How do you feel about guns in MMORPGs?
From Errol Flynn movies to watching the fencing events at the Olympics we all have an idea of how a sword fight "should" look, even if medieval sword combat probably looked a whole lot different. And from action and science fiction movies we have an idea of how combat with guns or blasters should look. If we compare that to what we see in our MMORPGs, sword combat isn't doing that badly. It isn't looking exactly like in a Hollywood movie, but it isn't all that far from it. Gun combat on the other hand just looks wrong in a MMORPG, because it looks very much like sword combat: Opponents standing toe to toe and exchanging blows for quite some time. Doesn't look like any movie scene at all. Nor does it look like what we are used to from shooter games.
The reason of cause is that for the MMORPG a gun isn't handled all that much differently than a sword: Whether you hit and how much damage you deal is mostly determined by your stats, and in most games there isn't even any aiming involved. Also there is this convention that everybody starts out with X "points" of health, loses some of them every time he gets hit, but otherwise these hits don't result in you getting weaker in combat. In sword fighting you might still explain that away with the health being in fact more like stamina, and the loss is from you exerting yourself to dodge blows. In gun fights that explanation looks a lot weaker.
If I stand 50 meters away from you and I'm attacking you first with an assault rifle, while you are armed with an axe, and will have to get to me before being able to harm me at all, that fight would be an auto-win for me in any realistic simulation. In a MMORPG I'd get one free shot that maybe reduces your health by 10% before you are hitting me. And then we stand toe to toe, me shooting you every X seconds, and you hitting me with the axe every X seconds, until one of us drops to zero health. That just feels extremely weird to me, and not like an assault rifle at all.
How do you feel about guns in MMORPGs? Does it bother you that they work so much differently than in movies or shooter games? Or are you able to keep up the suspension of disbelief?
The reason of cause is that for the MMORPG a gun isn't handled all that much differently than a sword: Whether you hit and how much damage you deal is mostly determined by your stats, and in most games there isn't even any aiming involved. Also there is this convention that everybody starts out with X "points" of health, loses some of them every time he gets hit, but otherwise these hits don't result in you getting weaker in combat. In sword fighting you might still explain that away with the health being in fact more like stamina, and the loss is from you exerting yourself to dodge blows. In gun fights that explanation looks a lot weaker.
If I stand 50 meters away from you and I'm attacking you first with an assault rifle, while you are armed with an axe, and will have to get to me before being able to harm me at all, that fight would be an auto-win for me in any realistic simulation. In a MMORPG I'd get one free shot that maybe reduces your health by 10% before you are hitting me. And then we stand toe to toe, me shooting you every X seconds, and you hitting me with the axe every X seconds, until one of us drops to zero health. That just feels extremely weird to me, and not like an assault rifle at all.
How do you feel about guns in MMORPGs? Does it bother you that they work so much differently than in movies or shooter games? Or are you able to keep up the suspension of disbelief?
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