fundamental distinction between weapons: Hitscan vs Projectile. That is, Weapons that instantly hit the point on the screen you're aiming at vs Weapons which project something which will eventually intersect that point. Hitscans are usually easier to use but lower power, and form the backbone of a shooter's arsenal. It seems like Ion Fury has too many projectiles, and not enough ammo for it's hitscans, leaving you to use the one hitscan which does have sufficient ammo, the shotgun, as your mainstay.
Isn't hitscan basically covered by 'accuracy' though? That said, it's nice addition/explanation to the category, for sure. Whether a weapon is hitscan or not definitely impacts its accuracy.
That hitscan weapons are weaker is completely made-up. In the ur example, quake, the strongest weapon is the thunderbolt, a hitscan with pinpoint accuracy. In modern quake the holy Trinity is 2 hitscans (rail gun and lighting gun) plus the rocket launcher, all with similar power.
@@InnuendoStudios good decision. I am not into shooters, the last one I played to the end was Duke Nuken (back in that days) and I never heard the term "hitscan" before, whereas I understood the concept inside the accuracy umbrela. Anyway, thanks @afroofdoom for introducing me to the concept. Also, nice move bringing *some kind of people* to the channel talking about this game genre ;)
That last line reminded me soo much of CoD MW the guns feel AMAZIN, the sound design is beefy, the reload animations are incredible, but there are so many flaws in map layout and inconsistencies w/ connection that the gun fights are occasionally miserable.. overall 6/10
@@strike123456789 0:11 15:32 TRANS RIGHTS!! 💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙 💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗 🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍 💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗 💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙 (trans rights!) edit: got the order of the stripes wrong the first time.
My favorite weapon is from the Marathon series by Bungie. It's so old it doesn't even use a mouse to aim, yet it has a look up and down mechanic. Anyway, Marathon 2 had these dual wield double barrel shotguns which would reload by twirling around the character's hands like some fancy lever action rifle reload. It's the most satisfying FPS weapon I've ever used. Very thumpy and rude, combined with juggling.
Marathon's bestiary isn't super fun to fight against for the most part (solid but often boilerplate), so a lot of the fun comes from the series having a good arsenal and plenty of weird level/story design choices. Case in point, burning through the opposition with dual shotty so you can reach Durandal's screeds faster. It's an odd kind of pacing, but a good one.
@@DragoonEnRegalia Yeah, I remember it mostly for its story which I could barely follow but appreciated given other FPS barely had any, and weirdly maze like levels.
Excellent video Ian, This was a very interesting topic for me to watch, I've been playing fps for a long time and the arsenal sometimes seems to be overlooked by the designers and just leave it as "If it sounds cool and does good damage is fine". Just to add something, I really like the point you made about guns stealing the spotlight or leaving gaps in the combat, and one aspect that I think magnifies or diminishes this aspect is the difficulty. To put an example, in Halo 3, when you play in difficulties from heroic to below the game has a wide variety of guns and lets you use them with a good sense of freedom, sure, there are guns that maybe have a little bit too much power on them like the battle rifle or the carabine, but there's still room for the player to use the other guns and no feel like they are just scratching the enemies. But when you turn up the difficulty to legendary or beyond if you decide to use skulls, the game monopolizes the combat on the BR, carabine, plasma pistol, power weapons, etc; and leaves the other guns like the assault rifle barely being able to take out a grunt with a full clip.
I've never played Halo 3 on legendary (just heroic and normal), but my experience with Halo Reach on Legendary is that the only weapons that exist are the "headshot weapons", the plasma pistol (strictly for taking down shields), a few BFG-type weapons, and maybe the energy sword and gravity hammer. Everything else might as well not exist. It wasn't a fun experience in the end, which is why I've never played on Legendary since.
I agree. I think Halo would benefit hugely from 1 extra weapon slot. As ajshell2 said, you often end up with 1 "headshot weapon" that has lots of ammo and is really efficient for killing weak-medium enemies, and 1 BFG that you're saving for hard encounters. It's not awful because those 2 weapon types are really satisfying, but it does leave 90% of the weapons (including most of the interesting, unique ones) to gather dust. 3 weapon slots would let you have your BR and BFG _and_ experiment with all the weapons you find.
Great video, really put into words why I feel so baffeld when people complain that you cant just use the super shotgun in doom eternal. Learning to pick the right weapon for the current situation in doom eternal makes you feel like a god and is the main reason its probably my favourite fps ever.
One interesting aspect I think is very important to weapons is also movement. The old school faster movement put a large focus on dodging projectiles, which in turn lent itself to arsenals since weapon switching in the open didn't immediately punish you. Modern shooters had a much larger focus on slower movement and hitscan weapons, leading to pop-and-shot style combat a-la CoD. And especially in CoD, the way they made up for this slower combat was to decrease time to kill, which again influenced what weapons even exist in those games. I'd argue that Ion Fury in particular has a problem with the balance between guns, enemies, and movement. Bum rushing in quake feels better than bum rushing in ion fury not just because Ion lacks that mid-range versatility, but also because it's movement (very fast and somewhat skillbased) is at odds with it's monsters (incredibly accurate, quick to attack with little tell, and fast projectiles/hitscanners) is at odds with it's arsenal (the problems you talked about). Anyways it's interesting how interconnected mechanically shooters are. Really sucks about Ion Fury's devs. Trans rights.
Fantastic point and also why the 2016 Doom reboot is so phenomenal. They realized this when they made the game and they designed the ENTIRE game around this type of play. It really punishes you for approaching things in a careful manner, just trying to pick off one enemy at a time. It forces you to just GET IN THERE. It really embodies the phrase "rip and tear" as more than just a stylistic/marketing gimmick. It's one of the most thematically pure games ever made. MAN it's good.
@@treschlet That's an interesting point of view. To me, that's what made Doom 2016 feel less great what it could have been. True, Doom has never been about cheesing and taking out one and one enemy, but Doom 2 and Final Doom perfected the puzzle aspects of the series I think. The puzzle was to figure out when to start monster infighting, when and which order to grab powerups and armor, which monsters to kill first and which ammo to pick up. Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal ignored all of this which made Doom 2 and Final Doom so great. The modern versions don't allow for natural backtracking, relies way too much on jumping and y-axis platforming, and effectively replaced health and ammo pickups with an QTE pinata mechanic. The levels also feel way less self-contained than Doom 2 / Final Doom levels.
This talk of how an arsenal covers different niches reminds me of what I've read regarding Halo: Combat Evolved. Basically, the core trifecta that they focused multiplayer balance around was the sniper rifle, shotgun, and pistol, being solid choices for long, short, and medium ranges respectively.
9:32 Best part of the whole video. 16:06 This happens so often with so many things, especially artistic proffessions, it amazes me. I do not want to fall behind in my fields, I want to maintain my skills and continue to improve.
I think the biggest thing about the arsenal is how it meshes with the enemies, and that ends up being the biggest thing that separates the legendary games from the merely decent ones. I point to Doom and especially Doom 2 as games that understand this very well, every enemy is unique and distinctive, with very specific move sets and very distinct telegraphs for their attacks, varied design, and most importantly, solid meshing with the weaponry. Each one has very specific methods on how best to take it out, be it the rapid strafing through Imp fireballs, the constant movement to avoid the Revenant's homing missiles, or the frantic zipping in and out of cover to land shots on the Arch Vile before it blows you to pieces, and what makes Doom and other games like it work so well is how you can feasibly fight any normal monster with nearly any weapon and you can see how the dance of the game changes depending on the weapon and level design, from something as simple as being able to one-shot the Pink Demons with the Super Shotgun all the way to gambling on the stun lock chances to dish out way more damage with weapons like the Plasma Gun at the risk of taking an avalanche of damage if the RNG isn't in your favor. So I think another important aspect is that the unique traits and quirks of the different weapons and enemies encourage the player to experiment and modify their style in new and creative ways to survive an encounter, rather than each weapon just having a set function that the player repeats every encounter
Doom's "pain" mechanic for monsters plays a major role. Cacodemons can deal massive damage but can be stun-locked super easily, whereas the Arch-Vile barely ever reacts to even the super shotgun... but because that chance is above zero, you still have a fighting chance to stop its attack if you happen to get caught in close-quarters combat with it. It's also interesting that if you chaingun the pinkies, they keep moving towards you slowly, but if you chaingun a cacodemon or a lost soul, they're propelled backwards... so you can use the chaingun to create distance with a lot of flying enemies quickly even if you don't kill them.
While not all Doom 2's weapons are novel and some are just the same weapon with some attribute sliders changed, besides the vanilla fists, pistol and chainsaw they all fill a different niche as opposed to being superfluous. Fists (with berserk): insane melee damage, great way to conserve ammunition besides causing infighting. Shotgun: Snipe enemies from afar. Double-barreled shotgun: Massive damage at a medium distance Chaingun: Great for stunlocking enemies with a high pain chance Rocket launcher: Splash damage, great for taking out clusters of enemies Plasma cannon: Maybe somewhat overlapping with the chaingun, but also homing and it's not a hitscan weapon BFG 9000: Okay to ludicrous amounts of damage, depending on whether or not you're using it correctly. Great for taking out enemies around corners, behind doors or on top of elevators.
@@swivelmaster The horizontal auto-aim for Doom's projectile weapons is very slight, so I don't blame you for not noticing all these years :) So yes, even the rockets from the rocket launcher are homing in a small angle cone around the imagined reticule. The effect is most useful with the plasma gun however because of the rate of fire.
One of the things I like about Ultrakill is that it's optimal to have fun. You have to switch weapons a lot if you want to fight optimaly, even if the shotgun can be a bit of crutch.
Ultrakill's main design is just to have fun. You can play it like a regular shooter and not even interact with the score or style mechanic whatsoever. And it's awesome for that. Even weapons considered "Shitty" by the community are still incredibly effective and it becomes purely about player expression at that point, rather than the simon says bullshit that made Doom Eternal so unfun.
