A long time ago I posted a “Why do I suck so at Doom?” thread. This is sort of a follow up. I have since sucked at Duke Nukem3D, Quake, and Half-Life. And if I get Doom 3, I doubtless will suck at that too.
My question is, is it just me, or are the games really that hard? When you play, do you get killed or hopelessly wounded every single time you get hit by an ambush or new monster you haven’t encountered before? And if the game really is that hard, is it part of playing that you’re supposed to die 200 times, or do you think the games should offer you a better chance?
Note: I suck at the regular versions of all these games. All of the third-party extra levels for these games usually offer challenging levels for people who find the regular version too easy(!!!)
These games have a higher than average learning curve. Try playing online against those people that find the regular game too easy. I’ve found that this forces you to get better. After a week or so of nightly play you should at least be able to hold your own in a deathmatch. The computer opponents will seem easy after this.
Do you have a good joystick? Some people prefer using a keyboard, and some a good joystick, but you won’t get anywhere with a cheap stick, preferably one whose controls you can remap.
You do remap the controls to whatever’s convenient and intuitive to you, right?
I don’t know about aiming for the head. I only know of one FPS (Unreal Tournament) where it’s an instant kill. I seem to remember Counterstrike being “one-or-two-shots-anywhere-kills”, and I know Battlefield 1942 is like that, so it really wouldn’t matter where you aim in those. In most games the torso is a larger and therefore easier target.
Some more suggestions:
Never stand still! Besides making yourself harder to hit, you won’t be accused of “camping” by those pathetic little dweebs who spend more time bitching about the tactics of other players than actually playing the game.
Concentrate on finding health packs and armor, not weapons and ammo.
With rocket launchers, aim for the ground at your target’s feet. Rockets are very easy to avoid if they’re fired directly at you.
Straife, straife, straife! If you only run forward when avoiding fire, everyone will know exactly where you’re going. Practice “circle-strafing” with easy-level bots. You do this by holding a strafe button while continously aiming your crosshair at your target. Just remember to reverse your strafing direction periodically when playing against human opponents, so your movements won’t be predictable.
There’s no shame in running away from a fight when you’re low on health or ammo.
Ditto on Kalashnikov’s advice on remapping the keys. For example, most FPS’s default to A and F for straife left/right, but I find D and F much more comfortable.
One other thing: Focus On One Game. Trying to switch back and forth from Duke Nukem 3D to Half-Life to Unreal Tournament croggles the mind… the controls are JUST off enough from each other to make you mental, and a split-second’s hesitation will get you killed.
Ditch the joystick-- the joystick was great for Doom, but if you’re actually expected to aim, instead of just point in the general direction of your target, a mouse/trackball is an absolute necessity.
I like the WASD configuration for moving. (W/S = Forward/Back A/D=Strafe Left/Right) The first and penultimate fingers stay on the strafe buttons, while you use your middle finger for forward & back. Thumb on the spacebar - usually jump. Other actions you need quick access to on the row above the spacebar, VBNM
Adopt this control config, & soon you too will be in a position to exclaim “sk00ld j0000!!!” (Although I’m sure you’ll be able to resist.)
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It is crucial to establish an input configuration you are comfortable with and use it 'till you no longer have to think about it (kind of a zen thing ).
Also, you might want to try FPS games like "Thief "or “No one lives Forever.” They allow for more stealthy and tactical moves than the “run & gun” games you mentioned.
My current favourite, America’s Army actually requires that you hold still if you want to be accurate, especially if you’re using a sniper rifle. Every player has a “combat readiness meter” (or something like that) that climbs to maximum if you hold still, are prone, are aiming through your sights, are not wounded and have a elader nearby, etc. The higher your value, the less “shaky” your aim will be.
Sometimes you have to lie there for up to ten seconds until your meter reaches the top before you can snipe a guy. Of course, if he sees you, he’ll often start blasting away with his AK47. You just have to wait (and not panic) while the bullets zing past you and hope he doesn’t get lucky before you can blow his head off.
Serious AA players know this and won’t accuse a sniper of “camping” if he stays in one place for a few minutes. Of course, as the tide of battle shifts, he’d better relocate.
