During Red Orchestra 2’s testing, Tripwire got a lot of feedback complaints that it ‘wasn’t like Call of Duty’. He acknowledges it’s ”smart business, to a degree,” when you ‘give away kills’.
By compressing the skill gap with ”a whole bunch of randomness,” you get weaponry that doesn’t promote skill in order to achieve kills - ”can get kills with zero skill at all”.
“I’m really discouraged by the current state of multiplayer shooters,” John Gibson told PC Gamer. “I think that, and I hate to mention names, because it sounds like ‘I’m just jealous of their success,’ but I’m really, I feel like Call of Duty has almost ruined a generation of FPS players.”
He feels Call of Duty has led the majority of FPS players believe kills should come easy, otherwise ‘the game sucks’, and not because the player has so little skill in actually playing without huge advantages.
“They’re like: ‘I hate Red Orchestra, I can’t play it.’ Well, why? ‘Because the guy doesn’t move like he does in Call of Duty. Call of Duty has great movement.’ Why is it great? ‘Because it just is, I just like the way it works.’”
“One of the things that Call of Duty does, and it’s smart business, to a degree, is they compress the skill gap. And the way you compress the skill gap as a designer is you add a whole bunch of randomness,” he explains. ”A whole bunch of weaponry that doesn’t require any skill to get kills. Random spawns, massive cone fire on your weapons. Lots of devices that can get kills with zero skill at all, and you know, it’s kind of smart to compress your skill gap to a degree.”
“Back in the Quake and Unreal days, you know, we had to get good at aiming,” continued Gibson.
“These guys don’t have to anymore. The skill gap is so compressed that like, “The game makes me feel that I’m awesome.” These guys, when I actually watch them play, they’re actually very poor FPS players. And I don’t think it’s because they’re incapable of getting good, I think it’s because they never had to get good. They get enough kills in Call of Duty to feel like they’re awesome, but they never really had to develop their FPS skills beyond that.”
”And it’s a shame because when you do that, when you create a shooter like that, you’re very limited on the amount of depth that you can give the game. It’s all gotta be very surface level, like I’m sitting there eating cotton candy and I never get any meat and potatoes. And it’s frustrating for me as a designer to see players come in and they’re literally like “In Call of Duty it takes 0.15 seconds to go into ironsights. In RO2 it takes 0.17 seconds to go into ironsights. I hate this.””
Check out the full interview between John Gibson and PC Gamer.
