Anime The mistake a lot of modern boomer shooters make

[HeatEXTEND]

No, the term "RPG" is a retarded and nobody can actually refute the Pacman point without demonstrating why.

It does not need refuting, terming things is based on the understanding that people will try to make the world understandable between each other as best as possible. You can sit on a table so why isn't it a chair? Because we as people agree to try and understand the world between us. Very simple and obvious really. To go against this is what's commonly known as "navel-gazing" (fun fact: even used across languages, "navel staren" in Dutch for example).

 

[GamerCat_]

No, the term "RPG" is a retarded and nobody can actually refute the Pacman point without demonstrating why.

It does not need refuting, terming things is based on the understanding that people will try to make the world understandable between each other as best as possible.

Should be. But "RPG" has no inherent explanatory power to convey what the thing currently is and relies on you already knowing. It is very easy to imagine someone asking this without being wilfully obtuse. Imagine trying to explain what an "RPG" is and isn't to someone very old and out of touch, but completely earnest and eager to understand.

"I sat down, with Mister HeatExtend. He had kindly offered to explain to me how, despite the fact one appears to be playing a role in all computer games, only a minority of these are correctly described as role-playing games. He told me that..."

 

[HeatEXTEND]

They typically revolve around:
In-game character progression as opposed to irl player skill progression beyond understanding the mechanics of the game.
A sense of adventure and/or exploration.
A tangible story driven goal.

Now try that with a chair.

 

[GamerCat_]

They typically revolve around:
In-game character progression as opposed to irl player skill progression beyond understanding the mechanics of the game.
A sense of adventure and/or exploration.
A tangible story driven goal.

Now try that with a chair.

"I wanted to ask HeatExtend more, about these adventures and roles. But I must desist."

 

[HeatEXTEND]

gottem

 

[GamerCat_]

gottem

Now that Werner is gone I can ask you my questions.

This is quite simple still. How is one supposed to understand that any of the traits of games you listed make for a "role playing game"? The first is the best one, but limited. The idea of controlling an entity/actor whose capabilities are independent of your own as the one playing/controlling him. That's a very distinct thing, but I still don't think we have the right words for it here. And as for the others, adventure and story goal? Seriously?

Suffice to say I am unconvinced. Werner probably was too, but he considers the world and people to be intractably mysterious. So he didn't mind.

 

[Lemming42]

You're doing so much in this first act, mechanically, experiencing such an amazingly varied spread of things which somehow manages to feel bound within this form of "JRPG". By the end of act 1 can we say that JRPG is a boring mechanical contrivance with boring stock fiction layered on top of it? It's treated more like a challenge. To take a few quaint formal elements of old "video games" and incorporate them into cutting edge multimedia. To take lining up guys to punch a monster one at a time and turn that into something that will shock the entire world.

Whether you're trolling* or whether you actually believe this, I genuinely got a laugh out of it, so great post. The out-of-nowhere Hitchens image took me out too.

*sorry if you're not, but when your first posts are "I hate RPGs", "Halo is not a shooter but an experience", and "I love Fallout 3" then eyebrows are going to be raised. And I'm saying that as someone who unironically likes Fallout 3!

I actually agree with a decent amount of what you're saying in principle about how videogames are a multimedia artform and broadly-defined "gameplay" is just one facet of what they're capable of, but Halo and FF7 strike me as two of the funniest possible examples to uphold of that idea. Halo always struck me as a decent but fairly run-of-the-mill shooter (and I did play it when most of its novelties were new), while FF7 sits in my mind as FF6 but with even longer dialogue scenes and more time-wasting minigames, plus arguably the worst plot in Final Fantasy (which is really saying something). I think the coolest thing about Halo was vehicles and dimwitted squadmates, both of which had already been done in one form or other by that point.

