Would Call of Duty be better as a rail shooter?

[J T]

I was thinking about this after the recent thread about Operation Wolf style games played with a controller.

Those games don't have you navigating environments, they instead have you focus on the shooting while the environment changes around you. Call of Duty (in its modern form) and other "corridor shooters" practically do the same thing. Character movement isn't really important, except for dodging fire and taking cover. Older shooters like Doom and Wolfenstein required you to work your way through a maze while gunning for your life and searching for ammo and delicious dog food. In Call of Duty-style games, you don't eat dogfood to heal and get better, you just have a sit behind a rock until you're magically unaffected by the 30 bullets lodged in your chest. There is really no gameplay benefit to exploring the world around you.

As these modern shooters strip away the need for finding health upgrades and the need to find your way through a maze, why not just eliminate movement entirely and put the whole thing on rails like Operation Wolf in 3D? They want things to be cinematic, and what better way to do that than to completely take over control of the player's attention and to throw as much crazy stuff into their field of view as possible. It might sound like I'm making fun of Call of Duty, and I am a little bit, but I'm quite serious. I think a really well planned story told by means of a rail shooter could work. If the gunplay is made fun, and you don't need to find hidden health packs and ammo, then there's no reason to have you walk through a half-assed maze. You could maybe even make it 3rd person like Nam 1975, but with modern 3D graphics. That would allow you to still have the gameplay element of dodging bullets and seeking cover as it scrolls its way through a scripted sequence of events. The linear rail could then take you through whatever kinds of exciting environments they want: deep in a cave, running on rail cars, shooting out the side of a chopper, car chases, foot chases, skydiving, etc. Am I crazy, or does this seem like the logical next step?

[AppleQueso]

I'd find it really amusing if modern FPS games actually turned into rail shooters, I don't know why.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

I don't think it would be better off.

See, as little control as you're actually given in CoD, you still have the illusion of control. Take that control away from the player, they likely wont bother.

[AppleQueso]

I think the issue might be the fact that you're putting a lot of focus on the single player aspect of these games, when the entire main draw for most is the multiplayer.

You can't really have deathmatches in a rail shooter.

[J T]

I don't think it would be better off.

See, as little control as you're actually given in CoD, you still have the illusion of control. Take that control away from the player, they likely wont bother.

When I play these games though, I think the illusion of control is continually being broken. I want to explore, but I can't. There's either nowhere to go outside of the corridor I'm being herded through, or I know if I stop and look around without pushing forward, then I'll just get shot. I feel constrained when I play a corridor shooter because they give you control of your character, but the enivornments make that control pointless.

A rail shooter somehow seems more honest about things. They want me to see a scripted sequence and I see everything they had planned for me, which means they never have to worry about me missing the awesome nuclear explosion beyond the mountain top because I was too busy pointing my gun at my shoes. As long as the gunplay is still good as gravy, then it could still be a fun game.

[J T]

You can't really have deathmatches in a rail shooter.

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!

Imagine two player rail sequences where each person sees the action from a different vantage point. One person is in the leading car, the other in the car behind. Create enough strategic gameplay that can occur on one screen (basically like a single screen old school arcade game), but make the background scenery flow along. You could even have random placed items that appear that allow more movement, like passing cars that you have to jump to in order to get another clip for your hand gun.

You're right that it would feel wildly different from the current multiplayer of the COD series though, and since much of their popluarity comes from a bunch of dudes sitting around the TV and shooting each other in the head, it might be hard to explore the same depth of skilled gameplay in a rail shooter that an FPS deathmatch can currently provide.

[Luke]

Not one bit.

Finding cover, knowing when to exit, knowing when to confront fire head on are all a part of making the moh and cod series feel "real".

To boot, "finding that spot" is tough in itself and a challenge to keep. Your own direction of the camera is essential as well. These games aren't "shoot here, then shoot here", who you shoot and when you shoot all are factors on how you proceed in the game.

[J T]

The real difference between a rail shooter and an FPS is that with a rail shooter, your environment is pre-determined and you have control over your aiming reticule, while in an FPS your aiming reticule is fixed to the center of the screen, but you can control the aspect of the environment you look at. It's like the difference between pointing at something with a mouse on a computer, or sliding around the background like an old microfilm setup. Either way, the basics of the gameplay is that you point at something and click to shoot it.

We've found lots of ways to make the FPS version more interesting though, and there hasn't been as much development of the rail shooter. One of the things that made games like CoD and Gears of War famous though is that they allowed you to find cover. This idea is more rooted in Time Crisis (a rail shooter) than it is in Doom (an FPS). If FPS games can incorporate ideas from rail shooters, I don't see why rail shooters couldn't steal some ideas from FPS games.

For example, if you had a moving character running through an on-rails enivironment, you could still have the rush of dashing from cover to cover, or of gaining better positioning for a better shot. You could even amp up the realism. The scrolling environmental background could be pre-rendered or even film footage of the world you see. If you mapped on some polygonal frames to the video, it would allow for the false impression that your character is actually running around in that environment by blending film footage with 3D animation (sort of like a Roger Rabbit of the gaming world, or an updated version of Astron's Belt). This would allow for more strategic shooting that takes advantage of the passing bits of cover and powerups that scroll by on the rails.

What I like about this idea is that it brings back the importance of single screen gameplay. This was actually something that I really liked about Gears of War too. In my opinion, Gears of War is just Space Invaders made 3D with some clever design ideas. Most of the gameplay takes place from one vantage point of a room. You have a bunch of enemies approaching, you have cover to hide behind and take shots at them, and they become more dangerous as they advance, so you have to fend off the hoardes. Almost every vertical shmup out there is just Galaga with a scrolling background. What they have done to make things interesting is that what scrolls in becomes important for the gameplay and they've really amped up the challenge of what happens on screen as you move your pixels around to dodge and destroy other pixels. The rail shooter could develop similarly to the shmup. I think the rail shooter is an under-developed genre that could still accomplish a lot within a single screen as you scroll through 3D environments.

[CD AGES]

Now thats an interesting thought. Maybe Activision should contact RAW THRILLS about developing an arcade version (i'm thinking Ghost Squad style), much like how they did with Guitar Hero

[Menegrothx]

Publish it as an arcade exclusive and you'll see a revival of the arcades