The weird thing is Goldeneye which sorta did Arsenal but you could only carry the weapons you found in the level (also it seemed like you could only dual wield a weapon if you encountered enemies that could.)
To your weapon characteristics I would also add 'projectile speed'. I think slow-moving projectiles are one of the key things that distinguishes retro shooters from modern shooters, allowing for more skill-based multiplayer and focus on movement.
I like that you didn't even waste time trying to prove the creators are transphobes, just put it out there, anybody interested can check for themselves.
@Arnold Cash correct. i dont know what point you think you're making, but debating whether or not trans people exist or deserve to live is pretty transphobic, yeah.
Ha, my favorite weapon was the priest who could convert enemy to my side in AOE :) Not an FPS, but it would be cool if I could convert a bunch of zombies in an FPS who would follow me around and help me fight.
You can do that in Prey! (That is, 2017 Prey.) You can compel your enemies to fight alongside you for a little while, or even turn dead bodies *into* enemies who fight alongside you til they die!
System Shock and its sequel have INCREDIBLY solid arsenals even though their effectiveness really kinda zig-zags throughout the campaigns (especially the latter half of SS2). Multiple ammo types for nearly every bullet-consuming gun to cover enemy weaknesses, 1's grenade varieties and rheostats on every energy weapon, 2's gun upgrading, exotic biomass-soaked alien weaponry, and those sweet sweet Psi powers... There's also something I love about how 1 uses the dart gun as a bridge between you & your first pistol, to carry you until you start plugging teflon rounds into every cyborg within earshot.
"Putting the player in charge of whether the game is enjoyable" really stuck out to me. It reminds me of the Dark Souls/Bloodborne problem. Darks Souls is tense, difficult, and punishing... but you can always opt to sit behind a shield that resists 100% physical damage, which slows the combat to a glacial pace but makes it so you almost never die. Why do the fun and enjoyable thing of rolling to dodge attacks when it's equally effective and significantly easier to just hold up a shield and block them? In response, From Software made Bloodborne, removed every shield except for one joke shield that warns you about how they "engender passivity," and reworked the main combat mechanics to include rallying, rewarding you with healing if you immediately go on the attack after taking a hit.
I get your point but I enjoyed Dark Souls fine using a shield the whole way. Besides, turtling is (usually) not a viable strategy against bosses so most players will be forced to engage with rolling at some point.
As a games enthusiast and designer I really appreciate the vindication of someone else talking about how it's not the player's job to find the fun but rather the designer's job to put the fun where it cannot help but be found. That said the biggest piece of info for me from this was fuck the transphobic developers. Give your money to someone who likes human rights and makes a better shooter.
Awesome video as always. I would just like to add that DUSK has one of the most balanced arsenals i have ever seen, i doesn't really do anything new, and the weapons alone aren't really that interesting, but when it all comes together, hoooo boy it makes the combat a absolute delight! (also you really should give the game a third chance, the second chapter does get kind of samey, but the third one makes up for that A LOT)
@4:32 he shows the different weapons and when he comes to the rocket launcher a zombie starts creeping around the corner on the left. And then, when it cuts to the thunderbolt, gibbs are lying around in the room. Lmao
I very highly recommend that anyone here play ultrakill. It has one of the best weapon arsenals in any game period, not just fps. The damn marksman has more depth and unique interactions than some entire arsenals
I particularly like the middleground where you can carry 3-4 weapons. I love plenty of "loadout" shooters, but it often feels like I'm stuck with a go-to weapon I can't drop and a superweapon I'm saving up, which doesn't let me experiment much with the weapons I find (like in Halo when I come across an energy sword but it's no use because I've already got a rocket launcher, and dropping my battle rifle for it would be silly). Just that 1 extra weapon slot would solve it. (I said "3-4" specifically because I still had this problem in FEAR, which has 3 weapon slots. Then again, FEAR effectively requires 2 go-to weapons: a shotgun and pistols/AR/penetrator.)
The key to Quake's combat and one that isn't made clear by the campaign is that Quake style weapons are so unique that you're meant to swap to them directly as opposed to cycling through the arsenal, in multiplayer the time for combat is so quick it necessitates this quick swapping. But I think the issue you're speaking of is not a facet of the weapons so much as it is their application: the pistols default shot is a tight shotgun pattern meant to be used at medium range it's alt fire is meant for fast moving targets / smaller targets and CAN be used at long range, the ion bow is meant for long range... until you charge it all of those bolts are meant to hit targets as well, thus meaning you can charge to decrease your range and increase your damage. Remember when a gun has an alt fire it's not a question of which is the real fire mode so much as it is you're meant to use both. And this leads us into game difficulty with these older shooters the game teaches you in real time how to play and on easier difficulties enemies can die so quickly that they can lead to bad habits in their player base (ie if the default shotgun does fine enough then no one will learn the specialties of the arsenal because those moments just don't happen).
Now, let's talk about BioShock. BioShock's arsenal was near flawless. It really didn't have a BFG, but it had the Chemical Thrower witch I think was kinda like a machinegun, but the addition of Plasmids made it waaaay more varied, and augmented the arsenal in interesting ways.
Uh no, like all of the plasmids are useless except for electrobolt and the flame one. And the only weapon you need is the shotgun, chemical thrower fucking melts big daddies though. And in Bioshock 2 the only reason why you switch weapons is because of ammo scarcity.
Belated comment - I've been catching up on a bunch of your videos that I missed over the past year and a half - but whatever. I just wanted to say that the fact that you kept my attention and interest during this particular video is absolutely a credit to your video-making skills. I don't play FPSs. I have never had any interest whatsoever in FPSs. My gaming interests are basically Skyrim, Minecraft, Breath of the Wild, and watching Mega Man Lets Plays, for some reason. First-person shooters have never been something I've cared for, or about. However, I watched this video. I paid attention, I understood it, and I actually kind of enjoyed it, and that says something about your skill as a video maker, because the subject matter alone is 100% not the reason for any of those things. Keep up the good work.
I wish, at 5 minutes in, I had any hope left that it was about anything other than video games. Should I not be giving up? I don't care about the video games side.
For me, the arsenal in Fear was one of the most interesting and fun to use collections of weapons. This was a great video by the way. Also I played ion fury and I totally agree with your point. Project warlock as a contrast had a lot more potential with its guns by introducing the magic system, and then allowing the guns to be upgraded into being different at the cost of trading off a spell
@JohnnyTheWolf the game is divided into a variety of different zones with each zone getting a theme that affects the enemies in it along with some minor variations in how the levels end up being designed. It is still, however a very retro doom shooter so it doesn't end up innovating in that area. But as the game goes on, i think it gets more interesting. Perhaps the demo is bad, or maybe that isn't enough to save it. It isn't sn objective thing
I feel like the "new model" is going to get gradually closer to loadout with ammo vatiability and/or weapon mods. I mean the use of single fire/burst fire for some weapons, the rotation of bullet types in some games with stuff like hollow points and armor piercing, and the weapon mods often tied to the alt fire button most notably in doom eternal but also heavily present in games like ultrakill, seams to be a nice balance between the tightness of the loadout and the flexibility of the arsenal. Instead of a combat shotgun AND an ssg, we may expect a shotgun that can switch between shell types and slugs, and which may have a wider spread but higher pellet countweapon mod to mimic the ssg, and the grenade and rocket launchers will likely all become weapon mods due to their power, etc. I even imagine multiple reload buttons that let you draw from different colour coded ammo types, with stuff like explosives being relegated to weapon mods. Basically the design of the doom eternal heavy auto cannon and the combat shotgun may become the standard as an entire games loadout. Here is just two weapons, with respectively a shotgun, assult rifle, mini-rocket launcher, sniper rifle, sticky grenade launcher and even minigun (auto shotgun). This basically fills the role of an entire arsenal, and yet I find myself nearly never using them bc doom eternal has them as part of an arsenal which also has actual rocket launchers, miniguns, and sniper rifles (balista) with more focused design, in fact the sticky nade launcher mod for the combat shotgun is probably the single most used fire mode between the two wrapons, likely because the only close alternative is grenades that don't stick and have a cooldown, but lo behild as soon as I begun using them more I saw the sticky nade mod become less and less used as I prefered using nades and saving shotgun ammo for the ssg. Basically I think this would allow less design effort due to fewer assets, while retaining high variability and customization options for players.
You just summed up a lot of problems I have with Brutal Doom as a game (as opposed to a steaming pile of stolen assets made by a Nazi with an apparent gore fetish) with that last statement: "Making guns that feel good to shoot does not by itself make for a good arsenal."
Can I just take this oppurtunity to give some love to the arsenal of the 3rd person shooter/platformer ratchet and clank? It's so much fun, at leaat in many of the titles, like the first three, tools of destruction and crack in time have great collections weapons that allow you make your own active arsenal with complementary weapons.
I had myself a lil squee when you mentioned Bulletstorm. I think I remember you asking about shooters on Twitter, and I chimed in that the Leash was one of my favorite mechanics. I feel seen lmao
Man I totally forgot about Bulletstorm. What an underappreciated gem. Super fun gunplay, great environmental design, strong pacing and a surprisingly engaging story. Everyone who didn't play it back then should check it out.
Eh, I didn't like how much it made me work for all the neat stuff. Like, yeah, I DID see that I can do awesome combos, but it's only half as fun when I HAVE to do them to unlock stuff.
Interesting analysis! John Romero has mentioned that one of his design goals with Doom's weapons was that no weapon should ever become obsolete from picking up a new one, which matches some of your analysis of the Ion Fury weapons
I'd also recommend checking out the Doom community's creative output some time as the best modern Doom mappers have figured out the importance of balancing factors like ammo pressure and monster encounter design to make levels that are very fun to play. Give the BTSX series a look if you need a starting point
Even so, Doom has a two guns that I could think of as being made obsolete. The super shotgun makes the combat shotgun totally irrelevant in Doom 2, as it's more consistent and deals more damage. This was also a problem in Doom 2016. Eternal fixed it by making the sticky bombs so damn good. The pistol is also completely useless. It uses the same ammo as the chaingun but has a lower dps and you can get a chaingun as early as E1M2. Same for Doom 2016, the pistol is completely worthless, glad it got junked for Eternal.