I'm not saying either one is a bad game (though I don't think I could manage an FF7 playthrough nowadays) but the Halo fixation in particular is puzzling me because, while I can see a lot of its artistic merits, I see the same merits in Half-Life or Red Faction or any of the many other contemporaries released in the same five-year-window. I mean, yeah, you can stop and look at rock textures in Halo, in the same way you can stop and look at steel walls in Half-Life. You can technically stop walking in Mario 1-1 and look at the sky and the bricks and listen to the soundtrack in order to receive a cutting-edge multimedia experience too. It's true but it's also clearly painfully subjective and your posts, while fun to read, seem to essentially be a very extended version of the sentence "I like how Halo looks and sounds". Which is an entirely legitimate view obviously but also can only be countered with Ash's "well I don't like how it looks or sounds and also it plays like shit", which will cause the two of you to be locked in an eternal unwinnable deathmatch.

I'm half-expecting you to cite Dungeon Siege as the next example with a paragraph about how it "questions, deconstructs, and overcomes the essential nature of being a 'videogame' by shedding the vestiges of interactivity and instead transcends outmoded hackneyed notions such as 'challenge' or 'balance' to focus on the evocation of feeling".

 

[Hell Swarm]

I'm not saying either one is a bad game (though I don't think I could manage an FF7 playthrough nowadays) but the Halo fixation in particular is puzzling me because, while I can see a lot of its artistic merits, I see the same merits in Half-Life or Red Faction or any of the many other contemporaries released in the same five-year-window. I mean, yeah, you can stop and look at rock textures in Halo, in the same way you can stop and look at steel walls in Half-Life. You can technically stop walking in Mario 1-1 and look at the sky and the bricks and listen to the soundtrack in order to receive a cutting-edge multimedia experience too. It's true but it's also clearly painfully subjective and your posts, while fun to read, seem to essentially be a very extended version of the sentence "I like how Halo looks and sounds". Which is an entirely legitimate view obviously but also can only be countered with Ash's "well I don't like how it looks or sounds and also it plays like shit", which will cause the two of you to be locked in an eternal unwinnable deathmatch.

Your post explains why Halo stands out compared to Half-life and Red faction as something more replayable. The physics and dumb AI really do bring something novel to the table. The grunt waddlng in, sticking his team mate and chaos happening or your AI friend driving himself off a cliff and dying is something very few other shooters do as well as Halo. Halo is effectively a chaotic and comedic game of random weird happenings that make each play through rather unique. Half-life is great but it's so tightly controlled each play through is going to be rather similar. Halo leans towards the CRPG open world style of dynamic experiences and you see a lot of Halo's iconic features present in games like STALKER as well. The game has room to be dynamic and do interesting things. Which is something we're really missing today despite so many games copying the open world style that thrives with it.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Whoa guys there are way too many retards in this thread calm down

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Now that Werner is gone I can ask you my questions.

No. Do the chair.

 

[GamerCat_]

You're doing so much in this first act, mechanically, experiencing such an amazingly varied spread of things which somehow manages to feel bound within this form of "JRPG". By the end of act 1 can we say that JRPG is a boring mechanical contrivance with boring stock fiction layered on top of it? It's treated more like a challenge. To take a few quaint formal elements of old "video games" and incorporate them into cutting edge multimedia. To take lining up guys to punch a monster one at a time and turn that into something that will shock the entire world.

Whether you're trolling* or whether you actually believe this, I genuinely got a laugh out of it, so great post. The out-of-nowhere Hitchens image took me out too.

Haha. Excellent. You're my favourite poster here so far.

*sorry if you're not, but when your first posts are "I hate RPGs", "Halo is not a shooter but an experience", and "I love Fallout 3" then eyebrows are going to be raised. And I'm saying that as someone who unironically likes Fallout 3!

I am trying to provoke people, obviously, but I consider it against the spirit of the game to ever lie. Also I doubt I could think of any lies that would upset people more than my sincerest beliefs.

I actually agree with a decent amount of what you're saying in principle about how videogames are a multimedia artform and broadly-defined "gameplay" is just one facet of what they're capable of, but Halo and FF7 strike me as two of the funniest possible examples to uphold of that idea.

I sincerely get blown away more every time I look at them. I can just get lost in the details, or the flow. I have the capacity to stare at rocks in Halo: CE and find myself prompted to talk for hours enthusiastically without moving on.

