Vapourware 2000s First-Person FPS Shooter Games

[HansDampf]

No they are the DNA of a RPG and since the first shooters didn't have as much new ideas, they tried to emulate most of the elements of existing roleplaying games. That is why I find 90s shooters so boring as they want to be similar to rpg's but are actually inferior because the fps combat is pretty bad. Why play Doom or Duke Nukem when I can play Might and Magic? The shooting aspect really improved in the 2000s. I am not saying that 2000s didn't bring decline because most shooters in that period were shit as well, especially the Call of Duty series.

What is the DNA of a FPS?

 

[Average Manatee]

Duke Nukem Atomic (edition)

 

[ind33d]

Cheating in a 2010s multiplayer game somehow has something to do with which 2000s singleplayer shooters are best?

an fps's mechanics should be strong enough that you can outplay someone who is aimbotting and still win. in halo and quake this is possible.

 

[Groover]

L4D2 versus was some of the best multiplayer stuff I've ever played, when it was still active. Never understood people who stuck to campaign mode though, that shit got boring very fast to me.

Play it on expert realism and fire up a custom map. Basic non-realism campaign IS a snoozefest. Versus is still the most active mode in that game, but it's such a toxic cesspool to the point that it's not worth sacrificing peace of mind to compete with mouthbreathers

 

[Groover]

The shooting aspect really improved in the 2000s. .

No it absolutely did not. Weapon limits, regen health, hitscan galore, simplified enemy roster, slower movement speed, linear & realism-based level design was all heavy decline, and then some. Furthermore all the good things usually attributed to the 2000s were already introduced in the 90s - dedicated grenade & melee input, recoil, vertical aiming, alt fires etc.

I don't think it's as dire as you seem to want it to be. Weapon limits introduce a layer of decision making and playstyle, instead of just mindlessly sucking up all pickups in something like Doom, Quake or Duke, and going about your business.

Enemy rosters ARE simplified, that's for sure, but they're typically more dangerous, to the point that a larger pool of baddies to shoot at would seem almost redundant. How many enemies in your glorified 90s shooters can be defeated by just mindlessly strafing left and right by a wall (or out in the open for some)? Say what you want about the decline of CoD, I won't deny most of it, but leaning out of a piece of cover to frantically search for your enemy who's easily able to take you out is more interesting than dancing the polka with a braindead minion... to say nothing of the bulletsponge galore of the classic Doom games. Cyberdemons are a cakewalk once you figure out how their ai works, but they never stop being a pain in the ass to take down due to bloated hp pools.

I think, with the advent of CounterStrike, there was a desire to introduce a closer-to-life lethality to gunfights that didn't really exist up until that point - an encouraged level of hyper awareness and vulnerability that wasn't emphasised with the static encounters of most of 90s FPS level design. Most video games are power fantasies, but there seems to have been a concerted effort in the 2000s to move past that and introduce a more cerebral challenge, rather than the rote reactions and trial-and-error oriented gameplay of older shooters. It's more structurally interesting to play against enemies on a level playing field.

Edit: I get the impression that most people on this forum are jaded old fucks who talk about games considerably more than they play them, teetering on the edge of a midlife crisis by stubbornly holding onto the last vesitges of their youth. What a pathetic existence, if that's the reality

 

[JarlFrank]

Quake is pretty much perfection in the genre. Everything since is either derivative of Quake or pales in its shadow.

Movement is slick and responsive. The weapon roster may feel basic but there's no gimmicks here, it's all workhorse weapons that are satisfying to use. Explosions adding their force to your movement speed makes rocket jumping possible. The enemy roster is varied and when facing multiple enemy types at once it can become quite challenging - but there are barely any hitscan enemies beyond the basic grunts and the shamblers (who have a long enough attack telegraph for you to dodge behind cover). Level design is full 3D, finally transcending the limitations of 2.5D engines like Doom and Build.

Its own sequel is mediocre in comparison, and Quake 3 doesn't even have a campaign and is therefore irrelevant for single player.

What is there that surpasses Quake? Nothing. Unreal tried to be Quakey but with its own flavor, and while it succeeded at being interesting, it's not quite at the level of Quake.
Several recent retro FPS games are inspired by Quake (Dusk, HROT) but they don't quite reach its quality, either.

Quake stands alone as the giant of its genre.

Quake is, as the advertisements of its time rightfully claimed, the most important computer game of all time.

 

[Groover]

Regenerating health sucks, I agree, and it's a near essential component when combined with hitscan enemies who you can't reliably avoid.. but projectiles tend to be ridiculously slow and easy to circumvent, so more thought needs to go into this aspect of design. We haven't yet reached the zenith. Try out Half-Life 1 MMod on Steam with and without projectile physics and note how neither feels better. One is easier to avoid, but less challenging, and vice versa.

