Celia Alexis Wagar's CritPoints

What elements of fighting games do you think could work in shooters?

Okay, I have a lot of these ideas actually.

For one, the round structure. You could have a 1v1 fight with life refills for both players when one of them dies. Reset the match. I think Quake Live had a mode that worked like this actually.

Supers are an obvious one that Overwatch implemented (the ults both charge up over time and as you deal damage or healing to other players).

A more nuanced idea is having projectiles that disappear if one player is hit. Not only does this actually appear in some fighting games, but it would help FPS games emulate the rock/paper/scissors nature of fighting games. Currently FPS games are all about trading hits and trying to hit your opponent more consistently with a higher DPS weapon from a position of advantage. You kill your opponent if you can DPS more efficiently rather than necessarily counter their actions. A big part of the reason the same doesn’t happen in fighting games is the way hitstun interrupts attacks during startup. So imagine faster/slower shots, shorter/longer ranges, shot startup time, blocking, reasons to not shoot constantly.

Bigger projectiles, shooting large swaths of projectiles, and having them move slower. The idea here is space control, denying space to your opponent by laying down the fire. Slow projectiles are a big deal in fighting games because you can operate alongside them. They can serve this same role on FPS games. They need to be bigger because FPS characters have a wider space to move across. Having a wave of projectiles, grouped together like a larger projectile, could avoid the problem of the whole thing fizzling on touching a wall. The projectiles in one shot could be programmed to all disappear when hitting a player, and individually disappear on hitting environment geometry.

Using more buttons on the mouse. Currently FPS games get attack variety in by separating out the attacks among a bunch of weapons that the player switches between. This is slow, this is clumsy. Unless mapped efficiently, across relatively few keys, players can’t switch weapons very efficiently without sacrificing access to the movement keys for a few seconds. Basically, make less weapons, give them more diverse functions, map them to more buttons on the mouse. A gaming mouse has like 5 buttons on it. That’s plenty. 2 is too few. You might lose some people due to not owning a gaming mouse, but you can double bind those functions to the keyboard. On that note, the number of keys used should probably be reduced. You can get more functionalities out of the mouse buttons by having charge functions and tap versus press functions too.

Juggle Combos. These can get really dynamic in some fighting games. They can work off projectiles exclusively with some characters.

Projectile variety. Fighting games have amazing projectile variety. There’s no FPS projectile as versatile as Link’s Bombs in Melee in any FPS game. Part of it is also the way the 2d space constrains movement and keeps it clear what’s going on