I'm just here to say that I hope you're doing ok and that you'll get healthy soon! You're one of my favourite content creators, ever since the Phil Fish video. Take care, Ian! ♥️
I'm surprised splash damage wasn't part of your taxonomy, when it affects both the player and enemies. Or projectiles/hitscan, which is a dichotomy related to but different than accuracy or range.
He did mention explosive weapons, but I think he combined it into the "range" category. And yeah, time-to-impact would be a great category to add. If you are being torn apart by an immobile hitscanner halfway across the map, a sniper rifle and rocket launcher can both kill him but one will do so before you yourself take too much damage.
That was a wild ride. I’ve never really thought to how integral weapon balance and novelty are to the shooter arsenal. It’s pretty much part of the level design or at least of the same importance. Keep up the great work.
Random thought, but doom 2016/eternal’s plasma rifle and gauss cannon/ballista have a weird relationship. They use the same kind of ammo, and I’m not sure what that’s supposed to accomplish. It feels more like it encourages you to lean on one and exclude whichever performs worse. The gauss cannon is a highly destructive point-beam that takes a ton of ammo for every shot- basically the first step down from the BFG. Except with no AOE. The plasma rifle doesn’t offer anything special enough to compete with that sheer damage output you give up by using ammo the gauss cannon could do with. Lightish ranged rapid fire is covered by the game’s machine gun, so it doesn’t get that as a special property. On the other hand, doom eternal’s ballista is more like a crossbow with no scope. The beam does good damage, but it doesn’t have the OOMPH of the gauss cannon. Rather, you’ll find yourself using plasma rifle’s ability to do damage rapidly and good ammo efficiency over ammo-consumptive and disappointing shots. This sharing of space is odd, I think
Go check out Painkiller, they made like 4 games, and each weapon is awesome. The "Pistol" of Painkiller is the Stake Thrower, a weapon that flings sharpened stakes the size of firewood that pins demons to walls.
This reminds me of rhe third-person shooter Nuclear Throne: it uses a hybrid-is system, in which you can carry 2 weapons at a time, but can switch them for others you find. It has 5 main "classes" of weapons that somewhat follow the archetypes: Slow, but powerful long-ranged "bolts" (such as a crossbow) Fast, ammoless, risky melee Fast, mid-damage, ammo hungry "bullets" Risky, long range, "explosives" Special "energy" weapons. Usually high damage but ammo-hungry
I SWEAR I read this as "what makes a school shooter arsenal good." And I thought that sounded like an interesting question. We are not doing well here in America lol.
And then you have Tron 2.0 which just tosses ALL of this out the window, gives you a single ammo type for all weapons that is also used to open doors, crates, activate bridges, and read emails. And also gives you a weapon (The Disc) that does NOT use ammo, can home in on enemies, be used for melee, and reflects enemy shots back at them, who's only draw back is that you have to wait for it to return before firing it again. So you wind up spending most of the game head shotting grunts with it until you're in a boss fight when you use the shotgun, or put into a sniper section and are forced to use the sniper. Also, the dedicated melee weapon uses ammo, which might be one of the few cases where that's a thing. Can anyone else think of a case where a melee weapon has an ammo cost? On top of all of this, most of the power ups you can equip either up your ammo consumption or is straight up made for use with your disc. The designers either really wanted you to use the disc, or weren't very good at designing the other weapons.
this honestly makes me think back a bit on my time playing borderlands 2, which in a lot of ways has aged like milk, but still has such a fun selection of guns and character abilities to swap between that kept the gameplay fresh enough to ignore some of the issues with the game over all. Having a randomized selection of stats and abilities and then topping them off with the very unique legendary weapons really made for a nice game I could pick up and just run through encounters every so often if I had an hour to just mess around.
This video was about weapon arsenals, wich is the opposite of Borderlands. But yeah, the weapons are really great in that game and interact with the player skills.
@@Deimos94 I mean, I guess wether or not Borderland's system counts as an arsenal is kind of up for debate, just felt applicable since generally speaking the game does encourage you to have a wide array of weapons on you to fulfil certain nieches that you swap between on the fly
@@WyrmsOfWonder It’s not an arsenal IMO, as 4 + grenades and skill is too little to count as that. The elemental damage, healing and slag nessacity make you chose versatile weapons, rather than specialized ones. Basically one weapon to deal damage. It’s more about resource management I think. In BL2 I build my loadout based on ammo (1 weapon type per slot, max 2 of one kind), health regen (grenades, skills or Moxxi’s), slag (skill or elemental weapon), damage dealing (fire or corrosion) anti shield (shock weapon) and something for reviving myself (rocket launcher or Hyperion weapon). A loadout then would consist of a Grog Nozzle (health, slag), shock weapon, corrosive weapon, fire weapon and slag grenades (more slag because every enemy needs to be slagged). One of these already has to double as the reviving weapon. There’s zero room to optimize for distance or enemy clusters. A harold or riccochet shotgun is better at crouds, but these weapons are already deadly against single enemies. They feel similar to the crossbow from the video: multi purpose and multiple other weapons do the same job. But it’s still fun for sure when you turn the weapons on it’s head like a gunzerker with an LMG-like Vladof sniper for close enemies and a Hyperion shotgon for far away enemies.
I honestly feel like the Borderland series is terrible at gun play because it has too many options. Like, I enjoy it, but every few minutes having to do multivariate calculus in my head to determine if the fire-based sniper rifle I am about to pick up is net better than the one I am already carrying really slows it down.
So when are you going to release the directors cut of this video, you can’t tell me the first draft of this script wasn’t 15 pages filled with love letters and lists of favorites lol
I have to admit, that I forgot your channel's name for the 10th time. At this point I just search for 'Alt-Right playbook' to find you, since the algorythm seems to dislike you... UA-cam isn't fair...
Holy shit, as someone who does not like FPS games. The audio cutting in on that shotgun made it click, going from meh, it's a shotgun to oh boy that has impact.
I recently related Jak 2 and Jak 3, while they're not FPS, they do have similar issues. In Jak 2 ammo for the blue gun and the peace maker are so rare and unpredictable, they're barely worth using. In Jak 3 ammo for each is a lot more common, with more boxes giving ammo that you're low on and more enemies doing the same. Jak 3 also has a huge variety of weapons which all seem really cool, but the reflexor is so overpowered and ammo efficient (and that's the 4th gun you get out of 12) all the others become redundant. Even the red scatter gun (shot gun) served a real purpose in Jak 2, as a useful gun that you could reliably find ammo for. The red gun was still good in Jak 3, but the reflexor is just so much better.
I have a trackable attribute to put traps (and fixed heavy weapons) into perspective: the time they take to be set up (SETUP) maybe you need to watch quite a lewngthy animation before your character brings out one super heavy weapon, placing traps takes time for setting everything up. Perhaps you have a weapon that does different things. Halos needler blows shit up when you hit often enough. it's often an instakill with a setup. perhaps you hit enemies first with a weak attack that makes them vulnerable to the important attack. You could try to put complexity/difficulty into that metric as well. I know unreal has a gun that can shoot a ball that when hit with the other firing mode explodes.
It's absolutely fascinating to watch a video about something you don't know or care about. I vastly prefer loadout-style shooters, when I do shooters at all, which means I've never really thought about what makes an arsenal good.
An interesting comparison that I have done is looking at the weapon you can get in Mega Man games. Some of them you get a range of different attacks that each do different things that are each useful in their own way while others have too much overlap, especially with the games where your regular attack is powerful in it's own right which puts more pressure on each other attack to carry its weight.
Yeah, but Mega Man is a side scroller while all the games Ian talked about here were FPS's. If you had to compare that to anything, it'd have to be another side scroller like Metal Slug or Contra.
One should not underestimate the aestethics of a gun. Everyone who played Wolfenstein Enemy Territory knows the Thompson is better than the Mp40, no matter if they have the exact same stats.
I've never played _Enemy Territory._ The Tommy in _RTCW_ sucks and the silenced Sten is the only SMG worth using once you pick it up in Village 1, as it packs a bigger punch per round. It does tend to overheat, but if you keep your bursts to the right duration and spacing it's manageable.
In ET, the swaggest weapon is picking up one from a dead enemy, i.e. American walking around with an MP40 or vice versa. Mind, not that that's enough to trump the Thompson's delicious thud. :)
Mark Brown's GMTK video is here: ua-cam.com/video/yuOObGjCA7Q/v-deo.html
And Chris at Errant Signal talked about DOOM here: ua-cam.com/video/TyOF2RsO3ck/v-deo.html
...and also here: ua-cam.com/video/4DT7xa-G9bA/v-deo.html
...and also here: ua-cam.com/video/NtRKUsuE-m4/v-deo.html
Definitely thought this was a school shooter vid from just title lol
I love this stuff, such interesting design
If you'r looking for good weapon design with some wacky ones in the mix, you should get into "Ratchet and Clank"
@Jamie J "Bad Habit" - The Offspring!
ua-cam.com/video/_wMa_t5cBgY/v-deo.html
Hold on, hold on. What about Star Wars Republic Commando's "arsenal?" How do you even? Talk to me Mr. Studios!
Innuendo Stuido Viewers can get a little taxonomical. As a treat.
Little a
Aesthetics are why I absolutely LOVED Halo 2's Needler. Almost no one else I saw at the time liked it. Weak, inferior, always throwing it aside the moment they got something stronger.
But I found it just an AMAZING feeling to take two Needlers, turn an enemy into a pincushion, then watch them explode. I started getting a really good feel for exactly how much of my ammo I needed to put into a foe before the blast would finish them off, to conserve ammo and keep using my Needlers for longer.