Halo always struck me as a decent but fairly run-of-the-mill shooter (and I did play it when most of its novelties were new), while FF7 sits in my mind as FF6 but with even longer dialogue scenes and more time-wasting minigames, plus arguably the worst plot in Final Fantasy (which is really saying something). I think the coolest thing about Halo was vehicles and dimwitted squadmates, both of which had already been done in one form or other by that point.

Halo is a great case study because it superficially looks like so many other things but is essentially different in ways that can only be explained by consideration of the things I'm trying to draw attention to in this thread. As I put it before, Halo is a "convergent evolution" towards "fps", not a product of the tradition that existed before it. On one hand Halo is fundamentally different because of its distinct creative genealogy. And on the other, Halo is fundamentally different because its creators had a very rich vision in mind which was lost on most players because it was expressed in ways and places people aren't used to seeing expression in.

Really comprehending Halo requires you to unkink your mind and trace back a novel creative process, which does not at all resemble what the memes tell you good games come from. And understanding why it's fun requires the same. All attempts at hammering out formula and theory on why video games are fun are terrible (the best humanity has managed so far is the theory work of Icycalm, who unfortunately is now addicted to D&D and crime). And more interestingly, an understanding of human pleasure and satisfaction is necessary to fully understand Halo's subtext and metanarrative. Halo is a fun game. Halo is also about fun and games. But wait, isn't it about war?

"Olly olly oxen free!"

I'm not saying either one is a bad game (though I don't think I could manage an FF7 playthrough nowadays) but the Halo fixation in particular is puzzling me because, while I can see a lot of its artistic merits, I see the same merits in Half-Life or Red Faction or any of the many other contemporaries released in the same five-year-window.

I can talk at length about anything. I'm sure you all believe that by now. I can and have said a lot about Half-Life, of Red Faction I only played (and enjoyed!) Guerilla.

All of these things we can talk about as multimedia. Certainly. But Halo is a particularly good example because it is so consistently appraised as the wrong kind of media. People believe it is not only just a game, but as a game it is just an "fps". We can correct a whole lot at once by talking about Halo. And of course, some of us may have forgotten, look at the title of the thread. In my first post I sincerely sought to answer the question and believe that Halo is an essential part of the answer.

A comparison between Half-Life and Halo: CE might be a lot of fun to write up seriously. Might try that for a more accommodating audience soon.

I mean, yeah, you can stop and look at rock textures in Halo, in the same way you can stop and look at steel walls in Half-Life.

I stop and stare in most video games. In Halo I find more than most if I look and think.

You can technically stop walking in Mario 1-1 and look at the sky and the bricks and listen to the soundtrack in order to receive a cutting-edge multimedia experience too.

Yes. I played Super Mario Sunshine last year. Great fun just looking around that island. Love Japan's fascination with beaches during that period.

It's true but it's also clearly painfully subjective and your posts, while fun to read, seem to essentially be a very extended version of the sentence "I like how Halo looks and sounds".

I like how Halo looks and sounds, and so do its creators. The point is that they liked how it looks and sounds and everything that it is so much that that was their priority. The experience of Halo is not a game. A game is a means of facilitating an experience of Halo. That is why it is the way it is. This is the key to my posts in this thread. Do you understand?

I'm half-expecting you to cite Dungeon Siege as the next example with a paragraph about how it "questions, deconstructs, and overcomes the essential nature of being a 'videogame' by shedding the vestiges of interactivity and instead transcends outmoded hackneyed notions such as 'challenge' or 'balance' to focus on the evocation of feeling".

I haven't played it. Should I? Oh wait this is that game Ross played where you have like a dozen characters at once. I always thought that looked really fun. Interestingly I see it was made by RTS developers. Which makes sense. Their fascination is with activity, autonomy, and scale. Not systems for abstracting personal action. I feel like I might enjoy Dungeon Siege a lot, but if I were to play it I probably wouldn't have much more to say than I just did. It does sound like they didn't care about being a game challenge and were more interested in portraying a certain idea they had (groups of people fighting groups of monsters). If I were to write this hypothetical paragraph would there be anything wrong with it?

You said "subjective" before. Is there anything I'm writing where it sounds like I'm not aware of that? Am I mistaken anywhere? Am I attributing objectivity to anything which is subjective?

