That’s Not Right #1: Auto Cover

As I posted a couple of days ago, I have a lot of games on my plate right now. Make no mistake, all of them are in my lineup because they’re fun – I’m past the point in my life of playing games I don’t enjoy just because someone else says I should be playing them (the exception is when I’m ordered to by my boss, but at least I’m getting paid for that).

But even the best games can have annoying elements, things we forgive because the experience as a whole more than makes up for it. What’s harder to forgive is when those same elements keep showing up again and again in future sequels and copycat franchises. Some elements even become cemented into the genre. Like auto cover.

"Hey buddy, I'm crouchin' over here!"

Since the beginning of the stealth genre, video game developers have tried to come up with a way to simulate that scene in action movies where the jewel thief/secret agent/escaping prisoner slinks down a corridor with his back against the wall and peaks around the corner.  The solution was the cover system, and while it looks just like it does in the movies, it also sucks.

Let me walk you through a typical scenario: You have a hallway you want to sneak down. First, you run to the wall and press a button, which enters cover mode and snaps you to the wall. Then you start moving down the hall, only now you move stupidly slow. Also, the camera has panned in close to show just how cool you look as you’re shuffling along, which means a guard could be ten feet in front of you and you wouldn’t be able to see him – he’d just stand there scratching his head, wondering if you suffer from agoraphobia.

The solution is to exit the cover system and walk down the hall like a normal human being, then re-enter when you’re closer to the end of the hallway. Then the cool part: peaking around the corner. It worked – there’s a guy right in front of you! He’s shooting you in the face while you try to remember which button unglues your ass from the wall.

Here’s another scenario: There’s a nearby guard patrolling the area, and you’re crouching behind a crate to keep him from spotting you. But your head is still clearly visible, like a toddler who doesn’t understand that closing his eyes during peek-a-boo doesn’t make him invisible.

"Those guys totally can't see me – I'm crouching for crying out loud!"

But maybe that’s just a quirk of the animation, and he really can’t see you – nope he spotted you. Your mistake? You thought that in order to crouch behind the crate, you should press the crouch button. A rookie mistake. What you really wanted to do was crouch and then press the cover button too, which makes you push up against the crate like you’re trying to make love to it. Remember that for next time, but for now, he’s spotted you! Time to pull off some more sweet Hollywood moves – let’s vault over the crate!

In 90% of the games, that means pressing the same button as the one for cover – are you going to jump over it? Nope, it looks like you’re trying to sneak alongside it; now you’re standing up with your back to the crate, the entire upper half of your body exposed. You might succeed in confusing the hell out of the guard, but he'll probably decide to shoot you anyway.

Stupid problems like these were the result of early cover systems, for which the video game industry had a solution: auto cover. This made cover so much easier! Just move your player up to a wall and he automatically pushes against it for more awkward sidestepping. Pull the joystick away from the wall, and he becomes unglued. Simple, right?

Only there's one little problem: Now every wall has been transformed into an ass magnet. If you want to say, run around a corner, you first have to run towards the camera and circle back around – all of a sudden you have the turning radius of a golf cart. That, or the auto cover requires you to run into the wall with such determination that you look like you fell for the old Road Runner gag where he paints a doorway on the side of a mountain. Neither scenario makes you look like a suave spy.

"Aliens are attacking and my ass is glued to this rubble...this is the worst day ever!"

The only thing auto cover systems truly succeed at is screwing up: If you are playing a game with auto cover it is inevitable that at some point you will get screwed over and killed by no fault of your own. This happens because no matter how much developers tweak auto cover, it still can’t read your mind, which is what it's trying to do.

The best cover systems I’ve seen are the ones where you hold in a button the entire time you want to be hiding. Release it and you’re instantly unglued. It works well, but I’m starting to wonder how important cover systems are in the first place. If I want to hide behind something, can’t ducking suffice? If I want to slip from one side of a doorway to the other, can’t I, you know, walk there? If I want to peek around a corner, can’t I just swing the camera around (assuming it’s a 3rd person game)? Is that goofy wall walk worth all the extra hassle? 

Feel free to share your thoughts on cover systems in the comments section, including the best/worst examples of you have seen.