Though I won't deny that their homing effect making my precision better was a factor. :p
Same here
The fact that it homed, had a consistent execute feature and was aesthetically pleasing made it my favourite.
But sometimes it felt like the game itself didn't want me to have it.
It has to be mentioned that arena shooters like Diabotical/Quake/Unreal Tournament all have arsenals, but they're also mainly multiplayer.
People have used keybinds for each individual weapon, so they switch to the appropriate weapon faster, rather than having to scroll through them.
Also, it's because of a pro player's keybinds in Quake 2 that we all use WASD today.
i just tried diabotical a few days ago and it was such a blast to play. highly recommended!
especially the speedrunning maps, i had no idea "defrag" was a thing and now i kinda regret not looking into quake games sooner
@@excelatbiting1980 I found out about quake's 24 year old community history last year, and man it gets deep, especially if you include the other arena fps - warsow pickup is like a whole other planet
The WASD binds came before quake 2, but yeah... it's a strong point about the binds.
I recently went back to playing HL2DM and after a while I realised everyone had interesting key set ups for their binds.
I was getting absolutely murdered until I realized I could have my keys set up so I could shoot someone with the Magnum, switch to shotgun, and finish them off.
It would take 4 hits with the shotgun, (4*25%) or two hits with the magnum (2*75%), but the shotgun has spread, so hits more.
If I used just the shotgun, they'd always kill me with the Xbow, or head shot with the pistol, while I chipped away with the shotgun.
but, if I hit with the pistol, I'd not have much time to line up the next shot (recoil, player dodging), so I'd bound a spare button to switch to shotgun, fire the shotgun and the spread on that would mean I wouldn't need to aim.
Now they could still head shot me in that time, as their aim was just better than mine, and they're better at dodging.
but I went from 1:10 K:D ratio to 4:5 K:D pretty much overnight, just by changing my key binds so I could change weapons faster than default.
Then I spent the some time improving my aim, and now I'm no longer Terrible, just Not Great.
@@chrisflanagan7564 Half Life Deathmatch is a great arena shooter, glad to see more people getting into it!
"Thumpy and rude."
Same.
@Tom S. Tea HIYO!
As I like to say. When it comes to shooters, guns are the main character. They are how you interact with the world. If you don't nail your weapons, you don't have a good shooter.
Look who is here !
controlllllll
@JarekTheGamingDragon
Based on the video's taxonomy and design analysis, I just came up with a hypothesis: In Resistance: Fall Of Man, you only have a handful of weapons you need: The Carbine, Bullseye, Rossmore, and Auger. Am I off?
Some games take this literally, with nail guns and rail guns that literally impale people with rails... looking at you Fear... ;-)
I agree. I love Halo because it has such a good weapon sandbox and I love how the sandbox is used to make encounters interesting.
A friend linked this on social media and on a whim I clicked it. I gotta say, you had me hooked from the opening slide. For that alone, you have my respect. ...And then you started talking and... I was enthralled. I am *so* glad I randomly clicked on this. I look forward to exploring your other videos!
They make some quality content.
I praise your Persona 3 doggo. Better stand user than Iggy
"Wolfen-steen"
Actually it's EYE-d Software
SpatialPlatypus I immediately hate this timeline, et me go back-
what hump?
your legs are broken
also:
wEYEld at hEARt
Inland EmpEYE-EAR
WestEARia, Unrecorded nEYEght
I forgot this was a gaming channel at one point.
Based on the original title (What Makes a Good Shooter Arsenal?), I thought it would be a satirical look at the loadout of like a school shooter, and... Yeah, the change was a good call.
I read is as asking FC Arsenal what a good shooter in soccer is. Like What makes a good shooter, Arsenal ?
In german we shoot the ball. We dont kick.
@@EnbyFranziskaNagel i clicked on this video right after a video of Mourinho so I was expecting something about football😂
The feeling you get when you nail some baddie with all six rockets of an eightball gun is Unreal.
I was just thinking about all the weapons I know, and man, Unreal does a lot with its ten slots. Everything has an alt fire (which gives a different damage/rate/consumption tradeoff, or activates a special trait), and a third of them have another add-on feature besides (to wit: ASMD's combo shot, eightball's homing, bio rifle's exploding residue). And then the sniper rifle and minigun perfectly minimax the rubric in the video: extremely BFGey, the sniper having rare ammo while the minigun reuses otherwise-useless pistol ammo to vicious effect!
@@T3sl4 Oh man, also the pulse rifle's beam I think could be chained together via multiple people to increase damage,
was that in UT or was that only in UT2003 and later ones?
@@BarbarianGod Was that UT's Link Gun? I forget...
@@T3sl4 Ah yeah, I think that's what it was called, did it also do healing on teammates?
@@BarbarianGod I think it repaired vehicles, iirc.
Much love to Project Warlock. Haven't had that much fun with a shooter in years.
I love this channel so much. FPS so often get left out of “smart guy video game crit” so I’m really stoked to see this.
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I guess what I take from this is that a good arsenal needs to be backed up by good level design incentivizing you to get the most out of it.
which Ion Fury does, atleast for me. The game encourages a run and gun glass cannon style of play and the level design is made for that, the weapons are built for that too. A lot of his complaints are preferences that the game doesn't fit his playstyle, so I have to hard disagree with the creator of this video.
I can never shut up about the new Doom games, and neither can anyone else, but holy cow do I appreciate the level design in 2016 and Eternal
"The shotgun sounds like God slamming his fingers in the car door!"
- Ben (Yahtzee) Croshaw.
This is bigger than shooters too! I was having exactly these thoughts when shifting back and forth between InFamous and Assassin's Creed 2. AC2 has way more stuff that Ezio can do in a fight, and shit tons of weapon options, but InFamous's attacks all have a really clear tactical purpose that's really intuitive while in AC2 there's not really much difference between collectible weapons aside from aesthetics, and a lot of attacks outside the basic just really don't have much function.
Can also be traced back to each game's roots. The Sly Cooper trilogy was a pretty focused set of stealth action games that saw stealing and sneaking as the game's most engaging mechanic while combat was pretty secondary, to be avoided. Prince Of Persia tended to get way into the weeds with combat when the most enjoyable thing, at least to me, was scaling some insane environments and using parkour and a dagger that rewinds time as the bedrock of its traversal. Infamous kept the gamey but fluid movement that made Sly enjoyable while the Assassin's Creed games doubled down on some annoying combat. Infamous also built a tight combat loop to compensate for the stealth elements it didn't inherit from Sly, whereas AC couldn't really let go of the platforming so they made this parkour system which is both contextual and unengaging.
I think Batman is kind of what the Assassin's Creed games never were, a legacy that then got passed on to the Middle Earth games. The combat is crunchier, the stealth more engaging, movement that was perhaps not more complex but added enough to turn routine and unremarkable towers into genuine thrills and rewards.
I feel like one of the more interesting marks of whether media succeeded is whether those with no nostalgia for it are able to make it just as good or better than those who do.
I don't know if the kids making Doom and Quake style games in the modern Era don't have nostalgia for those games. I was born in 1995, so by most reasonable standards my nostalgia period is the mid to late 2000s, not the late 90s. More Halo, COD, and GTA, not Ocarina of Time and Mario 64.
However, I didn't have a lot of money as a kid, but also started gaming _very_ young. As such, my first FPS wasn't Halo 3 like you might expect, but Perfect Dark, because we couldn't afford an Xbox or gaming PC for Halo CE or Counterstrike respectively. My nostalgia games largely came out in the 90s despite me being too young to remember them coming out - stuff like Mario 64, N64 Zelda, the aforementioned Perfect Dark. The PC I eventually got wasn't very good, so I played older PC games like C&C Renegade (mostly played in 2008 to 2010, game released in 2000) or Freelancer. I didn't really upgrade to mostly playing newer stuff until 2010, when I got Modern Warfare 2 and a PC which could actually handle it.
I find that Halo is somewhere in between arsenal and loadout. Weapon and ammo availability tend to line up with enemies in ways that make it feel more like an arsenal, but not completely. Also it has two types of grenades, being able to melee with any gun, and most areas having 1-2 nearly omnipresent weapons around in addition to other weapons makes it feel like you have 4-7 weapons most of the time. And it doesn't have all those extra aspects of a loadout that you mentioned beyond only being able to carry so many weapons at once, unlike CoD (haven't played Halo 5 yet so maybe it has some now).
To me Halo uses a lot of the best elements of both systems and occasionally steps outside either of them as well (vehicles, boss fights, turrets, ect.) and that's a big part of what I love about it. Thanks for the great video.
I agree, at least in Halo 1. Later halo games move away from the arsenal a bit in favor of providing covenant "equivilants" of human guns and lots of guns that do the same thing... Especially 4 and 5. Halo 4 literally has five guns that basically do the same thing (DMR, battle rifle, pistol, light rifle and carbine)
I love Halo, but I wish it had 3 weapon slots. Halo specifically has the problem that you get stuck with 1 efficient weapon (BR/carbine/magnum...) and 1 power weapon (rocket/fuel rod...). This is a real problem for the medium-high power weapons (shotgun, beam rifle, needler, energy sword, brute shot...) because they're not powerful enough to replace the power weapon _and_ they don't have enough ammo to replace the go-to weapon. The result is the most interesting weapons get ignored 90% of the time. Just 1 extra weapon slot would solve this and encourage more experimentation.
I've recently been fascinated by how period pieces struggle with the arsenal and the weapon categories that players are used to. For example, Battlefield One doled out machine guns and submachine guns in ways no WWI soldier would have been familiar with so they can retain the fast paced running combat, while Red Dead Redemption 2 quite effectively uses the repeater carbines as the rapid fire weapon on offer while using a more cover based combat system to make the overall slower rate of fire more comfortable.
Meanwhile, Red Orchestra makes the standard weapon for all classes a bolt action rifle, fitting the WWII setting perfectly, and they manage to make it work wonderfully.
Looking back, I'm surprised that machine guns are so prevalent in WWII shooters when the Red Orchestra games show how much fun cycling a bolt action can be.
