Anti Frustration Features / First-Person Shooter

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• One example of this trope implemented by multiple first-person shooters is aim assist when using controllers. Aiming with analog sticks typically has issues, compared to aiming with a mouse: analog sticks are incapable of turning the camera faster than the speed they can reach when they're pushed as far as possible in one direction, and increasing that speed is a trade-off between being able to make sudden turns and precise aim adjustments. As a result, many console shooters implement aim assist, which checks if you're aiming sufficiently close enough to a desired target and aims directly at them for you, regardless if you actually were doing that or not. It's such a prevalent trope that with modern games that if your console shooter doesn't have aim assist, it will have something to replace it, like the gyroscopic motion-based aiming featured in the Nintendo Switch version of Doom (2016).
• Don't tell the other splicers, but BioShock gives you the Dungeon Masters Girlfriend treatment:
  • Enemies deliberately miss their first few shots at the player, alerting you to their presence so you aren't instantly killed. Their first shot is guaranteed to miss and the next few have very poor accuracy.
  • Big Daddies move much slower when you are not looking at them to not only spare you getting drilled from behind by surprise, but also to allow you to easily run away from the buggers if you need to.
  • And most notably, unless you disable Vita Chambers in the options, you can't truly die in the game. Dying just kicks you back to the nearest Vita Chamber and any damage or kills you've gotten on enemies are retained.
• BioShock Infinite and its Burial at Sea DLC always play a short violin Stinger when you've cleared an area of enemies. Given the sheer size and scope of some of the areas the fighting takes place in, this is very helpful. Also, Infinite doesn't count falling off of its floating city setting as a death; you're simply instantly teleported to someplace close to where you fell with a tiny decrease in health.
• Black Mesa has a fair few, mostly serving as improvements over Half-Life:
  • The train tracks in "Power Up" and "On A Rail" will no longer electrocute you when you stand on them, and your tram will automatically decelerate to a standstill if you dismount/are knocked off it while it's moving.
  • During the sequence where you defeat the Gargantua in "Power Up", there's no risk of accidentally walking between the tesla coils and getting electrocuted, since the coils don't exist any more and the Gargantua is electrocuted through wires it gets tangled in.
  • Following this, you were originally required to drive a train out of a siding onto the turntable, run all the way up to the control room to rotate said turntable towards the exit, and then return. In Black Mesa, the injured guard in the control room manages to muster up enough strength to activate it for you.
  • "Residue Processing" provides a lot more ammo than in the original's Drought Level of Doom, giving more leeway in ammo usage as well as for disarming traps.
  • The Long Jump module received a massive overhaul in preparation for the Xen chapters, which ensure that any jumping sections within the border world are far less aggravating than they were in Half-Life:
    • Activating the module is now performed by double-tapping the jump button while using directional keys instead of holding crouch and jump; a more simplified activation method that all but eliminates the loss in jump distance that would otherwise occur when jumping from a crouch.
    • With this new input layout comes the ability to use the module omnidirectionally, which not only offers greater control over player mobility while navigating Xen's floating islands but also allows the module to fulfill more combat-centric applications, allowing the player to quickly and more effectively sidestep and backpedal out of harm's way. Mastery of this movement is mandatory if you're going to stand a chance against Xen's bosses.
    • By tapping any directional key while in the middle of a long-jump, the player can activate jets to influence their mid-air trajectory in that direction once per-jump. This grants the player the ability to either correct an off-course jump or prevent themselves from overshooting their intended target.
    • To top it all off, the module comes equipped with a set of landing jets, which completely negate the effects of fall damage - one of the more common avenues of death while navigating Xen in Half-Life.
  • Xen's healing pools heal you at a much faster rate than in the original game. Of course, the level design and enemies will find ways to prevent you from exploiting this.
  • During "Gonarch's Lair", if you're carrying the pizza or purple hat with you for the "Pepperoni Precipitation" or "Rarest Specimen" achievements, the webs that you usually need to shoot to break apart will break on their own, to alleviate unfair deaths while you're running from the Gonarch with a physics object in your hands and said webs in the way.
