Why the sound of a gun had to be nerfed in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

Buchman wolfenstein enemy territory was first being worked on in the early 2000s is developer a British video called Splash Damage when a closed beta test with just a handful of players this group would offer feedback on all sorts of just aspects of the game from the map design to the respawn timer to the weird grenade physics it allowed some players to chuck them around corners in a way they really shouldn't have been able to however perhaps the single most peculiar response that Splash Damage received from this group of players was that the Allies Thompson submachine gun was considerably better than the axis equivalent the mp40 the general consensus was that if you had a Thompson it was slower but harder hitting and if you have an mp40 it was faster but it was weaker the Thompson was sort of like this more boxy smaller it sort of had like us I don't know a sturdier kind of feel to it you'd use it until you couldn't then begrudgingly get the mp40 just because at least think of Blair Gaines there are more of them in that Coach carried over games but the thing is enemy territory just like loads of the objective team shooters was designed in a way that should have made this impossible not unlikely but impossible because yes the game may have had you playing as an axis soldier using axis weaponry and have you competing against a team of Allied soldiers using Allied weaponry but that difference was only ever a surface level thing the guns for the sake of balance had the exact same stats the m1 garand mirrored the karabiner 98k the colt was identical to the Luger and the Thompson was no different to the mp40 so why were players saying something else what gone wrong here I put those questions to Ed Stern now the lead writer for swash damaged although if you're familiar with the credits for enemy territory perhaps you knew him better as Edie Bunga Boyce turn instead he told me that to begin with the team assumed this was just a mistake they could open up the config files for both weapons and see that numerically players were essentially comparing the exact same gun they're identical absolutely the same damage rate of fire reload speed clip size absolutely the same the players are wrong this is this is bad feedback and then we look at the server data and players are getting more kills with the Thompson than the mp40 the players are right how what what's going on here and the one thing we trace it to is the Thompson had Basya audio it just sounded more powerful so players felt more powerful they felt more confident with it they went from where head shots they got more head shots they got more kills the players were right so the fix for it was to change the audio not the weapon we we just put there Spacey audio on it and they felt more similar and you know that's solved the problem it may not have been a perfect fix I should point out as some W et players believe even to this day that the Thompson is in fact the superior SMG but either way I think it's a really interesting problem for a game developer to try and tackle it's the game design equivalent to that time ron weasley figured he being slipped a lucky potion before his big Quidditch match and then played an absolutely blinder in front of the Gryffindor hoops now if you were tasked with trying to balance the game of Quidditch right then and there and you were to ask one for some feedback mid-game he's gonna tell you listen hands up I've nicked off a Felix Felicia's here and that's probably why I'm playing so well that's your problem that's the thing that needs fixing if I wouldn't actually be the case would it really you'd be looking at some kind of placebo doping sandal here and you'd probably want to at least suspend Harry Potter from Hogwarts why he conducted an investigation probably Hermione as well I mean she knew about it she might not be an happy that was happening but she didn't exactly grass them up either did she hang on what was I talking about the point I'm making is this the discussions between players and developers about what's wrong with a game or even what's right can be way less straightforward than we'd like to think is what game designer I drew and young describes as evil data here's him talking about the concept at GDC just a couple years ago so evil data is play testing results that are distracting that are unclear or that are misleading and in turn that may lead to you guessing what to do it may lead to a worse game it may lead to a less unique game longer development time and you know many other bad scenarios by some really fantastic examples of this like when that game company was doing some early tests for journey again about exploring game fast desert landscape and occasionally meeting other players although importantly as you'll know if you played it you can never speak to these people or type messages or anything so direct now the team had considered including friend invites at one point during development and incredibly some of the feedback they receive suggested allowing proper voice chat integration because players wanted to be able to talk to the friends they'd been chosen to play with that's somewhat understandable right players could see each other there jumping around the helping one over for the environments why not also offer the option to allow them to talk as they play well because in the words of creative director Genova Chan Journey is a game about strangers it's more unique if you don't know how old they are who they are and you just look at them as a pure human being the problem wasn't the lack of voice chat then it was that players knew who they were playing with and so that's what they changed there's another fascinating story from the world of warcraft beta about how players hated a system known as fatigue XP which meant the longer you played the less experience you'd eventually receive for defeating enemies to get rid of that fatigue you need to find it in and then just log off for a while the idea being Blizzard wanted a way to discourage players from staying online for too long without taking a break and while Beth feedback was simple get rid of it just like with Wolfenstein SMGs there seemed like an obvious solution to the problem it just needed fixing but instead of reacting to that initial response the team at Blizzard took a step back and realized that the problem wasn't necessarily the system itself but the framing of that system and so they flipped it on its head they patched the game so that players would receive bonus XP when defeating enemies if they'd recently logged off while at and in the actual numbers here didn't end up being much different but rather than discouraging players from over playing they managed to encourage players to regular log off instead that did the trick the complaints for the system largely disappeared with that patch this back and forth over feedback can be an art form in and of itself yes sometimes you need to just make the gun less powerful but other times you'll need to filter that good data from the evil beta as agile and young might say but it's got to be a difficult line to walk I'm sure a splash damages Ed Stern what the team had learnt from tweaking the Thompsons sound effect all those years ago and how it applies to the development process now and how they interpret player feedback I think it has had a big influence on us kind of institutionally because I think we went into it with a very determinist algebraic mindset of this therefore that if that then this then player does this therefore we change that and the end result is this and the more we've done it there will we've realized that people are not data-driven in the same way that code is that people's reactions are human and emotional and they're the result of lots of things not all of which they are aware of and the kind of rule of thumb with this which is a bit of a cliche is that players are hardly ever wrong about how they feel but they're usually wrong about why that is I think that's sort of [ __ ] I think I think that's there were a really big simplification but it's not always wrong like definitely you get oh it's definitely like this it's because of that I'm like no well that's there is that's the resultant vector of loads of different things changing the music in combat changing the ambience the way the the the footfall audio works changes people's perceptions of what the weapon damages are because it changes what's the way of putting it the adjectives and adverbs change the verbs in the game like the whole feel of it is made of so many different elements and people as with cinema tend to downplay the audio side of things actually audio is a fantastic persuader and it has a really massive impact sometimes greater than the impact of actually changing the stats on the weapons so we had thought though isn't it to think that two weapons with identical stats can feel so different in a player's hands just because of the way they look or the way they sound I mean I say that but I don't think you find me falling for something so trivial [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well that was a daft way to end a video hopefully the right kind of deft will see what the comments have to say we are a serious video game journalism outlet here at people make games please don't forget that and you know else we take seriously internet security thanks to dashlane for sponsoring this month's episode Vaseline is an app for iPhone Android Mac or PC that's designed to keep you safe from the internet while simultaneously handling a bunch of stuff that you probably find quite tedious like for example now that steam doesn't have quite the same monopoly over the PC gaming market you may be gonna want a couple of new passwords because hey you're a responsible internet user who doesn't still use the same password that you came up with in high school right - lien lets you create passwords that look like this and then you can 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Channel: People Make Games