@@Ninjat126 Right? The second after you miss your shot and have to operate the bolt lock before your enemy gets you is the longest, most thrilling second there is in gaming. I think part of the problem is that studios are afraid to depart from the style of combat that their brands are famous for. When you have to constantly reload and thus line up every shot with more care, that necessarily makes for a bit slower tempo fire fight, but it's no less exciting for it. Not to mention the audio aesthetic of a bolt action rifle with all the click-click-click-click BANG! is just so satisfying when well executed.
@@Oxtocoatl13 the animation and sound team on RO2 deserve medals.
The combination of bleedout mechanics and a delayed killfeed really bring it all together, there's always that little moment of anticipation and the clinking of metal between every shot.
Rising Storm 2 and Insurgency manage to nail the bolt-action feeling really well, but those games are all about the automatics. Missing a shot with your bolt-action in those is less "tension as you prepare for a second shot" and more "you're instantly torn to shreds by half a magazine of 7.62, serves you right for bringing a 19th century rifle to a 21st century conflict."
I think you're being too hard on BF1. Pre some of the more wild DLC guns and a few hard to unlock exceptions you were locked to small magazine machine pistols (assult) or clunky full autos with long reloads. (Support) your two other classes had your single fire rifles and more often then not were better for modes like conquest or operations because of their long stretches of fields where full autos were weak because of their low accuracy. While not particularly historically accurate (to avoid being boring) they did a really great job at balancing the combat to allow your single fire guns a serious competitive niche when compared to the full autos which were plentiful enough to not make single fire rifles the norm. Battlefield 1 had the most unique and well balanced guns in the series when compared to 3 or 4 where most of the guns are functionally identical and you have massive magazines to shread though crowds of guys. Add in the freedom and variety of gadgets and grenades and you'd have lots of variety in combat not just limited to how the maps were designed and the guns were balanced. Personally I think it's the best Battlefield of all time and I've been a fan of the series for a long time.
Comparing RO/RS series with Battlefield games is like comparing apples with oranges. Just admit you prefer a more tactical shooter than an arcade one were it's main focus isn't historical accuracy.
Ultrakill has three weapons: pistol, shotgun, machine gun
Every one has a specific use and there is never a moment when i'm thinking "what do i do here" and i never find myself using the same weapon for any longer than a few seconds
there is another
maybe when you wrote this there weren't a lot of weapons, but there are now 4 weapons, each of which have at least two different modes, and one of which has an alt version that functions completely differently
so depending on how you slice it, there are actually like 11 weapons and all but 3 of those can be used for pretty much any situation
it's not that each weapon has a distinct use, it's that they have their own quirks which allow you to create combos with them because of how freely you can use them
to be specific, every weapon has something that lets it do high single-target damage and something that lets it do damage to groups of weak enemies
the alt pistol pierces enemies and the charge pistol, alt or not, has an ability that pierces enemies
the marksman pistol can toss coins to multiply damage
all shotgun shots pierce filth enemies, and the pellet system of shotgun damage allows you to both attack large groups and focus one guy with close range burst damage
the nailgun can be used with magnets to shred groups, but i find it also to be a great tool at dealing burst damage to one boss or miniboss by sticking a magnet on them and then going buckwild
sure the pistol's a little worse at crowd control, or really everything unless you're just using the marksman for coins, but it does pretty much everything equally well
and if you're like me and you like beating bosses with nothing but a pistol, then it's great
and now in 2023 the game feels even better, there's even more weapons and arms to use and most of the things available are quite distinct and feel good to use in conjuction with one another, and the game's environment also very much promotes diverse use of arsenal as well as your "tools" (such as whiplash) to make the most out of everything available to you in the most fun way possible. it isn't just the arsenal that's good (though for the record it's a great one, tactial use of throwing fucking COINS is the sickest shit ever too, especially when you throw in punching those coins and shooting them with a railcannon to the mix) it's also what you're using it against that lets that arsenal shine so well. everything feels unique but also like it meshes so well with each other it's simply beautiful, once the game fully releases i'm quite confident all the good things you can say about it will increase too. i kinda expected the video to be about ultrakill but then saw it released a good while ago and also the footage of it that was still shown was definitely at a point where much less time was spent on getting into it so it may not have that same feel as when you're really in the groove with your arsenal and the game in general.
Ultrakill has 15 guns you can use
And if u count anything that does damage it has 19 weapons
4:35 Demon walks in while Innuendo Studios is showing off weapons
4:36 Fragments of their corpse on the floor
I don't know why, but I found this part humorous.
such a perfect outro tune to fit the vibe man. As much as the video made me wanna jump back into some Doom nostalgia, that slowed-down segment made me want to immediately track down that Offspring song and crank it to 11.
This. Watched their Woodstock 99 Performance right afterwards and I guess my work soundtrack for today is set too!
“You want gun shoot good? I’ll give you gun shoot good.”
-Respawn Entertainment
I wasn't born until after FPS games had moved away from the arsenal.
The arsenal lived on in Ratchet and Clank, and that was where I was introduced to it.
Those were my first games, they're absolutely brilliant, and they cemented my love for an arsenal.
Though they definitely fall prey to the overlapping use-case issue, which has worsened as the series progressed.
They counter that with aesthetics and timing. The mini-nuke and the heavy bouncer do basically the same thing. However you unlock the heavy bouncer much later in the game, by which time the mini-nuke has fallen off in both effectiveness and novelty.
Weapons in the arsenal becoming obsolete over time means the designers have to make multiple versions of each archetype so that you always have all the options available.
Ratchet and Clank also counters the overlapping use case problem by making the ammo capacity of the big weapons relatively small and spacing the checkpoints out enough that you probably end up using all the weapons evenly so you can make sure you have some backup ammo for each one, just in case.
One might even say they...upped the arsenal? :v
Although I think it might have taken until Gladiator for that arsenal to really mature. Funnily enough, Gladiator was also the first to use strafing as the default movement option.
Although, play 2 with the extra weapons from Ratchet and Clank 1 and it is still a massive list of weapons.
you're all wrong, the only weapon you need is the vortex cannon and it should be available from the beginning in every game including stardew valley
>Although I think it might have taken until Gladiator for that arsenal to really mature.
Eh, not really, at least half the arsenal is only used if you're leveling the weapon, or are forced to use the weapon due to not having better weapons yet or because of a challenge. Oh and the dual vipers/raptors become useless right out the gate, and because of how the game handles ammo pickups, it's a really bad weapon.
And don't get me started on how bad the B6/B11 is.
Great video, but I think you missed one very important and completely fundamental distinction between weapons: Hitscan vs Projectile.
That is, Weapons that instantly hit the point on the screen you're aiming at vs Weapons which project something which will eventually intersect that point. Hitscans are usually easier to use but lower power, and form the backbone of a shooter's arsenal.
It seems like Ion Fury has too many projectiles, and not enough ammo for it's hitscans, leaving you to use the one hitscan which does have sufficient ammo, the shotgun, as your mainstay.
Isn't hitscan basically covered by 'accuracy' though? That said, it's nice addition/explanation to the category, for sure. Whether a weapon is hitscan or not definitely impacts its accuracy.
I felt like the main difference between them was that projectiles were easier to miss with, so I decided that was covered under "accuracy."
That hitscan weapons are weaker is completely made-up. In the ur example, quake, the strongest weapon is the thunderbolt, a hitscan with pinpoint accuracy. In modern quake the holy Trinity is 2 hitscans (rail gun and lighting gun) plus the rocket launcher, all with similar power.
@@InnuendoStudios good decision. I am not into shooters, the last one I played to the end was Duke Nuken (back in that days) and I never heard the term "hitscan" before, whereas I understood the concept inside the accuracy umbrela. Anyway, thanks @afroofdoom for introducing me to the concept.
Also, nice move bringing *some kind of people* to the channel talking about this game genre ;)
@@InnuendoStudios That's pretty fair, but I'd argue that there's a pretty notable aesthetic difference between the two that's worth mentioning.
That last line reminded me soo much of CoD MW the guns feel AMAZIN, the sound design is beefy, the reload animations are incredible, but there are so many flaws in map layout and inconsistencies w/ connection that the gun fights are occasionally miserable.. overall 6/10
Trans rights!
Trans rights!
..are human rights!
This has nothing to do with the video
@@strike123456789 0:11 15:32 TRANS RIGHTS!!
💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙
💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗
🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍
💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗
💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙
(trans rights!)
edit: got the order of the stripes wrong the first time.
@JohnnyTheWolf **transforms into 18-wheeler to roll over hatred**
I like the Mindless Self Indulgence bit and the end
^Offspring
@@InnuendoStudios huh weird I could have sworn it was MSI but of course, you are right it is Offspring 🤦
My favorite weapon is from the Marathon series by Bungie. It's so old it doesn't even use a mouse to aim, yet it has a look up and down mechanic. Anyway, Marathon 2 had these dual wield double barrel shotguns which would reload by twirling around the character's hands like some fancy lever action rifle reload. It's the most satisfying FPS weapon I've ever used. Very thumpy and rude, combined with juggling.
Marathon's bestiary isn't super fun to fight against for the most part (solid but often boilerplate), so a lot of the fun comes from the series having a good arsenal and plenty of weird level/story design choices. Case in point, burning through the opposition with dual shotty so you can reach Durandal's screeds faster. It's an odd kind of pacing, but a good one.
@@DragoonEnRegalia Yeah, I remember it mostly for its story which I could barely follow but appreciated given other FPS barely had any, and weirdly maze like levels.
Excellent video Ian, This was a very interesting topic for me to watch, I've been playing fps for a long time and the arsenal sometimes seems to be overlooked by the designers and just leave it as "If it sounds cool and does good damage is fine".
