In your situation, one game would have an insta death sniper rifle or rail gun, where the other player moves at incredible speeds due to a variety of movement options, but also just in general movement sleed compared to a baret 50 cal player in cod who has to aim at a character moving at a snails pace. Dodging and strafing are something that hardly exist in these games outside of very small situations where players are close. In UT99 you can move fast and hope to dodge their weapon
So, maybe CoD is just a bad 'shooting mans' game from that perspective, because that's the one I see referenced over and over, but I'll be frank -- all that's beeing said with things like this is that fast games require faster tracking and slow games require slower tracking. Tracking is not the end-all, be-all, and frankly, things like "hoping to dodge their weapon" don't really apply to hitscan weapons. Most of the tacticool shooters that leave on ADS have projectiles with travel time and feature location-specific damage, so while you may not have to dial your mouse sensitivity up a notch or two to stay on target w/ a similar amount of physical mouse movement, you still need to be able to get the jump, ADS, lead at range (if they are moving) and hit the head. One is rewarding pure twitch, one is making twitch less critical but rewarding precision. If you're not in a head to head 1v1 HONOUR BOUND fight, but you're shooting at targets down-wind, I'd argue it's even trickier. I have a much harder time landing a sniped HS on a sprinting target in PS2 (even with a 2x scope and no sway), for example, than I ever did shooting someone across the map w/ a sniper rifle in UT99 or a rail in Q2/RA2.
The main flaw with ADS is it slows down gameplay and it lowers the skill ceili because of that. Even a game like Tf2, an "arena shooter" thats very casual oriented has a far higher skill ceiling then most ADS games.
this is an undeniable truth involved with ADS heavy games, they have a much lower skill ceiling when it comes to shooting people. And gunplay revolves essentially around who gets the first shot off because movement is so absolutley gimped by needing to aim all the time.
The two biggest problems I have with this argument are that a) it isolates skill to reflex and twitch and b) downplays the importance of reflex and twitch in an ADS game. When I lose a heads-up fight in a game with ADS, it's generally because the other guy's aim was better and/or they shot first. When I lose a heads-up fight in a non-ADS game, it's because the other guy's aim was better and/or they shot first. Either that or it was cheap bullshit like pulse wiggling or rocket primary or MAX suits or knifing.
Frankly, I'm having trouble thinking of an arena shooter where the person landing the first shot wasn't at a huge advantage, except in situations where they had different weapons (because, you know, it's an arena shooter and you can control your enemy's access to weapons). First shot being less critical by any stretch probably has to do with situations where weapons differ (which is rare in an 'ADS' shooter because most of those have classes and/or fixed loadouts).
This is the biggest reason why a lot of hardcore fps players dont play fps games anymore, brcause you either play CSGO, which is not everyone cup of tea, or your stuck playing really old games with dead communities or indie shooters that dont have a high enough player count to even warrant getting good at.
I'd say a bigger factor has to do with the demographic/market for the genre moving away from PCs and to consoles, and with nobody wanting to make a good arena shooter. If you go back to the glory days of 'hardcore FPS players', everyone was playing arena shooters, TFC, and CS. What are hardcore players playing now? Hat Fortress 2, and CS:GO -- arena shooters have disappeared. It's a genre thing, not a mechanic thing. You can't tell me that hardcore FPS players who aren't interested in a game like Battlefield w/ classes, loadouts, vehicles, and not-straight-up-DM game modes as the 'primary' modes would suddenly thing they were hot shit if you took out ADS. I don't think a single one of the guys I used to play Q2 and UT with but who have no interest in a squad-based shooter have messaged me to say "man, if I didn't have to ADS sometimes, I'd be all over Battlefield/Planetside with you".
I have no issues with games like COD or Battlefield existing, but ADS is not a good mechanic to just throw into every game, which is the case nowadays. Hell you can look at a game like Brink which had a heavy emphasis on beingable to traverse incredibly fast, but yourestill super limited when trying to aim your gun. Same with Titanfall. And gamers dont want that shit in their games anymore, you can look at the dwindling numbers of Titanfall and Destiny to understand that it hurts more games then it helps, and communities dont last because theres no skill ceiling to try and reach other then a bar at the bottom of your screen filling up.
I think we're totally in agreement on the bolded. I definitely don't want it in Battlefront.
Look, I guess I can say I appreciate the disdain for the impact that ADS (and milsim console shooters) have had on the genre, because I feel the same way about WoW and MMOs. I don't think WoW is, inherently, a /bad/ game (much like CoD4, I don't really care for it but I don't think it's objectively /bad/), but there's no denying it shaped everything that came after it, and for the worse as far as my tastes are concerned. The 'golden days' of 'hardcore' MMO play, mechanics, etc are all pre-WoW, as everything afterwards has basically taken WoW's mechanic streamlining and "mainstreaming" of the genre and tried to copy it, and FPS games are going down the same path post-Modern Warfare. Compared to its predecessors, WoW doesn't require /less/ skill, but it places emphasis on different skills. WoW arenas require different skills than WoW BGs, which require different skills than DAoC's open world 8v8 or RvR. WoW dungeons/raiding require different skills than DAoC's ML raids. Even the 'base' leveling models require different skillsets - WoW encourages a fast, efficient solo build to grind quests, whereas DAoC's quests were mostly for loot and to level you just needed to kill mobs (and play with a group).
Not every MMO needs to be a themepark PvE-centric (some need to focus on PvP), just like not every shooter needs to be milsim/squad play/ADS-driven (some need to play like arena shooters). That doesn't mean they're bad or are "casual babby games" as some folks here like to posit while smugly waving their e-peens around like it's 2001.
Edit: Oh, and to note, I do get the 'slower = less fun' argument somewhat, in that I hated UT2k3/2k4 vs. the old Quake games and UT99 because they slowed down the speed/TTK a bit -- changing the sniper rifle, nerfing the translocator, changing the shock combo, lowering rocket count, etc, etc -- but other people think UT2k4 is the greatest arena shooter of all time. Different strokes, I suppose.
Edit 2: Oh I'm also super hyped for Splatoon because even though it's a TPS I feel like it's going to scratched that arena shooter itch. I hope.
