O
nce limited to fantasy RPGs, loot has proliferated
into racing games, survival games and even strategy
games such as Total War: Warhammer. However, by
far the most significant adoption of weapons preceded by
words such as ‘Rare, Epic and Legendary’ is seen in shooters.
Games such as Destiny, The Division, Borderlands and Outriders
are geared almost entirely around picking up a constant
stream of slightly better guns.
Ten years ago, the idea was novel and interesting. Borderlands’
promise of a shooter with billions of different guns was an
irresistible concept, but now that novelty has worn off, it’s
clear that looting is antithetical to good
shooter design.
One of the most fundamental tenets
of making a shooter fun is that every
weapon in your arsenal serves a different
purpose. Guns should be designed either
to respond to a specific situation, or to kill
or manipulate enemies in ways that are either useful or fun.
This has been true all the way back to the original Doom,
which set the template. The pistol is your default and fallback
weapon. The shotgun is your all-purpose death-spitter. The
chaingun is for dealing with waves of enemies. The rocket
launcher is for clusters of enemies. The plasma gun is for
fighting tough enemies, and the BFG is for extracting yourself
from particularly sticky situations.
You don’t have to use them like this, of course, that’s part of
the fun, but every weapon is designed as a specific tool for a
specific job. That’s partly why picking up a new weapon in an
FPS is a treasured moment, as you say, ‘Ooh, what does this do?’
The idea behind ‘looter’ shooters is to increase this feeling by
a hundredfold, giving you a constant stream of new weapons.
However, most weapons you pick up in a looter-shooter are
just slightly better versions of weapons you’ve already seen,
offering only incremental stat gains that don’t translate to a
meaningful difference in play.
This then flattens the core experience. Your only metric for
progression in a game such as Destiny is numerical – your
power level, or the numbers that fall out of an enemy when
you shoot them. Your experience throughout the game is
fundamentally the same – you just have cooler-looking armour
and do more damage. You might have
special powers and spectacular effects,
but the core shooting at level 1 is still
more or less identical to level 50.
Compare this with games such as
Bulletstorm or Doom Eternal, where
you have maybe eight to ten weapons,
each of which is designed to fight a different enemy type or
kill enemies in an entirely different way. Here, your metric
for progression is your own knowledge about how those
weapons work, the combinations between weapons and
enemies, the resulting effects and your general ability to
cause ten different flavours of mayhem.
Shooters aren’t about numbers. A bullet to the head is
nearly always fatal, no matter your ‘level’. The question is
whether you can get the bullet in your enemy’s head in the
first place. Shooters are about movement and dynamism, and
reducing the dynamic joy of an FPS to a weaponised version
of Top Trumps is tragic.Games
Rick Lane is Custom PC’s games editor @Rick_Lane
RICK LANE / INVERSE LOOK
LOOT GRATES
Shooters are being ruined by an obsession with loot,
argues Rick LaneYour experience is the same –
you just have cooler-looking
armour and do more damage