This is a Bad Time to be an FPS Fan
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Innovation typically seems to come from two sources: the few companies that are willing to throw large amounts of money at innovative, risky ideas (often led by a famous "auteur" of sorts, e.g. Suda51 or Peter Molyneux), and independent developers who aren't risking as large a budget. This has gotten us FPSs like Team Fortress 2, which completely bucked the trend -- and has been wildly successful as a result. Counter-Strike, still the third most popular game on Steam after over a decade, was originally developed as a mod by fans. But remember that not all new ideas are good, hence the risk: even incredibly innovative and critically successful games often fail commercially, as in the case of Psychonauts.
A near-identical trend can be seen in anime. Over the past half-decade, there has been much complaint about a huge number of shows aping the style and setting of past blockbusters, Kyoto Animation in particular being a particularly large target due to their extraordinary success with franchises like Haruhi and K-ON. In some seasons there have been half a dozen shows following nigh-identical formulas, much in the same way that there's so many identical blockbuster FPSs. Just like with FPSs, to avoid risk, companies pander extremely heavily to the perceived demands of specific demographics that they believe will buy the show or game no matter what -- instead of trying to make something innovative and interesting.
But what was the biggest anime hit this year? Not the Battlefield 3 or Modern Warfare 3s of anime, formulaicly aping past successes. No, it was actually Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magicka, which not only broke to pieces most of the stereotypes of its purported genre, but came out of the nowhere to become the most wildly successful show in years.
A genre of media becomes stale over time, with new ideas stemming to a trickle. People become disillusioned and disinterested, and stop buying new titles. This makes it more urgent to try new ideas, generating more innovation and more fresh content. This content is then aped due to its success, and the cycle repeats.
Counterstrike, as another commenter pointed out, is still the third most popular game on Steam. And yet, every major FPS franchise has moved further and further away from that model.
SOCOM and the Gears of War franchises were probably the two biggest non-respawn online shooters on consoles, and the latest iteration of both has instead put respawn pandemonium front and center instead.
Nothing beats the tension of a shooter where you don't pop back to life 0-5 seconds later. It makes players more likely to work as teams, and it compels players to act with self-preservation instead of running around like damn fools.
I miss those experiences. Hell, I'm playing MW3 because Search & Destroy mode is the closest I can get these days, outside of hardcore PC games like ARMA (which I would probably love if it didn't run like garbage).
Call of Duty has a mode similar to Counterstrike (without buying weapons, but the respawn style is similar enough).
I never got into Counterstrike, so maybe I just missed the whole genre, but every shooter I've played in the last (almost) 20 years had respawns.
Dying or being incapacitated was easy (usually 1 shot in most places) so the only way you could really win was to coordinate very well. You'd be given a map and plan the movement sequences of each team through the level. When you gave a specified "gocode", that team would advance to the next checkpoint by running through a corridor or entering a defended room.
Then, you'd interleave the paths so that in larger rooms you'd have multiple teams enter simultaneously for maximum effect, because otherwise your team would usually get bottlenecked at the entry point and die.
Oftentimes, one of the teams would fall behind or die because of bad planning (or insufficient information while planning). But you'd have to keep going anyway, often with disastrous results. This taught you about failure modes and planning with redundancy.
It also taught you about winning the war before it happens. You never ever ever ran into a room guns ablaze. That's a good way to get your entire team killed, and probably the hostage that you're trying to save. Instead, you have one person open the door, another chuck in a flashbang and more to cover you while you get in through the bottleneck. In any reasonable amount of time it would take for your enemies to react, they'd be picked off already. And hopefully the other team did the same on the other side of the room. The whole thing took under 10 seconds. Not much left to chance or shooting ability.
I miss the old Rainbow Six. Obviously I don't shoot people for a living, but it was one of those games that actually taught you something.
It's a nice way to get people playing instead of sitting around watching, but at the same time placing a cost on dying that simply doesn't exist in most multiplayer shooters today.
Action Quake 2 (and its spin-offs, namely Action Half Life, and its creators went on to make CS), Rainbow Six, Rogue Spear, Rocket Arena (in all of its incarnations), The Specialists. I think the Existence HL mod did this, too?
