test journal

All online FPS games begin the same way, by spawning. From Quake to RTCW to CoD there is that same common element, a fundamental and obviously unavoidable feature of the genre. Of course the spawn systems differ, in fact I was careful to choose examples that showcased the three main different spawn implementations that we see in competitive games regularly.

What spawning often comes down to is RNG (random number generation), a term that those fond of MMORPGs are more likely to be familiar with than the casual FPS player. RNG is not dismissable, there is not an alternative, yet it poses quite the dilemma for the competitive gamer. Surely the most skilled game would be one that is least reliant on RNG, there are no coin flips in Chess, nobody rolls a dice in Football[1], you'd rather the fate of the game be entirely in the hands of the players without an uncontrollable random number influencing the outcome.

Quake as a traditional deathmatch game throws both players into the arena in completely random spawns. This can be rather devastating, on some maps getting a bad spawn can net your opponent mega, a stack of armor and weaponry uncontested. However much lead you may have though it is likely the control will go back and forth in the course of the map and as such the initial spawns do not cause that much issue, although they can be rather demotivating. Respawns in Quake are rather predictable. Both players will know roughly where the next spawn will be judging by where the frag was made and therefore the respawns can be controlled. This makes for a fair and balanced gameplay mechanic which does not ruin games.

CoD is pretty much the polar opposite of a traditional deathmatch game, on the surface the Search & Destroy gametype seems to make spawns completely non-random and irrelevant but this isn't quite true. There are typically many individual spawnpoints in a teams spawn in S&D games and where each player spawns is entirely random. It is possible that the majority of your players spawn at the back end of your spawn and that the enemy has the majority of their players spawn at the very forward spawns, or your SMGs spawn at the back meaning they are essentially blocked and unable to rush. In a game like CoD4 stuff like this hugely influences whether you will win or lose a round and it is hardly a fair system merely because it IS entirely random. CoD/S&D gameplay does offer a decent solution however the actual spawn system is not it; the round system is. Yes their is a spawn dilemma but a bad spawn setup will only affect that one round. Considering a map is played out over 24 rounds the influence this has overall on the game is infinitesmall.

Timing is very important in the both S&D and traditional deathmatch games, but you could certainly argue that it influences the flow of the game much more in objective based games such as ET. There are two very important numbers which competant players will always have in their minds, their own spawntime and the enemy spawntime. These two numbers should influence pretty much every decision a player or team makes during the course of a round.

This creates various problems for those who want to limit how much RNG influences gameplay. The spawntimes are random which means it is entirely possible to get "good" or advantageous spawntimes aswell as obviously "bad"/disadvantageous spawntimes. This problem can be overdramaticised; I do not believe that this makes attacking impossible, but in particularly unlucky cases on certain stages it can render 2 of your 3 attacking spawns almost useless. The argument could be made then that it requires more teamwork or more skill to work around and use this to your advantage but I disagree. In the current 5on5 metagame completing a stage 1-2 spawns later than you could have can essentially lose you the map.

This leads us on to a second issue, that the spawntimes randomly generated by the server at the beginning of the round are fixed until the end of the round. The standard 20/30 spawntime means that the pattern never changes, the entire round is played out with the same time between spawns repeated every minute. This not only means that a "bad" spawntime sticks with you until the end of the round but also on a general level only makes the round more stale and repetitive. Innovation is something we are starting to see far less of in ET and the move to 5on5 has only exacerbated things. 5on5 is definitely here to stay by this point, so where should we look to bring back that creativity, that flair... are there things we can change to spice up the meta-game and perhaps add some more variety?