Now that Werner is gone I can ask you my questions.

No. Do the chair.

Is a table a chair? If you want to sit on it badly enough anything is. I'm not going to discriminate.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Is a table a chair? If you want to sit on it badly enough anything is. I'm not going to discriminate.

Right. Good luck and have fun.

 

[Lemming42]

I like how Halo looks and sounds, and so do its creators. The point is that they liked how it looks and sounds and everything that it is so much that that was their priority. The experience of Halo is not a game. A game is a means of facilitating an experience of Halo. That is why it is the way it is. This is the key to my posts in this thread. Do you understand?

But you could say that about almost any game made after the 70s/early 80s arcade era, surely? Even games as early as SMB1 were inviting the player to enjoy the audiovisual aspects as much as the gameplay itself. The whole point of hiring artists and composers who don't work on the actual programming or level design is to make sure there are people dedicated purely to the audiovisual aspects of a game.

Nothing you're saying is in any way wrong but it seems like you could swap "Halo" for almost any other game and have the paragraphs be 90% the same. Even games that many people consider terrible, like Oblivion, could be given the same treatment, since the art and sound design teams genuinely did try their best to create a beautiful fairytale-looking world (and succeeded brilliantly - the game looks fantastic, character models aside). Plenty of people genuinely loved getting lost in Oblivion's beautiful lush forests, but if someone says that the combat and exploration sucks and someone else then feints with "oh, but Oblivion isn't a game, you're enjoying it wrong, it's an experience, more fool you for expecting it to be a mere game", the conversation sort of stalls because what can anyone say in response to that? It's moved so far into the realm of the subjective that the conversation just sort of turns to "I like it"/"well I don't".

All the talk about Halo having a "rich vision" and "interesting geneology" and how we need to understand human pleasure to understand its metanarrative (which was sidesplitting to read, btw, well done ) is just sort of fluff and window dressing; an extravagant way of saying "it started as an RTS". I mean, Raven Software started with Black Crypt and brought that RPG/dungeon crawler energy to Hexen, but if someone isn't a fan of Hexen, I think it'd be insane to say they're playing it wrong because they "expected an FPS" or a mere "game" instead of the "experience" which Hexen actually is, that the game is an evolution and meeting ground between RPG and FPS (both of which, naturally, it defies and transcends), and that we must understand pleasure itself to truly grasp Hexen... especially if the person's overall argument as to why Hexen is fun ultimately appears to amount to "I like the soundtrack and graphics".

If I were to write this hypothetical paragraph would there be anything wrong with it?

It wouldn't be wrong, but it'd be laugh-out-loud funny to most Codexers - the game has a reputation (pretty widely, not just on here) of being a glorified screensaver; the mechanics are so simple and the player is almost totally extraneous to the experience, beyond moving the party forward, occasionally clicking on enemies (optional thanks to party AI), and maybe drinking a health potion. Again, I think the comedy of the paragraph would come from the grandiose, over-the-top way of saying the otherwise-unremarkable statement of "I like the visuals and soundtrack, even if the combat wasn't very good".

The first Dungeon Siege is pretty fun in spite of it all though, but it's almost comical in how barebones it is and how little it asks of the player. If you want to see really nice fantasy landscapes and hear cool music though then it's good for that, I had fun with it before it wore out its welcome about 10 hours in.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Nothing you're saying is in any way wrong but it seems like you could swap "Halo" for almost any other game and have the paragraphs be 90% the same.

He's using LLM, you're using autism.

You're not the same.

 

[Lemming42]

I wondered that, but I think he's for real; he has that spark of hilarity that LLMs typically can't replicate yet and you only get with real forum posters. His posts might be LLM-assisted but "an understanding of human pleasure and satisfaction is necessary to fully understand Halo's subtext and metanarrative. Halo is a fun game. Halo is also about fun and games" is just too perfectly hysterical to have come entirely from an LLM.

EDIT: Put the posts into an LLM to see if it could get the style down:

Spoiler

Fun, but it doesn't have the same genius.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Duke Nukem 64 handles terribly. Have you actually played that game?

