How Necessary Is Sticky Cover?

Editor's note: I've been playing a number of shooters with sticky cover lately, so Daniel's article caught my eye. Is it time for developers to pull away from the sticky-cover mechanic? -Brett

The first Gears of War has become my latest stop after recently acquiring an Xbox 360. This is a particularly interesting game for me because I’m not enthused by the proliferation of sticky cover systems in today’s shooters. I was waiting for Gears of War, the game that inspired this wave, to finally prove to me that pressing a button to move into cover really is necessary.

I think the main reason I don’t view cover systems as a revolutionary innovation like most other gamers is because I already went through my fascination with the mechanic during the previous two console generations. Gears didn’t invent cover at all; it was just the game that finally managed to popularize it.

One of the coolest parts of playing Metal Gear Solid in 1998 was being cautious and checking around corners. WinBack for the N64 was probably the first time where taking cover made me feel like I was in a tactical SWAT-style firefight out of the movie Heat or something. From there the mechanic actually became pretty common throughout the PS2 era, showing up in games like Splinter Cell, James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing, and even Enter the Matrix.

By the time Rainbow Six Vegas and Splinter Cell: Conviction came out on 360 and PS3, I was already kind of burned out on the chest-high walls populating every game out there. All these shooters started to blend together, with little to differentiate them. Gears of War succeeds with its cover system because developer Epic didn’t merely paste it on top of a third-person shooter -- they designed an entire game around it.

Now, just because one game uses that mechanic really well doesn’t mean that mechanic is the best way of doing things. I actually find the “cover” button to be a rather restrictive method of letting players do something very simple: hide behind things to protect themselves.

The Call of Duty games ask you to use cover almost as much as Gears does, but there is no cover button. You simply take cover by getting behind stuff while ducking and sidestepping out or (in the case of the PC versions) leaning. Ducking and leaning basically accomplish the same thing without actually cementing your character to a wall, and it doesn’t strictly define what you can and cannot take cover behind.

By this principle I’ve been able to effectively take cover in almost every first-person shooter I’ve played. Hell, even GoldenEye had a sidestep mechanic, and its instruction booklet encouraged you to take cover. Cover works in all these games without inexplicable chest-high walls dotting the scenery.

Taking cover definitely makes games more tactical -- I don’t think anybody doubts that -- but what matters is the mentality behind being able to do it. Should games simply give players hiding abilities like duck and lean and then encourage their use, or do they need to be so accessible as to devote a button to forcing the player character into the action?

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Isaiah Taylor

July 19, 2010

Have you played Transformers: War For Cybertron? A game that flaunts the CPU-players being able to take cover and avoid fire, but the player isn't granted this privilege. Odd choice considering all the lasers and big ass bombs you have to avoid.

Sidenote: I hate it when you are in a fire fight and the A.I. is automatically tuned [autotuned] to aim at you and not your non-human support characters. Makes cover even more pointless. Makes 'developing a strategy of attack' less believible.

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Jose De Jesus

You make a very interesting point. Although I don't have a problem with the sticky cover system, I do believe that a lot of times it breaks the scene when you have a bunch of tiny walls laying around for no actual reason. I wonder if it might just be an issue with gamers being lazy.

Filipe Uva

July 21, 2010

The problem with the lack of a cover system in tactical shooters like COD:MW2 and MH is that by using only crouch/prone and lean you don't have the same level of awareness and immersion that a programmed cover system provides.

When you hide against something, in real life, you can feel whatever you're hidden behind and it's difficult to provide that feeling of actually being attached to cover with only crouch and free movement, the sticky cover feels a lot more natural and intuitive, even if there is still space to evolve.

Wich leads me to my next point, cover, as we know it, is still based on concepts from around the end of the 90's, it's still a latent system, one that still has a lot of ground to cover.There's the possibility of automatic cover that has been implemented in some games (Call of Juarez : Bound in Blood and others) wich tries to predict when players want their cover to be fixed without too much stickiness ; dynamic cover is another possibility since it doesn't constraint you to fixed cover points distracting you from the action, the main problem on most current cover games nowadays (one that GoW iludes so well).

Cover isn't really a necessity on tactical shooters but I believe it to be an evolution, exactly as Rainbow Six Vegas improved when they implemented one in the sequel but, as you say, there's really no necessity to map a button only for it nor does it need to always have a third person perspective (as Killzone 2 shows) , just let the system evolve =)

Carlos Castro Reyes

Good topic. I've recently taken a break from FPSes only to jump back in with Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena while also replaying GoW with a friend so I've been conscious of both these mechanics.

I totally get what you're saying, but I think you're overlooking some of the benefits that sticky-cover provides. In Riddick there were a number of times where I really wished I had a cover button because the tilt mechanic just doesn't always cut it and it was difficult to gauge how much of my body was in or out of cover. A problem sticky cover doesn't have to deal with. Third person perspective helps too.

I don't have the link available at the moment, but I recall Cliff B mentioning that he had pictured Gears of War as a horizontal version of Bionic Commando where the cover sections are like the platforms. Kill enemies, progress, kill enemies, progress, etc. Games without sticky cover, like Riddick, feel more open ended and give the players more options in combat, but have a completely different feel to them.