Games like Verdun and Red Orchestra 2 have set perfect examples for what realism in shooters can be. Of course this style of game play is by no means for everyone, no one enjoys waiting sixty seconds for spawns or listening to teammates throwing out orders. Understandably, it is not for everyone, however, this style of a game is engineered beautifully and with much greatness.

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad

There are plenty of shooters on the market now, with a wide variety of game-play mechanics. Spawn times and locations make all the difference in how multiplayer games are played. With Call of Duty players, they go running into battle with very little worries, shooting at everything, like Rambo. Why? Mainly because if they get killed, they respawn instantly, there are little to no consequences other than the K/D ratio getting bumped down a tad. At the other end of the spawn spectrum, there are games like CSGO where, according to the most competitive and popular modes, the player is killed and does not respawn until next round. It makes the matches infinitely more competitive since players do not have the luxury of extra lives, forcing them to play with caution and creates a more intense game.

A drastic example of a game that utilizes spawns and spawn times is Red Orchestra. When you kill an enemy, it effectively feels like it is a true accomplishment. The reason for this is the spawn time, which can take roughly a minute and spawns the player back at his base, which usually is quite far from the combat zone. This style of spawning effectively takes down massive instantaneous reinforcements from coming from anywhere from anyone. As well, because of this spawn system, players are much more cautious and make smarter decisions, of course depending on the player.

However, just as important as spawn times are spawning locations. AAA games like Call of Duty and Battlefield both do pretty good jobs when it comes to minimizing spawn kills. However games Star Wars: Battlefront have made poor efforts at creating fair spawns where teams are balanced and there is a limitation at spawn killing. Especially with the beta for this game, people were getting camped on during crucial matches in the Walker Assault mode. Players on the Imperial side used jet packs to seize vantage points that could see all of the Rebels’ spawns. As if having the high ground was bad enough, the Imperials could hide behind cover and rocks, they could throw grenades from cover and take down clueless players that are not even aware of the situation they are in. This is not new information by any means, the awful spawns in battlefront have been a hot topic all throughout the game, what needs to be known however is that issues like this must be fixed before they get swept under the rug and are left for the players to fend for themselves.

Back with some of the older Battlefield games there was no teammate spawning. You could only spawn on captured objectives. That was a very effective way to play because those who held out at the objective, had the upper hand since reinforcements could spawn at their objective, as opposed to the attackers. It was a thrilling experience that create very tense moments that seem to have been lost over the years with a lot of current shooters.

Battlefield Cinematic

When you spawn, is just as important as what you spawn with, Verdun and Red Orchestra and perfect examples of how the weapons given to the player change the game. Freedom in games is a great thing, freedom of where to spawn, freedom of when to spawn, and freedom of what guns to use are all important for more casual games. With Verdun however, there is a limit to what special weapons can be used (machine guns, sniper rifles, etc.) which of course makes it much, much harder to always play the kind of soldier you want to be, but it does create a kind of order in the game. Suddenly there are not infinite amounts of players sniping eachother across the map or every player getting gunned down immediately with machine guns. Players and their teams are automatically balanced.

Of course, games like Red Orchestra and Verdun give the players much more unforgiving environments and lower health levels, meaning that it would be much more difficult to really make a change in more of the modern shooters. The reason for this is the obvious fact that most players had semi automatic or bolt action rifles that could not fire 800 rounds a minute. This is why limited choices of weapons works better in historical games, because the weaponry available was not as dangerous or could put out the vast amount of bullets that modern weaponry can do. That shows that how what the player gets at the spawn with, where the player gets to spawn, and when the player gets to spawn, change the gameplay drastically for all the players.