In every situation, I'd always rather be able to experiment with all the weapons. It promotes creative freedom, and is just more fun. I'll try any game that follows that old school mantra, and avoid a lot of the 'realistic' stuff that shuns it.
That's why Insomniac is my favorite developer. They give you an insane arsenal of unique guns and gadgets to play with. They also find ways to promote you to use them all with enemy varied encounters and weapon leveling.
Yeah, and if you'll notice I pointed out that Insomniac does this by ensuring some weapons do or don't work against certain enemy types. Like, in Sunset Overdrive, half your guns suck against the robot enemies.
The argument that without a weapon limit players would generally stick to their favorites only holds true if the level design facilitates that behavior.
For example, a sign of a great custom WAD for Doom is tight ammo (and health) balance. They give you just enough to get through each encounter and they even change the amount with each difficulty.
Weapon limits and regenerating health in most games honestly just seem like crutches for level design to me.
Regenerating health works great if you're trying to create a movie-like experience. If you want the player to feel like they're in Black Hawk Down, then regenerating health does a great job, because it encourages you to take cover more often.
For a legit fun FPS, health kits are better since they encourage you to explore, engaging more fully with the space, and finding interesting stuff.
Min-maxing is one of the reasons I find the two-weapon limit to work in very few games; since the consequences for using something suboptimal are much worse you're mostly compelled to use the boring reliable all-rounder guns (or an all-rounder and one specialist gun). Games where you can carry more guns promote you to experiment more because the consequence for being "wrong" is much smaller as you can just switch to another weapon.
The thing is there's so many systems interplayed with it it's kind of a chicken or the egg thing though; two-weapon limit games overwhelmingly skew towards boring hitscan stuff, no enemy variety and extremely linear level design (with the removal of ammo as a prize seemingly being one cause of that). On the other hand, those issues might be more related to the general direction of the genre and not the weapon-limit mechanic itself.
In the end Halo is the only non-realism or survival FPS where I think it genuinely adds something (and most survival FPS work off an inventory system, which I think is a bit different), and that's a result of several specific design choices that most who cloned it's base systems didn't emulate in any way. Even Halo has to make sacrifices like relatively predictable enemy formations for it to work, although it still has far more enemy variety than most FPS with weapon limits.
I'll note this is from a singleplayer perspective as I think limits have more validity in multiplayer where you know exactly who your opposition are going to be, and the game doesn't have to be designed around you potentially having the "wrong" weapon. Not to mention it can heavily promote teamwork.
Yes. Even in real-life the whole point of Assault Rifles is to be an "overpowered" gun that can handle most situations. Pretty much all my favourite weapon loadouts in games either have no Assault Rifle or make the equivalent shitty so other weapons can shine.
I'll be avoiding AR-type weapons in my project. In my ideal world, they just don't exist.
I don't think hitscan/level design/etc have anything to do with two-weapon limits aside from being under the umbrella of "realism," which is a dumb thing to aim for in an FPS. Nothing to do with the weapon limit.
I'm not sure I get what you mean by sacrifices in enemy formations. You do realize those are all specifically designed, unique encounters, and that the specific makeup of level geometry and enemy types is what makes that, right? Like... that's why Halo is so great, because of its encounter design.
I think alot of having a good 2 weapon system is tied to ammo pickup balance, something that halo did particularly well since you cant really main a gun for extremely long periods of time.
Alot of games get the 10 gun arsenal wrong too though and only a couple of the guns have a use or guns become irrelevant once you have that pocket knife assault rifle, or just poorly designed enemies that offer no different strategy in how you should deal with them firepower-wise beyond hoarding a burst dmg nuke type weapon for big threats.
You're right. Ammo pickup balance is the key. Likewise, you're totally right on the gun thing. Like, in Serious Sam, why do I have two shotguns when the auto shotgun is clearly better than the not-auto shotgun and they use the same ammo type? Guns fall out of use.
That same angle can be encouraged with no weapon limit. 'Shit, i'm out\low on ammo on all guns but this one which is shit against this enemy'.
Secondly, Far Cry 2 is very unique example that isn't applicable for most weapon-limited FPS games which tend to be scripted and linear. Not a lot of games make it possible for you to start a fire that spreads out.
The existence of this mechanic or gameplay option is divorced from whether the game has weapon-limitation or doesn't. It's not like weapon limiting has allowed them to add starting out fires.
"Scripted and linear" has literally NOTHING to do with a two-weapon limit.
My entire point in bringing up FC2 was that some games take a "bad" mechanic and do it right. Yes, not many games do it well. Some do. That's down to the game design.
Not really sure this is entirely true. Hunting games and rpgs often offer not only a choice of weapons, sometimes a dozen or more, but also huge amounts more options for skills, magic, tactics and equipment to deal with the situation than a shooter might offer. Zelda asks you to defeat a boss using a specific item, but that isn't really representative of all other genres of action-based games.
Yeah, but RPGs tend to just plain suck at combat, often having the same skill reskinned in multiple ways. You and I might have different builds, but our playstyle is likely to be the same.
In a shooter, if I have a shotgun and you have a sniper rifle, we are going to tackle the same encounter very differently. The RPG might have "more stuff," but the FPS tends to be better at "more specific roles."
Why's it always two anyway? Why not three?
Bioshock Infinite would have benefited greatly if, while still insisting on limited weapon slots, they had a third one exclusively for explosives, because you NEEDED explosives.
To the original question, yes they can be good. Halo's fun.
Gears has 3. Bioshock Infnite needed more. I think most people do it because of the simple tap-to-switch. Even Destiny has tap to switch or hold for heavies.
Done right: Uncharted games.
Why? Because situational weapons are always littered around where needed, and variety is handy throughout most areas. Also useful is that ammo requirments have you looking to switch often. The whole thing matches the adventurous tone of the games.
Done wrong: most games.
Why? Because what usually ends up happening is that favourites develop early and most of the time, if the game is adequately challenging, branching out feels like an un-fun risk.
Games are unrealistic anyway, why focus on this element? Besides, isn't it limiting from a gameplay perspective anyway, when designing scenarios? Isn't it better to start knowing exactly what weapons all players will be carrying?
There are some other games where I manage to enjoy limitations, but usually when there is a twist. For example, I think TLOU strikes a genius balance with the backpack.
Also, as a side note, someone mentioned Resistance and the two weapon limit in 2 vs 1's weapon wheel is just one of the many things I hated about 2.
Uncharted's weapons aren't differentiated enough to be interesting, so most of the encounters come off as half-baked. The "best" encounters in that game routinely quoted to me are largely "sit still and shoot at guys while they charge you" moments. Or the train.
I already pointed out how Resistance uses enemy variation to ensure that you're still limited, albeit in a different way.
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