There are also a number of games that restrict spawning in other ways, mostly by spawn point or territory control: Gloom, Natural Selection, Day of Defeat, Battlefield, etc.
Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, America's Army - pretty much the entire "tactical shooter" genre until some of those franchises started moving in on the console casual market.
Not to mention the two console serieses I already listed in the post you responded to, both of which moved multi-million units serving up non-respawn multiplayer.
I agree with you on respawns in a lot of ways, but I think there's ways to make things tactical and tense without them. TF2 did a good job of this by at least having respawn timers, whereas MW3 is a complete joke - I can't play it except for in S&D because every time I take time to set up a flank or get behind cover, someone on the other team spawns behind me and catches up.
Of course back then, nobody used Ventrilo so that system wouldn't work very well today.
AQ2 was nice, because
- no respawn while a round was active
- hit zones (head = bad, legs could break)
- bleeding (you need to bandage yourself, sometimes _fast_)
- instant kills were possible with ~all~ weapons. Standard pistol to head, one shot. Throwing knives (My favorite!) to head -> Dead. Knife to stomach? Chuckle, run - he's going to bleed to death w/ a 80% chance.
- equipment/weapon selection at the start of the round a la 'classes', but more free. Giving you stealth (no footstep noises), protection (armored vest), better/more weapons/ammo etc.
- nice variety of missions and settings
Did you ever play the AQ2 Single Player mod? We basically put a bunch of standard Q2 monsters at interesting locations on the AQ2 maps so you could practice against them. Was quite popular after a while: a team of half a dozen people modding for pretty much every AQ2 map out there.
Maybe I need to search for my installation of Q2 again and give it a try on a slow weekend day ;)
These things came together to create some wonderful cinematic moments. I remember one, during a clan match: I was the last member of my team alive, almost completely out of ammo, with three remaining on the enemy team. They rushed into a room to get me. I managed to take down one with the last bullet in my gun, then kicked another out of the room, causing him to drop his hand cannon. I whirled and threw my knife into the face of the third, then grabbed the dropped shotgun and took out the second as he ran back in. I think I had to take a break to recover after that, haha.
I also remember AQ2 not showing which players were alive on either team. I distinctly remember games where I'd use the radio command to report in, only to be met with complete silence... and suddenly realize I was all alone.
Even as a long time CS player, I still prefer AQ2. I'd love to find a modern game like it.
Here's all I want from an FPS:
1. Single-player mode: A succession of well-designed, non-linear levels where you run through and kill everyone. Have lots of routes through the level. Make it really wide open. Maybe have the levels all run into each other without pauses in the middle to load--MDK did it ten years ago, so no excuses. Soundtrack: thrash metal.
2. Multi-player mode: Choose from a set of well-designed, non-linear levels where you can run through and kill all your friends. Soundtrack: thrash metal.
Really, I'm not demanding anything, concept-wise, that wasn't already in Doom II. I just want it with modern technology and without all of this bullshit about flashlights and cutscenes.
In general, this year's (PC/FPS) games I'd pick as being worth a lookin are:
* Deus Ex: HR. This year's GOTY for me. Amazing single-player storyline, and it's truly open-approach as far as levels are concerned. I played the game almost entirely stealthily (ie. finding air conditioning ducts to hide in and making extensive use of augmentations which showed enemy patrols' FoV in order to avoid detection), but you could approach it completely differently and gun down every last dickhead guard. In a year where Portal 2 had clenched my favourite spot, this did incredibly well to claim it.
* Portal 2. Valve, Portal, `nuff said. I didn't think it was as good as the first one (there were a lot less twitch-esque puzzles, due to the PS3/360 not being able to support the rapid mouse movements a PC does), but still an excellent game.
* Battlefield 3. The whole BF3/MW3 thing is the most ridiculously hyped up marketing exercise in existence, but the multiplayer here is still Battlefield, and still solid. Might not be your cup of tea, but definitely fun for a hoon.