• Borderlands:
  • Ammo chests are weighted slightly to what you're low on.
  • Running out of health puts you into a "Fight for your Life" mode that lets you get back on your feet if you manage to kill an enemy within a short time, undoubtedly a useful feature given the amounts of damage a lot of the enemies can dish out. However, this can arguably make the frustration worse in a few instances, for example if you managed to kill the only nearby enemy a nanosecond before you went down due to afterburn or something. Fortunately, Death Is a Slap on the Wrist thanks to the New-U stations, which only consume your Money for Nothing, scattered about.
  • In a mid-game mandatory Escort Mission where you have to protect a beacon from Hyperion robots for a certain time the beacon cannot be permanently destroyed; its health depleting only halts the timer until you repair it. If you fail to do it and have to repair it enough times, the Big Bad himself will remark on how much you're sucking at the job. Afterwards, the beacon becomes completely invulnerable. The Difficulty Spike said mission presents in single-player means that, to a first-timer, it makes completing the mission possible.
    Handsome Jack: You're really bad at protecting that beacon, aren't you?
  • Some quests give you specific weapons or items that you must take to complete them, or as a quest reward. Should you get a quest item or reward when your inventory is full, you'll still get the item anyway, with your inventory going over its maximum limit.
  • Accidentally sell an item you didn't want to? Buy it back for the exact price you sold it for!
  • At one point in the Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep DLC, the player has to complete a jumping puzzle designed by Tina over a lava pit. If you die, the game simply plunks you back next to the puzzle rather than booting you to the last New-U station, and it doesn't charge you any money for the respawn.
• If the player loses enough times in a Brothers in Arms game, the player is given the option to replay last checkpoint with full health, instead of whatever health the player left off with. In the Road To Hill 30 game, it even tells you "War isn't fair, but a game should be."
• During the boss fight against the Giant Venus Maneater in Bulletstorm, you never run out of PMC ammo. If you happen to run out, you instantly spawn another full clip.
• Deep Rock Galactic has a few anti frustration features in place to prevent the game from becoming too frustrating:
  • When playing solo, you get Bosco to assist you with everything. He can mine materials for you, shine a light where you tell him to, can attack enemies, and he can also carry large objects for you. Bosco can also revive you if you go down (but he can only do so a limited amount of times). Bosco is Purposely Overpowered since a solo player would have a harder time fighting enemies by themselves, waste more time trying to mine materials alone, and their chosen class may not be suitable for every map. There is an option to disable Bosco for those who want a challenge playing solo.
  • Escort missions involve protecting the Drilldozer from enemies while it slowly makes its way to the Hearthstone and then drill it for its core. The Drilldozer has three parts that have their own separate health bars. No matter what side the Drilldozer is attacked from, the left side is always the first one to lose health and the other parts only lose health when the previous parts are destroyed (Left side, then right side, and then the main body). In the event that a Bulk Detonator shows up, it's programmed to never attack the Drilldozer since it explodes upon death and said explosion would massively damage the Drilldozer. That being said, you still have to keep the Bulk Detonator away from the Drilldozer so you don't blow it up next to it.
  • You can drink beer at the bar before starting a mission and certain types of beer are strong enough to make your vision blurry and dizzy. It takes a while for the drunkenness to wear off on its own and it can carry over to the mission itself. Drinking the Leaf Lover's Special instantly sobers you up.
  • If a player is incapacitated, they won't bleed out or be removed from the game. This can give other players who are caught up in a firefight plenty of time to take care of their problems first before going back to revive their friend. This also means that the team will never truly be down a player unless someone leaves the game.
  • The secondary objectives will have you either collecting certain minerals or killing a certain amount of Fester Fleas. There will always be more for you to find than you need so that you aren't stuck looking for the last bit that you need in a massive cave.