Slower movement speeds also add another layer of thoughtfulness to the way you move around a battlefield. You have to consider if you can make it to point B unscathed, given your limitations. In the older shooters, this is a non issue and one less "game within a game" as you can freely zip around the environment thoughtlessly.

 

[janior]

quake 4 is pure garbage

 

[Average Manatee]

Slower movement speeds also add another layer of thoughtfulness to the way you move around a battlefield. You have to consider if you can make it to point B unscathed, given your limitations. In the older shooters, this is a non issue and one less "game within a game" as you can freely zip around the environment thoughtlessly.

No. Mappers can control player movement perfectly fine in DOOM through map design or monster placement. Giving players a wide open area to circlestrafe around monsters unobstructed is a mistake that will get you laughed at. Play through a proper modern WAD in UV, I suggest Sunlust.

Enemy rosters ARE simplified, that's for sure, but they're typically more dangerous, to the point that a larger pool of baddies to shoot at would seem almost redundant. How many enemies in your glorified 90s shooters can be defeated by just mindlessly strafing left and right by a wall (or out in the open for some)? Say what you want about the decline of CoD, I won't deny most of it, but leaning out of a piece of cover to frantically search for your enemy who's easily able to take you out is more interesting than dancing the polka with a braindead minion... to say nothing of the bulletsponge galore of the classic Doom games. Cyberdemons are a cakewalk once you figure out how their ai works, but they never stop being a pain in the ass to take down due to bloated hp pools.

You are going the wrong way with this. The more dangerous an enemy is the less that you can throw the player into complex maps or situations with multiple enemies to threaten them. Hence why 99% of FEAR combat can be boiled down to "activate slow mo, lean out, headshot" in an area with either 1 or 2 corridors. The fact that DOOM enemies can't endanger a player on an open battlefield (aside from hitscan or archviles with no cover of course) means mappers need to get creative with how they do things. And its that creativity that makes the game interesting rather than just replaying the same boring corridor fight for 32 levels.

I think, with the advent of CounterStrike, there was a desire to introduce a closer-to-life lethality to gunfights that didn't really exist up until that point - an encouraged level of hyper awareness and vulnerability that wasn't emphasised with the static encounters of most of 90s FPS level design. Most video games are power fantasies, but there seems to have been a concerted effort in the 2000s to move past that and introduce a more cerebral challenge, rather than the rote reactions and trial-and-error oriented gameplay of older shooters. It's more structurally interesting to play against enemies on a level playing field.

Again completely flipped. More lethality, less movement, more hitscan, fewer enemies all means you rely more on reaction and trial and error. Difficult DOOM fights are almost entirely about strategy and some can be almost puzzle-like in how you approach them. Once you do understand them they become simple, which is evidenced by the fact that there are players who can consistently beat levels of absurd difficulty.

 

[JarlFrank]

Regenerating health sucks, I agree, and it's a near essential component when combined with hitscan enemies who you can't reliably avoid.. but projectiles tend to be ridiculously slow and easy to circumvent, so more thought needs to go into this aspect of design.

Yeah but what if, think about this a minute, your weapons also fire projectiles so you need to anticipate their travel time and connect it to the enemy's movement path.

Arcane Dimensions does this perfectly, a mod for Quake which replaces its hitscanning shotguns - both for the player and for enemies - with fast projectiles that can be dodge and must be properly aimed.

Also see Ion Fury for a Build Engine example, all the bullet weapons have very fast projectiles that are hard but possible to dodge.

 

[JarlFrank]

You are going the wrong way with this. The more dangerous an enemy is the less that you can throw the player into complex maps or situations with multiple enemies to threaten them. Hence why 99% of FEAR combat can be boiled down to "activate slow mo, lean out, headshot" in an area with either 1 or 2 corridors. The fact that DOOM enemies can't endanger a player on an open battlefield (aside from hitscan or archviles with no cover of course) means mappers need to get creative with how they do things. And its that creativity that makes the game interesting rather than just replaying the same boring corridor fight for 32 levels.

Moreover, good Doom and Quake encounter design consists of mixing different types of enemies that are pushovers on their own but become dangerous in combination.
But then you get the secret tool of enemy infighting, so luring them into shooting each other is a valid strategy.

When you get pinkies + imps + shotgunners + an archvile in combination, the fight becomes tough and you have to prioritize targets.
Same in Quake with combinations like a bunch of ogres on an elevated position dumping grenades on you while a bunch of Fiends leap at you in melee.

You can't do that if all your enemies are the same.

 

[Ash]

ALL 2000 FPS pale in comparison to the 90s kings - Doom, Quake, Build Engine Trio, Unreal etc. Suck it down your linear hitscanning hallway.