* Tribes: Ascend. Still in beta, and still being actively tweaked (thankfully, as the balance is currently nowhere near correct). Still, it's undoubtedly Tribes: fast, airborne, and team-oriented. Woot woot.
* Dead Space 2. My favourite horror/FPS mashup. It's not so much scary as it is shocking; generally, you get less of a fright (unlike Amnesia, which is deeply unsettling), and more of an OH FUCK style surprise. Really, really glad EA kept this franchise going, but I imagine after one more round I'll be over it (sadly).
Also, if you play nothing else from the indie establishment, Bastion is amazing. If I was to recommend only two games from this year, for me, they'd be Deus Ex: HR, and Bastion :).
In terms of other tactical games you might like, I don't typically play that genre so can't be a good recommendation engine unfortunately. Company of Heroes, while an RTS (and long in the tooth now), focusses more on local tactics than it does traditional RTS trappings (ala Starcraft 2). Thanks to the recent failure of CoH: Online, it's had a bunch of balance changes backported and is currently undergoing somewhat of a rejuvenation :). The Dawn of War II series is RTT (tactical; there's no basebuilding) but the online is so hardcore most have been turned off it by now.
Edit: If you like hardcore tactical multiplayer, you might want to check out "Battleground Europe". Oldest online multiplayer game still running, as far as I know. It has its rough edges, and certainly can't compete in the graphics area, but the realism when it comes to weapons modeling is the best I've seen. Not to mention the skills you find in the longtime players. Check out the top anti-aircraft gunners (like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_eeYikGjjw).
It probably wouldn't work now. There was a certain zeitgeist in the early 90's where all that stuff went together better than it does now, and you can't turn back time. I just don't remember many FPS games being as fun as Doom and Doom II.
FPS Multiplayer is pure skill (frag better than your enemies). FPS Singleplayer is mostly puzzle (find the trigger, figure out the right weapon use). Both elements give you a feeling of achievement.
In addition there is story telling, which is not game-specific, but games are a great medium to tell stories (and not just with cut scenes).
Another aspect is addiction, which is discussed in great length for Farmville, WoW, and others. This grinding/leveling has little to do with gaming in my eyes.
The question of wide-open/non-linear vs linear and the choice of soundtrack belongs to the story telling aspect.
1: E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy
That's not to say that the overall state of FPS campaigns isn't disappointing. I'm looking forward to seeing if Respawn (the Infinity Ward founders' new studio) can do anything to reverse that trend.
Is anyone really surprised by this anymore? Review scores remain high because it's a wide known fact that if you review the game too badly, you won't get any more games for reviews from that publisher. It shocked me the first time I heard of it, but it should be old news by now.
IMO though multiplayer has been steadily improving, albeit a little slowly.
The difference then was that everything was new, the game was not designed for sticking c4 to jeeps, it was just possible due to the fact that the jeeps were modeled with cavities inside and the game physics was realistic enough. You had to be creative to come up with tactics like this, and then the tactics really stood out because nobody expects it, in bf2 when you see a jeep you always expect it to be rigged.
I feel BF2 took many of those elements and removed the joy out of them by making them into special cases, such as "Press A to jump over the wall"-thing. Bf2 does not have exactly that but i'm talking about the concept of pre-scripted mechanics that can be triggered by one button instead of a game expressive enough for the player to make those mechanics himself by combinations of other simpler mechanics. And i'm not only BF2 talking about bf2 but also most other games from the last 5 years.
That describes nearly every single-player FPS ever made. And it's exactly why I have always preferred MP to SP. Everything he mentioned is wrong with single-player today has always been wrong -- boring, repetitive, tedious. Duke and Quake weren't any better, MP was way more fun than SP back then too. Multiplayer is like single-player, except the enemies are intelligent, it's different every time, and you can go any way you want (not just down the alley, up the correct ladder, through the air vents, to collect the good gun you need to beat the next guy who will always be waiting in the same spot). I play America's Army 3 now, it's MP only.
You could argue, of course, that those two games aren't really pure FPS. Since they do have a story.
