Examples of Luck-Based Mission in First-Person Shooters.
- Several Borderlands 2 Badass Rank Challenges and achievements depend on luck. For instance, the "Jackpot!" challenge requires playing the slot machines in Sanctuary until you win either a big pile of Eridium bars or an ultra-rare weapon. Statistically, you have a roughly .25% (about one in 400) chance of either of these spins coming up. Another achievement requires a natural 20 or a natural 1 during looting in Tiny Tina's RPG session, but at least that one's less frustrating than the slot machine challenge, in that you're not obligated to spend anything.
- In H.P. Lovecraft-based FPS Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, the fourth mission has the player riding in the back of a pickup truck while the driver navigates the streets of Innsmouth. As firearms are extremely inaccurate (and you're shooting at things that don't take that much damage from them), there's very little point in shooting back, and if the game decides that the swarms of inhuman monsters taking potshots at you are accurate enough to overwhelm your first aid supplies, you're going to be doing the level over. And over and over and over...
- A number of combat-oriented shooter missions - such as in Men of Valor and Call of Duty (or thereabouts) - where you have to run through an artillery barrage to a foxhole or somewhere to get to the next stage, and it's up to chance whether you go down or not while running. Such as the second half of "Heat" in Modern Warfare, where you go from holding the line to running back through it.
- The first boss of Descent, between the boss's random teleport spams and Macross missile massacres, and the population of enemies (Super Hulks and Class 1 Drillers) in its lair. Especially if you're trying to save the hostages on Insane skill. In fact, many of the levels are this on Insane due to the random roaming nature of many enemies.
- In Doom mod Reelism, a slot machine in the HUD decides everything in gameplay, like weapons, enemies, or conditions of the level. Sometimes, you can get tons of overpowered weapons. Sometimes, the game decides to spawn a lightning-fast invincible enemy dangerously close to you. Sometimes, you become an invincible and deadly dog...
- In GoldenEye (1997) for the N64:
- Unlocking the Invincible cheat requires finishing the second level, Facility, within 125 seconds. Being able to do this is largely dependent on where Dr. Doak (with whom you must speak in order to finish the level) randomly spawns. This is not a question of looking in the right place. Only one specific place renders it possible to finish the level in time.
- The Statue level. While nowhere near as difficult as the above, if the player looked in the wrong place for the randomly generated flight recorder, he would run out of time to unlock the cheat.
- Many levels in the Halo series on Legendary difficulty are luck based missions due to the randomization of enemy spawns and random unavoidable death situations. Well, that's why you've got plenty of save points.
- In Halo 2 Legendary, the odds are dramatically stacked against you, and even if you play very well, you're still fairly likely to die. So you just do any given hard segment over and over again, doing the exact same thing each time, until the one time when all the chips fall just so, and you make it through. It's certainly not skill-based: if you use an optimal strategy and execute it flawlessly each time, you'll still die ten times and succeed once.
- Jackal Snipers, with their one hit kills and near-perfect accuracy on Legendary, often create luck based situations, particularly where they spawn randomly.
- Something even more sinister can happen if your luck is really bad. All of the Halo games after the first will try to detect if your last checkpoint landed you in an Unwinnable situation. If it detects this (say, you die two seconds after spawning several times in a row), it will send you back a checkpoint. However, it isn't unusual to be insta-killed very easily due to reasons listed above, and if it happens enough times, you'll actually lose some of your progress.
- Halo 5: Guardians has the Warzone Firefight gametype, in which player success is largely determined by whether or not the bosses spawned are unreachable or Nigh-Invulnerable bullet sponges, or whether or not your objective is defense of an objective across the map or protection of a highly-exposed relic.
- The final battle in Killzone 2 has elements of this; the final boss has a teleporting ability that lets him constantly Flash Step all around you. It does make a lot of noise and give off an easy-to-detect blue light, but he moves very fast when he decides to attack and absolutely LOVES to teleport BEHIND you or directly in your path if you try to run. There's simply no telling if he'll suddenly materialize three inches from your back or if you'll run smack into him and (in either case) end up being gutted by his knife of doom.
- Heck, just put in the whole of the battle leading up to that fight; the player is attacked by what amounts to a battalion of elite soldiers, numbering up to at least 40 vs 2. Your partner is stupid. And the Helghast have the smarts to flank you from almost every direction with not only machine guns, but also flamethrowers and rocket launchers...just try to survive all that in one go on Elite difficulty, if at all.
- Left 4 Dead:
- Witches are randomly placed (if at all) each time a level begins (which means two times per map in Versus Mode). There is an achievement for successfully clearing an entire campaign without disturbing ANY witches. Guess how frequently witches are placed on choke points where hugging the wall (or worse, ledge) still gets you too close to the witch to avoid alerting her?
