City 16

It’s a familiar scenario: After making the seemingly endless trek to your objective, besting numerous foes on your way, you are finally on the home stretch and boom. Headshot. In online games the sniper is always there and always ready to punish rash moves and errant mistakes.

“Dirty snipers” is the rallying cry of whoever in the house happens to be playing, or watching, as the familiar sniper rifle icon separates your username from that of the person you are currently cursing. When done badly the sniper can be the single biggest frustration in a game. Battlefield Heroes, for example, was pretty much ruined for me almost solely because of snipers.

Technically that’s not fair. It’s not the fault of players sporting the sniper rifle that they are ruining Battlefield Heroes; characters simply move to slowly. As a byproduct of the players unurgent gait across the landscape any half-decent sniper can, of course, be a persistent annoyance. The match that forever turned me against the game consisted of the large Coastal Clash map, two snipers spawn camping and multiple deaths. At this point, especially at the early levels, you are pretty much helpless if you spawn away from cover.

This is less of a problem if there is an easy method of countering a persistently pesky sniper. Team Fortress 2′s Heavy class is, unsurprisingly, a sniper magnet. He’s slow moving, large and his gun has no accuracy against far away targets. The difference between Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield Heroes is that, during those times when you find your Heavy is being consistently taken out by a sniper in the distance, the fix is surprisingly simple. In Battlefield Heroes any solution you engineer to get rid of a tricky sniper has to be done with your existing class and environment. In Team Fortress 2, however, if you have a similar sniper problem you can choose any of the other 8 classes to fix it. Particular fun can be had as the Spy as your new Sniper friend is often not expecting to be troubled from the safety of his base, at least the first couple of times you kill him.

If snipers are such a frustrating part of online games shouldn’t they just be removed? Categorically: no. As I said at the start the sniper is always ready to punish a rash move. Good, rash moves should be punished. Death is cheap in gaming with the penalty being a simple spawn timer and a reset to base. Unlike spawn campers, grenade spammers or turret hoggers the sniper enforces care and attention in an environment that breeds the opposite. Snipers bring back the risk that balances the reward. In TF2 you may find yourself legitimately having an issue with them as the lumbering Heavy, but if a sniper was giving you a consistent problem as, say, the Scout then you’re not paying enough attention to your surroundings and the means you go about completing the objective.

More importantly sniping can be a lot of fun. It’s a slightly different mindset you have to adopt to be effective with the class. Perhaps ironically, given my issues with Battlefield Heroes, the best fun I’ve had playing a sniper has come from Battlefield: Bad Company*. In Bad Company the sniper class, and in particular the ghillie suit, is fantastically realised. It was Bad Company in which I learned of the concept of safety bushes: whereas many snipers may prefer the perceived safety of a building or roof, the real thrill comes from crouching down and moving from bush to bush getting as close to the action as you possibly can. There is genuine pleasure gained from the fact that as long as nobody sees your muzzle flash you are practically invisible. There have been moments hidden away in my bush in which an enemy soldier has run directly past my ear or a tank has rolled past oblivious. A good sniping position increases the tension tenfold: death is suddenly less cheap as you’ll lose your spot but at the same time you have a limited number of times you can operate from the same place before you’re spotted.

Just a little closer.

This is the perhaps the source of the frustration, and joy, of the sniper: they are playing a different game, aloof and distant from the main ground war. It’s the ultimate griefer class of the traditional class-based shooter dynamic. Frankly, if you don’t hate them then they aren’t doing their job right.

*I’m going to lose some respect points here by mentioning I’ve never played one of the main PC Battlefield games.