The Call of Duty franchise has sold millions upon millions of copies since it was first introduced during the previous generation and really took off with the first Modern Warfare entry for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. The developers of Red Orchestra, Tripwire Interactive, think that hasn't been a good thing though and said that the Activision franchise has "almost ruined a generation of FPS players" in an interview released Wednesday.
“I’m really discouraged by the current state of multiplayer shooters,” Tripwire president 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.”
Gibson says brought in "hardcore" Call of Duty to test the Action Mode for Red Orchestra 2 in the hopes of making something that was appealing to that audience while maintaining the style of Red Orchestra's play. Things did not go well.
“We iterated on it a lot,” he said. “And just listening to all the niggling, pedantic things that they would complain about, that made them not want to play the game, I just thought, ‘I give up. Call of Duty has ruined this whole generation of gamers’.”
Gibson said that every complaint he received came down to Red Orchestra not feeling like Call of Duty. He pegs the main problem with Activision's shooter to what he calls a "compression of the skill gap" that makes aiming skills less important.
“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!’,” he explained.
“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’.
While Gibson does have harsh words for Call of Duty and other shooters that take the tension and sense of vulnerability out of shooters, he does praise shooters that are adding more story and RPG elements like Fallout 3 and Deus Ex.
The melding of RPG elements and shooter elements has been great. I’ve seen this reflected in a lot of the reviews, it’s like, “Okay guys, we’re tired of this on-rails experience.”
What do you think? Does Tripwire's Gibson have a point?
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Via: PC Gamer
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