  • The M.U.L.E, a quadrupedal robotic chest that acts as your deposit for securing resources, will both automatically follow the player(s) if they walk far away enough or when a player calls for them: meaning players won't have to worry about tracking down their M.U.L.E when they can't collect any more minerals. They'll even sit still, meaning situations where they push players from specific areas aren't too common.
    • On top of this, the in-game HUD will mark M.U.L.Es with a silhouette when they start walking towards the escape pod and will even mark the path they took with several lit totem pools.
  • The mission selection screen will mark specific regions with what rare minerals will appear there, meaning players aren't required to look up a wiki to find out.

of walking through difficult terrain (Often to the point of walking up walls) and squeezing through tight areas: meaning the player won't ever have to spend extra time making sure a tunnel they make is big enough.

• In Dino D-Day, The Dilophosaurus can pick up a downed enemy and throw them at another player to instantly kill both. However, knocking down someone can prove to be a difficult task (especially if you're out in the open, since you become a sitting duck for gunfire), so there are harmless goats scattered around every map for you to freely pick up and throw.
• In the Doom mod Combat Shock 2, "MAP06: Closure" starts atmospherically, with you travelling through several empty rooms to collect weapons one by one... but you can also open a nearby door to grab all the weapons in one giant pile and immediately teleport into the level proper. This is a boon for speedrunners, who will end up restarting this difficult map many times while trying to clear it, and wouldn't want to repeatedly waste time on the opening segment. The in-game automap even points out the door with a sign saying "Here gggmork", referring to a prominent Doom speedrunner.
• In Doom (2016), killing enemies when you're low on health will cause them to drop health containers. Performing a Glory Kill when you're at low health will make enemies drop even more. Also, enemies will occasionally drop free ammo on death if one of your ammo types is empty.
  • The healthbar consumption under damage is treated as non-linear, with the last ticks containing more "hit points" than the first ones. According to the developers, it has been made with an intention to invoke Last Chance Hit Point experience when playing on Ultra-Violence and Nightmare difficulty levels.
• Doom Eternal ramps up the difficulty from its predecessor, but also adds a number of helpful features:
  • The game adds Extra Lives scattered around the levels, items that are automatically activated when Doomguy's health reaches zero, and allow for him to seamlessly continue in action instead of dying and having to go back to the last checkpoint.
  • Unlike in the previous game, falling to a bottomless pit due to failing a platforming segment will bring the player back to the nearest platform instead of killing them. It does take away some health every time you do this, however, so falling into enough pits will kill you eventually.
  • When you're near the end of a level, you gain the ability to fast travel to previous areas in order to backtrack and hunt down secrets you might have missed.
  • When your chainsaw runs out of fuel, it'll automatically replenish its fuel to 1 pip after a short cooldown, meaning that it's usually possible for you to find a fodder demon somewhere and saw it for some emergency ammo. Given how strapped for ammunition you'll be in Eternal compared to its predecessor, you'll be taking advantage of this a lot. In fact, to facilitate this, the game will constantly respawn fodder zombies in arena zones (including all boss fights), so that one will always have something to chainsaw or Glory Kill in case they need health or ammunition.
  • If you're struggling with a Boss, the game will offer you Sentinel Armor, a temporary Rune that massively boosts your damage resistance, for no penalty.
  • The campaign provides more Praetor Tokens and Sentinel Batteries than a player actually needs, so one doesn't need to obsessively accomplish every challenge or find every secret to max out Praetor suit perks and unlock all rooms in the Fortress of Doom.
• Half-Life 2:
  • Crates with infinite ammunition for a specific weapon are typically present during scenarios where said weapon is required to defeat an enemy to proceed. During the Gunship fight at New Little Odessa, the one instance where no such crates are present, you're instead presented with a group of endlessly-respawning rebels who are able to replenish your RPG ammo.
  • Suit chargers in the Citadel can rapidly charge your suit to double capacity as well as replenish your health — a welcome accomodation for a level where you're taking fire from Combine soldiers in all directions with little to no cover.