 

[Groover]

No. Mappers can control player movement perfectly fine in DOOM through map design or monster placement. Giving players a wide open area to circlestrafe around monsters unobstructed is a mistake that will get you laughed at. Play through a proper modern WAD in UV, I suggest Sunlust.

I'm talking about the inherent speed of the player character. Doomguy is always lightning fast and able to easily outpace most monsters, which means that you don't have to think quite so intently about where you'll be positioning him. If you make a bad call about a certain maneuver, you can easily rectify it by sprinting back because he's so fast. The risk is lesser since you're still much more powerful than the enemies. In FEAR, since you bring that up, your character being slow as molasses means that you have to carefully consider where you'll move to, since it's considerably harder to get yourself out of a jam if you make the wrong call (triply so when playing on Extreme difficulty and limiting your slo-mo usage)

You are going the wrong way with this. The more dangerous an enemy is the less that you can throw the player into complex maps or situations with multiple enemies to threaten them. Hence why 99% of FEAR combat can be boiled down to "activate slow mo, lean out, headshot" in an area with either 1 or 2 corridors. The fact that DOOM enemies can't endanger a player on an open battlefield (aside from hitscan or archviles with no cover of course) means mappers need to get creative with how they do things. And its that creativity that makes the game interesting rather than just replaying the same boring corridor fight for 32 levels.

I'm not a huge fan of FEAR, but that game's trump card is its AI.. and I know that its brilliance is endlessly parroted and that the reality is a little less than that, but it's still much more interesting than Doom's enemies who just slowly lumber towards you, or awkwardly get stuck on geometry. There's a level of dynanimism to FEAR's encounters that adds an extra level of unpredictability that you rarely (if ever) get in Doom or the build games, since the replica soldiers aren't always so predictable. The basic enemy intelligence leads to you finding an optimal route through a level and, barring finding secret routes, exploiting that, for what little it's worth. I love games that challenge you to come up with solutions to unexpected situations, and you need a certain depth and uncertainty in enemy response to really land that feeling. None of the hit 90s classics really nail that emergent gameplay so well.

Again completely flipped. More lethality, less movement, more hitscan, fewer enemies all means you rely more on reaction and trial and error. Difficult DOOM fights are almost entirely about strategy and some can be almost puzzle-like in how you approach them. Once you do understand them they become simple, which is evidenced by the fact that there are players who can consistently beat levels of absurd difficulty.

See my point above. You can't really lean on trial and error if the encounter doesn't play out the same (barring savescumming), due to unpredictable AI behaviour.

Yeah but what if, think about this a minute, your weapons also fire projectiles so you need to anticipate their travel time and connect it to the enemy's movement path.

I get that, which is why I recommended Half-Life 1 Mmod (available directly through Steam) which allows you to enable projectile firing for both you and the enemy. It certainly feels better to play than the vanilla game, but it's also much easier and it just feels like a sloppy melee combat game where you're just running around arenas like a decapitated chicken. The Half-Life ai, for all of its weaknesses, is at least a little more interesting than what you get in Quake and Doom, so it might be a better representation of projectile battles. Gunfights are more interesting to me when they're extremely lethal and measured, where every decision carries a lot of weight.

 

[Lemming42]

It's interesting how quickly lethality became a thing in FPS games. I think Soldier of Fortune might genuinely have been one of the first to innovate the style of gameplay where most shots were actually lethal - games like Half-Life and Unreal still had very spongey enemies just a couple years earlier. There's also Delta Force of course but that's a very non-standard FPS.

As soon as "shoot an enemy and they actually die" became a thing, people didn't seem to want the spongeyness of 90s games anymore, hence the runaway success of Call of Duty, a game where you fight clones of the same man about 2,000 times and he always dies in a couple hits. It's also interesting to think that some of the most infamous things people hated in games from the era were 90s-style spongey enemies - one of the major complaints about Far Cry for example was the mutants, because people vastly preferred fighting the human enemies who went down quicker.

Maybe a result of changing technology leading to changing expectations or something.

 

[Iucounu]

As soon as "shoot an enemy and they actually die" became a thing, people didn't seem to want the spongeyness of 90s games anymore, hence the runaway success of Call of Duty, a game where you fight clones of the same man about 2,000 times and he always dies in a couple hits. It's also interesting to think that some of the most infamous things people hated in games from the era were 90s-style spongey enemies - one of the major complaints about Far Cry for example was the mutants, because people vastly preferred fighting the human enemies who went down quicker.

I've always assumed the trend was in the opposite direction, towards more sponginess (like Mass Effect). But I've never played CoD or any of the other major FPS titles.

 

[ind33d]

quake 4 is pure garbage

quake 4 is a texture pack for quake 3 with a 7/10 singleplayer campaign, what the fuck kind of opinion is it that Q4 is bad but Q3 is good

 

[soutaiseiriron]

See my point above. You can't really lean on trial and error if the encounter doesn't play out the same (barring savescumming), due to unpredictable AI behaviour.