The biggest limitation of all first-person shooters is the narrow field of vision offered by your monitor. Fortunately, it’s a problem all players have equally (though having a bigger monitor with higher resolution helps a little), so you can give yourself a slight edge over newbies if you use a bit of imagination. If you run along a wall (which is a lot safer than across open ground), there’s no point facing “foward” and filling half your vision with the wall itself. Try running sideways (strafing) or running forward while keeping your head turned to the side. You should keep your head moving as much as possible, to make up for the lack of peripheral vision.
The controller set up I use seems to work pretty well. However you need a trackball mouse with two buttons and a scroller button. You use the ball to to turn left or right and aim in any direction. The left mouse button is forward. The scroll button switches weapons. The right mouse button fires. A/D straife. S is for moving backwards. From there you can set up keys for whatever else you need. Its hard when you start but after a while it gets easy.
I second the advice offered on strafing and using mouse+keyboard. Learning to strafe is the important thing - with time you will never run around a corner and then turn, you will automatically sidestep around all corners. I hardly ever run straight ahead, even when my objective is straight ahead - I weave around with the strafe keys as I run, because you never know when some sniper is trying to line up a shot on you.
One piece of advice you will not want to follow in certain games is the ‘aim for the head’ advice. With a lot of the older games it does not matter where you hit your opponent, so you should aim for their center of mass. Even on games where headshots do more damage it’s usually better to aim for the center of mass unless you are a very good aim.
Also, if you know anybody else who plays FPS games, watch them play sometimes. You will learn a lot.
Huh, almost all the games I’ve ever played have been one shot one kill to the head, except Max Payne. If the game does have it, you better damn well aim for it because in MP you won’t stand a chance.
Also, I am a fairly good FPS player, and I rarely aim for the thead, even in games that do have headshots do extra damage. It all depends on the situation and the weapon, of course - if I have something with a slow ROF and someone is standing still I will go for the head, but 90% of the time I don’t, and I can usually come in the top third in score on public servers, that is, if I’m trying to get lots of kills (I play a lot of team-based games and often forgo points to complete objectives).
One thing that might help you with aim, if you use a trackball instead of a mouse, is to locate the fire button off the trackball. I noticed that as I went to ‘fire’ the weapon while aiming with the trackball, the ball would move a tiny bit when I clicked the fire button.
I agree with the previous posts about re-mapping the keys to something that you like, and then playing so much that you don’t think about the keys, but think about where you want to go in the game, and going there. Along with re-mapping the keys, make sure you can jump, straif, and fire all at the same time. One job I worked at had a Half-Life battle every day at lunch for 30 minutes. I would always come in 3rd or 4th. Then I remapped the keys and started coming in 2nd or 3rd. Then I re-mapped the keys such that I could jump, straif, and fire all at the same time and started coming in 1st every once in awhile.
Playing with the same people all the time tends to turn the game into a chess game. You learn the style that they play with, and then you can change your style to get them.
One guy would always go for the Jump Pack, no matter what, so as soon as he died, all you had to do was run to the Jump Pack and there he was.
Reload your weapon as soon as possible (providing you are resonably safe for the next few seconds). Never let the ammunition in your weapon drop lower then half full, otherwise you may run out while under attack.
I’m on the side of always aiming for headshots. I just ran through Return to Castle Wolfenstein (figured it was about time I reinstalled it and actually finished it) and with automatic weapons headshots are relatively easy. Just aim up a little when you’re shooting anyone and chances are very good that one of the bullets in your spray will hit them in the head.
Multiplayer I don’t do much anymore but when I did play I was ok at it (usually in the top third of scorers in public servers). Don’t bother going for headshots. Most games are fast paced and unlike single player enemies humans tend to dodge far more – center of mass is your best bet.
Games like Thief and Hitman though, headshot everytime :).
Maybe you should play a slower paced game. I suck at all those FPS games too, because I cannot get my head around a) strategy, b) the number and placement of the hotkeys, c) using the mouse and keyboard simultaneously, while looking at the monitor, and d) getting killed 100 times a minute.
So I play games like Thief, and Tomb Raider, because there’s so much more breathing room, and you don’t have to be a nimble genius to survive.
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