The Video Game Revue

Day of Defeat: Source

Day of Defeat may very well be the perfect FPS, and its sequel, Day of Defeat: Source, brings the series from the old Half-Life engine into the much more advanced Half-Life 2 "Source" engine. Given how much I enjoy this game, and how I've recently been meaning to write a rant about how great it is, I was taken aback when I noticed its lack-lustre score over on Metacritic. Day of Defeat: Source has a meta score of only 80, while the user score is a much more respectable 9.3 out of 10 from 426 user votes. What's with the huge disparity?

One thing I noticed is that a lot of critics panned DoD: Source because upon release it only had four maps available. 1up.com gave the game a score of 60 and had the following to say about it:

Taken with the limitations of only four maps, on which to play one game type, all too soon you can find yourself in a mechanical rut playing them over and over. And that's something that the original didn't suffer from.

PC Gamer gave it 79, saying "[g]reat fun, but tough to recommend until more maps are available."

Some other sources complained about the strictly multi-player nature of DoD: Source. IGN gave it a score of 84 with the following comment:

I expect to be playing DoD a lot more than "Couterstrike: Source" [...] I recommend DoD:S to the multiplayer action crowd, but don't come crying to me when things start getting stale.

And PC Format, with its score of 81, said "It's firmly a team game, rocketing from tense action to a tedious slog, based entirely on how the rest of your team plays. [Dec 2005 p.91]"

A third trend centered around the game's WW II theme, which many critics seem to assume gives DoD a more or less fringe appeal. Gamespot scored the game at 81 and said the following:

While a lack of maps cuts into the game's value somewhat, Day of Defeat: Source still offers a satisfying and exciting experience for those who just can't get enough of World War II.

And Electric Playground scored the game 80 saying "[a] great game if you are a fan of the WW2 genre and a previous fan of the DOD series, but if not, you might find greater value in another WW2 title."

Now the first of these criticisms--the lack of maps--only applies to Day of Defeat: Source, and applies less and less as time goes by since new maps are being released continually (there are a couple of new ones scheduled for release on June 28th, in fact.) For comparitive purposes, I decided to check the meta score of the original Day of Defeat, and I was surprised to find the disparity between critical reviews and fan scores to be even greater. Day of Defeat has a meta score of 79 while 180 fans gave it an average score of 9.7 out of 10.

This brings me to my first point about why Day of Defeat is so excellent--particularly the original, although DoD: Source is catching up--and that is the absolutely brilliant level design. DoD features some of the best maps that I've ever played in any FPS game, period. Not all of the maps are good, of course, but when it comes to multiplayer FPS games, I find that the quality of the game's top three to five best maps matters more than the quality of all of the other maps. That is to say that for an FPS game to be utterly amazing, it really only needs to have a handful of hits in its map lineup; if a bunch of the maps are just filler, that's forgiveable, but only if those few top maps are so great that players have dreams about them.

I do agree with some of the criticism that DoD is narrow in scope as a strictly multiplayer game. To me, this is by design; whining that DoD (by which I mean to refer to both the original game and DoD: Source) is repetitive and lacks variety is like complaining that Space Invaders is repetitive and lacks variety. There are lots of FPS games out there strive to offer many different play modes (Unreal Tournament 2004) or an open-ended experience with regards to how the player chooses to play the game (Battlefield 2.) Day of Defeat is not trying to compete with these games on that level--rather, it strives to be a singular but pure gaming experience, and I strongly believe that it deserves praise for this outlook rather than admonishment. As classic games like Pac-Man or Joust demonstrate, the best games are not necessarily the games that provide the user with the most impressively broad experience, and I think Day of Defeat is a game that understands that very well.

Finally, while it may be true that DoD appeals to WW II genre fans because of its theme, I object to the labelling of the game as a fringe title for that reason. DoD has the same kind of general appeal as Counter-Strike, and in fact the two games are different takes on a very similar gameplay style. Some would say that DoD is less strategic than C-S, but I contend that it is merely a different kind of strategy. Certainly the biggest gameplay difference between the two is that in C-S one doesn't respawn until the start of a new round, whereas the respawn in DoD is continuous. DoD is also about capturing strategic points, whereas C-S concerns itself with more "capture the flag" style objectives (rescue/guard hostages, detonate/diffuse a bomb, or eliminate the other team.) There are definitely times when DoD has a very meat-grinder like progression--one respawns, runs into the thick of the action, and gets cut down in a flurry of chaotic gunfire--but this sort of thing happens in other multiplayer FPSes like Counter-Strike and Battlefield 2 as well. The real difference with DoD is that it happens more frequently because one always respawns quickly and the maps are relatively small.