Don't really agree. FEAR encounters end incredibly quick because the game is mindlessly easy and the enemies always spawn predictabily in the exact same places and the level design isn't complex or large enough for them to really move around. If you abuse the slo-mo and grenades to clear waves as fast as possible this goes double.
CoD2 Veteran imo beats it easily for dynamism because the player simply does not have enough time to handle each wave as it spawns (barring maybe perfectly timed speedrun-tier grenade throws), but the only shooters that I'd call "truly dynamic" would probably be SWAT 3 & 4, I can't really think of much else. Maybe Far Cry 2-5.

 

[Groover]

See my point above. You can't really lean on trial and error if the encounter doesn't play out the same (barring savescumming), due to unpredictable AI behaviour.

Don't really agree. FEAR encounters end incredibly quick because the game is mindlessly easy and the enemies always spawn predictabily in the exact same places and the level design isn't complex or large enough for them to really move around. If you abuse the slo-mo and grenades to clear waves as fast as possible this goes double

I'm making a comparison to Doom 1/2, Quake, and the build engine games. Like I said, FEAR's ai is not genius level, but it is more sophisticated than the aforementioned three. The soldiers also fake you out and flank you sometimes, and the combat encounters end quickly because of the low time-to-kill. Play the game on extreme mode and unbind slo mo, I doubt you'll find it quite so mindless then.

 

[Morenatsu.]

quake 4 is pure garbage

quake 4 is a texture pack for quake 3 with a 7/10 singleplayer campaign, what the fuck kind of opinion is it that Q4 is bad but Q3 is good

Are you retarded? Quake 4 is obviously a Doom 3 mod.

 

[soutaiseiriron]

Play the game on extreme mode and unbind slo mo, I doubt you'll find it quite so mindless then.

I did.

 

[HansDampf]

It's simple. Having to hide behind cover most of the time (not moving) because of lethal hitscanners -> boring. Shooting enemies while dodging various kinds of projectiles -> not boring.

No. Mappers can control player movement perfectly fine in DOOM through map design or monster placement. Giving players a wide open area to circlestrafe around monsters unobstructed is a mistake that will get you laughed at. Play through a proper modern WAD in UV, I suggest Sunlust.

I'm talking about the inherent speed of the player character. Doomguy is always lightning fast and able to easily outpace most monsters, which means that you don't have to think quite so intently about where you'll be positioning him. If you make a bad call about a certain maneuver, you can easily rectify it by sprinting back because he's so fast.

You wouldn't say that if you

Play through a proper modern WAD in UV, I suggest Sunlust.

Good level designers are aware of the strengths and weaknesses of different enemies, and know how to use them to their advantage and create interesting encounters. Players are expected to abuse the simple AI by hoarding enemies, staying in a certain spot for a while to pull enemies away from walls and create space so you can move behind them. Well designed encounters won't allow you to simply circlestrafe. You have to earn it. Add some Revenants, and your movement completely changes because you have to avoid homing projectiles on top of dodging non-homing projectiles. Put some Archviles in strategic places for soft area denial. Force the player to move behind cover for a few seconds to avoid the AV's attack without getting hit by all the projectiles. You can't get those situations when all the enemies are highly lethal hitscanners.
The big health pool of Cyberdemons is usually balanced by either giving the player strong weapons (BFG) or use them for infighting (another lost art in FPS games) which weakens them. There is also a trend in modern maps to use a new type of Cyberdemon that has only 1/4 of his normal health.

 

[NecroLord]

Speaking of Call of Duty, I can't stop listening to the soundtrack for CoD1. Michael Giacchino did great work on both MoH and CoD. The game itself is obviously comic book hero bullshit that flippantly treats WW2 like a big fun joke, but the soundtrack gets across a real sense of horror, unease, danger, and slowly-encroaching doom:


Which reminds me a lot of Soldier of Fortune's dynamic soundtrack, which always scored the gunfights with music designed to cause panic and dismay rather than make you feel like a big swinging dick:


The car chase music from CoD1 is great too, it manages to work in a dumb fun action movie kind of way while still being underscored with a profound feeling of dread:

World at War also has an awesome soundtrack.

 

[Goldschmidt]

"activate slow mo, lean out, headshot" i

You clearly have not played F.E.A.R. or have no clue how to properly play it.

 

[Goldschmidt]

Play the game on extreme mode and unbind slo mo, I doubt you'll find it quite so mindless then.

I did.

Nah, you didn't.

 

[Average Manatee]

"activate slow mo, lean out, headshot" i

You clearly have not played F.E.A.R. or have no clue how to properly play it.

Let me correct myself. Half the time you can't see the enemy well because it's dark and your flashlight evaporates at a range of 15 feet. In those instances you just go for 5 or so bodyshots