  • A more minor example is the supplies dropped by crates. They're dependent on the player's current status, so someone low on ammo might get a few more rounds, while someone with low health could find a medkit. It's done subtly enough that it's not really noticeable in-game — you just know that you managed to find that crate at just the right time!
• Halo series:
  • When fighting the Anticlimax Boss of Halo 3, Sgt. Johnson gives you a Spartan Laser, which at the time is the only weapon capable of doing damage to said boss. It doesn't matter if you brought in a fully-loaded rocket launcher or fuel rod cannon, they're useless here. Luckily, the laser has infinite ammo, so you don't have to jump off the edge when you run out of charge.
    • There's even a small nod to this as well. The Spartan Laser you're given is at an ammo capacity of 77 out of a possible 100. Given that the laser normally fires in increments of 20, such an ammo count should be impossible, cluing the player into its' significance.
  • Games from Halo 2 onward do this if you get caught into death loops at any point (i.e., if you die too fast after reloading your auto save point many times, particularly because of a plasma grenade getting stuck to you just before a checkpoint). Normally, such cases require reloading the entire level from the start, but Bungie decided that the game should throw a merciful bone to players who're stuck in impossible situations by reloading from two checkpoints back.
  • In Halo: Reach, the space combat section can get disorientating because one might easily end up flying "upside down". Thus, the game automatically makes your Sabre right itself if you stop turning for a few seconds. Also, so that enemies don't become too difficult to shoot at such long range, the reticle for hitting them automatically adjusts based on distance and waypoints appear showing where the enemy fighters are when there's only five left.
• Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy make any enemies who are carrying key cards somewhat immune to certain Force powers (i.e. Push and Pull will still knock them over, but they won't actually change position) to prevent players from accidentally throwing that key card down the nearest bottomless shaft and promptly locking themselves out from an item crate or the path out of the level. Relatedly, card carriers avert the worst aspects of Disadvantageous Disintegration if killed with a disruptor rifle charge shot, with the keys being the only thing left behind.
• Left 4 Dead:
  • Developers' commentary states that it's a major feature of the Director AI: It will try to estimate the survivors' stress levels and give them breathers if they seem to be fatigued by constant combat. Conversely, it'll also spawn hordes of the Infected if they try to Take Their Time.
  • When you go down, your survivor pulls out a Pistol to defend themselves until someone helps them up. In Left 4 Dead 2, you can discard your Pistol or Magnum for a melee weapon. If you happen to go down while having a melee weapon, your character will pull out another pistol from nowhere, allowing you to defend yourself until you get help. This lets players have less worry about incapacitation, knowing that they will have something to fight with even if they hold a melee weapon. This rule also applies to Chainsaws, which will be tossed away and traded for a Pistol once the Chainsaw runs out of gas.
    • The rule also applies for players in Left 4 Dead 2 who have died, but are revived from a Magical Defibrillator. Upon death, the player will drop all weapons and items they were carrying except for their secondary weapon (Pistols, Magnums, or a melee weapon) so that when they get revived on the spot, they will have a weapon to defend themselves with should their fellow survivors loot their body beforehand.
  • Left 4 Dead 2 has two finales that require the survivors to fill something with gasoline. Normally, you have to collect all the cans in the map, but if you are playing in single player mode, you need fewer cans to escape instead of having to collect all the cans. This is to compensate for the limitations of the survivor AI where they can't pick up or use gas cans at all^note However, this does not apply if you're in an online mode and happen to be playing alone; on Advanced or harder, you'll have to get all of the cans on the map yourself. The gas cans also can't be destroyed by Spitters until they are picked up and dropped, and since the game only spawns as many cans as is necessary to complete the finale, destroyed cans will simply respawn where they were initially grabbed from.
  • During the brief period after a Survivor is released from a Special Infected but before the player actually regains control of them, the Survivor is immune to all forms of damage (though they can still be pinned by a different Special). This is because the Survivor is locked in place for those few seconds, so the damage immunity prevents cheap shots.