In my view, the Day of Defeat formula comprises three crucial factors:
- high lethality
- small, potent maps
- fast respawn

The result is truly epic.

Ever since I got my first taste of high lethality FPSes, I've never really respected FPSes where the lethality is very low. When I used to play Goldeneye on Nintendo 64 (remember that crappy ray-tracer engine?) with Fritzkrieg, we quickly fell into the habit of always maxing out or nearly maxing out the lethality of the weapons, because the game just "felt right" that way. Low lethality works better in a single player FPS where the goal is epic shoot-outs against armies of low-intelligence bots; otherwise the low lethality makes the game feel like some kind of tournament fighter--seriously, like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat--rather than a genuine FPS experience. Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament got it right when they took the low lethality and turned it into some kind of fighting tournament style experience. Rainbow Six got it right when they decided that a one-shot kill wasn't an unreasonable thing to have in an FPS game. With Day of Defeat, the fact that it only takes one or two hits to kill or be killed makes the game that much more intense, and intensity is a big part of the DoD experience.

That is also why the maps are so small. Fans of Tribes and the Battlefield series are big on the sweeping maps of epic scope, and I readily admit that there is a place for that kind of thing. But there is also a place for an FPS that simulates a concentrated core of fighting. In Battlefield 2, the action generally centers around one or two contested "hot spots" that dynamically shift around as the situation changes, and that is a big part of the appeal of the game. With Day of Defeat, you never have to figure out where the center of action is, or worry about finding a vehicle to take you there, because you always spawn right near it. The maps in Day of Defeat aren't so small that the same dynamic of shifting "hot spots" doesn't still apply, but it is designed so that these hot spots are always within reasonable walking distance of where the players spawn. And although the maps are small in area, they are rich and detail and usually interesting to navigate through; by comparison, Battlefield 2 maps seem rather sparse.

The fast respawn creates an obvious design problem in that with most DoD maps when one team gets down to their last objective point, they all spawn near it and its difficult for the other team to capture it. DoD does a good job of keeping this problem in hand, however--I've only found that a few maps are frustrating in this regard (dod_flash is one, I think, and dod_avalance, as awesome as it is, can be bad for this as well.) The real problem, perhaps, is that overcoming this obstacle requires a bit of teamwork, and teamwork can be difficult to achieve with strangers online. Still, the disadvantages of having such a fast respawn cycle are outweighed by the advantages; after all, the theme of Day of Defeat is epic WW II battles, and the fast respawn creates the illusion that there are hundreds of soldiers involved in the battle. If you don't like it, you can always play Counter-Strike.

Speaking of the theme, another one of Day of Defeat's strengths is how colourfully themed it is. I've always been amazed by the characteristic feel of the weapons in DoD; nothing kills an FPS faster than generic-feeling weapons, and few things are as satisfying about a great FPS as when the weapons feel genuine. Through good artistic resources and excellent map design, DoD also crafts a very gritty sort of WW II setting. This isn't the sort of FPS where the WW II setting was chosen simply as a place-holder; one can feel that the game designers really invested themselves in it personally.

Overall, Day of Defeat is a powerful package, and one of the single most exciting games that I've ever played. Certainly it is limited in scope and provides an experience that might not appeal to you at all, but it is not one of those games merely for WW II afficionadoes, and it is not simply a cheap novelty FPS created as one of those campy "FPS mods gone pro." Day of Defeat fully contributes to the development of the artistic medium of video games, and I believe that it is the sort of classic game that will never go out of fashion.

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As a brief aside, I've still been playing lots of Dawn of War, and while I continue to greatly enjoy the game (it's certainly one of the best RTS games that I've ever played), it has really started to show its colours as being a very mainstream, StarCraft-like game. In spite of my earlier rant about it, I'm no longer convinced that my buddy Matt would necessarily get much out of the game, although he might be won over by the colourful Warhammer 40k theme.

I'm also now up to 56 hours in Disgaea and not quite finished, although the game's appeal is holding out very well and in many ways I'm enjoying it more now than ever before. I still hope to finish it soon.

posted by Parappa @ 11:08 AM