- Even worse if you are playing single player mode. You can go through the entire game avoiding witches. If a witch spawns in a finale, an NPC team member WILL disturb the witch without fail.
- Sometimes a witch will be placed at the top of a ladder that you must go up in order to continue the game, and she is placed in a spot where it is impossible to shoot or see her until you get to the top of that ladder, then it only takes half a second for her to get angry and rip your face off. This is especially horrible in one player mode when you are basically forced to sacrifice yourself just to continue.
- And then there's the items like first aid kits or special ammo. Usually, if the team is doing well, you will usually just find molotovs or pipe bombs off the beaten path, but if the survivors are crippled and have nothing to heal with, the AI Director MAY spawn more health kits or other healing items, which can sometimes make or break the game.
- The entire game itself can be a luck based mission at times no matter how careful your team is. Sometimes you can go an entire game without any incaps/deaths/restarts and other times you may have to restart several times due to being overwhelmed by the infected. Especially evident if you're playing with bots on any difficulty above Normal. Bots will always heal to 80% hp before leaving the saferoom. However this means by the last saferoom, you could be walking out with one or no extra medkits at all. Good luck surviving the Finale, as the bots will almost always get incapped or killed before the second tank, leaving you alone hoping that a smoker or hunter doesn't come out and ruin your day.
- The bots themselves can also make or break the game. Either they will quickly save you if you get in trouble or they will watch you die before deciding to do anything. Especially fun when the player is grabbed by a Smoker or Hunter, and the bot is melee hitting the normal zombies around them instead of the actual threat.
- The Sacrifice campaign for the first game is like this during the finale where you have to jump off the bridge and kick start the generator. If a Smoker grabs you while he is on a rooftop, the bots won't shoot the tongue or bother to snipe the Smoker, so you'll die and have to restart, thus you have to hope a Smoker doesn't spawn when it's time to do the sacrifice act. This is somewhat avoided in the sequel in the same campaign due to having more weapons and items to defend yourself with and having more special infected types so your chances of a Smoker grabbing you is lower.
- On Medal of Honor: Allied Assault's Hard (read Harder Than Hard) difficulty setting, many levels are practically impossible to pass without Save Scumming, particularly where there are randomly Respawning Enemies, and with the computer being a cheating bastard. For example, Omaha Beach, where even if you flawlessly dodge the machine guns, you'll still get randomly killed by artillery shells. And Sniper Town, with its randomly-placed hitscan snipers. Earning some of the medals is also luck based, particularly the Sniper's Last Stand and Storming Fort Schmerzen levels, where a certain number of Red Shirt comrades must survive.
- The exact same applies to the missions in Call of Duty where you have to outrun artillery.
- Same for most COD games on Veteran difficulty, with the random enemy spawning, near-instant death shots with pinpoint accuracy, and grenade spamming. Especially the original, which lacked regenerating health, and removed all medkits on Veteran.
- Many of events in Modern Warfare on Veteran depend on luck to some extent to overcome, but Mile High Club is above and beyond the call of duty, so to speak, with the combination of a one-minute time limit, cramped quarters combined with swarms of tangoes, unpredictable enemy behavior, Artificial Stupidity by your teammates, and the tendency for enemies to No-Sell your flashbangs half the time.
- Even on Regular difficulty, there are still a few sections of the games where your survival depends more on how accurate the enemy's shots are rather than any skill on your part - "Bag and Drag" from the third game in particular, where you're in a car chase and as such have no option to hide from the barrage of enemy bullets being fired at you. Dying seconds after moving to the back of the van for the first half without being able to do a thing about it is extremely common.
- The Car Ride stage in the first Call of Duty had similar fake difficulty.
- Even on Regular difficulty, there are still a few sections of the games where your survival depends more on how accurate the enemy's shots are rather than any skill on your part - "Bag and Drag" from the third game in particular, where you're in a car chase and as such have no option to hide from the barrage of enemy bullets being fired at you. Dying seconds after moving to the back of the van for the first half without being able to do a thing about it is extremely common.
- PAYDAY 2 reduces some of the random elements, but also adds additional randomness in. For example, drills are guaranteed to jam at least once when they are used, no exception, but will not jam more than thrice, and there's a number of skills that can mitigate the jam (smack the drill for a chance to restart it, random chance to restart it, faster jam fixing, etc). However, the layout of the levels is now much more random, and can absolutely ruin attempted runs. Shadow Raid, for example, requires an entirely stealth-based approach, as if you're spotted, you have 1 minute to get out, and if you haven't gotten enough loot, you fail. But camera, ladder and guard placement can ruin some attempts before they even start by placing too many guards on the dockside, taking up valuable pager uses before you get inside the warehouse, and severely reducing your options once inside.