In fairness, pretty much all Build Engine games are painful to play on a controller. Blood is probably the worst, and yeah. I've tried. Can not recommend.

 

[Ash]

Eh, what software are you using to do so? Or native support? Eduke engine doesn't have great native support. I would recommend just fine with the correct setup, with the vanilla z axis auto aim disabled (always). Skill issue perhaps?
The only time I remotely struggled was Shadow Warrior's annoying-ass bees, but they're annoying with M&K too.

 

[GamerCat_]

I like how Halo looks and sounds, and so do its creators. The point is that they liked how it looks and sounds and everything that it is so much that that was their priority. The experience of Halo is not a game. A game is a means of facilitating an experience of Halo. That is why it is the way it is. This is the key to my posts in this thread. Do you understand?

But you could say that about almost any game made after the 70s/early 80s arcade era, surely? Even games as early as SMB1 were inviting the player to enjoy the audiovisual aspects as much as the gameplay itself. The whole point of hiring artists and composers who don't work on the actual programming or level design is to make sure there are people dedicated purely to the audiovisual aspects of a game.

Games were always multimedia. And with particularly excellent craftsmen like those at Nintendo they were always able to build up games and the greater multimedia at the same time harmoniously. But what I'm saying about Bungie is that they had the weight of so much game tradition behind themselves, and relatively little multimedia of the kind they were interested in developing, and they very deliberately refined various existing ideas up and down until they had the balance they wanted. The more we look at Japan, the less exceptional this looks, since the Japanese are so effortlessly good at this. But for such a distinctly American effort Halo is a kind of miracle.

The Japanese look at the idea of firing a gun in a video game and turn it into Killer7 without ever having produced a game that feels like Doom as a culture because they're wired backward to us. But to make Halo bungie had to work so exceptionally against existing cultural programming. The evidence that this is hard can be seen in every irredeemable Halo successor. Killzone also has rather subdued and simplified elements compared to prior "fps" games. But why? They obviously had no fucking idea. Building towards final experience and sensation was lost on these guys. They were scrambling. Trying to guess how Halo worked because they couldn't understand the process that produced it. If it were easy, more people would be making Halos, among other things.

Westerners have serious problems working form towards ideas. Most Western games are an existing form and an unconnected scenario/premise layered on top.

Nothing you're saying is in any way wrong but it seems like you could swap "Halo" for almost any other game and have the paragraphs be 90% the same.

A lot of this is general, yes.

Even games that many people consider terrible, like Oblivion, could be given the same treatment, since the art and sound design teams genuinely did try their best to create a beautiful fairytale-looking world (and succeeded brilliantly - the game looks fantastic, character models aside).

Key difference that the rest of Oblivion does not handle well to reinforce this picture.

Plenty of people genuinely loved getting lost in Oblivion's beautiful lush forests, but if someone says that the combat and exploration sucks and someone else then feints with "oh, but Oblivion isn't a game, you're enjoying it wrong, it's an experience, more fool you for expecting it to be a mere game", the conversation sort of stalls because what can anyone say in response to that? It's moved so far into the realm of the subjective that the conversation just sort of turns to "I like it"/"well I don't".

But the trouble is that Oblivion is such a game. "Not a game" isn't a trick you pull to make something impossible to criticise mechanically. The intention is to clear the table of memes based heavily in incorrect mechanical reads so we can start again. All of the game parts of Halo compliment the greater work that it is. The same cannot be said of Oblivion.

All the talk about Halo having a "rich vision" and "interesting geneology" and how we need to understand human pleasure to understand its metanarrative (which was sidesplitting to read, btw, well done )

I am entirely serious about that.

is just sort of fluff and window dressing; an extravagant way of saying "it started as an RTS".

No. Its nature can only be understood if we appreciate that fact and the process of getting from there to "fps".

I mean, Raven Software started with Black Crypt and brought that RPG/dungeon crawler energy to Hexen, but if someone isn't a fan of Hexen, I think it'd be insane to say they're playing it wrong because they "expected an FPS" or a mere "game" instead of the "experience" which Hexen actually is, that the game is an evolution and meeting ground between RPG and FPS (both of which, naturally, it defies and transcends),

If you don't like something you don't like it. But if you're going to rules-lawyer about how it's bad you ought to make sense. If someone simply doesn't enjoy Halo I can't call them wrong. But if they call it a casualised Quake module I can call them wrong. Because that is wrong.

and that we must understand pleasure itself to truly grasp Hexen...

