Some games try to be realistic. In those games, assault rifles are terrible engines of destruction. You point at it. It dies. In others, they seem to have the effectiveness of a high speed rubber band gun, only not as cool looking.
The truth is, real world weapons in games have had problems since forever. DooM's Gatling gun fires pistol bullets at a pretty unimpressive rate. Off the top of my head, I'd guess around four hundred rounds per minute. Submachine guns made in 1918 fire over twice that fast. And building a Gatling gun to shoot pistol ammo really doesn't make sense.
The thing that actually saves the DooM Gatling gun is pain. It fires fast enough that it can keep many enemies in the game stuck in their pain animation, unable to attack or even move much. So while it's really not as powerful as it should be, it feels powerful.
Unfortunately, a lot of guns don't even do that. The TimeShift assault rifle got me to write this article, but the Half-Life 2 SMG and Halo 1 Assault Rifle are the worst offenders I can think of. They're all useless past 30 meters and not terribly useful up close as they do so little damage that two or three opponents will easily down you before you can kill anyone. I suppose the argument is that weak weapons force strategic play.
But they don't. I generally use a different weapon. Or I just wait around a corner and wipe out the AIs as they come to me. I don't suspect that is what the designer intended. But the designer got stuck between a rock and a hard place.
First, there's the problem of content. If fights are over too quickly, the game's over too quickly. There are only so many artists and so much time, so making the enemies stay standing is one way to keep the game's length up. Of course if it feels like I'm watering plants instead of firing a powerful weapon, the game has achieved the perfect combination of long and boring.
Second, there's the problem of risk / reward. A designer needs to make death a very real possibility for players to provide a challenge. But a designer also wants players to be in the middle of the action, with death flying in every direction to provide excitement. A few games have tried to balance these ideas by making it so the player gains power from every kill or actually needs to keep killing to stay alive. Some games are built around killing people in quick succession to increase your score. But, to my knowledge, those experiments have failed to catch on.
Not that I'm saying Devil May Cry is a failure, of course. But its system of dropping more money and health as the combo count got higher never provided me an incentive to get in the middle of a clump of enemies. I'd still focus on knocking guys away or doing air combos to isolate my targets. The only change was that as I learned to kill them faster and keep the combo going between targets, I could eventually get on a roll, which was awesome. I never got on a roll in HL2 or Halo.
Those games actively discourage uninterrupted action. In HL2 I found it most effective to always know where the nearest health boxes were so I could run to them if things got hairy. In Halo, your shield only recharges if you take no damage for ten seconds or so. Hiding behind rocks, waiting for your shield to recharge, is an integral part of the Halo experience. Does that sound like fun to you?
At least in Gears of War, I can still see over the cover I'm behind so I have something to look at. In Halo (or TimeShift or most other recharging health games) I'm usually stuck looking at radar so that I can hopefully get the drop on anyone coming around the corner and not have to start the waiting all over (or die and have to go back to the last checkpoint).
Maybe the problem is that shooters just have guns. In DMC there are guns, hand to hand, and acrobatics. Hand to hand generally sucks in first person, and acrobatics give people motion sickness. So there are just guns.
But there could be more, couldn't there? Stranger's Wrath had guns that knocked guys out or tied them up or made them throw up. SWAT 4 had its pepper spray paint balls and tasers (and flash bangs and rubber ball grenades and beanbag shotguns and riot shields and so on). Yeah, there's definitely room for improvement in FPS gameplay.
That's not to say the familiar isn't still fun. But when it makes assault rifles suck, it needs to be reevaluated. :)
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