Friend Or Foe / Video Games

• This is particularly common in "real world" first-person shooters, particularly WWII shooters. Often, the only difference between the uniforms worn by the soldiers on your side and those worn by the soldiers on the enemy side are a slight difference in the shade of khaki. In sci-fi shooters, you at least have more flamboyant, easily distinguished uniforms, or the enemy will be outright alien and easy to spot simply by their profile.
  • Happens so often in Red Orchestra to the point that there exists a specific apology message in chat.
• On the other hand, in a few shooters enemies can hurt each other with their attacks, the so-called monster infighting popularized by Doom.
• Fortunately, many games give you the option of turning Friendly Fire off. Lag and collision detection glitches can also result in team kills while, say, firing on an enemy to assist with a kill if your teammate moves near your line of fire.
  • Worse in Söldner, where every player could customize his outfit and color, meaning only the teamnames above their heads showed who was on your team. Enter a bug where sometimes a teammate won't have this blue name displayed...
• Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown has this as a running theme: who is friend and who is foe in a war where information is everything? For some specific examples:
  • In Mission 9, the heroes are about to go home after a job well done when a flight of F/A-18s signaling as Osean planes arrives on the scene. Bandog tries to identify them only for the new arrivals to open fire on the 444th- they're actually Erusean drones spoofing Osean IFF software in order to get in close to attack. Later, this same tactic is revealed to be how the Eruseans killed former President Harling and framed Trigger for it.
  • Near the beginning of the Third Act, the Erusean and Osean militaries attempt a decapitation strike by taking down the others' spy and communication sites. Problem is, the debris from the attack damage nearly every other satellite in orbit, essentially knocking out all advanced communications on Strangereal in general and Usea in particular. The communication breakdown sees Erusea descent into a civil war as Radicals, Conservatives, and anti-Erusean militias rise up and start shooting everything that moves, and a fair number of Osean forces also turn on one another due to the confusion. In these missions, the player has to manually identify friendly and hostile units via brief missle lock, long enough for AWACS to properly code them.
• Call of Duty has this problem as well — it's surprisingly easy to get the game to not display a teammate's name over his head even as you're staring right at him, though thankfully there's normally no friendly fire. Then you enter Hardcore mode, where friendly fire is enabled, the name-tags are disabled, there's no radar to show teammates' locations unless a UAV or spy plane is in the air, and health is reduced to the point that a single bullet with pretty much anything is an instant kill. Getting kicked from the server for too much accidental teamkilling is not at all uncommon.
  • Regarding Call of Duty, the single player campaigns have some of the same problems; the names of allied NPCs are often not displayed if you're not aiming at them or at a distance. The games try to acknowledge the inherent risk by allowing the player to accidentally/deliberately wing plot-relevant allies (who will often give a word of warning) or kill the occasional Red Shirt, but this isn't always consistent; add in some Artificial Stupidity, and you'll probably have a few unnecessary game overs on your hands.
  • Done twice during the mission "Second Sun" in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, where the effects of a nuclear missile going off over Washington, D.C. have caused a blackout and rendered all forms of communication beyond verbal a no-go. The first person the player's squad meets afterwards turns out to be a runner who simply forgot the Rangers' countersign, who rallies the squad to head for the White House. Afterwards is a very intense scene when a lightning strike reveals a group of soldiers crossing the street some thirty meters in front of the squad. They don't immediately reply to the countersign by Sergeant Foley, and suddenly guns are firing everywhere as it turns out they're Russian soldiers.
• A.S.P. Air Strike Patrol Deconstructs the "shoot anything that moves" aspect of Shoot Em Ups this way. Coalition forces and civilians are present throughout the game, and some missions will require you to make precise strikes on enemy forces in urban areas. Hitting friendlies or civilians will make international news, and damage public opinion of the Coalition. Do it enough, and anti-war protests will happen. Ultimately you'll earn yourself a Nonstandard Game Over as the Coalition is forced to pull out.
