This blog is written for the assignment of the GSND 5111 course. We are required to play a shooter game and write thoughts about it.

Call of Duty?

So, looking at the list of shooter games, I could recognize most of the names (except for that Spec Ops) but yet I had only played one of them; that was the original version of Call of Duty. My dad introduced this game to me when I was a kid. It used to be my dad's favorate game when he was still young; he liked to play it during work to kill the tedious time. I could've just open this game for a couple of minutes to again get familiar with it and write something about it, but then my classmate Sadaf told me that she wanted to try out Fortnite and that she was still a newbie in this game. I thought it was a good idea for me to join in and play in duo, as it's a good chance to try out new stuffs and it would definitely bring in new experiences than just playing in solo. And so we arranged to have some games.

No, Fortnite.

The first arrangement took place on Sunday (09/15/2024) afternoon. Because I'm completely new to this game, I didn't want to be the dumb noob dragging the team down, so I started a solo game an hour before our arranged time. I just chose the "Royale Battle" mode from the lobby menu; it seemed to be the most popular mode people are playing. After entering the battle, i found out it's basically the same as PUBG—a set of people are jumping out of a plane and landing on an island, looting "natural" resources (guns, ammos, huh?) and killing each other to get the final crown. What's different than PUBG was that Fortnite has got a building system, and that I particularly found its UI really messy. I often got lost in the huge amount of information the UI was delivering to me, and there were lots of unlabelled elements in the map; you must come close to get the information pop out. I tried to look for some game guidance, but after failing and looking up on Google, I found out that there is no new player guidance! During this game, my Internet crashed and it couldn't be fixed within a short time, so in the next duo game, I played on my cellphone hotspot.

Sadaf was then online and ready, but she couldn't talk via voice call because her roommate was sleeping. In the next game I invited her to start a duo match, but it didn't go well. Due to me lacking experience, I landed somewhere afar from the resources and was quickly eliminated by another player because I hadn't got a weapon. And also due to lacking realtime communication, I didn't even know when she jumped out of that plane! Sadaf was like, "there's no point for me to keep playing alone if we're a duo," and immediately quited the game so we could start over.

So yet another round. This time we made a plan of where to land before the game started, and survived the beginning phase. We wandered around the map and encountered an enemy duo in a wild hut. Apparently they knew how to build, so that soon as one of them saw me, they immediately made out a wooden wall to stop me from shooting them. But I took out my pickaxe, came close, broke their wall, switched back to my gun and emptied my slot on them. After looting his bag, I went to find Sadaf; she had already taken care of the other one in the enemy duo. Then we found a vehicle in the yard and drove to the center of the storm. This and that, in the last we were forced to face another duo in the smallest storm circle. I ran out of ammo, and also energy (they call it "stamina" in Grant Theft Auto) so I couldn't sprint to dodge, so again I took out my pickaxe and swung it on my enemy's head. Headshot, and suddenly the screen stuck for a moment and we won.

I and Sadaf were exciting. She wanted to have another around, but I had appointment with my friend for hotpot for dinner, so I fleed.

Oh... Is this becoming a diary?

The next day

We made an appointment to try out the game studio at Ryder #324 on the next day. So I got up early, headed to Ryder, only to find that the room was locked. 😅 We ended up finding a place in Snell that was suitable for a side-by-side duo game. This time it was obviously harder than the previous game we had, I reckon we had probably been playing with NPCs previously because we were both new players, and this time we were encountering real human players. Nevertheless, with realtime communication, we had a way better cooperation and ended up winning the 4th place in that game. Sadaf commented, "I still prefer a place where I could shout." And then she left to find her friend.

That is all, thank you for reading my diary.

My thoughts

• The UI is very stuffed and confusing. I doubt that even an experienced player will also get confused sometimes.

• It really needs an official guidance to teach new players about the elements in the game as well as the key bindings. It feels like I haven't even used half of all the common key bindings! Like after 5 matches I still don't know how to utilize the building system.

• I wonder how this "Royale Battle" mode survives. Within a level range, players must be losing for most games because there is only one winner for each game. Why don't players feel depressed?

• It's a little hard to aim on enemies with guns in this game, I'd say 50% due to my skill, 50% network lag. But it's definitely not as intense as in hardcore FPS games like CS:GO as players' HP are significantly higher in this game, making the local battle between two players more intense and tactical. I personally prefer this game more than CS:GO a lot.