That particular point is only true of Halo. Halo's metanarrative is about games, play, and violence. People call this absurd, but it's basically a deeper and more natural exploration of the player/protagonist connection ideas they played with in Marathon.

especially if the person's overall argument as to why Hexen is fun ultimately appears to amount to "I like the soundtrack and graphics".

If that's their argument that's their argument.

If I were to write this hypothetical paragraph would there be anything wrong with it?

It wouldn't be wrong, but it'd be laugh-out-loud funny to most Codexers - the game has a reputation (pretty widely, not just on here) of being a glorified screensaver; the mechanics are so simple and the player is almost totally extraneous to the experience, beyond moving the party forward, occasionally clicking on enemies (optional thanks to party AI), and maybe drinking a health potion. Again, I think the comedy of the paragraph would come from the grandiose, over-the-top way of saying the otherwise-unremarkable statement of "I like the visuals and soundtrack, even if the combat wasn't very good".

Autocombat sounds like an improvement on the average "RPG" to me. Very good combat.

The first Dungeon Siege is pretty fun in spite of it all though, but it's almost comical in how barebones it is and how little it asks of the player. If you want to see really nice fantasy landscapes and hear cool music though then it's good for that, I had fun with it before it wore out its welcome about 10 hours in.

Jesus. How long is this thing?

 

[Lemming42]

Westerners have serious problems working form towards ideas. Most Western games are an existing form and an unconnected scenario/premise layered on top.

To bring it back to the thread topic, I suppose you have described exactly the problem with the retro shooters (or whatever people want me to call them since I'm catching flak for saying "boomer shooters"). They go from a starting point of "let's make something that echoes Doom/Quake" and then just slap any old shit together for the visuals, audio (always awful fucking metal) and premise, and then call it a day, and even when the gameplay is reasonably strong, it all feels hollow and pointless.

It'd be interesting to think about how FPS games from Wolfenstein 3D up until around the first Call of Duty differ from each other, when devs were often not setting out to make "an FPS game" but instead selecting first-person with real-time as the best medium available. Doom, System Shock, Dark Forces, Hexen (and Hexen 2), Quake, Half-Life, Halo (there, I'm throwing you a bone ), and debatably Call of Duty itself all feel like they started out with a strong idea and then decided that a first-person real-time perspective would be the best mode of gameplay to support it, rather than the inverse. I also like 1999's Wheel of Time which very much feels like it could have been a Diablo-style ARPG but the devs instead went with the rather unusual first person route, with mostly good results.

It'd also be interesting to see the games that worse devs seized the opportunity to make "clones" of without really understanding what made those games good - Half-Life is often credited with killing the genre by spawning many clones but I can almost never actually think of any games that really feel like Half-Life clones (Red Faction is probably the closest), possibly because other developers were smart enough to realise that despite its relative simplicity there's a bit too much going on in Half-Life to make it an easily-repeatable formula. Call of Duty (especially CoD2) meanwhile offered an absolutely perfect formula for worse devs to just use over and over.

Jesus. How long is this thing?

It goes on absolutely forever, like realistically could be 25 hours or more. It drags like few other games. It's even funnier because all the enjoyment is concentrated into the first few hours. I kind of like it though but if you play it you'll see it actually is in essence just a pretty screensaver, especially if you have the expansion installed which adds tons of overpowered shit to the loot tables and scatters it through the base game.

 

[NecroLord]

Duke Nukem 64 handles terribly. Have you actually played that game?

In fairness, pretty much all Build Engine games are painful to play on a controller. Blood is probably the worst, and yeah. I've tried. Can not recommend.

Stop trying to play shooters, especially the oldschool ones with a controller.
You are just punishing yourself.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Call of Duty (especially CoD2)

For the record, CoD and Cod2 are the WWII games. Also Dusk and Nightmare Reaper are cool.