Just to add something, I really like the point you made about guns stealing the spotlight or leaving gaps in the combat, and one aspect that I think magnifies or diminishes this aspect is the difficulty. To put an example, in Halo 3, when you play in difficulties from heroic to below the game has a wide variety of guns and lets you use them with a good sense of freedom, sure, there are guns that maybe have a little bit too much power on them like the battle rifle or the carabine, but there's still room for the player to use the other guns and no feel like they are just scratching the enemies. But when you turn up the difficulty to legendary or beyond if you decide to use skulls, the game monopolizes the combat on the BR, carabine, plasma pistol, power weapons, etc; and leaves the other guns like the assault rifle barely being able to take out a grunt with a full clip.
I've never played Halo 3 on legendary (just heroic and normal), but my experience with Halo Reach on Legendary is that the only weapons that exist are the "headshot weapons", the plasma pistol (strictly for taking down shields), a few BFG-type weapons, and maybe the energy sword and gravity hammer. Everything else might as well not exist.
It wasn't a fun experience in the end, which is why I've never played on Legendary since.
I agree. I think Halo would benefit hugely from 1 extra weapon slot. As ajshell2 said, you often end up with 1 "headshot weapon" that has lots of ammo and is really efficient for killing weak-medium enemies, and 1 BFG that you're saving for hard encounters. It's not awful because those 2 weapon types are really satisfying, but it does leave 90% of the weapons (including most of the interesting, unique ones) to gather dust. 3 weapon slots would let you have your BR and BFG _and_ experiment with all the weapons you find.
Great video, really put into words why I feel so baffeld when people complain that you cant just use the super shotgun in doom eternal. Learning to pick the right weapon for the current situation in doom eternal makes you feel like a god and is the main reason its probably my favourite fps ever.
One interesting aspect I think is very important to weapons is also movement. The old school faster movement put a large focus on dodging projectiles, which in turn lent itself to arsenals since weapon switching in the open didn't immediately punish you. Modern shooters had a much larger focus on slower movement and hitscan weapons, leading to pop-and-shot style combat a-la CoD. And especially in CoD, the way they made up for this slower combat was to decrease time to kill, which again influenced what weapons even exist in those games.
I'd argue that Ion Fury in particular has a problem with the balance between guns, enemies, and movement. Bum rushing in quake feels better than bum rushing in ion fury not just because Ion lacks that mid-range versatility, but also because it's movement (very fast and somewhat skillbased) is at odds with it's monsters (incredibly accurate, quick to attack with little tell, and fast projectiles/hitscanners) is at odds with it's arsenal (the problems you talked about).
Anyways it's interesting how interconnected mechanically shooters are. Really sucks about Ion Fury's devs. Trans rights.
Fantastic point and also why the 2016 Doom reboot is so phenomenal. They realized this when they made the game and they designed the ENTIRE game around this type of play. It really punishes you for approaching things in a careful manner, just trying to pick off one enemy at a time. It forces you to just GET IN THERE. It really embodies the phrase "rip and tear" as more than just a stylistic/marketing gimmick. It's one of the most thematically pure games ever made. MAN it's good.
@@treschlet That's an interesting point of view. To me, that's what made Doom 2016 feel less great what it could have been. True, Doom has never been about cheesing and taking out one and one enemy, but Doom 2 and Final Doom perfected the puzzle aspects of the series I think. The puzzle was to figure out when to start monster infighting, when and which order to grab powerups and armor, which monsters to kill first and which ammo to pick up.
Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal ignored all of this which made Doom 2 and Final Doom so great. The modern versions don't allow for natural backtracking, relies way too much on jumping and y-axis platforming, and effectively replaced health and ammo pickups with an QTE pinata mechanic. The levels also feel way less self-contained than Doom 2 / Final Doom levels.
The end theme was very relaxing
Was really confused when Offspring's "Bad Habit" started playing.
@@CheesecakeMilitia Having used Offspring as 'angry music' while playing these kinds of games, I was not at all confused. ;)
For a second I thought it was Death Grips
This talk of how an arsenal covers different niches reminds me of what I've read regarding Halo: Combat Evolved. Basically, the core trifecta that they focused multiplayer balance around was the sniper rifle, shotgun, and pistol, being solid choices for long, short, and medium ranges respectively.
Hey! I just wanted to thank you for your work. I stumbled upon your channel recently and i've watched the majority of it. Keep it up! :D
9:32 Best part of the whole video.
16:06 This happens so often with so many things, especially artistic proffessions, it amazes me. I do not want to fall behind in my fields, I want to maintain my skills and continue to improve.
I think the biggest thing about the arsenal is how it meshes with the enemies, and that ends up being the biggest thing that separates the legendary games from the merely decent ones. I point to Doom and especially Doom 2 as games that understand this very well, every enemy is unique and distinctive, with very specific move sets and very distinct telegraphs for their attacks, varied design, and most importantly, solid meshing with the weaponry. Each one has very specific methods on how best to take it out, be it the rapid strafing through Imp fireballs, the constant movement to avoid the Revenant's homing missiles, or the frantic zipping in and out of cover to land shots on the Arch Vile before it blows you to pieces, and what makes Doom and other games like it work so well is how you can feasibly fight any normal monster with nearly any weapon and you can see how the dance of the game changes depending on the weapon and level design, from something as simple as being able to one-shot the Pink Demons with the Super Shotgun all the way to gambling on the stun lock chances to dish out way more damage with weapons like the Plasma Gun at the risk of taking an avalanche of damage if the RNG isn't in your favor. So I think another important aspect is that the unique traits and quirks of the different weapons and enemies encourage the player to experiment and modify their style in new and creative ways to survive an encounter, rather than each weapon just having a set function that the player repeats every encounter
Doom's "pain" mechanic for monsters plays a major role. Cacodemons can deal massive damage but can be stun-locked super easily, whereas the Arch-Vile barely ever reacts to even the super shotgun... but because that chance is above zero, you still have a fighting chance to stop its attack if you happen to get caught in close-quarters combat with it.
It's also interesting that if you chaingun the pinkies, they keep moving towards you slowly, but if you chaingun a cacodemon or a lost soul, they're propelled backwards... so you can use the chaingun to create distance with a lot of flying enemies quickly even if you don't kill them.
While not all Doom 2's weapons are novel and some are just the same weapon with some attribute sliders changed, besides the vanilla fists, pistol and chainsaw they all fill a different niche as opposed to being superfluous.
Fists (with berserk): insane melee damage, great way to conserve ammunition besides causing infighting.
Shotgun: Snipe enemies from afar.
Double-barreled shotgun: Massive damage at a medium distance
Chaingun: Great for stunlocking enemies with a high pain chance
Rocket launcher: Splash damage, great for taking out clusters of enemies
Plasma cannon: Maybe somewhat overlapping with the chaingun, but also homing and it's not a hitscan weapon
BFG 9000: Okay to ludicrous amounts of damage, depending on whether or not you're using it correctly. Great for taking out enemies around corners, behind doors or on top of elevators.
Mads Andreas Elvheim all correct except... unless you’re playing with a mod, plasma gun isn’t homing 😀
@@swivelmaster The horizontal auto-aim for Doom's projectile weapons is very slight, so I don't blame you for not noticing all these years :)
So yes, even the rockets from the rocket launcher are homing in a small angle cone around the imagined reticule.
The effect is most useful with the plasma gun however because of the rate of fire.
Mads Andreas Elvheim auto-aim and homing are not the same thing!
Most people: "Wolf-en-stine."
Me: "Vol-fen-shtine."
???: "Wolf-en-steen."
Vei-ner-schnitzel
ei in German is pronounced like the English word "I". (And st like sht and o like in old, not like in goo.) 😄
That was the point, yes.
"That's Frankensteen"
Wolfenstain
One of the things I like about Ultrakill is that it's optimal to have fun. You have to switch weapons a lot if you want to fight optimaly, even if the shotgun can be a bit of crutch.
Ultrakill's main design is just to have fun. You can play it like a regular shooter and not even interact with the score or style mechanic whatsoever. And it's awesome for that. Even weapons considered "Shitty" by the community are still incredibly effective and it becomes purely about player expression at that point, rather than the simon says bullshit that made Doom Eternal so unfun.
there's a really interesting video to be made that shows how quake's arsenal evolved into team fortress's diverse class loadouts
The weird thing is Goldeneye which sorta did Arsenal but you could only carry the weapons you found in the level (also it seemed like you could only dual wield a weapon if you encountered enemies that could.)
To your weapon characteristics I would also add 'projectile speed'. I think slow-moving projectiles are one of the key things that distinguishes retro shooters from modern shooters, allowing for more skill-based multiplayer and focus on movement.
16:35 - Was not expecting "Bad Habit" to show up when it did, but goddamn I'm glad it did.
I like that you didn't even waste time trying to prove the creators are transphobes, just put it out there, anybody interested can check for themselves.
@Arnold Cash cope harder
@Arnold Cash correct. i dont know what point you think you're making, but debating whether or not trans people exist or deserve to live is pretty transphobic, yeah.
@Arnold Cash Well, yeah. That's because they are. Glad you get it.
@Arnold Cash Yes.
@@vinny1641I mean if you disagree with trans people existing then yeah of course you’re transphobic
Ha, my favorite weapon was the priest who could convert enemy to my side in AOE :) Not an FPS, but it would be cool if I could convert a bunch of zombies in an FPS who would follow me around and help me fight.
You can do that in Prey! (That is, 2017 Prey.) You can compel your enemies to fight alongside you for a little while, or even turn dead bodies *into* enemies who fight alongside you til they die!
System Shock and its sequel have INCREDIBLY solid arsenals even though their effectiveness really kinda zig-zags throughout the campaigns (especially the latter half of SS2). Multiple ammo types for nearly every bullet-consuming gun to cover enemy weaknesses, 1's grenade varieties and rheostats on every energy weapon, 2's gun upgrading, exotic biomass-soaked alien weaponry, and those sweet sweet Psi powers... There's also something I love about how 1 uses the dart gun as a bridge between you & your first pistol, to carry you until you start plugging teflon rounds into every cyborg within earshot.