• In Fallout, you had to take a separate perk to have the computer mark your friends in green. Without it, you had to remember (or, in some cases, guess) who was on your side. Or you could just "check". If the game tells you "Ian", "Tycho", "Katja" or "Dogmeat", chances are good that they are friendly.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, while wearing Faction Armor, opposing factions will be hostile to you, regardless of your reputation with them.
• The main reason to play as an Engineer in Mass Effect or Mass Effect 2 is to scramble enemy robots' IFF targeting and make them go on a berserk rampage through their own side.
  • This is also how Samara greets Shepard for their first meeting in Mass Effect 2.
• In Fable, firing on a neutral character causes them to decide that the player is trying to kill them, and they promptly attack.
  • Fable has a huge problem with this. Trying to win any large-scale battle with non-scripted allies is virtually impossible because they end up flashing red any time the player hits them- even if it's in such a way that neither the player nor the ally has any way of knowing where the shot came from!
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Throughout the series, allies and escorts with ranged attacks or spells have no compunction against using them, even if you are current between them and their target. This gets even worse if they have large Area of Effect spells...
  • This is one of the contributing factors to Morrowind's notorious Escort Missions. The Suicidal Overconfidence of your escortees mixed with their Artificial Stupidity leads to them running off to attack every enemy in sight. If the enemy doesn't outright kill them, a stray blow from you likely will. If they survive it, there is a good chance they will then turn on you for attacking them. Either way, mission failed.
  • Oblivion attempts several methods to downplay this trope. For one, those you are escorting are typically tagged as "essential", meaning they can't be killed, only knocked out. Additionally, the AI is a lot more understanding with accidental hits (with NPCs just admonishing you for being sloppy, unless you hit them quite a few times in a row). Finally, Oblivion includes a method for yielding to NPCs you've accidentally made hostile.
• The original Diablo game had friendly fire enabled.
• It's quite difficult to avoid hitting fellow survivors in Left 4 Dead (well, except for the AI, which is good for you because otherwise they would be really bad at not downing you). There's even an achievement, "Safety First", for getting through a campaign without any friendly fire incidents. As of May 2017, only 4% of the players have acquired it.
• In Wing Commander: Privateer, it's trivially easy to fall afoul of this with the starting radar, which doesn't give target types any color coding; the militia forces fly the same ships (with different color schemes that are hard to notice until you're right next to them) as the pirates and Retros, further compounding the problem. More advanced radar models color-code contacts, making it much easier to determine who is or isn't a legitimate target.
  • In the main games, for the most part your opponents will be flying ships entirely different from your own side's, so it's easier to tell who's who. This doesn't, however, help too much if your wingman flies right into the path of the torpedo you just launched, resulting in an insta-kill of said idiot and everyone else declaring you a traitor, in all but the very first game (where there's no penalty for killing your wingman).
    • On a related note: during a mission briefing in the original game, one wingman "Maniac" is so much trouble that the player is given permission to shoot him if he gives you too much hassle. There is also a Friend or Foe missile used throughout the series that locks onto targets if it doesn't broadcast the right friendly comm code, however the comm system can get damaged in fights.
• Taken to an extreme in Team Fortress 2. While it is very easy to see who is friend or foe due to the brightly colored team uniforms, the Spy class has the ability to disguise as any other class and in the process take on the name of another player. As the Spy also has an instantly lethal back-stab attack and it's not always too easy to notice the spies on behavior alone, it has become common to "spy-check". That is, shoot at your own team, preferably at close range. Anyone who dies or starts running, IS A SPAH!. This is because you can not hurt your own team. The best class for spy-checking is the Pyro, as a quick puff of flame will render both the Spy's disguise and his invisibility watch useless. Pyros are in fact expected to set fire to anyone and anything in order to find spies, and a Pyro who does not do this will most likely be subject to a spy-check himself.