 

[Morenatsu.]

I swear I once played Blood on a controller. On a tablet during a roadtrip? Unless I'm misremembering...

 

[GamerCat_]

Westerners have serious problems working form towards ideas. Most Western games are an existing form and an unconnected scenario/premise layered on top.

To bring it back to the thread topic, I suppose you have described exactly the problem with the retro shooters (or whatever people want me to call them since I'm catching flak for saying "boomer shooters"). They go from a starting point of "let's make something that echoes Doom/Quake" and then just slap any old shit together for the visuals, audio (always awful fucking metal) and premise, and then call it a day, and even when the gameplay is reasonably strong, it all feels hollow and pointless.

"Cargo Cult" I believe is the term that captures all of this. Easier to say and repeat than talking about false or mistaken creative genealogies being repeated, creating retarded new simulacra-genres.

It'd be interesting to think about how FPS games from Wolfenstein 3D up until around the first Call of Duty differ from each other, when devs were often not setting out to make "an FPS game" but instead selecting first-person with real-time as the best medium available. Doom, System Shock, Dark Forces, Hexen (and Hexen 2), Quake, Half-Life, Halo (there, I'm throwing you a bone ), and debatably Call of Duty itself all feel like they started out with a strong idea and then decided that a first-person real-time perspective would be the best mode of gameplay to support it, rather than the inverse. I also like 1999's Wheel of Time which very much feels like it could have been a Diablo-style ARPG but the devs instead went with the rather unusual first person route, with mostly good results.

Call of Duty of course was a movie game. Specifically Saving Private Ryan and Enemy At the Gates if I have my timeline right. Medal of Honour also taking cues mostly from Private Ryan I believe. Those games don't bind you to gravity and roughly humanoid movement speeds not because they're afraid alienating casuals, but because that wouldn't feel enough like WW2. Existing standards of hardcore "fps" would have felt weird. They had to be tuned for purpose. But at the same time WW2 is tuned for purpose, both of the game and the rule of cool. In WW2 how many soldiers had 500 kills to their name? Probably not a lot. But you will because we're trying to make this exciting.

Also I think it may be written somewhere (maybe the manual), but even if it's not it's obvious that the inspiration behind Myth to some extent is the film Braveheart. Myth has giant Scottish guys, and Age of Empires 2 opens with William Wallace. Similar phenomena to all of this took place within and basically killed strategy games. They were made to be war movie experiences and then compfags BAWWWWed the internet into submission crying about how everything that isn't the niche type of thing they memorised and grinded skills in is gay and unworthy. Now the only strategy games that exist are ugly retarded starcraft or company of heroes clones.

Forms like the basic "fps" of Wolfenstein, the "rts" standard of base and resources, these were circumstantial good enough approaches for realising specific ideas and experiences which got sanctified for mostly not good reasons. Ease of replication is two-sided, ability to build tradition and expectations as a form is repeated can be good, but mostly this stuff just stuck because marketers gave it a name and then the logocentric slave-masses associated arbitrary words and concepts with what it's supposed to be. "I like the rts game. The rts is when there's base and resources. What is this Myth thing? Why is there no base? Am I being raped? Oh wait, marketers have a term for this. They're doing a very specific thing called real time tactics. Thank you Mandalore that makes perfect sense I get it now. You have assured me they are still building according to a set of rote mechanical rules so I will stop crying and shitting myself now."

Solidification of form has been a disaster in virtually every case. Westerners are too retarded and too easily enslaved by language.

Have I raised the subject in this thread of how the Japanese don't make fps in this thread yet? A lot of people think it's because their squinty yellow slant eyes can't handle it, they get headaches and explode if they look at Quake. That's actually not true. The answer really is that they simply never cared to. Now that more of them have PCs and a lot of games exist more of them can post about it online, they play a few popular current running ones, but this hasn't led to any major wave of enthusiasm. They haven't realised what they were missing out on. It remains a niche interest there, I believe for a simple reason. How many good ideas is the form actually good for?

