Games that do sniping right

Good sniping

There are two and only two popular games that have done sniping correctly. The first is Enemy Territory. Snipers are inherently limited by number because they are a class. Moreover, the weapons aren’t one-shot kills, it almost always takes at least two to take your opponent down, and your opponents move fast enough to be difficult to hit. Battlefield 1942 keeps the effectiveness of snipers down because they are actually vulnerable, not just in theory. The wide, open spaces expose a sniper and give his foes many ways to move around him. That still doesn’t prevent one third of the players on each team from thinking they’re SFC ‘Hoot’ Gibson (Eric Bana) from Black Hawn Down or Pvt. Daniel Jackson (Barry Pepper) from Saving Private Ryan. But you may just be fruity enough to be the film version of Vasily Zaitsev.

So what makes snipers balanced in these two games? Well, besides the fact that they can’t rack up sick kill ratios without any apparent skill, the most important thing is that they don’t disturb the flow of the game. Unlike Call of Duty or Counter-Strike, the game doesn’t stop to wait for the snipers to duel it out, or the smart players don’t have to wait for the dumb ones to rush out to die in the first, lethal barrage. Nobody is afraid of the snipers – they’re not going to take your one and only life, and even if BF1942 and Enemy Territory were limited to one life, the snipers just aren’t enough of a threat to worry about. You won’t die a useless death.

Is the solution to nerf the sniper rifle, like in CS? No. Matches are still slow – probably slower than before, actually. Now I know I’m going to get a flood of posts on the forums telling me I want Quake – that’s BS. I play Call of Duty because it’s fun, because I enjoy the style – and because I can find servers without sniper rifles.

Is the solution to limit the number of scopes? No. It may work for competition, but on a public server it means 2 or 4 people are gods and the rest chumps. Yes, the game flows better but it’s not worth pissing off the rest of the server to make one guy on each side look good.

So, I dare anyone – snipers, people who hate snipers, and those who snipe to maintain a respectable kill ratio – to find yourselves a server with scopes disabled and play. You’ll be amazed at how much faster and more exciting the game is, at how useful even the basic rifles are (and how well you can snipe with them, without slowing the game down.) Suddenly, craptastic maps like hurtgen and to some extent rocket become playable. You can rush, you can actually put pressure on the riflemen, because as good as the unscoped rifles are – and they’re damn good – they’re not the Finger of God and it’s actually possible to make it across the map.

And that’s the whole point. Everyone who says that snipers are balanced because they’re weak up close is wrong. Get enough snipers on a team in CS or CoD, and rushing is suicide for 80% of the people trying to do so. Almost anyone who moves, dies. The routes are too predictable, there are too many scopes, and too few rushers because half the attacking team snipes back.

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