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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

When the first-person shooter arrived, somehow we collectively decided that's what all games should now be.

I think we've learned that creativity comes from constraints. Early computing platforms certainly were replete with that.

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I've never been into Doom clones (to use the term from back in the day) and yet I have enjoyed playing countless video games from about 1984 through to the present. Very few of them are first-person games, whether they're head-clickers or other forms of first-person gaming.

To be sure, all games are not FPS. But you know, what are the so-called "AAA" game companies constantly grinding out…

It might be that they're targeting the 8 - 18 year old boy demographic, and that's always a huge cash cow, whereas older gamers have refined taste but don't spend that much money on games because they don't spend that many hours on gaming

AAA companies might pump out a lot of FPS- though it's arguable that they also grind out all sorts of other reliable and less-than-groundbreaking genres, from flavor of the decade trends (MMORPGs/MOBAs/live service battle royales/extraction shooters) to annual sports titles to Assassin's Creed sequels. The Call of Duty machine aside, I'm not sure if FPS is as much of a cash cow as it used to be.

And if you look at this best-selling video games list, there's only a single FPS in the top ten (PUBG, which is technically also third-person):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

Here’s the highest rated games on PS5, Xbox and switch this year. There is _one_ first person shooter in the top ten of all three of these lists combined

[0] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/ps5/all/current-year/... [1] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/xbox-series-x/all/cur... [2] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/all/all/current-year/...

Almost none of the FPS shooters try to to something creative, though. Duke Nukem 3D is still unbeaten for fun in multiplayer (and we still get it out now and then for that) with simple gimmicks like the holo duke, pipe bombs and laser mines.

Even just looking at "game uses 3D engine" we don't really have many great things. There's portal, and while some of the other stuff have promising ideas (like infinifactory), for all of them the controls tend to get in the way of fun.

For ease of use and fun pretty much all simulations - even as far back as the 90s - just using isometric projection are still unbeaten by attempts to go full 3D.

Adventure games became FPS as early as 1992 (only one year before DOOM, so maybe I'm not making much of a point here) with the coming of Ultima Underworld.

Wasn't UU an RPG rather than an adventure game?

That’s a fair point. I suppose if I wanted to focus on the first person perspective I could have mentioned Myst coming out the same year as DOOM, though I doubt it was even the first FP adventure game.

It was really a blending of multiple genres. Was really ground breaking by for its time.

UU was an RPG. What adventure games became were either full hybrid 3D mechanics (Tomb Raider) and niche point and click ones.

Tomb Raider isn't an "adventure" game, no matter what the "mainstream gaming press" says. Monkey Island is.

It was a real time action-adventure game with puzzles. TR made point and click adventures obsolete as they drove a puzzle-event bound game with free exploration. OTOH, text adventures would still be featureful and playable as they achieved incredible things very expensive to do with graphical games.

If Tomb Raider is an "adventure game" so is Donkey Kong. Tomb Raider is basically a platformer like Donkey Kong but in 3D. Neither made actual adventure games "obsolete" because taxing your hand-eye reflexes is a different sort of fun than taxing your brain.

TR has more to do than platforming, and more convoluted puzzles than DK.

Also, definitively, what killed the adventure genre would be the PS1 survival horrors. You have everything there: items, combinations, loads of puzzles, action and a shitfed perspective. Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Parasite Eve...

Pretty much the definition of an old 'point and click' aventure with action points.

Alone in the Dark predates those by like 4 years though...

It does and there were also plenty of horror adventure games, but Alone of the Dark would also make the jump to RE-style survival horror.

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