Different style video, im not into fps very much but I still got a lot out of it! Nice work Ian, I love how these videos are going
"Putting the player in charge of whether the game is enjoyable" really stuck out to me. It reminds me of the Dark Souls/Bloodborne problem. Darks Souls is tense, difficult, and punishing... but you can always opt to sit behind a shield that resists 100% physical damage, which slows the combat to a glacial pace but makes it so you almost never die. Why do the fun and enjoyable thing of rolling to dodge attacks when it's equally effective and significantly easier to just hold up a shield and block them? In response, From Software made Bloodborne, removed every shield except for one joke shield that warns you about how they "engender passivity," and reworked the main combat mechanics to include rallying, rewarding you with healing if you immediately go on the attack after taking a hit.
I see someone is a fan of Hbomb's videos. 😉
I get your point but I enjoyed Dark Souls fine using a shield the whole way. Besides, turtling is (usually) not a viable strategy against bosses so most players will be forced to engage with rolling at some point.
As a games enthusiast and designer I really appreciate the vindication of someone else talking about how it's not the player's job to find the fun but rather the designer's job to put the fun where it cannot help but be found.
That said the biggest piece of info for me from this was fuck the transphobic developers. Give your money to someone who likes human rights and makes a better shooter.
You mean like, the one or two homophobic guys? There's a popular saying called "separate the art from the artist"
Cope and seethe
Awesome video as always. I would just like to add that DUSK has one of the most balanced arsenals i have ever seen, i doesn't really do anything new, and the weapons alone aren't really that interesting, but when it all comes together, hoooo boy it makes the combat a absolute delight! (also you really should give the game a third chance, the second chapter does get kind of samey, but the third one makes up for that A LOT)
@4:32 he shows the different weapons and when he comes to the rocket launcher a zombie starts creeping around the corner on the left. And then, when it cuts to the thunderbolt, gibbs are lying around in the room. Lmao
I very highly recommend that anyone here play ultrakill. It has one of the best weapon arsenals in any game period, not just fps. The damn marksman has more depth and unique interactions than some entire arsenals
I particularly like the middleground where you can carry 3-4 weapons. I love plenty of "loadout" shooters, but it often feels like I'm stuck with a go-to weapon I can't drop and a superweapon I'm saving up, which doesn't let me experiment much with the weapons I find (like in Halo when I come across an energy sword but it's no use because I've already got a rocket launcher, and dropping my battle rifle for it would be silly). Just that 1 extra weapon slot would solve it.
(I said "3-4" specifically because I still had this problem in FEAR, which has 3 weapon slots. Then again, FEAR effectively requires 2 go-to weapons: a shotgun and pistols/AR/penetrator.)
Not only was the analysis really interesting, but the slowed down version of Bad Habit's breakdown at the end was the cherry on top. 10 outta 10
The key to Quake's combat and one that isn't made clear by the campaign is that Quake style weapons are so unique that you're meant to swap to them directly as opposed to cycling through the arsenal, in multiplayer the time for combat is so quick it necessitates this quick swapping. But I think the issue you're speaking of is not a facet of the weapons so much as it is their application: the pistols default shot is a tight shotgun pattern meant to be used at medium range it's alt fire is meant for fast moving targets / smaller targets and CAN be used at long range, the ion bow is meant for long range... until you charge it all of those bolts are meant to hit targets as well, thus meaning you can charge to decrease your range and increase your damage. Remember when a gun has an alt fire it's not a question of which is the real fire mode so much as it is you're meant to use both. And this leads us into game difficulty with these older shooters the game teaches you in real time how to play and on easier difficulties enemies can die so quickly that they can lead to bad habits in their player base (ie if the default shotgun does fine enough then no one will learn the specialties of the arsenal because those moments just don't happen).
LOL, love the half speed "Bad Habit" at the end.
That's the part I had to turn down if my mom was home.
that's the only part I knew for years because every kid at school sang it but no one ever told me what song it was from!
when you want to click the thumb up button at the end of the watch, and you realize you somehow already clicked it before.
Now, let's talk about BioShock. BioShock's arsenal was near flawless. It really didn't have a BFG, but it had the Chemical Thrower witch I think was kinda like a machinegun, but the addition of Plasmids made it waaaay more varied, and augmented the arsenal in interesting ways.
I'm playing BioShock now and I could not agree less.
Uh no, like all of the plasmids are useless except for electrobolt and the flame one. And the only weapon you need is the shotgun, chemical thrower fucking melts big daddies though. And in Bioshock 2 the only reason why you switch weapons is because of ammo scarcity.
Slick video. Really interesting perspective on the split between arsenal and load out style games. Good food for thought as a designer.
Belated comment - I've been catching up on a bunch of your videos that I missed over the past year and a half - but whatever.
I just wanted to say that the fact that you kept my attention and interest during this particular video is absolutely a credit to your video-making skills. I don't play FPSs. I have never had any interest whatsoever in FPSs. My gaming interests are basically Skyrim, Minecraft, Breath of the Wild, and watching Mega Man Lets Plays, for some reason. First-person shooters have never been something I've cared for, or about.
However, I watched this video. I paid attention, I understood it, and I actually kind of enjoyed it, and that says something about your skill as a video maker, because the subject matter alone is 100% not the reason for any of those things.
Keep up the good work.
With a title like that, it really could be about games or domestic terrorism.
Edit: for posterity, the title used to be just "shooter arsenals"
I wish, at 5 minutes in, I had any hope left that it was about anything other than video games. Should I not be giving up? I don't care about the video games side.
For me, the arsenal in Fear was one of the most interesting and fun to use collections of weapons. This was a great video by the way.
Also I played ion fury and I totally agree with your point. Project warlock as a contrast had a lot more potential with its guns by introducing the magic system, and then allowing the guns to be upgraded into being different at the cost of trading off a spell
@JohnnyTheWolf the game is divided into a variety of different zones with each zone getting a theme that affects the enemies in it along with some minor variations in how the levels end up being designed. It is still, however a very retro doom shooter so it doesn't end up innovating in that area. But as the game goes on, i think it gets more interesting. Perhaps the demo is bad, or maybe that isn't enough to save it. It isn't sn objective thing
@JohnnyTheWolf sure. Try it out on the higher difficulties. The lower ones are fairly easy.
I feel like the "new model" is going to get gradually closer to loadout with ammo vatiability and/or weapon mods. I mean the use of single fire/burst fire for some weapons, the rotation of bullet types in some games with stuff like hollow points and armor piercing, and the weapon mods often tied to the alt fire button most notably in doom eternal but also heavily present in games like ultrakill, seams to be a nice balance between the tightness of the loadout and the flexibility of the arsenal.
Instead of a combat shotgun AND an ssg, we may expect a shotgun that can switch between shell types and slugs, and which may have a wider spread but higher pellet countweapon mod to mimic the ssg, and the grenade and rocket launchers will likely all become weapon mods due to their power, etc. I even imagine multiple reload buttons that let you draw from different colour coded ammo types, with stuff like explosives being relegated to weapon mods.
Basically the design of the doom eternal heavy auto cannon and the combat shotgun may become the standard as an entire games loadout. Here is just two weapons, with respectively a shotgun, assult rifle, mini-rocket launcher, sniper rifle, sticky grenade launcher and even minigun (auto shotgun). This basically fills the role of an entire arsenal, and yet I find myself nearly never using them bc doom eternal has them as part of an arsenal which also has actual rocket launchers, miniguns, and sniper rifles (balista) with more focused design, in fact the sticky nade launcher mod for the combat shotgun is probably the single most used fire mode between the two wrapons, likely because the only close alternative is grenades that don't stick and have a cooldown, but lo behild as soon as I begun using them more I saw the sticky nade mod become less and less used as I prefered using nades and saving shotgun ammo for the ssg.
Basically I think this would allow less design effort due to fewer assets, while retaining high variability and customization options for players.
You’re definitely one of my favorite youtubers. I need more uplods
You just summed up a lot of problems I have with Brutal Doom as a game (as opposed to a steaming pile of stolen assets made by a Nazi with an apparent gore fetish) with that last statement: "Making guns that feel good to shoot does not by itself make for a good arsenal."
You so full of effort. Thanks
Can I just take this oppurtunity to give some love to the arsenal of the 3rd person shooter/platformer ratchet and clank? It's so much fun, at leaat in many of the titles, like the first three, tools of destruction and crack in time have great collections weapons that allow you make your own active arsenal with complementary weapons.
I had myself a lil squee when you mentioned Bulletstorm. I think I remember you asking about shooters on Twitter, and I chimed in that the Leash was one of my favorite mechanics. I feel seen lmao
Man I totally forgot about Bulletstorm. What an underappreciated gem. Super fun gunplay, great environmental design, strong pacing and a surprisingly engaging story. Everyone who didn't play it back then should check it out.
Eh, I didn't like how much it made me work for all the neat stuff. Like, yeah, I DID see that I can do awesome combos, but it's only half as fun when I HAVE to do them to unlock stuff.
The final chapter of Dusk is really good, hopefully you get around to it eventually
Interesting analysis! John Romero has mentioned that one of his design goals with Doom's weapons was that no weapon should ever become obsolete from picking up a new one, which matches some of your analysis of the Ion Fury weapons
I'd also recommend checking out the Doom community's creative output some time as the best modern Doom mappers have figured out the importance of balancing factors like ammo pressure and monster encounter design to make levels that are very fun to play. Give the BTSX series a look if you need a starting point
Blood achieved this. The flair gun was still useful up until the end.
@JohnnyTheWolf: Creative burnout is real, son.
@JohnnyTheWolf even the pistol does not become useless as it is more precise over a distance than the chaingun
Even so, Doom has a two guns that I could think of as being made obsolete.
The super shotgun makes the combat shotgun totally irrelevant in Doom 2, as it's more consistent and deals more damage. This was also a problem in Doom 2016. Eternal fixed it by making the sticky bombs so damn good.
