Jakub's Rant: Sniping January 20, 2004

Why like them

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Sniper rifles suck

There, I said it. Deal with it. Let me say it again – sniper rifles suck. Don’t like it? Tough, because odds are that if you’re annoyed, you don’t have the skills to use any other weapon. So go back to humping the dirt in Call of Duty or camping the bridge on de_aztec with all your l33t skill.

That sniper rifles are the bane of first-person shooters is an indisputable fact, yet people choose to dispute it anyway. Why? Because everyone has the little fantasy of being the lone wolf, the deadly, stalking sniper who hits without being seen, goes 10-0 every round and by the time the map is over he’ll be hailed as living god by the peons he’s slain or saved from certain death. Sniper rifles exist in games because they appeal to the Munchkin inside all of us, because we all want to run around with the BFG 9000 and lay waste to earth, heaven and hell. And make no mistake about it, if there is a BFG 9000 in a game, odds are it fires one shot at a time and has a big huge zoom on it.

Every other ‘reason’ for the existence of sniper rifles – realism, historical accuracy, weapon diversity, giving players identifiable roles – is a lie. There’s nothing realistic about sniper rifles as they appear in games, nothing historically accurate, they not only don’t improve weapon diversity they make it worse, there is NO skill involved, but yes, scoped weapons do give a new role to players – the dirt-humping camper.

So let me dispatch these myths and send them to hell before we tackle the reasons why sniper rifles should never, ever be implemented in any other game again.

1. Realism. No, sorry, there’s nothing realistic about taking a shot every second with your scoped Mosin-Nagant or Springfield. They’re bolt-action rifles and need to manually load the next bullet, meaning losing sight of the target. The guns also aren’t one-shot kills. If they are, so would be the MP44 Sturmgewehr or AK-47 at shorter distances, which use similarly sized ammunition. As it is, most games set sniper rifles to be the Finger of God – simply look at your target, twitch your finger and boom, he’s dead. Forget that it’s called “sniper rifle” and imagine it’s called “Finger of God” – would you implement a weapon with that name, as a designer?

2. Historical Accuracy. Sorry son, the battlefield just isn’t comprised of 50% snipers. Yes, limiting their use to 1 or 2 people per team is possible, but that has other drawbacks, like making 1 or 2 people on each team 5:1 kill ratio gods, while everyone else suffers.

3. Weapon Diversity. No, when a sniper rifle makes it into a game, everyone wants to use it. All other weapons lose a tremendous amount of appeal. Who wants to rush with the MP40 or AK when you know you’re going to run into a veritable wall of lead – why not just snipe back?

4. Skill. Yeah, right. Sorry buddy, but poking your head out every few seconds to take a cheap shot before moving to a new location isn’t skill. All you need is the most basic semblance of aim and reflexes to get a sniping kill. In a sniper duel, it’s just a matter of who’s faster and more accurate – just TWO basic, basic abilities get exaggerated in importance.

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Why scopes suck

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Slowing down the game

Having accepted the fact that the sniper rifle is the single most powerful, abusive weapon in the game, we can logically assume that most people will want to use it. Moreover, those that do NOT want to use it, will often end up doing so in order to not look like they suck compared to their ‘l33t’ teammates who must be so damn good for racking up at 4:1 kill ratio.

What happens when two thirds, half, or even a quarter of the team has sniper rifles is that the game slows down to a crawl. All the players without scopes would rather wait for the snipers on their team to thin out the snipers on the other side, rather than poke their heads out and die. Depending on the map, the minute or two is a waste as the two sides carefully dance their sniper duels, until one side is so strong it can rush, or until the snipers on the other side are thinned out sufficiently to permit the real play to start.

So, putting that together, what we have is a collection of unskilled munchkin noobs who pick up scopes, waste half the match shooting at each other and padding their kill count until only the unskilled munchkin noob with the best aim is left and the real game can begin. Odds are he’s not a good player, despite the score – oh he can aim like crazy, but what else can he do? Does he understand the flow of the game, would he be able to survive a regular firefight, can he move in combat? Probably not – unless he’s one of the good players whose ego forces him to pick up a scope and maintain a respectable kill ratio.

Does anyone besides me see something wrong with that – that the least skilled, most chickenshit, predictable players will dominate a match. They engage in their own little private game, stamping out each other sometimes, but mostly focusing on the easy kills – the people actually going for the objective. All the while these skill-less ingrates are being protected from the few rushers who make it through Sniper’s Alley by the people actually trying to play the game.

Just how reflective is Pavlov or Hurtgen of World War II warfare? Would a sniper who slowly moved into position during the night, hid himself perfectly to take shots at lone targets or small groups, really be able to get 20 kills in the span of a few minutes? No. He doesn’t know the same three routes that everyone is taking at the start of every round. He doesn’t know if there will be a squad on patrol behind him or beside him. If he’s part of an assault, he’s a support item – not the heavy artillery. And yet in games, snipers are given a ludicrous advantage over everyone else.

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Games that do sniping right

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Good sniping

There are two and only two popular games that have done sniping correctly. The first is Enemy Territory. Snipers are inherently limited by number because they are a class. Moreover, the weapons aren’t one-shot kills, it almost always takes at least two to take your opponent down, and your opponents move fast enough to be difficult to hit. Battlefield 1942 keeps the effectiveness of snipers down because they are actually vulnerable, not just in theory. The wide, open spaces expose a sniper and give his foes many ways to move around him. That still doesn’t prevent one third of the players on each team from thinking they’re SFC ‘Hoot’ Gibson (Eric Bana) from Black Hawn Down or Pvt. Daniel Jackson (Barry Pepper) from Saving Private Ryan. But you may just be fruity enough to be the film version of Vasily Zaitsev.

So what makes snipers balanced in these two games? Well, besides the fact that they can’t rack up sick kill ratios without any apparent skill, the most important thing is that they don’t disturb the flow of the game. Unlike Call of Duty or Counter-Strike, the game doesn’t stop to wait for the snipers to duel it out, or the smart players don’t have to wait for the dumb ones to rush out to die in the first, lethal barrage. Nobody is afraid of the snipers – they’re not going to take your one and only life, and even if BF1942 and Enemy Territory were limited to one life, the snipers just aren’t enough of a threat to worry about. You won’t die a useless death.

Is the solution to nerf the sniper rifle, like in CS? No. Matches are still slow – probably slower than before, actually. Now I know I’m going to get a flood of posts on the forums telling me I want Quake – that’s BS. I play Call of Duty because it’s fun, because I enjoy the style – and because I can find servers without sniper rifles.

Is the solution to limit the number of scopes? No. It may work for competition, but on a public server it means 2 or 4 people are gods and the rest chumps. Yes, the game flows better but it’s not worth pissing off the rest of the server to make one guy on each side look good.

So, I dare anyone – snipers, people who hate snipers, and those who snipe to maintain a respectable kill ratio – to find yourselves a server with scopes disabled and play. You’ll be amazed at how much faster and more exciting the game is, at how useful even the basic rifles are (and how well you can snipe with them, without slowing the game down.) Suddenly, craptastic maps like hurtgen and to some extent rocket become playable. You can rush, you can actually put pressure on the riflemen, because as good as the unscoped rifles are – and they’re damn good – they’re not the Finger of God and it’s actually possible to make it across the map.

And that’s the whole point. Everyone who says that snipers are balanced because they’re weak up close is wrong. Get enough snipers on a team in CS or CoD, and rushing is suicide for 80% of the people trying to do so. Almost anyone who moves, dies. The routes are too predictable, there are too many scopes, and too few rushers because half the attacking team snipes back.

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