  • Averted in the Spy's own "Meet the Spy" video. The Soldier's point-blank shotgun blast would have been a perfectly valid tactic in game, resulting only in a BLU spy annoyed at being interrupted mid-monologue. Instead, the Spy's head explodes in a shower of Ludicrous Gibs.
• Averted in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 and Red Alert 3, Allied Spies and/or Imperial Sudden Transports can disguise themselves as enemy units, but will never be mistakenly fired on by their own side. The only way for an enemy to attack them without using scouts to break their disguise is to force-attack (explicitly give orders to attack, as units without orders will not engage them). Yuri's mind control towers, however, immediately Face–Heel Turn spies as soon as they hit their effective range.
• Some stages in the Gauntlet series of games had this, where your shots could either stun or even harm other players.
• Side-scrolling beat-em-ups, such as Final Fight, also have this. Even ones that did not (such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or X-Men games) would have certain special wild attacks (respectively, environmental attacks and hurled enemies) that could harm other players.
• Doom had friendly fire in co-op mode. Much more famously, any monster with a projectile could incite a riot by accidentally hitting its allies, which would cause them to forget all about the player and kill each other. They don't really notice if one of their buddies wanders into the line of fire. Quite a bit of Doom strategy is based around tricking enemies into hitting each other.
• Gwent: The Witcher Card Game: Many card effects indiscriminately hit either side of the board. It's a common rite of passage in the game for ignorant newbies to accidentally obliterate their own units.
  • Scorch, which destroys the highest unit(s) on the playing field is the prime offender of this. It's gotten to the point that there are message boards dedicated to explaining that if the highest unit is on your side it will be destroyed. To a lesser extent this applies to epidemic which targets all of the lowest unit(s).
• Star Fox 64 had a mission on Katina that, in addition to being a Shout-Out to Independence Day, involved assisting a Cornerian Defense Force base's fighter compliment in fending off Andross' forces. The problem — Andross' fighters are designed nearly identically to the CDF "greenies", and they are both easy to destroy with the Arwing's lasers. Fox's CDF friend Bill will not hesitate to call Fox out if he shoots down a CDF fighter.^note One way to tell them apart is to try locking onto them: only enemy fighters register as valid targets.
  
  Though rare, it's possible for the rest of the Star Fox team to shoot down the CDF fighters as well.
  Peppy: Enemy down ... Wait! That was one of ours!
• This is a major danger in the Total War series, particularly with siege units.
• Set Dragon Age II to Nightmare difficulty level. Put a two-handed warrior with a BFS and a blaster mage with area-effect spells in your party. Let the AI control them while you muddle around as some other character. Watch the Total Party Kill ensue.
• Chivalry: Medieval Warfare has serious problems with this, mostly because all battles eventually turn into multi-man melees with archers firing into the fray. And when you swing any sort of weapon into a fray that size, you're eventually going to chop your ally's head off by accident. Archers don't have it any better, and unless you're really good a sizeable portion of your arrows will end up adorning your pals. Even with proper caution taken it's very, very hard to avoid decking someone on your side during any battle bigger than a three-on-two.
• As per the Chivalry example above, it's also possible to accidentally hit allies with projectile weapons in Mount & Blade. Don't fire/throw into melee, it's just not going to end well. Fortunately, melee attacks can't harm your allies, though weapon swings will probably bounce off them (similar to swinging at a wall, for instance).
• MORDHAU, being a spiritual successor to Chivalry, would naturally have its share.
  • In big frays, hitting your teammate because you were swinging a big-ass maul around is basically inevitable if it gets beyond 3 against 1. Stabbing has less possibilities, but not every weapon is good at that, and even then it's perfectly possible for one of your side to get in the way and get shanked to death. And the less said about firing into a massive fray, the better. There's even a perk to reduce friendly fire damage by 50%, which is almost a must for certain builds. And since it also dampens friendly fire that you take, it's still recommended for when you just can't trust your teammates to aim their giant sod-off zweihander anywhere that isn't your back. And there's even voicelines for both callign out a teammate for hitting you and apologizing after hitting a teammate, though not all of the latter are friendly...
