Pros and cons of different game modes in PvP shooters

written 2024-05-14

In this post I'm going to compare different game modes in PvP shooters and discuss their pros and cons from a game design perspective.

Team Deathmatch

Where two teams race to a specified number of kills. This is one of the most obvious ways to make a game out of shooter mechanics, and is probably the most commonly played (definitely always has the most players queueing in all the shooters I've played). But it has some serious problems.

The biggest problem is that when avoiding dying is as important as killing, players are incentivized to "camp" - find a good spot to stay in and just wait for enemies to come into view so you can kill them from relative safety. Camping makes the game more boring for the other team who spends all their time looking for the opposition until they get spontaneously sniped, but also more boring for the player doing it; people only do it because the game incentivizes it.

Another problem is that when avoiding dying is as important as killing, any player who ends the match with more deaths than kills was probably actually *hurting* their team. This can lead to negative feelings in and between teammates.

Almost any other game mode doesn't have these problems since dying doesn't hurt your team. In those modes you're incentivized to play in a way that's healthy for the game, and it's almost impossible to be a negative.

However, Deathmatch has some upsides.

First is the lack of respawn delay. In other game modes which are based on controlling positional objectives, there's usually a delay before you can respawn, so that enemy players you kill don't just immediately continue being a threat. If they instead respawn very far away from the objectives, that's basically just a hidden respawn delay since they have to spend time running back there to be relevant again.

Another advantage of Team Deathmatch is that it's not a big disadvantage if one of your teammates quits. This is, as far as I can tell, an inherent flipside of the potential to be a negative for your team; one is good and the other bad, but there's no real way to have one without the other. You *could* implement some sort of compensation mechanism for undersized teams (for example, they have more health) but such artificial advantages are likely to feel unsatisfying to play against, and so most games I've seen don't do it.

Overall though, I still consider Team Deathmatch a bad game mode. I think the reason it's so popular is the way the games sell it as the "standard" mode. It's almost always at the top of the list and they also often show you how many people are queueing in each mode, and once you can see more people are queueing for Team Deathmatch, you know that you're more likely to find a match quickly if you queue for it too, because these games don't do queue settings correctly.

Queue settings advice

FFA Deathmatch

For most game modes, making it free for all instead of teams doesn't change that much. But for deathmatch it actually completely fixes both problems. Of course, FFA isn't a golden solution either because people often *enjoy* being on a team, especially if they're playing with friends. But it's a good thing to have as an option.

Capture The Flag

Where each team has a flag that spawns in their base, and is tasked with stealing the enemy flag and brining it to their base.

This mitigates the problem of camping with Team Deathmatch, but doesn't remove it. A few players on each team should usually stay at their own base guarding their flag from the enemy. And while this is an improvement since the enemy knows where to find you, it's still likely to be boring compared to running around, and depending on the game it confers a huge advantage on the defenders. If the game has low health it may be next to impossible for attacking players to steal the flag since the camping defenders will see them first and kill them almost every time. This may not be all that enjoyable for the players who keep running to the enemy base, knowing their odds of making it are miniscule even with good strategy.

King Of The Hill

Where there's a designated area that the teams compete to occupy, and whoever holds it accumulates points. The hill may move throughout the match.

This is a good mode. It gets all the players playing and working with their teammates. It doesn't have camping because you have to stay inside the hill to keep generating points, and that usually requires you to be in the open.

Many games have a variant called Domination involving multiple hills that continue generating points for your team after you leave, so you can capture a hill and then move on to the next one.

Star Wars Battlefront

This is a game with only one game mode which is a combination of Team Deathmatch and Domination. There are hills called command posts, but killing enemy players also scores you a point. It doesn't have respawn delay, camping is less of a problem because of higher time-to-kill, and it's possible to be a negative for your team but not as easy as in pure Team Deathmatch because you can help capture command posts even if you die more than you kill. It's a nice compromise and I like it a lot especially since you can choose how much to focus on command posts versus killing, it has many different viable strategies and playstyles.