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In a recent interview with PC Gamer John Gibson, President of Killing Floor and Red Orchestra 2 creator Tripwire Interactive, gives us his very concise assessment of Call of Duty's impact on this generation of gamers, and he sums it up by saying "Call of Duty has almost ruined a generation of FPS players".

 

There is loads of food for thought to be found in this article, as Gibson eloquently points out how the dumbing down of gameplay - or "compressing the skill gap" in industry jargon - leads game design down a slippery slope to a more and more shallow gaming experience that offers instant gratification rather than engaging challenge.

 

Here's an excerpt from the interview:

 

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. 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. You don’t want the elite players to destroy the new players so bad that new players can never get into the game and enjoy it.

 

But the skill gap is so compressed, that it’s like a slot machine. You might as well just sit down at a slot machine and have a thing that pops up an says “I got a kill!” They’ve taken individual skill out of the equation so much. So you see these guys—I see it all the time, they come in to play Red Orchestra, and they’re like “This game’s just too hardcore. I’m awesome at Call of Duty, so there’s something wrong with your game. Because I’m not successful at playing this game, so it must suck. I’m not the problem, it’s your game.” And sometimes as designers, it is our game. Sometimes we screw up, sometimes we design something that’s not accesible enough, they can’t figure it out, we didn’t give them enough information to figure out where to go… but more often than not, it’s because Call of Duty compressed their skill gap so much that these guys never needed to get good at a shooter. They never needed to get good at their twitch skills with a mouse.

 

Players like Elliot [Cannon, Lead Designer] and I, back in the Quake and Unreal days, you know, we had to get good at aiming. 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.”

 

Link to full article - a highly recommended read.

 

 

Just last month a new group named GHOST RECON LIVES and aimed at oldschool GR players was founded by GHOSTHOST over at Steam community.  Within days since its launch on 10th of February 2013 it has gained over 80 active members and is organizing regular GR online multiplayer games.  I suggest interested players go check it out and make some new GR friends. And while you're at it, please bring some of them back here.  

 

GHOST RECON LIVES - Steam Community Group

This may look slightly off-topic, but listen in first...  

Project Reality Devcast #1 - Mod DB

 

 

Just a little heads-up on some impressive GR.net statistics. The site is approaching a count of 600,000 total posts, roughly one half of which are made in the respective GR games categories while the other half goes into other topics like discussing military issues, computers, other games and gaming in general, web site feedback (and administration), and last but not least humor and other off-topic banter.

Between the different GR game forums, original Ghost Recon still leads the pack with comfortable ease at about 165,000 posts, with Advanced Warfighter a distant second at about 80,000 posts, and AW2 at roughly 50,000 taking third place. Future Soldier and all other recent "Ghost Recon" titles combined (who could possibly keep track of them all) bring together a grand total of about 8,000 posts.

So even after over a decade has passed and about, I dunno, half a dozen of GR "sequels" have been released, the old King remains well seated in his throne, even when it comes to forum participation. Keeping in mind that the Future Soldier forums where launched in late 2008, well ahead of the game's release and before we even knew what the game would be called, the discrepancy of fan interest becomes even more obvious.

Within the last 4 years, interest in Future Soldier has garnered 8,000 posts, or an average of 2,000 posts per year, while good old Ghost Recon managed to draw the attention of 165,000 posts since 2001, or 15,000 posts per year on average... every year for over a decade! The total post count for Ghost Recon keeps surpassing the sum of posts of all other GR games combined.

So much for Ubisoft knowing their audience, and a hint to their developers soaking up fan feedback . The more they take the series away from its core values the less people are interested in their games. Simple. But we've been talking about this for far too long and all of their soaking of our feedback seems to have been nothing more than Ubisoft wiping the floor with it, so rather than going on another rant about this (tsk... looks like I already did)...

...I'd much rather like to give praise to GR.net for being here for us fans, for staying true to us, for never letting us down, for giving us a place where we feel welcome, where we can voice our enthusiasm as well as our criticism.

Thank you, Rocky! Long live Ghost Recon, and long live GR.net!