Back when video gaming was in its infancy, at the dawn of the First-Person Shooter, game characters were near-invulnerable one-man armies, who would cheerfully walk through a hail of bullets while dispatching a vast array of adversaries who distinctly lacked Artificial Intelligence.
Today, however, games have by and large moved to altogether more realistic territory, at least in terms of the damage the hero can take, and more and more often modern games seem to send the player scurrying for cover.
Cover-Based Shooters have their roots in both the third-person shooter, established with luminary games like ‘Tomb Raider‘, but also in tactical shooters like ‘Rainbow Six‘. ‘Rainbow Six’ practically introduced to gaming the concept that it was possible to die after being shot only once, and encouraged players to plan more tactically and seek shelter from enemies. Cover was also a constant concern in ‘sneak-em-up’ games like ‘Metal Gear Solid‘ and ‘Splinter Cell’, but there didn’t tend to be that much shooting going on in those games – cover was mostly for hiding behind. Then ‘Gears of War’ came along and changed everything.
Gears of War
The first success of a true third-person cover-based shooter was Epic’s 2006 XBox 360 smash-hit ‘Gears of War‘ – one of the first games (certainly the first on the next-generation format) to have a specific button for moving in and out of cover. Although the format was inspired by ‘Kill.Switch‘, a 2003 XBox game, taking refuge from enemy fire behind anything and everything possible was a relatively new concept to many console gamers, which goes some way to explaining the success of the game, and its sequel ‘Gears of War 2′.
Success tends to breed success, particularly in an industry like video gaming – the development cycle of major games is so long and expensive that publishers often only back an idea when it’s either truly ground-breaking, or (more often) following a winning formula. Bioware’s 2007 effort ‘Mass Effect‘, and its 2010 sequel, ‘Mass Effect 2′, were mainly famed for their epic, galaxy-spanning space opera story arc, but the combat dynamic of the games is steeped in the third-person cover-based system.
Grand Theft Auto IV
Now, it seems like every big game that rolls off the development line has a cover system; ‘Grand Theft Auto IV’, for example, the latest game in the wildly popular car-jacking franchise, heavily incorporates the use of cover into its combat mechanics. ‘Grand Theft Auto III’ saw the series move into the 3D world, and IV – famed as a game aiming for a more realistic approach, while retaining the carefree sandbox element – has kept moving forward by stepping into the shelter of the cover-based bandwagon.
Even the latest installment of the Harry Potter series, Part One of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’, has taken on the air of a cover-based shooter, as the player guides the bespectacled boy wizard from barrel to pillar, blasting away at Death Eaters with an array of increasingly gun-like spells. Popular gaming website Kotaku points out the inclusion of a “machine-gun spell”, in a game fast becoming known as ‘Gears of Wand’.
Harry Potter is not the only film tie-in game getting in on the cover-based party, however; the latest game (and indeed film) in the James Bond 007 series, ‘Quantum of Solace‘, echoed the attempts of recent Bond films to move in a more realistic direction, and heavily employed a cover-based combat mechanic. Perhaps it’s cynical to accuse movie tie-in games of simply copying the most popular game style of the time for a quick cash-in, although probably only as cynical as the move tie-in game genre itself – regardless, it’s a testament to the popularity of this particular game style.
Once a relatively minor side-note in the annals of gaming history, the third-person cover-based shooter (‘TPCBS’? Not quite as snappy as FPS…) has established itself as a major part of modern gaming, as is evidenced by the huge success of the games employing this particular combat system. Gears of War and Gears of War 2 may have started the bandwagon, but the Mass Effect games and Grand Theft Auto IV have also done their bit to advance the reputation of the style, and the fact that it’s even being used in film tie-in games like ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Quantum of Solace’ speaks volumes.
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