Indeed, it's not like these are getting any less fun. If anything, it's getting easier to rediscover the classics since the likelihood that they will work under Wine is increasing.
I don't want to have to collect things to move on. I don't want to solve puzzles. I don't want skill points that make me better at shooting a rifle. What makes me better at shooting a rifle in a game is what makes me better in real life -- practice. When I started playing AA3 I sucked, I couldn't control my weapon, but with practice I got better. When I used to play SoF2 I would load a map locally and practice shooting walls for hours. Learning to shoot a perfect two shot burst at head level. People would think I was cheating because I could take their heads off before they even fired a shot. And it wasn't because of artificial skill points, it was because I practiced.
To me multiplayer FPSs are like competitive sports. They take practice, they are intense and thrilling, they require team tactics, there is competition against real people, and there is the thrill of victory from beating a real person. I don't want to out-smart code a developer wrote, or out-shoot an AI programmed to be less accurate than a computer should be. I want to out-smart a person who is trying to out-smart me. I want to out-shoot a person who is trying their best to out-shoot me.
I hope companies continue to make good SP FPS and RPG games, because I know people that really like them. They just don't do it for me.
Deus Ex is probably not as good as an example as System Shock 2. Deus Ex was way too long ever for me, and can indeed become tedious.
System Shock 2 also has something like a skill point system, but it feels different: In Deus Ex you can always do almost everything, just with more or less efficiency. System Shock 2 tends more toward unlocking e.g. the ability to use a specific gun. The game also has a knack for keeping you low on at least one supply (health or ammo or weapons or so).
Experience points are limited, you get them for progressing in the story. So you can't stay around and grind. (That's similar in Deus Ex.) So your level of abilities is just a convenient way for escalating the stories. Just like getting new weapons in Half Life or new kinds of tanks in a real-time strategy game.
On the other hand, you might like games like nethack or Spelunky. They have a notion of your character growing in abilities, but since each game is short, you start from zero each time, handling the progression well just becomes another skill. A bit like picking up weapons and ammo in Quake 3 in the most efficient manner possible. Or Master of Orion, where getting new technology is part of the game (and can be compared to getting new skills in an RPG).
Thief, Rainbow Six (1, 2 and 3, not the crap that followed), Hitman.
As for Quake... try doing this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpiNDxssUL0
I'm surprised my favorite indie FPS of the past decade hasn't been mentioned here: Air Buccaneers. Basically it was was a UT2004 mod, an FPS where you can man hot air balloons airships with manually loaded/aimed old-style cannons. Being part of a good team of 2 or 3 on one of those things was a blast.
Seems they're updating it: http://www.airbuccaneers.com/
And if I'm honest, when you get past the fact it's Mechs, the gameplay looks a little dull to me.
The crux of the article is disappointment in the single player campaign.
Once someone hits upon the next big thing every GameStop will be bursting at the seams with Panda themed RPGs (or whatever). Whining about how one's beloved genre is stagnant is just, well, whining.
Edit: Sorry to pull the comment, but my recollection of the release dates for DOOM and GoldenEye made me want to double-check them first.
In another comment I said I liked multiplayer FPSs because they are like competitive sports. But the friends I know that like single-player FPSs and RPGs don't like sports, they didn't play them as kids and they don't like watching them.
The latest crop of MP FPSs, like MW3 and BF3 have mass appeal. I suspect a lot of the people playing them would otherwise be outside playing basketball, watching football, riding skateboards, or hanging out at the mall. The fact that these games are now on consoles makes it much easier for previous non-gamers to get into. Consoles are much cheaper than gaming PCs, and they are socially acceptable as non-geeky.
It occurred to me that all the author's problems with single-player games, e.g., linear levels, dumb AI, could be solved by playing multiplayer. So I tried to think of a way to combine the campaigns of SP with the player vs. player of MP. One thought was to have each MP map be connected to the rest. Winning an objective, like blowing up or defending a bridge would move the next round's spawn points to the other side of the bridge, and the game would continue with a new objective. More campaign-like.