- PAYDAY: The Heist can be either smooth sailing or a nightmare to trudge through thanks to the special units of the SWAT teams. Tasers will use said weapon to shock you to death, which freezes you in place and makes you fire your gun uncontrollably. Shields will use said shield to flank you and require to be hit from behind. Cloakers can instantly down you. Bulldozers have high firepower and can only be shot in the face. There has been many cases where a single cloaker wiped out all four players and bulldozers plowed through even the most hardened players. And you can get multiples of the same special units coming after you.
- Any level that requires you to use a saw, drill, or hacking device. The items will jam or stall at some point, but how many times they stall is random.
- Several levels are mostly or purely luck based:
- Diamond Heist forces stealth upon you if you want to get to the diamonds without trouble. If a guard spots you before then, you're forced to install the hacking devices on the alarm boxes and make sure they don't jam as the SWAT team come rushing in. Even if you get to the vault without being discovered, it's randomized on whether or not the codes work. If the codes work, great. If not, you're then forced to find the CFO (and your cover is blown by then), take him to the roof and have Bain pick him up for some negotiations. The CFO himself is also luck based on whether or not he gives up the code. If he does, then you can get to the vault. If he refuses to give up the codes, then Bain kicks him out of the helicopter to his death and you will have to find another person who can give the code. You will get the diamonds no matter what, but how you get them depends on whether or not the game wants you to succeed.
- No Mercy also has a ton of randomization in nearly all of its objectives. In the first part, you have to destroy several cameras, but they are in random locations and the more players there are in the game, the more cameras you will have to destroy and you only have 7 seconds to destroy them either way. Once you do, you then have to keep the civilians down and make sure they don't run off to trigger the alarm and yes, where some of them are located are also randomized. When you are going through the computer and then searching for a specific file, you may get some events where someone may come up to the hot zone, to which you will have to yell at them to stay down, or if they are a guard, kill them.
- Should the alarm go off in the No Mercy level, the ICU gets sealed and you have to hack it away with a saw, and then use the saw again on one of the 3 isolation booths and hope the first one you picked has the patient you are looking for. On top of this, even when you get the blood samples, you have to get them validated and it's randomized on whether or not they will be successfully validated. Even worse, when you call the elevator, how many times the cops cut the power is random.
- In Perfect Dark, obtaining the dual CMP-150's on the second level requires you to reach the weapons cache computer without being detected, which heavily depends on the positioning and behavior of the guards. On Perfect Agent, this is close to impossible due to the AI's keen senses.
- Rage (2011) gives the achievement "JACKPOT!" for rolling four kills on your first roll in the Tombstones Mini-Game. Yeah, an achievement for getting a particular result on a dice roll. The odds are 16:1 against on the face of it, and that's assuming id Software didn't weight particular rolls. Likewise the achievements for completing the other minigames (e.g. an in-universe trading card game).
- The first three PC Rainbow Six games can be a crapshoot with the semi-random positioning and movement of the tangoes, espcially on Elite difficulty, where they often headshot you as soon as you poke your head around a corner (sometimes even on the "normal" difficulty setting), and during stealth based missions where you have to avoid being detected. Cases in point: in Rogue Spear's Arctic Flare mission, if the two tangos outside the control room are facing towards the stairs as you come up them, they WILL alert the bridge guards, resulting in the ship being blown up or hostages being killed. Often, they seem to already know you're coming. On "Perfect Sword", sometimes the tangos will come downstairs after the sniper fires, sometimes they won't. If they stay holed up upstairs, you're more or less fucked, as its nearly impossible to clear the room without a hostage being killed.
- Receiver has two sources of this: the level is generated randomly, and your starting loadout is generated randomly. Given that there is no Emergency Weapon, therefore, starting with exactly one bullet is a major handicap.
- Sniper: Ghost Warrior features an escape sequence in which you must swim across a lake while being shot at by at least 3 enemies with near-perfect accuracy and no way to fire back at them. Surviving the segment boils down to winning enough of their accuracy coin-flips to reach the other side. Did we mention you can't dive under the water? This is one of many escape scenes you WILL be shot repeatedly during but it stands out for offering absolutely no way to retaliate.
- Many first-person shooters task you with defeating a certain number of enemies in a given amount of time (such as TimeSplitters), and this often comes down to how often and near enemies spawn.
