What's the point of this 'Cone of Fire' thing ?

In the real world of course there isn't such a thing as an expanding cone of fire - at least not anywhere near the degree that we see in games. You can definitely make a game where there is a lot of recoil but no cone-of-fire. Such weapon-mechanics do exist in some games. Generally you need to up the recoil a lot for guns not to become "too accurate" for game balance.

That said, I am not necessarily totally against the concept of con-of-fire. Firstly you kind of need it for the idea of "hipfire" to work in the game, and secondly it does add management of COF as a skill-element. In real-life handing recoil is a lot tougher than we can easily model it in a game, and that's why burst-fire is used if you want to maintain accuracy. COF mimicks this by rewarding burst-fire with more accuracy by having less COF penalty. In a game with no COF there tends to be little reason to not go full-atuo and just focus on recoil compensation. This diversifies the gameplay and the types of weapon-fire that is viable and useful. COF is also useful in balancing out alternative firing-stances, like having some reduced accuracy while strafing for example vs. sitting perfectly still, although I suppose you could also balance that out with more recil for alternative stances.

Another point that is worth mentioning too is that combining moderate recoil with COF makes the gunplay more approachable. Keep in mind that most videogame players aren't hardcore enthusiasts, and this is where a lot of the income comes from, especially for a free2play game like PS2. Even if you are a casual player who can't quite manage his COF well, you can have some decent sucess by spraying and countering recoil. If there was no COF the recoil would need to be very high for weapons to not be too powerful - which I think would lead to a lot of newbie (not in a derogatory sense of the word) players feeling like the guns are all "way too wild" and too hard to even start trying to control. It puts a very high skill threshold on using guns in the game and that isn't good for the games accessibility. Ideally we want to have guns that are easy to learn to use, but hard to master, and I think that using both recoil and COF mechanics in combination is a pretty good way to do this.

The key of course is to have the right amount of COF versus recoil. Too much COF inaccuracy and too little recoil and you get very "skill-less" gunplay. Planetside 1 had this (large COF, but no recoil - or just very little, I can't remember exactly). PS2 mimics Battlefield fairly closely in that recoil management is the most impactful, and COF management is something you learn as a more advanced technique to be more effective at longer ranges. I think the balance is pretty good here. Unless you dump your entire magazine, most of the bullets will go very close to where you aim.

As for the AA turrets thing, that is a part of the balance of the weapon. If you want to make a weapon that is very effective at close range but less so at extreme range then you want it to have some spread - like a shotgun. If it was pinpoint accurate then the damage would just have to be nerfed in return for it not to be overpowered - although you could I suppose also degrade the damage of the projectiles severely over range. I guess that AA artillery just seems like it fits in the style of "peppering the skies" with explosive shells rather than sniping down targets *shrug*

In the end it boils down to preference I think, but the design choice isn't just arbitrary - there are pros and cons to each way of designing the gunplay, and like it or not the COF + recoil aproach is currently the most popular and well-tested model of providing interesting gunplay in first-person-shooters. I think the PS2 devs basically looked at the battlefield series and said "this works pretty well, let's do something very similar", and personally I don't think that was such a bad choice. Altough I see the benefits of a pure recoil-based system I would probably have done something similar if I were making the game.

-Stigma

This assessment is correct. While some might argue it´s intention is realism or balancing, it is infact a helpful tool to combat bad aiming.
Pair a 650+ RoF weapon with 30-100 bullets per magazine with a decent CoF and the chances are high that even if your aim isn´t right on target you will get enough hits to kill.
Sure someone who gets his aim on target will most likely still kill you faster, but you´ll at least dmg him. Without CoF being off target would result in all shots going haywire, except if the weapons recoil luckily pulls the gun on target.
Now pair the previously mentioned factors with an extremely short TTK and suddenly you´ll end up getting the kill, as long as you shoot first.
I´m not sure if you have played the initial versions of Counter-Strike but back then you would rarely win a fight if you used full auto because the gun was jumping all over the place and you were forced to burstfire most automatic weapons to land hits.
CoD´s popularity vastly comes from having introduced and expanded on mechanics like this to give players a good feeling, a low skill ceiling and a flat learning curve. Take any full auto weapon in PS2, unless you fight over long ranges you can just spray n´pray and end up with very decent results.

L2P

If the game was like real war everyone would quit.

Cone of Fire for hip-firing works great and makes sense to me, for all the reasons that people have brought up. CoF for that simulates the difficulty of handling a firearm and compensating for recoil.

But when you Aim Down the Sights, there should be no CoF. It just doesn't make sense that your barrel suddenly turns to spaghetti and spews bullets where your sights are not pointing.

So I think that CoF should be minimal when ADSing, but to compensate recoil should be turned way up. Firing any weapon fully automatically should result in extreme inaccuracy.

ARMA has some of the best gunplay out of any video game, and models firearm mechanics reasonably well.



Everyone uses single/burst fire most of the time, and only use fully automatic fire for suppression (as it should be).

Hip firing has no crosshair. This simulates the guesswork in point shooting. Why should there be a crosshair for hip firing?

Movement visibly affects where the sights are pointing. They will sway, or totally disappear when you sprint.

Recoil for weapons make aiming difficult (yet rewarding), and done in a way where your bullets will always go pretty close to where your weapon is pointing.

As it is PS2's gunplay model is extremely arcadey, and rewards people who can exploit the netcode (namely those who move first and spam ADAD). It's much closer to the gunplay in things like Borderlands than a competitive FPS (I do love me some Borderlands, but arcadey gunplay is better suited for silly games with exploding rifles).

The whole point of cone of fire is that the world isn't perfect.

In reality, there are a ton of variables preventing shooters from making perfect shots all the time.

First and foremost, people aren't perfect shots. You can train for years and become a DAMN good shot, but there will still be some variability in your performance.

Then there are many environmental factors that effect the bullet such as wind, temperature, humidity, etc. Some have more drastic effects than others, but they're all there.

The net result is that these factors are going to work together to make your bullet hit someplace other than exactly where you were aiming.

Since it is impractical to accurately simulate all of these many variables in a fast-paced shooter, developers make use of a cone-of-fire to roughly approximate the combined effects of these variables.