More complex MP gameplay would appeal to me as an MP fan, it would require more team tactics, and the consequence of losing would be greater. But would it appeal to an SP fan? I truly don't understand the appeal of single-player games. Is there a way to make multiplayer FPS games more appealing to single-player FPS fans? What do people actually like about single-player first person shooters?
After Halo 2 shipped, Bungie went to the drawing board for its next title and a company that faniced itself as inspired and innovative did the only thing that it knew how to do; innovate.
But by the time Halo 3 was released, Halo 2 had grown into a different beast entirely. While Bungie developers, perhaps naively, thought of their baby in terms of things like 'awesome' and 'badass', H2 had become the flagship competitive title for MLG, the now largest pro gaming curcuit in America, and had fostered the first real breakthrough of competitive console FPS into the American ultra mainstream. The people playing this game now thought of it in terms of 'balance' and 'skill gap' and 'teamwork', topics that require experience on a level of play beyond the grasp of the creators themselves to truly understand.
And there's a huge difference in the way you would develop for those two schools of thought. Bungie was caught up in making a game for themselves still, and they did so at the expense of alienating a fanbase that had become nothing like them. For a game that lives and dies by its online community, this was the kiss of death.
After a game becomes competitive you can't change the recipe, you can only add sugar. No one clamors for drastic changes to be made in baseball or basketball because the attraction to competitive games isn't innovation, it's competition. Bungie desperately wanted to improve the franchise with cool features and new mechanics and powerups and it was all for naught because, at the end of the day, all Halo 2 players wanted to play was Halo 2.
The big question is, of course—are people willing to pay FULL_GAME_PRICE for small updates, like you describe?
MW3 has garnered quite a lot of flack for being entirely derivative and little more than an iterative annual EA sports title-style update.
As for your question, this type of thing is far more suited for incremental updates a la modern MMOs. Make the game free on psn/marketplace and charge a cheap annual subscription fee with trials to hook casual users in and you a have a recipe for success. Place a huge emphasis on community and competition so that hardcore players become heavily invested (from all ends of the personality spectrum), be an extremely active presence on your (robust) online community and listen to fans who understand your game. A fact that I think is lost on many developers is that, while catering to the casual crowd over the competitive seems like it should be better business, what casual players put in their disk tray day after day is largely dictated by what they see when they check out their friends list, and if a hardcore player spends eight hours a day online, guess what's going to quickly become every casual player's go to game?
- Raven Software's recent releases, Wolfenstein and Singularity (360, PS3, and PC). While both have similar core gunplay to most modern FPS's - iron sights, etc. - they offer unique enemies and a lot of neat gimmicks and twists. I haven't played Wolfenstein, but I know Singularity has stuff like weapon upgrades, various powers, etc.
- Painkiller (PC) is very much a descendant of the original Quake, with a similarly gritty medieval atmosphere, and a similarly brown color palette. It's not a pretty game to look at, but it's pretty fun. Personally was a bit too repetitive for me. Stay away from its sequels and expansions at all costs, though.
- Serious Sam HD (PC, 360) is tons of fun and hard as hell, with massive amounts of enemies in every level and a lot of massive, beautiful, and most of all colorful arenas. While The First Encounter and The Second Encounter originally came out on PC and Xbox 1, you should check out the recent HD remakes (on Steam and on Xbox Live Arcade) instead. And stay away from Serious Sam 2 (not to be confused with The Second Encounter) at all costs; it's not a good game. On the other hand, Serious Sam 3 comes out next week and seems promising.
- Hard Reset (PC) is a recent indie FPS that has gunplay similar to Painkiller and Serious Sam, but with an ultra-cool cyberpunk aesthetic. It also has more depth, with there being two weapons that can be upgraded in a variety of ways. However, it's somewhat short and has no multiplayer component (though they recently added a solo survival mode), so even though it's only $30, you may want to wait for it to be on sale. There's a demo available on Steam.
I'm loving BF3! I'm hesitant to call it the best multiplayer FPS ever, as that's rather subjective. But certainly it's my favourite so far.
(Still, the real meat was in the multiplayer, of course)
Funnily the guidelines also mention this: "Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site."