If you’re a First Person Shooter player looking to improve your skills, then my FPS Self-Improvement Series of articles is exactly what you’re looking for.
I’ve played FPS games competitively for nearly a decade and have decided to share my knowledge of FPS gaming in six thematic articles. Each entry takes a look at a different aspect of FPS gaming and how to improve your performance in that specific field of expertise.
This fifth entry in the series details 5 tips for improving your practice sessions. Learn about item timing, sparring groups and the best game to pick for practicing your overall FPS skills. Good Luck.
1. Sparring makes all the difference
Get a friend of yours of a similar skill level to play some 1 vs 1 matches against you, while you’re both on VoIP (TeamSpeak, Ventrilo) or LAN. Talk over each others weak points, share map, movement and weapon tricks you’ve discovered, etc. Squaring off against the same person regularly will allow you to better track your progress, and to benefit from each other’s progression.
It is even better to join a practice-focused clan, or team of individual sparring partners. Play 2 vs 2 and 3 vs 3 matches amongst yourselves, explore the maps, test out the guns on each other. These kinds of freeform practice sessions tend to propel your skill level in no-time. And having a whole pack of players to gain knowledge from, as opposed to just one other player (or just yourself) makes all the difference.
The other benefit of joining a practice-oriented team is that you can learn teamplay at a steady pace. You’re not faced with constantly changing teammates (public play) or with the pressure to win, which distracts you from your learning process (genuine clan matches).
It is these kinds of practice sessions that enabled my Jedi Academy: Siege clan to reign unbeaten during its 3 months existence. Training consistently with the same folk, 3-4 times per week, in varying formats provided swift results. Change it up between free for all, one weapon only, regular team skirmishes and organized duel matches to benefit from this fully.
Spar with a regular crowd to improve more swiftly
2. Empty maps are your friend
There are a lot of uses for simple offline practice sessions without bots.
You can merely run across maps to discover item locations, get used to spawn timers, devise sneaky map tricks and routes, and to get a feel for moving across the map at optimal speed.
But you can also take advantage of the empty map to practice prediction and combo-based attacks while moving. This is especially useful for getting the hang of the Shock Combo (Unreal Tournament series) and rocket launcher / grenade launcher weapons.
Without the pressure of hitting an actual opponent, you can focus purely on the way your projectiles move. Practicing like that helps to make shots land more easily in genuine combat.
3. Time is of the essence
Well, timing is actually. In hardcore/arena shooters like Quake and Unreal Tournament, you’ll be faced with timed weapon, item and power-up spawns. These kind of things are on static timers that reset every time the item is picked up, which allows a skilled player to keep track of when it will respawn.
Most top tier players do this for all important power-ups, major armor and health pickups, and their favored weapons. And it gives you a major advantage, because you can snatch away everything before the opponent even knows it’s there.
So you need to practice this kind of thing, and in contrast to my first tip I’m going to advice you to learn this during live matches. Take on the responsibility for timing a single important power-up during a clan match (TDM or CTF), because it’ll give you the pressure to actually keep track of the timer – and when you forget your teammates will burn you for it.
Most of these games feature in-game clocks which should help you calculate new item spawns. Now everyone does calculations a little differently, but here’s how I would do it: if a weapon spawns every 28 seconds and there is 5:11 left on the clock, then substract 11 from 28 and 17 from 5. If it’s at 4:30, substract 28 from 30, etc…
It doesn’t sound very difficult, but it gets more challenging when you also have to focus on actually playing, winning battles, outthinking your opponent(s) and timing more than one item!
This definitely takes some practice and a lot of time.
4. Game choice matters
Training in a skill-capped shooter like Battlefield, Call of Duty, Counter Strike or Halo will not gain you as widely varied and proficient a skillset as you would in more hardcore (read: difficult) games like Quake, Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Unreal Tournament.
Pro Quakers are nearly always proficient in any other shooter. The reason for this occurrence is that an arena-based shooter instills in you the basics of every type of aiming (hitscan, prediction, tracking, combination, leading) but does so with full movement and at breakneck speed. This hones your reflexes and thought processes to a level beyond what is required in most other shooters and makes adjusting to different rules easier: your basic skills are already top level anyway.
So you may wish to decide beforehand whether you really want to play just this one shooter, or whether you’re going for all-out proficiency. If you want to go for the latter, then head on over to Quake Live. It will be difficult and you will get owned a lot, but when you do break through and start hitting pro servers, you’ll be a capable player in more than just the one game.
5. Do not take it too seriously
Practicing is all well and good, but it’s best done with a good helping of fun.
To harken back to my Jedi Academy clan example; our clan practice sessions were always drenched in fun. Every session we’d organize some sweet for-fun competitions, and we even had our own unofficial game mode: rooftop kicking. Yup, we’d stand on top of a roof or platform and use only kicks to take down each other.
I also remember the hours my Enemy Territory team wasted finding weird little trickjumps on maps, which actually gave us some good defensive positions and offensive routes. But more importantly it was a very good practice in team building. These kinds of silly things help bring the team together and make the more attuned in the heat of battle.
Hardcore training is fine, but practice that you actually enjoy sticks better. That is another reason why tip number one is so important: a good partner or team will be fun to spar with – and that will help you perform at your best.
GameDrone FPS Self-Improvement Series:
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