  Raider voiceset: Have you seen the size of this fucking sword!? Of course yer gonna get clobbered if ya stand next to me ya tit!
  • And then there's siege weapons. Ballistae are bad enough, what with how they just keep going until they hit a wall; shooting them into a melee is one way to get a multicolored shishkebab. And catapults and mortars... it's pretty much impossible to not kill one of your guys with a shot unless you're very good or very lucky. Prepare to be literally kicked off the siege engine in question if you do it too much, especially if you wipe out half your team in one Epic Fail of a shot.
• One of the more embarrassing things to happen to players using howitzers in World of Tanks is this—because howitzers (including artillery guns) are both hideously inaccurate and devastatingly powerful, there's very few arty players who haven't accidentally teamkilled an ally thanks to the terrible accuracy on their gun.
  • Alternatively, you could have your sights on an enemy that was "tracked"^Definition Short for "de-tracking", or rendering a vehicle immobile by way of destroying its tracks. long enough for your crosshair to lock in a guaranteed direct hit, only for them to fix it and run off after you've fired, at which point an ally just so happens to stop right in the middle of your aim. Direct hit, ally goes kaboom, see you back at the garage.
  • Light tanks tend to be the biggest receivers of this trope. Not just because of artillery, but because they can be so busy running circles around Tank Destroyers or Heavies, that they aren't paying attention to the guns of their own team-mates. This can result in many cases of Friendly Fire while team mates fire on enemy tanks while unaware that an allied Light Tank is about to come screaming around like a jackrabbit on crack.
  • In World of Warships, Torpedoes are basically addressed "To whom it may concern" as missed torps that haven't sputtered out or hit their intended mark can be just as lethal to an ally, as they can to an enemy. There's even been cases of particularly careless carriers with torpedo bombers sinking themselves with their own torpedoes.
• This can be a bit of a problem in some flight simulators, especially those taking place in the Cold War Middle East. For instance, in F-15 Strike Eagle it is possible to play missions against Iran, who can and will field the American-built F-4 Phantom and F-14 Tomcat. The problem is that, since you play an American strike fighter, your allies are also in Phantoms and Tomcats. Any pilot with a too-itchy trigger finger who doesn't obey the rules of engagement (identify, then engage) will come home to find a nice neat court-martial summons waiting for them.
• This can happen in XCOM2 during Retaliation missions. The Vichy Earth would not hesitate to shoot at civilians for the simple crime of not living under their rule. And they send some Shapeshifter infiltrators to make rescuing them harder for La Résistance. But sometimes, civilians run away from enemies, and sometimes, they trigger reaction fire from enemies who used the overwatch order (an order that makes them shoot at the first enemy that moves). Faceless act exactly as civilians until your soldiers get near them, or all the other Vichy Earth troops are killed. And sometimes, they get shot by their own allies while running away.
• In Half-Life: Alyx, Russell pilots a hacked Combine Scanner to help guide Alyx to his hideout early on. It gets destroyed, but he manages to repair it midway through the game. Except he doesn't tell Alyx he's done this, and as the drone pops in very suddenly and can potentially be mistaken for a Manhack it's possible for a particularly Trigger-Happy player to put several rounds into it before they realize it's friendly. Fortunately, it's Friendly Fire Proof, so no harm done, but still.
• Deep Rock Galactic: While it's easy enough to tell the dwarves apart from any enemies, when fighting against absurdly huge hordes of bugs in tight quarters does inevitably lead to some friendly fire incidents. Some weapons, like the Engineer's Grenade Launcher and especially the Driller's Satchel Charge naturally have more problems, due to explosion radius and the usual panic in which they're tossed out. At least there's perks to mitigate friendly fire damage, though the dwarves themselves will still get pissed.
  "TRIGGER DISCIPLINE, ya whale piper!"