Op Ed

[Jan 07, 2012, 5:52 pm ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

Bitmob.com - Shooters only need eight guns.
At last count, Borderlands contains over 17.5 million color-coded, procedurally generated firearms. The gun population of planet Pandora outnumbers the individual populations of Cuba, Greece, Israel, and Switzerland. What the hell am I supposed to do with all that? I know we're talking about a loot drop game where the entire appeal lies in those loot drops, but outside of dollars, I don't need 17.5 million of anything. That's way, way, waaaaaaaay too much crap to ever constitute fun. Hell, even the comparatively modest arsenals of Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 quickly blur into one amorphous, nondescript mess.

Eight guns. That's all you really need. Maybe fewer. And imposing that kind of limitation will net you a better game to boot. Here's how.

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36.

Re: Op Ed

Jan 9, 2012, 07:04

Bhruic

If you're working on an established franchise, you pretty much have to include the most popular weapons from the previous games I'm curious, did you just completely miss the fact that Call of Duty went from being set in WWII, and containing WWII-era weapons to being set in modern times with modern weapons? Did you miss the fact that people continued to buy the game despite the fact there were no weapon overlaps? Regardless of that fact, that's an irrelevant point, as it doesn't address the actual issue - whether guns are the "defining element" of shooters. The fact that people may come to expect a sequel to a game to contain weapons from previous versions of the game is nothing more than people expecting a sequel to be similar to its predecessors. So you're saying that if two weapons are of the same basic type, they are the same weapon? No, I'm saying that two weapons that are called the same thing, but have minor variance in their listed stats are both the same base item. You want to count each separate variation as being a completely unique weapon - which is just plain stupid. Or, to use your "modern weapons" example, you're suggesting that when I have a FAMAS in BF3, and I switch the accessory from a flashlight to a muzzle suppressor, that I suddenly have a completely new gun in my hands. Sorry, that's not how it works. You're implying that weapons are completely irrelevant and have no impact on gameplay. No, I'm not implying any such thing. No wonder you're putting forth so many irrelevant arguments, you don't even have a handle on what I'm saying. Of course weapons are relevant to a game. The weapons in Quake are quite different than the weapons in CoD, and that definitely helps differentiate the games. But if two games share weapon sets, that doesn't make them undifferentiated. There are many, many more factors that go into that. And it is those factors that end up defining games, not which particular guns they happen to have included. Again, the guns that end up in a game are almost always a result of other factors that have been decided on before the guns are ever considered.

		Date	Subject	Author
	1.	Jan 7, 17:03	Re: Op Ed	Silicon Avatar
	2.	Jan 7, 17:12	Re: Op Ed	Agent.X7
	3.	Jan 7, 18:14	Re: Op Ed	Prez
	5.	Jan 7, 18:33	Re: Op Ed	FloorPie
	7.	Jan 7, 19:39	Re: Op Ed	Agent.X7
	4.	Jan 7, 18:25	Re: Op Ed	jacobvandy
	6.	Jan 7, 19:24	Re: Op Ed	panbient
	8.	Jan 7, 20:07	Re: Op Ed	gilly775
	9.	Jan 7, 20:32	Re: Op Ed	Cutter
	10.	Jan 7, 20:57	Re: Op Ed	Jerykk
	11.	Jan 7, 21:15	Re: Op Ed	Prez
	12.	Jan 7, 21:17	Re: Op Ed	Agent.X7
	14.	Jan 7, 22:06	Re: Op Ed	xXBatmanXx
	29.	Jan 8, 12:10	Re: Op Ed	Beamer
	13.	Jan 7, 22:00	Re: Op Ed	xXBatmanXx
	16.	Jan 8, 00:17	Re: Op Ed	Agent.X7
	15.	Jan 7, 22:17	Re: Op Ed	WarpCrow
	17.	Jan 8, 01:49	Re: Op Ed	Bhruic
	18.	Jan 8, 02:26	Re: Op Ed	PHJF
	19.	Jan 8, 03:21	Re: Op Ed	J
	20.	Jan 8, 03:46	Re: Op Ed	Jerykk
	21.	Jan 8, 04:55	Re: Op Ed	Bhruic
	22.	Jan 8, 05:47	Re: Op Ed	Jerykk
	23.	Jan 8, 06:25	Re: Op Ed	Bhruic
	24.	Jan 8, 06:43	Re: Op Ed	Jerykk
	25.	Jan 8, 06:51	Re: Op Ed	Bhruic
	26.	Jan 8, 07:10	Re: Op Ed	Jerykk
	27.	Jan 8, 09:59	Re: Op Ed	Bhruic
	30.	Jan 8, 19:01	Re: Op Ed	Jerykk
	31.	Jan 8, 19:44	Re: Op Ed	Prez
	32.	Jan 8, 19:59	Re: Op Ed	Jerykk
	33.	Jan 8, 21:32	Re: Op Ed	Bhruic
	34.	Jan 8, 22:17	Re: Op Ed	Sepharo
	35.	Jan 8, 23:00	Re: Op Ed	Jerykk
>>	36.	Jan 9, 07:04	Re: Op Ed	Bhruic
	37.	Jan 9, 11:41	Re: Op Ed	Jerykk
	38.	Jan 9, 12:19	Re: Op Ed	Bhruic
	39.	Jan 9, 16:53	Re: Op Ed	Jerykk
	40.	Jan 9, 17:34	Re: Op Ed	Beamer
	41.	Jan 9, 19:20	Re: Op Ed	Jerykk
	42.	Jan 10, 11:27	Re: Op Ed	Bhruic
	43.	Jan 10, 23:14	Re: Op Ed	Sepharo
	44.	Jan 11, 00:14	Re: Op Ed	Jerykk
	28.	Jan 8, 11:59	Re: Op Ed	theyarecomingforyou