Game design observation
Insurgency: Sandstorm is a first-person shooter video game aiming (pun intended) for
realism – not as much as the Arma series, but arguably more than something like the
Counter Strike games. For me personally, it struck a nice balance between the
boeing-cockpit-like controls of Arma and the bullets-shoot-from-player’s-eyes simplicity of
Source engine games, which might have contributed to me having over a thousand hours on
it. Despite it being a game about guns, I will not be focusing on them. Instead…
One realistic element that I find very intriguing and yet very underrepresented in multiplayer
games that I encountered is proximity chat. In Insurgency: Sandstorm, when you push the
button to talk over the microphone, your voice can be heard not only by your teammates
over the radio that everyone is using, but also by any close-enough enemy who can just
hear you talking. This can lead to some pretty hilarious situations of your communication
giving you away in stressful situations, or by you being able to pin-point an enemy’s location
thanks to his voice-chat comradery with his team. However, this is still not what I want to talk
about…
The game also contains voice-lines which you either trigger from a selection wheel (think
along the lines of “The enemy is in that building!”) or they are responses triggered
automatically (when a grenade lands in your vision, your character usually exclaims
something like “FUCK THAT’S A GRENADE!”). These voice-lines are also guided by the
laws of proximity, meaning they can also affect the gameplay if either side of the given match
is listening out for clues. Almost there…
One of the systems in Insurgency: Sandstorm is suppression. When you’re under fire, not
hit, but the bullets are whizzing by, this has a negative effect on your character: less stamina,
shaky hands, tunnel vision, all the fun parts. And here is the catch: being under suppressive
fire influences your proximity voice lines.
This means that instead of calmly, militaristically relaying information, the voice lines become
erratic, stuttery, full of emotion. So instead of “Requesting a gun run on this location.” you get
“The jet! The one that goes BRRRRTTT!”, in place of “Negative.” you have “WHAT?! / Are
you kidding! / I fucking can't!”, “Fire chemical mortars.” becomes “Use the gas! Fucking fire
there!”. And I just think that’s beautiful.
Closing remarks: the jet does in fact go brrrttt, see for yourself.