  • In the second game, Wandering Witches cannot be startled via an AI survivor accidentally shooting them, meaning that the AI won't hold their fire like they do for car alarms. This is most beneficial in the Sugar Mill, as the amount of Witches in that level would basically render the AI useless if they refused to fire.
• In Medal of Honor (2010) and Medal of Honor: Warfighter's single-player portions, the player gets infinite secondary weapon magazines, and also has the option of holding the reload button near an allied NPC to get more primary weapon ammo from them. However, this feature in the former game has some limitations:
  • Your allies will only carry spare ammo for weapons that you start the mission with and/or picked-up weapons chambered for the same ammo as what they're using. So while your M4A1-wielding squadmates can give you ammo for that Mk 14 EBR or M1014 shotgun you started with, and Voodoo (who uses an M60) can give you ammo for that G3A3 you picked up, they can't give you ammo for an AKM or Dragunov that you picked up somwehere.
• Overwatch:
  • When players use their Ultimate Abilities, each team hears something different. This allows each team to know instantly if they should run for cover, or take advantage of the moment to push forward. For example, when Pharah uses her Barrage ability, the opposing team hears her shout "Justice rains from above!" Her allies hear "Rocket barrage incoming!" Likewise, when Mercy uses her Valkyrie ability, her team hears, "Heroes never die!" Her opponents hear "Helden sterben nicht," which is just the German translation of that phrase (in general, enemy characters who speak another language primarily will announce their ult in their non-English tongue, to make them even more discernable).
  • Supportive abilities including ultimates will not fire if the condition for them to work aren't present, helping prevent accidental use of ultimates. For example, Ana cannot use her Nano-Boost ultimate unless there is one other teammate in her sight, and the same applies for Brigitte's armor packs.
• Slime Rancher:
  • As of 0.3.0, when you shoot your plorts to sell them on the Plort Market, the fire rate of plorts will increase the longer you fire in order to decrease the tedium of selling plorts. This also happens when taking plorts out of the Plort Collector, as well as depositing food into Auto-Feeders.
  • Gordos usually require 50 food items to pop, but the favorite food of their base Slime counts as 2, meaning they could pop after only being fed 25 items if they're only fed their favorite. Pink Gordos have no favorite, so to compensate for having no other way to hasten the process, they will pop after only being fed 30 items.
  • Similarly, if you snag a Gold Gordo, since Gilded Gingers—the only thing Gold Gordos will even eat—are so hard to find, they will only need 3 to pop.
  • Objects and Largos being carried in front of your vac pack become transparent so you can see where you're going. Those used to the Gravity Gun would appreciate this feature.
  • Different colored teleporters need 25 of a certain color plort, warp depots need 20, and slime lamps need 12. The gold forms of all of these are the exceptions—they each only need one gold plort, since gold plorts are harder to get and can't really be farmed like every other plort.
  • If you get knocked out by falling into the Slime Sea, some of your items, excluding Slimes and Plorts, will wash up on the shore in the Docks area if it's unlocked. This makes drowning a little less painful.
  • When racing for Quicksilver Plorts in Nimble Valley, the Plorts will be gathered automatically instead of you having to vacuum them manually, allowing you to focus on just zapping as many Quicksilver Slimes as possible.
  • The "Burstin' At The Seams" achievement originally required filling a Silo entirely, with 4 slots of 100 items. The "Little Big Storage" update upgraded the Silo to 12 slots of 300 items each — and changed the achievement's requirements to filling each slot with at least 50 items. Still harder (you now need 600 items instead of 400) but not nearly as hard as fulfilling the old requirements with a new Silo would have been.
  • Since the Party Gordos spawn in a random location each week, party music plays as you approach, and increases in volume the closer you are, as a clue that you're close to finding it.
  • Drones are shaping up to be a pretty big one, as they can be programmed to do a lot of maintenance tasks like feeding slimes and selling plorts, allowing the player to be away from their ranch for longer before returning to tend to their slimes.
