The Wrong Kind of Double Kill
There are two types of weapons in FPS titles:Â hit-scan weapons and projectile weapons. Hit-scan refers to when a player fires a virtual bullet that instantly hits its target. There’s no travel time associated with the shot, and no need to lead your targets, which means you don’t have to shoot where they’re going to be instead of where they are. If you’ve ever played the Call of Duty series, most of the weapons in those games are hit-scan weapons, aside from items like throwing knives and grenade launchers.
On the other side of things, we have projectile weapons. Projectile weapons feature travel time for their virtual bullets, even though the projectiles themselves are often so fast that you don’t really notice. It seems like Destiny pretty much exclusively uses projectile weapons. Everything from lightning quick scout rifles to slow but powerful rocket launchers.
The problem is, that when you’re allowing a player to fire their weapon while another bullet is currently traveling towards them, you create a situation where a gun battle can end with both players killing each other. It happened in Halo, and it happened in the Destiny alpha as well. Perhaps even worse, you can actually encounter double kills where both players are eliminated by each other’s melee attacks, of all things!
If the recent World Cup sporting event has reminded us of one thing, it’s that people don’t like when competition ends in a tie.
