The Dynamic Cover

This is something I have thought about for a while, but kept forgetting to write in here.

Goldeneye on the Wii was the first time I really thought about it, but cover systems in games needed a change.  Gears of War perfecting what we got in Kill.Switch was a fantastic start, but what Goldeneye did was smooth and would later be seen in other games as well.

Goldeneye was in first person, as I'm sure most of you know, and usually when you are crouched behind a wall for cover and need to pop up to take a shot, you have to move your hand away from aiming to unduck and take your shot.  Instead what the game did was, if you were behind cover and pulled the left trigger to aim, you would pop above cover ready to fire.  It was simple, sure, but then we got games like Far Cry 3 that made it even better.

In Far Cry 3, not only did we have the cover of popping over cover, we had it on the sides as well.  What made it even better was the animation indication that you were in cover and that pulling the trigger would let you lean out.  This same stuff would be later used in Battlefield and even Call of Duty.  Even third party games started to adopt the idea with Tomb Raider doing it, and honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if we see it in maybe the next Uncharted.

Sticking to cover ala Gears and Uncharted was solid, and if still used would not bother me at all as there are still problems with the dynamic way that say Far Cry would do things, but I think it's nice for a first person game at least.  Going from Killzone's snap cover to Far Cry was nice and fluid, and as I've stated before, Far Cry is one of the best FPS games to come out in a long time in my opinion.

-Eddie