10 Video Game Abilities Developers Always Get Wrong
2. Suppression Mechanics
Ubisoft
One of the things military shooters always tend to struggle with is the idea of suppressive fire. You've probably heard the line "lay down some suppressive fire!" dozens of times across military fiction and film, and it even gets said repeatedly in video games too. But while developers find it easy to relay the mechanic in single player, it's a bit of a headache online.
To date, the only series I can really think of that's actually gamified suppression well has been Ghost Recon. Both Future Soldier and the more recent Wildlands and Breakpoint have forced players to think about their positioning in relation to whether or not they may be suppressed, and it even further emphasises the importance of flanking. However, look pretty much anywhere else, and suppression is nigh-on invisible.
Light machine guns are usually heavy and cumbersome, but if you were to use those weapons in most other first or third-person shooters the effects would be negligible. The advantages of having a larger magazine size are almost always inhibited by slow ADS and reload times, but without the added effects of suppression, players rarely ever have the incentive to give those weapons a go.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
