Game Design Advance

“RPG elements” is sort of game designer’s code for “no skill required”. With the exception of World of Warcraft, most games that have players earning experience points and unlocking new abilities don’t require mastery so much as a willingness to sink the right amount of time.

In opposition to its single player campaign, which emphasizes gritty, quasi-cinematic realism, the multiplayer in Call of Duty 4 has a lot of numbers. Players get points for almost everything they do. Killing an enemy, killing an enemy while crouching, killing an enemy with a certain gun, etc. These points will then unlock new guns, attachments to guns, special abilities called ‘perks’, such as dropping a grenade as soon as you die.

All this creates a single player, meta-RPG that lies on top of the different games of Deathmatch and Capture the Flag and King of the Hill, and keeps Call of Duty 4’s multiplayer from being well made but ultimately average.

This meta-game acts as an opiate for the mass of players who will never play the game on a high level but because of the realities of sorting and matching players by skill level still have to roll with the big boys. No longer are you purely concerned with your kill to death ratio. For every person you bring down, you get just a couple of more points towards the next piece of kit that you want to try out.

The downside of this is of course that the difference between doing well and doing poorly is often having a laser sight. In the end though a skilled player will be able to overcome these types of disadvantages, and the rest of us will enjoy the consistent pleasure of playing with new toys.