The pistol is also completely useless. It uses the same ammo as the chaingun but has a lower dps and you can get a chaingun as early as E1M2. Same for Doom 2016, the pistol is completely worthless, glad it got junked for Eternal.
I'm just here to say that I hope you're doing ok and that you'll get healthy soon! You're one of my favourite content creators, ever since the Phil Fish video. Take care, Ian! ♥️
Bad Habit screwed sounds pretty rad.
I can't believe you remembered Bulletstorm. Incredible.
Yo that slowed down Bad Habit clip at the end sounded like the fucking apocalypse and I need more of it.
I'm surprised splash damage wasn't part of your taxonomy, when it affects both the player and enemies. Or projectiles/hitscan, which is a dichotomy related to but different than accuracy or range.
He did mention explosive weapons, but I think he combined it into the "range" category. And yeah, time-to-impact would be a great category to add. If you are being torn apart by an immobile hitscanner halfway across the map, a sniper rifle and rocket launcher can both kill him but one will do so before you yourself take too much damage.
Brilliant analysis.
A similar structure of analysis could also be applied for *character action games* as well, with added parameter around movement.
That was a wild ride. I’ve never really thought to how integral weapon balance and novelty are to the shooter arsenal. It’s pretty much part of the level design or at least of the same importance. Keep up the great work.
Great video, I hope some developers use your insight when considering new projects!
Clearly, with you arguing in favour of diversity (in weaponry), the trolls will report-abuse this video just like your last one.
Random thought, but doom 2016/eternal’s plasma rifle and gauss cannon/ballista have a weird relationship. They use the same kind of ammo, and I’m not sure what that’s supposed to accomplish. It feels more like it encourages you to lean on one and exclude whichever performs worse.
The gauss cannon is a highly destructive point-beam that takes a ton of ammo for every shot- basically the first step down from the BFG. Except with no AOE. The plasma rifle doesn’t offer anything special enough to compete with that sheer damage output you give up by using ammo the gauss cannon could do with. Lightish ranged rapid fire is covered by the game’s machine gun, so it doesn’t get that as a special property.
On the other hand, doom eternal’s ballista is more like a crossbow with no scope. The beam does good damage, but it doesn’t have the OOMPH of the gauss cannon. Rather, you’ll find yourself using plasma rifle’s ability to do damage rapidly and good ammo efficiency over ammo-consumptive and disappointing shots.
This sharing of space is odd, I think
Go check out Painkiller, they made like 4 games, and each weapon is awesome. The "Pistol" of Painkiller is the Stake Thrower, a weapon that flings sharpened stakes the size of firewood that pins demons to walls.
This reminds me of rhe third-person shooter Nuclear Throne: it uses a hybrid-is system, in which you can carry 2 weapons at a time, but can switch them for others you find. It has 5 main "classes" of weapons that somewhat follow the archetypes:
Slow, but powerful long-ranged "bolts" (such as a crossbow)
Fast, ammoless, risky melee
Fast, mid-damage, ammo hungry "bullets"
Risky, long range, "explosives"
Special "energy" weapons. Usually high damage but ammo-hungry
I have 1500 hours in Nuclear Throne, I could go on for DAYS on that game's weapons. God, no one does game feel like Vlambeer.
@@InnuendoStudios I'd watch a "Vlambeer retrospective" vid for sure. :)
Just now noticed the credits theme is the Offspring's Bad Habit. Nice to know Innuendo's a chad punk appreciator.
I SWEAR I read this as "what makes a school shooter arsenal good." And I thought that sounded like an interesting question.
We are not doing well here in America lol.
I did the same thing!
And then you have Tron 2.0 which just tosses ALL of this out the window, gives you a single ammo type for all weapons that is also used to open doors, crates, activate bridges, and read emails. And also gives you a weapon (The Disc) that does NOT use ammo, can home in on enemies, be used for melee, and reflects enemy shots back at them, who's only draw back is that you have to wait for it to return before firing it again. So you wind up spending most of the game head shotting grunts with it until you're in a boss fight when you use the shotgun, or put into a sniper section and are forced to use the sniper. Also, the dedicated melee weapon uses ammo, which might be one of the few cases where that's a thing. Can anyone else think of a case where a melee weapon has an ammo cost? On top of all of this, most of the power ups you can equip either up your ammo consumption or is straight up made for use with your disc. The designers either really wanted you to use the disc, or weren't very good at designing the other weapons.
this honestly makes me think back a bit on my time playing borderlands 2, which in a lot of ways has aged like milk, but still has such a fun selection of guns and character abilities to swap between that kept the gameplay fresh enough to ignore some of the issues with the game over all. Having a randomized selection of stats and abilities and then topping them off with the very unique legendary weapons really made for a nice game I could pick up and just run through encounters every so often if I had an hour to just mess around.
This video was about weapon arsenals, wich is the opposite of Borderlands. But yeah, the weapons are really great in that game and interact with the player skills.
@@Deimos94 I mean, I guess wether or not Borderland's system counts as an arsenal is kind of up for debate, just felt applicable since generally speaking the game does encourage you to have a wide array of weapons on you to fulfil certain nieches that you swap between on the fly
@@WyrmsOfWonder It’s not an arsenal IMO, as 4 + grenades and skill is too little to count as that. The elemental damage, healing and slag nessacity make you chose versatile weapons, rather than specialized ones. Basically one weapon to deal damage.
It’s more about resource management I think. In BL2 I build my loadout based on ammo (1 weapon type per slot, max 2 of one kind), health regen (grenades, skills or Moxxi’s), slag (skill or elemental weapon), damage dealing (fire or corrosion) anti shield (shock weapon) and something for reviving myself (rocket launcher or Hyperion weapon).
A loadout then would consist of a Grog Nozzle (health, slag), shock weapon, corrosive weapon, fire weapon and slag grenades (more slag because every enemy needs to be slagged). One of these already has to double as the reviving weapon. There’s zero room to optimize for distance or enemy clusters. A harold or riccochet shotgun is better at crouds, but these weapons are already deadly against single enemies. They feel similar to the crossbow from the video: multi purpose and multiple other weapons do the same job.
But it’s still fun for sure when you turn the weapons on it’s head like a gunzerker with an LMG-like Vladof sniper for close enemies and a Hyperion shotgon for far away enemies.
@@Deimos94 yeah that scans
I honestly feel like the Borderland series is terrible at gun play because it has too many options. Like, I enjoy it, but every few minutes having to do multivariate calculus in my head to determine if the fire-based sniper rifle I am about to pick up is net better than the one I am already carrying really slows it down.
So when are you going to release the directors cut of this video, you can’t tell me the first draft of this script wasn’t 15 pages filled with love letters and lists of favorites lol
I have to admit, that I forgot your channel's name for the 10th time. At this point I just search for 'Alt-Right playbook' to find you, since the algorythm seems to dislike you... UA-cam isn't fair...
This was a really interesting analysis. Thanks!
Holy shit, as someone who does not like FPS games. The audio cutting in on that shotgun made it click, going from meh, it's a shotgun to oh boy that has impact.
Most games don't get shotguns right, the only one that immediately comes to mind is left 4 dead
I recently related Jak 2 and Jak 3, while they're not FPS, they do have similar issues. In Jak 2 ammo for the blue gun and the peace maker are so rare and unpredictable, they're barely worth using. In Jak 3 ammo for each is a lot more common, with more boxes giving ammo that you're low on and more enemies doing the same. Jak 3 also has a huge variety of weapons which all seem really cool, but the reflexor is so overpowered and ammo efficient (and that's the 4th gun you get out of 12) all the others become redundant. Even the red scatter gun (shot gun) served a real purpose in Jak 2, as a useful gun that you could reliably find ammo for. The red gun was still good in Jak 3, but the reflexor is just so much better.
weird to come back to this video after a couple years and see ultrakill shown since i've gotten into it and promptly p ranked all but 1 level
it's more levels than 1 now :( violence is too hard
I have a trackable attribute to put traps (and fixed heavy weapons) into perspective: the time they take to be set up (SETUP)
maybe you need to watch quite a lewngthy animation before your character brings out one super heavy weapon, placing traps takes time for setting everything up. Perhaps you have a weapon that does different things. Halos needler blows shit up when you hit often enough. it's often an instakill with a setup.
perhaps you hit enemies first with a weak attack that makes them vulnerable to the important attack. You could try to put complexity/difficulty into that metric as well. I know unreal has a gun that can shoot a ball that when hit with the other firing mode explodes.
Did you just pronounce it Wolfensteen.
He's from the universe that grew up with the Barensteen Bears as a kid, it's okay.
It's absolutely fascinating to watch a video about something you don't know or care about.
I vastly prefer loadout-style shooters, when I do shooters at all, which means I've never really thought about what makes an arsenal good.
Your videos are the chicken soup to my soul. That probably makes no sense but I just I effing love your videos thank you for making them
Controlled 3-5 round bursts is the supreme challenge of the experienced machine gunner.
An interesting comparison that I have done is looking at the weapon you can get in Mega Man games. Some of them you get a range of different attacks that each do different things that are each useful in their own way while others have too much overlap, especially with the games where your regular attack is powerful in it's own right which puts more pressure on each other attack to carry its weight.
Yeah, but Mega Man is a side scroller while all the games Ian talked about here were FPS's. If you had to compare that to anything, it'd have to be another side scroller like Metal Slug or Contra.
One should not underestimate the aestethics of a gun. Everyone who played Wolfenstein Enemy Territory knows the Thompson is better than the Mp40, no matter if they have the exact same stats.
I've never played _Enemy Territory._ The Tommy in _RTCW_ sucks and the silenced Sten is the only SMG worth using once you pick it up in Village 1, as it packs a bigger punch per round. It does tend to overheat, but if you keep your bursts to the right duration and spacing it's manageable.
In ET, the swaggest weapon is picking up one from a dead enemy, i.e. American walking around with an MP40 or vice versa.
Mind, not that that's enough to trump the Thompson's delicious thud. :)