And really, watching some of these guys play... one of the things that Call of Duty does, and its 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 doesnt 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, its kind of smart to compress your skill gap to a degree. You dont want the elite players to destroy the new players so bad that new players can never get into the game and enjoy it. Im looking at you, Dota. [laughs] Sorry.
But the skill gap is so compressed, that its 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! Theyve taken individual skill out of the equation so much. So you see these guysI see it all the time, they come in to play Red Orchestra, and theyre like This games just too hardcore. Im awesome at Call of Duty, so theres something wrong with your game. Because Im not successful at playing this game, so it must suck. Im not the problem, its your game. And sometimes as designers, it is our game. Sometimes we screw up, sometimes we design something thats not accesible enough, they cant figure it out, we didnt give them enough information to figure out where to go... but more often than not, its 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 dont have to anymore. The skill gap is so compressed that like, The game makes me feel that Im awesome. These guys, when I actually watch them play, theyre actually very poor FPS players. And I dont think its because theyre incapable of getting good, I think its because they never had to get good. They get enough kills in Call of Duty to feel like theyre awesome, but they never really had to develop their FPS skills beyond that.