    • Drones can collect the plorts of Fire Slimes, removing the danger of collecting them (or the frustration of trying to put any vac'd-up Fire Slimes back in the trough without having them ricochet out).
    • "Victor's Experimental Update" added Advanced Drones, a subset of Drones that could be programmed with two tasks. This effectively allows you to have the equivalent of four regular Drones in each expansion (as you can't have more than two Drones placed per expansion). What's more is that their recipe is near-identical to normal Drones, but Wild Honey is swapped for Manifold Cubes, a resource you get by trading Bug Reports (what Glitch Slimes become upon leaving the Slimulation) to Victor. Since Victor's expansion is inside the Lab, whereas Wild Honey must be obtained from Apiaries placed in the much farther Moss Blanket, this actually makes it more practical to craft Advanced Drones than regular Drones
  • When "Victor's Experimental Update" dropped, it was soon discovered that Victor's sidequest is a bit harder to unlock than Ogden's and Mochi's. On top of the requisite "Unlock X Zone, Unlock X Expansion, then do a Range Exchange with them", Victor also requires you to have purchased the Treasure Cracker Mk II before doing the Range Exchange. To ease this sting a bit, the required amount of gadgets to craft to unlock it was slashed from 35 to 20.
  • Exiting the Slimeulation will always empty your water tank, even if you didn't vacuum up any debug spray. The same update introduced a Portable Water Tap, which you can place down at any gadget site to refill your water on the go. You have to hunt down the treasure pod that contains it, but it'll save you a lot of trips to the Docks to refill once you do.
  • It's not a perfect solution, since it's limited by gadget site locations, but Portable Scareslimes, also introduced in 1.4.0, can make free-ranging slimes a bit easier by scaring slimes away from expansion exits.
  • You can't enter the Slimeulation with anything in your inventory. Lest you have to run back to a silo to deposit anything you brought unknowingly, there are some cubbies near the teleporter you entered from that you can deposit your items into.
  • If you send a Drone to gather chickens from a coop, it will never fully empty the coop of that kind of chicken, so as not to prevent more from breeding.
  • Victor's Lab includes a static Phase Lemon tree, from which you can harvest a Phase Lemon the same way you harvest a wild one (launch another fruit at it). If you're tired of having to hunt down the wild Phase Lemon trees as they keep teleporting while waiting for the fruit to ripen, there you go.
  • Speaking of Phase Lemons, it used to be that harvesting them from your garden still required you to shoot other fruits at it. This was changed with update 1.1.0, which let you harvest Phase Lemons like any other fruit just by vaccing them up.
  • Casual mode. It plays exactly like adventure mode, except Largos will not attempt to eat plorts, which means no Tarr will form. Players who don't want to deal with Tarr while out exploring or want to keep certain slimes close to each other will appreciate this. There's also no Easy-Mode Mockery. The only downside is the inability to get any Tarr-centric achievements.
• Slime Rancher 2:
  • Chickens will continue to breed no matter how many are in a coop, making it easier to feed carnivorous slimes.
  • You can now upgrade your vacpack to have extra tanks, which makes carrying around a lot of foods, plorts, or materials at once less tedious.
  • Another vacpack upgrade makes it so when you're knocked out, you don't lose the entire contents of your vacpack and get to keep at least one unit of each item.
• Syndicate (2012) has checkpoints during the Agent Tatsuo boss fight. Also, in the fight with Agent Tatsuo, there will be drones flying about that dispense guns when you Breach them, just in case you run out of ammo. On La Ballena, there's a part where you have to shoot down drones with the Swarm missile launcher, which has many ammo stock-up points for when you run out.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • Official servers scramble the teams if one team keeps losing very badly. If the teams are skewed in one side's favour (usually from multiple members leaving), autobalance kicks in to shift players into the smaller team.
  • During the Tough Break update, there was a Contract system that would reward players for playing the game while using a specific weapon. If the player didn't own the weapon, there was an option to temporarily rent one for the duration of the contract.
• In Quake, every time you exit a map with less than 50 health, your health will restore back to 50 on the next map.

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