While Gears Of War didn't invent wall cover, it did popularized it. Multiple games now use third person wall cover. And for practically every genre it is associated with, it is awful for the most part.

A good example is a game I was playing recently, Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

With in the games skill tree, the player can spend experience points that allow a greater sense of awareness. Agumented vision that shows enemy through walls. Pinpoint markers show enemy position beyond the boundaries of wall.

This mostly becomes moot however, when the player can simple glue themselves to a wall, and have a full 180 degrees viewpoint from a third person perspective.

In the case of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, even though it does seem to fit the gameplay and outright makes aspects irrelevant, it is in their. Most likely on the basis, thats it's a popular console mechanic. This is outright bad game design in my opinion.

For practically every action game that uses this mechanic, the AI cannot cope. In Mass Effect the AI will blindy run towards you regardless of you being unhittbable. It doesn't take your wall cover into account For supposed "tactical games" like Rainbow 6: Vegas you once have a full 180 degree view without any limiting. Simply pop up your head, fire, duck. Rinse and repeat. The advantage third person wall cover gives, is huge. The AI for the most part, cannot cope with it and the mechanic itself (to me at least) is outright boring. When I think of action games, I think of something visceral like MDK. Doing strafe circles around dozens of enemy. Sitting in a corner, popping my head up and down with bursts of fire, is practically the exact opposite of visceral.

It seems to be me, this mechanic would work much better as a first person only mechanic. Without the ability to pull out to third person for a full 180 degree viewpoint. In a game such as "Red Orchestra 2" using wall cover delivery limits what the player can see giving disadvantage as well as advantage. Aside from not having a full view in front of them, they also lack side and back views. This limitation makes the tic-tack-to of battles far more interesting than they would if you could simply pull out into third person.

Did you put a French text into Google Translate or something? That's a really rough read.

@digitalsea87 said:

Did you put a French text into Google Translate or something?

Why are you being insulting?

@digitalsea87 said:

That's a really rough read.

This is basically what you are saying. But instead, you put the rude comment ahead of it.

While I agree, it probably is a rough read, you could have simply stated that instead of being a jerk about it.

Pretty sure Vegas had an option to always be first person. The demo of the first one certainly had first person cover when I played. In Mass Effect most enemies are as glued to cover as you are, unless they are the types that like to run up in your face to get around your cover (a pain on the hardest difficult). Deus Ex was a bit weird with it, that is true, but three examples of it being used poorly doesn't prove that it's a bad thing. Especially when games like Gears of War handle it so damn well. I will give you this though, the cover in ME3 is needlessly crowded into the same button as a billion other things, including using objects in the environment, which got frustrating in the demo. But I think you're over simplifying and generalizing.

Wait, you can take cover in Deus Ex? Man, I totally forgot that when I played through the DLC a few weeks ago.

I actually think Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Rainbow Six: Vegas are one of the few games that did cover mechanics right. You never feel "stuck", you simply hold the button whenever you need to be in cover and let it go when you don't need it. Games like the first Uncharted, Kane & Lynch and Mass Effect are worst offenders when it comes to sticky cover that you can't easily get out of.

P.S I didn't find Augmented vision to be really that useless, it helped me great number of times locating enemies that are upstairs or in rooms that aren't directly accessible.

Seeing how Deus Ex had horrible combat, its probably not a very good example to use.

And its 'Deus' not 'Dues'.

@whyareyoucrouchingspock I don't see how @digitalsea87 was rude by asking. This isn't so much improper English and instead reads more like translated writing. There are incomplete sentences that would easily stem from a translation due to the way verb tenses in English remain so different from every other language, as well as strange placements of adjectives that make sense but seem to be in the wrong place.

Anyways, while I agree that AI doesn't usually handle wall-cover well, it's a really nice mechanic and one I usually miss when it's absent. When it doesn't exist in an active shooting-based game, I feel like the gameworld makes less sense, and when it is there, it makes the game that much easier to play. Also, it is possible to get decent AI for cover-based shooting; Gears of War and the original Metal Gear Solid trilogy both had AI that could handle your cover, albeit in MGS it was always a wall you were hiding behind.

Also, you won't win fans by using the word "visceral", as it's been used so much that it's lost meaning. Visceral actually means "relating to deep feelings rather than the intellect" or "of relation to the viscera." Of course, you definitely don't mean either of these things, but that's because everyone's pretty much lost what "visceral" might mean in a games language. I suspect you mean that it's more fun and grips you more, but that's definitely not how anyone is using the word. Most people seem to use it to define a sense of synesthesia; the game has you accomplishing a violent task while giving you great sound effects, visuals, in-game rewards, and perhaps a nice rumble of the game controller to make something just feel AWESOME.

But whatever we do mean by visceral, I think most of us would agree that we'd much rather take cover and fire than "circle-strafe around dozens of enemies" any day.

It doesn't usually bother me, but 3rd person cover mechanics have a tendency to fuck you over from time to time.

@Little_Socrates said:

But whatever we do mean by visceral, I think most of us would agree that we'd much rather take cover and fire than "circle-strafe around dozens of enemies" any day.

I don't see why. When using wall cover, an action game is basically deduced to wack-a-mole. When playing action games I want kinetic motion, not static camping.

With wall cover in the majority of these games, you are encouraged to be static, by simply sitting tight, your health automatically regenerates in the majority of these games. Why would you (or whoever is reading this) opt for that over something that encourages physically moving (beyond courching) to dodge?

So your main problem with cover mechanics is that the AI in some games can't handle it?  I think the problem there is bad AI.
 
For what it's worth, a part of me does dislike how the player character is magically capable of seeing around corners, and that is why I generally shy away from multiplayer in such games.  Again though, this is not a problem with cover mechanics, it's a problem with the third-person perspective, as you are capable of doing this with any third-person game.
 
So there you go, your position against cover systems is now rendered untenable.

I can understand how it may mess you up in multiplayer but I think it's a good mechanic to have in single player

@Spoonman671 said:

So your main problem with cover mechanics is that the AI in some games can't handle it?

Thats part of the problem.

@Spoonman671 said:

it's a problem with the third-person perspective, as you are capable of doing this with any third-person game.

Which is what I was saying.

With Red Orchestra 2, being stuck to first person limits how much you can see.

This includes vehicals as well. In the Battlefield series, you can just pull out to third person from third person in a tank for a better idea of your surroundings while in Red Orchestra 2, you are always in first person in a tank, limited in what you can view, this automatically gimps you just as it does with first person wallcover.

Eh, never had any negative things to say about cover mechanics. Sure they aren't perfect, but sometimes jumping in a game is ****ed up too.