Journal of William "Billy" Redbot:
April 15, 2010
War has come a long way. Used to be, a sniper was someone who sat in the bush and picked off point men with a short-barreled carbine. Now, we use bullets the size of your thumb and a newfangled rifle that can throw them over a mile and a half.
When I get back to the States, I think I'll give sniper school a try. Maybe Fort Bragg. The rifles are monsters, but the shooters are surgeons. It's amazing the things you have to know to be a sniper. I watched a Captain kill a man at a dead run yesterday - it took nearly two seconds for the bullet to reach the target! Like hitting a moving taxi cab with a frisbee.
Every element here is a sniper target: shoot the soldier, C4 the tank, and pound the gun nest with mortars.
Being a sniper in a first-person shooter is usually no easy task to begin with. You sacrifice aiming speed for a much longer viewing distance when you trade out your iron sights for a scope. Plus, your fire rate is drastically diminished en lieu of more powerful ammunition. Bang! Click-chk-whir-buzz-clack. Bang! You get the idea.
It's actually kind of funny how the sniper role has changed over the years as games change... At one point, it was a class that offered a more powerful - but slower - main weapon, and that's about it. Since running and gunning was out of the picture, snipers camped. Hard. Anti-camping measures were put in place to quell the screaming run-and-gun advocates, so the sniper profile had to appeal in other ways. Enter games like Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which hands snipers the advantage of visual camouflage, blocks of C4 for up-close devastation, and a mortar strike ability that can be used from afar. Not to mention an unlockable Spotter Scope, which literally places a visual blip on enemies for your entire team to see.
So how does Bad Company 2 balance the sniper class? Two words: bullet drop.
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