> "A lot of “casual” games end up using the hitscan method as it simplifies the learning curve for most beginner players. But what about games that aim to create an “immersive and realistic” shooting experience? They cannot achieve their goals within these constraints. We need to use an alternative method."
It's not saying casual games are the only games to use hitscan but it's usually easier and quicker to implement hitscans than projectiles (and more intuitive for casual gamers).
Half Life and Halo both use the hybrid system depending on the weapon, as written in the article.
I'm not sure what you mean by "competitive", but there are many non-casual games that don't use hitscan. Off the top of my head, Arma and Red Orchestra.
I would argue that both counter strike and Call of Duty are casual arcade games, despite them being played competitively. Battlefield and Arma instead are not (as) arcadey games and thus do not use hitscan.
Having complex mechanics on one part of the game does not make the game a non-arcade. It is arcadey on the sense of how it is played. You're playing in small enclosed areas and it is extremely easy to pick up the game. Of course, you can learn the spray patterns but it is not at all required to play the game.
The battlefield series in turn, while not really realistic, has way more moving parts in it thus making it less arcadey.
I don't think map size has any factor in "arcadeness". The degree to which mechanical complexity exists and interacts with different aspects of the game is. CS traditionally has a huge skill gap where other games don't have any, e.g. in Battlefield movement is relatively irrelevant; so to get kills, you can largely just rely on aim. In CS, only having aim will not get you many kills at all (the most obvious issue being that you will simply miss most shots, irrespective of how well your aiming ability put the crosshair on the opponent).
> The battlefield series in turn, while not really realistic, has way more moving parts in it thus making it less arcadey.
I think you vastly underestimate just how complex CS is and how many gameplay elements are intermingled to make plays happen at higher levels of play. As a long time player of both BF and CS... BF has more "stuff" and more things going on at the same time (mostly due to large number of players and vehicles), but is definitely not the more complex game.
On top of that, CS even at medium levels of play, is more about game sense (strategy, understanding your enemies positioning and reactions to stimuli, timing, ... game sense in itself is a vast sea of complexity) and communication than raw mechanical skill, although the latter can to some extent compensate for the lack of the former. At high levels of play, purely mechanically skilled players are... worthless.
Is this even true? The only thing "skillful" about CS guns is that they have fixed spray patterns. Otherwise it's very much point and shoot because they're all hitscan. Burst fire weapons (which aren't very popular in CS afaik) take slightly more skill, but still, projectile weapons are objectively more difficult.
As a high level cs player I would argue that the ingame movement and how it interacts with the gunplay is more important to master than the spray patterns.
> The only thing "skillful" about CS guns is that they have fixed spray patterns. Otherwise it's very much point and shoot because they're all hitscan.
It's free to play, download it and see for yourself how "point and shoot" weapons in CS are.
Slightly less snarky - in CS shooting while moving (as practiced in most other shooters, including BF and CoD) is extremely inaccurate, sometimes comically so (close up, you will miss your opponent, despite your gun barrel visually sticking into their player model). This means that just to fire a gun accurately you require good left/right hand coordination (you move with the left hand, and aim and shoot with the right). For example, you might strafe left to check a corner, register an enemy, you will then flick on their had and synchronize your counterstrafing with your shot. This might sound simple, but the skill ceiling is extremely high.
As a long time player of both BF, CoD and CS (all versions) I can tell you that the gunplay of CS is by far the most difficult to master (or rather, get to a half decent level) out of all popular shooters.
The time to kill in CS is very low - often zero.
> Burst fire weapons (which aren't very popular in CS afaik) take slightly more skill, but still, projectile weapons are objectively more difficult.
In most games burst fire weapons are easier to use than their full-auto counterparts, since their bursts are often artificially more accurate than manual bursts
To be clear, I played well over 1000 hours in 1.6, I'm not new to the game! I've also played CS:GO, but only 50 hours or so.
I think you might be getting things backwards. The fact that it has a low time to kill means it takes less skill to get a kill. When a fight takes longer, there are more opportunities for the higher skill player to increase their advantage over a lower skill player. This is a pretty well-known relationship in game design.
To put it another way, if you look at a game with a long time to kill, like a fighting game or moba, if you put a top 1% player vs a top 5% player in a 1v1, the better player will ALWAYS win every single encounter (assuming equal start). This is because even if the better makes a mistake, or the worse player gets lucky, the fight is long enough to compensate for that.
In a game like CS, because the time to kill is so fast, it only takes one single mistake by the better player and the worse player will win the encounter.
I should clarify that like most games, I think CS still has a very high skill ceiling, but a ton of it is in communication/positioning/knowledge and also the kind of "raw skill" like reaction time that can't fully be trained.
I don't think comparing TTK across genres makes much sense, since e.g. in a fighting game a single kill is an entire round of the game.
> When a fight takes longer, there are more opportunities for the higher skill player to increase their advantage over a lower skill player. [Therefore making the game more skillful]
I very much disagree. Letting your opponent get the drop on you is a major mistake. The game giving you opportunities to plaster over huge blunders easily does not make it more skillful.
In CS you have short time to kill, long time to reset, precisely to make positioning and game sense more important and to heavily punish whiffing. If a slightly better player in terms of mechanical skill could always just do a 180° and get the kill regardless of how poor their positioning was, you are clearly not increasing the skill gap of the game. Rather you end up with a CoD-style experience.
Similarly, the importance of a single kill in CS varies widely. It could be relatively inconsequential, or it could decide the round (even if it is the first kill in a 5v5).
> In a game like CS, because the time to kill is so fast, it only takes one single mistake by the better player and the worse player will win the encounter.
That's the point of the game's design. You can't and shouldn't expect raw mechanical skill to save you every single time if you get yourself into a bad situation. Sometimes it might, some bad situations are also very hard to avoid. But if you keep getting into bad situations w.r.t. to your opponent you are clearly not the better CS player. Similar to racing, if you get off the track in a corner, your mistake was seven corners before that.
Sorry for the late response, I forgot to check this thread for a while...
This original thread started with a discussion about the mechanical complexity ("skill") of CS. Not positioning, game sense, etc. Though other games have that stuff too!
> The game giving you opportunities to plaster over huge blunders easily does not make it more skillful.
The thing is, having a long time to kill doesn't really allow you to plaster over anything, at least not at a high enough level. Once you're at the highest tier of a game, every single one of those positioning + game sense decisions matters too... but then raw mechanics wise, those long ttk games are more complex than CS.
(I didn't down vote your post, but I just want to state my opinion)
Just because people play a game competitively, it doesn't make the game inherently competitive. For example, many people play Minecraft competitively; that doesn't make Minecraft a competitive game, just a game that you can play competitively.
I think they meant "casual" in a conventional sense as "easy to get into" as they talk about "simplifying learning curve". So opposite of it is "hard to get into", and "immersive and realistic" is one kind of such games, but not the only one.
PUBG is not hitscan. Fornite snipers are not hitscan. I’m sure there are plenty of other examples, but there’s two competitive ones. I would agree though that most FPSs are hitscan, at least for “fast” (e.g. bullets rather than rockets) projectiles.
Correct. This is perhaps most clearly an intentional design decision with Ana from Overwatch who has a gun that switches from projectile to hitscan depending on whether you are scoped in.
Yes, casual games also use hitscan. Given the sentence follows a paragraph mentioning several other shooters that also at least partially use hitscan, it's fairly clear that they do not claim that only casual games use it.
The article also provides examples answering your second demand.
