Tripwire president John Gibson says he is “discouraged” by the state of multiplayer shooters on the PC.
“I just thought, ‘I give up. Call of Duty has ruined this whole generation of gamers,'” John Gibson, president of Tripwire Interactive said to PC gamer in an extensive interview about the state of the PC FPS. Tripwire is best know for the Red Orchestra franchise, and Gibson talked at length about his frustrations with trying to sell Red Orchestra 2 to the Call of Duty crowd. He does praise singleplayer shooters such as Fallout, saying that they are “finally coming out from under the shadow of the Hollywood movie, overblown ‘I’m on a rail’ linear shooter,” but is “discouraged” by the state of multiplayer shooters on the PC.
“When I was developing Action Mode [for Red Orchestra 2], I got a group of people that I know that are pretty hardcore Call of Duty players. And my goal was to create something that was accessible enough for them to enjoy the game-not turn it into Call of Duty, but try to make something that I thought was casual enough but with the Red Orchestra gameplay style that they would enjoy,” says Gibson. He said that his frustrations with the Call of Duty players eventually led to him giving up on them entirely.
“I’m really discouraged by the current state of multiplayer shooters. 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. I know that’s a bold statement, but I won’t just throw stones without backing it up.”
When asked what the Call of Duty players specifically complained about, Gibson said “Almost every [complaint] boiled down to ‘it doesn’t feel like Call of Duty.‘” He spoke of the “randomness” of games like Call of Duty and how they “compress the skill gap.” He says that it is OK to compress it to a degree, so that the elite players aren’t constantly dominating newbies, but Call of Duty takes it too far. “You might as well just sit down at a slot machine and have a thing that pops up and says ‘I got a kill!’ They’ve taken individual skill out of the equation so much.”
Gibson says that the idea of making players feel awesome despite their personal skill has made it incredibly difficult for more hardcore, skill based games like Red Orchestra 2 to flourish. “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.” He says that when these players come in to a game like Red Orchestra 2 and aren’t immediately successful like they have been in Call of Duty, they instantly assume that the problem must lie with the game, not the player.
“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 Red Orchestra 2 it takes 0.17 seconds to go into ironsights. I hate this.'”
Source: PC Gamer
