The two shooters I've played in this generation are the Battlefield series and Uncharted series. What I've seen over the years is that the former has become more and more like CoD, where you have bullets do more damage and players have less health, resulting in essentially insta-kills. For Uncharted 3 (the beta was perfect), I felt like it took longer to kill in the game than Uncharted 2 and I ended up enjoying UC3's multiplayer over UC2's (along with other reasons).

So I wanted to know what the general opinion is. Do people really enjoy the low TTK you see in Call of Duty? It must be, since the series sells so ridiculously well and every major shooter (BF, KZ3, etc) have been converging more and more towards CoD.

I personally like high TTK. You can achieve this either through high recoil or high health/low damage (I like the latter better), and what it does for me is it really makes positioning more important and really adds life to the map. You can actually get to cover, and it's more about out maneuvering your oponent rather than who was lucky enough to get the first shot (and who has the connection advantage).

BC1 had high TTK, and it's destructible environments REALLY complemented it. You have enough health to get to cover, but you were never safe because the enemy could blow the cover up. And this just add a huge dimension to the map and cover.

Uncharted 3 has high TTK, and it really compliments its vertical gameplay too. You could never really have jumping and climbing work out well if you can get shot to death instantly.

Wait, Uncharted is a shooter?! Woh! I really missed something there.

Funny?

What's funny? I seriously thought Uncharted was an Adventure Game.

Low time to kill of Call of Duty by far. Halo took me early on for online multiplayer in Halo 2, but after playing COD I have never liked long time to kill nearly as much.

I think it is more realistic forces you to be less reckless and watch your and partners back more while also being more realistic to real combat. Still I love variety and think Uncharted 3 does it right as well as Halo, but I never liked Battlefield at all as a military shooter.

Good for you. Was it necessary to post your discovery on this thread? You're clogging it up.

Realism doesn't mean good though. And Call of Duty and "realistic" just don't go together. Pulling out a knife from your body and throwing it? It's a Michael Bay movie on crack.

As for watching your partner's back, in reality this doesn't work out well. You'll just instakill both you and your partner who are clustered together. In fact, grouping together was less effective in BF3 than Bad Company because of the low TTK. Your partner has very little time to respond, and it's more about who gets the first jump than your HP level.

If it was a high TTK, you and the first guy will first shoot. Let's just assume you come out with 50% HP. Then the partner and you get in a fire fight, and you end up dying. In a high TTK situation, you can't just run and gun against a group of enemies. You either have to get a good position on them, and/or aim reallly well for the head. In a low TTK game, you can just spray the body and wipe out everyone.

Fair enough concerning realism as no game can do it all right, they are games after all. But I can gurantee if in real war you come under fire from enemy forces from behind and no one is there to defend the squad will be eliminated. In Battlefield this surely creates a little more team work because you can more easily defend. I am just saying it creates more of a thrill to me knowing if you are not constantly alert that you will be knocked out of the match.

The knife thing is probably just so people do not get involved in long hand-to hand combat because otherwise it would be easy for players to get free kills from a distance.

Now do not take my response as an all out attack on battlefield as I only played the last two betas and did not like them. I could if I gave the time as I love online shooters. My main reason I like quick to kill is I play 80% deathmatch/free for all because it is just that much more intense to me. Battlefield does not even have this while Halo , uncharted 3 and many others do.

Overall, I would say there are more long time to kill shooters than stort time: Killzone, resistance, uncharted, battlefield, Halo, MAG, just to name a few. In fact, I think there are a lot less short to kill shooters, but COD remains the most popular so it could appear there are more multiplayer shooters like it.

Lol Battlefield is shit now, so I don't really care.

As for tension, I really don't find a lot of tension with low TTK. I can understand how people who really care about the K/D ratio may feel that way, but dying just feels inevitable and cheap in a low TTK game. You can avoid dying, but that means just camping, moving really slowly through the objective, ugh.

I felt a lot more tension in Bad Company 1, because you HAVE a chance of survival. You can actually get to cover. And what adds even more to the tension is that although you have the possibility of surviving, you also have a high possibility of dying once you're in cover. The enemy is probably prepping their grenade launcher right now, and so you're dashing through the building you get into. Add the intense sound effects Battlefield is famous for, and it's just thrilling when you're running and you hear an explosion behind you and you're now thinking about how to outflank your pursuer.

So to sum it up:

1) You need a chance to survive in order to have tension or good gun fight

2) You also need a way to take advantage of the map and positioning. You can do this by creating open maps with lots of diversity, and add niches like destructible environments (Battlefield) or vertical gameplay (Uncharted). Otherwise, you have a pretty boring FPS game still, where you can really only charge forward and throw grenades back and forth (Killzone).

Battlefield could greatly benefit from a higher time to kill. It's one thing when you have a low ttk game like COD where you're playing on small confined maps and the respawn time is just a couple of seconds, but when you spend a couple minutes trying to get back into the action just to get killed by a couple of shots by some guy you couldn't even see, that takes away a good chunk of enjoyment from the game.

Halo on the other hand not only could use a lower ttk rate, but a bit faster pace as well. It's almost painful going back to the sluggish pace of Halo games after spending any amount of time with COD.