Views: 711,215

Rating: 4.9341993 out of 5

Keywords: Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, wolfenstein enemy territory gameplay pc, wolfenstein enemy territory 2019, wolfenstein enemy territory multiplayer, wolfenstein enemy territory montage, wolfenstein enemy territory Thompson, wolfenstein enemy territory MP40

Id: RDxiuHdR_T4

Length: 12min 18sec (738 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/megaapple]

"Players are hardly wrong about how they feel, but are usually wrong about why that is."

Pretty much hit the nail with it. The Mass Effect story (QA complained guns were weak, they "beefed up" the sound effect, QA felt fantastic) and that World of Warcraft story are such a good examples.

This behavioral design thing is such a great area to explore.

[u/Vodiodoh]

Reminds me of gears of war. In later games they beefed up the sound to make them sound more powerful. Also, they made the guns sound like how they operate.

Hearing the weapon made me understand how it worked.

[u/emohipster]

I played so much W:ET back in the day. I was straight up addicted, playing up to 10 hours a day as a kid. The sound in this game was so good, haven't played a game yet that made me feel the same way.

One thing about the Thompson vs MP40 in this game was, that whatever team you were on, the other team had the other gun. And both guns really sounded completely different. The Thompson had a lower, thumpy kind of sound while the MP40 has a sharper sound. So my main thing to do was to swap my Thompson for a MP40 or vice versa ASAP. If you played with people who play a lot like I did and used the sounds to their advantage, it really threw them off for a second because they were hearing something that normally shouldn't damage them, so if your first few shots missed, they wouldn't be alarmed until you started hitting them.

[u/frankxanders]

Very cool!

I work in the audio space and a passion project I'm currently working on has a lot of fictional firearms. This video gave me some neat stuff to think about.

[u/pandeomonia]

In a 12 minute video I wish they would have spent more than 7 seconds playing the audio from the gun(s) in question

[u/BallisticBurrito]

Puny sounding guns in games are a major turnoff. I recall watching videos on Anthem and thinking "wow, these sound like total weak garbage".

[u/Klepto666]

"The enemy is weekend!"

The amount of hours I've lost to playing ET... anyway, there's a few points that weren't touched on why the notion may have continued past play testing.

First, the SMGs in RTCW single-player (I hadn't played multiplayer) DID have different stats. The Thompson did 8 damage with a 30-round mag, the Mp40 did 6 damage with a 32-round mag. People jumping from RTCW to ET is going to leave false preconceptions. In truth, vanilla ET SMGs do 18 dmg body/50 dmg head. Speaking of vanilla...

Second, servers quickly got server-mods that added a lot of functionality and customization. ETPro, ETPub, No Quarter, etc. How prevalent were these mods? Well, let me put it this way: almost every gameplay clip in this video was on at least one modded server. These mods could change the functionality and bring back those changes: some servers would have a higher damage thompson and a higher mag-capacity mp40. You couldn't be sure if your Garand could reload in mid-clip, or if you had to waste the remaining bullets, until you made sure what that server had going. Could you double jump? Could you poison enemies with your revive needle? Etc.

It's no surprise that, years later, I'd still occasionally see players wanting to switch teams to Allies just for the Thompson, and NOT because they wanted to be on Offense for that map.

[u/SemenVillage]

How did they make the Kar98k identical to the M1 Garand? Did they make the Kar98k semiauto or the M1 slower? Also they have different capacities.

[u/[deleted]]

This is tangentially related but the sound design in Watch Dogs 2 is really good. The uzi in particular has a really loud effect

Too bad you never get to enjoy it because you spend half the game in "detective mode"