The only notable project being made in Japan right now that resembles a "first person shooter" is Doekuramori's Citadel project. A quick look at his twitter (trigger warning: shotacon (based)) will yell you a few things about him. For one, his bio is a description of the game. "Developing Outlaws & Marathon-like FPS / Gun simulator hybrid　-Beyond Citadel-". He retweets old western fps games (emphasis on OLD) and is clearly familiar with the history and creative trajectory of them. And only appears interested up to a certain point. And only for certain elements. He likes "FPS" but his particular cited inspirations are 'Outlaws', an old LucasArts game with relatively intricate and high-effort multimedia presentation, and probably his favourite detail, mechanically novel and intricate depictions of old cowboy guns. They're treated sort of like machines you have to work rather than a seamless means of engaging with what's in front of you. You are not the gun, you are a man holding one.

And of course his other listed inspiration is Marathon. He likes dark science fiction visuals, he's inspired by the idea of "fps" as a mere platform for something that's actually interesting beyond the game of firing a gun and getting to the end. Outlaws inspired how to make guns feel. Marathon inspired how to present everything else. But there's also a third more important influence he doesn't name. It makes it harder to explain what the game is at a glance. He's very obviously taking aesthetic cues primarily from the Sega Saturn Dungeon Crawler 'Baroque'.

Cry all you want, but dungeon crawlers are first person action games. The Japanese mostly evolved away from making these things, deciding that there were better ways to make the point in most cases. Dark Souls' grandfather was a dungeon crawler with real time combat. It was pretty fun. Slow, moody game.

The Citadel could probably more accurately be described as an arthouse Dungeon Crawler that implemented guns than a "boomer shooter" which has "bruh crazy ahhhhh schizo japanese shit" (The 4mex party line).

Again we have a very distinct creative continuity. 'The Citadel' and 'Beyond Citadel' are interesting because they are less "fps" and more like a new branch of dungeon crawler which is borrowing certain (mostly discarded) elements of "fps". It's a dungeon crawler in which you can go fast and fire guns. But that's as far as the 'boomer shooter' resemblance goes and is incidental. The spread of guns appears mostly determined by what he wants to make. Their distribution throughout the game does not follow a power scale, does not regard balance, they're in the game because they're cool. You get a weak smg after a strong assault rifle because he wanted to make another gun and why should they be distributed scaling by power? They're in the game because Doekuramori is Japanese. His relationship with guns is that of an object fetishist. They aren't cool until they're elaborate machines which we're simulating the handling of. It's not about shooting, it's about handling guns.

'The Citadel' has more involved gun handling mechanics than 'boomer shooters', but not by too much. The care is there, but only so much realised detail. 'Beyond Citadel' probably has more potential ways to interact with your gun than Escape From Tarkov. Do you need 90% of these to beat the game? Probably not. But the guns are as much the stars of the game the barely clothed anime girl handling them. Western "fps" tend to have guns which are childishly simple in their mechanical realisation because they are only incidentally about guns for the most part. The appeal to most people was being a weightless shooting turret and pointing and clicking at things. So many years after Doom the average highly played "fps" has evolved into a cartoonish game of online laser-tag with vestigial things on screen that look like guns (sometimes, in overwatch they're holding giant toys).

The other thing you'll notice if you look at Doekuramori's twitter, look at his media tab if you dare. All of those drawings of characters from the game are his own. He's a true multimedia artist. These are official. They're actually bonus collectibles in 'Beyond Citadel'. Even the shota pornography (based). The man has many interests, and is capable and willing to present them to you in many ways. This is all an elaborate way for me to reaffirm that the source of interesting innovations in "fps" and anything else is in personal whim and will. While adherence to form leads to stagnation and death. Retards call his games 'boomer shooters'. That's the subreddit where I find their posts about it. But there will never be an intentional "boomer shooter" as interesting as this game. It is impossible to produce the novel innovations of this game by attempting to make a "boomer shooter". The form has to follow or be bent to will.

Few will understand...

It'd also be interesting to see the games that worse devs seized the opportunity to make "clones" of without really understanding what made those games good - Half-Life is often credited with killing the genre by spawning many clones but I can almost never actually think of any games that really feel like Half-Life clones (Red Faction is probably the closest), possibly because other developers were smart enough to realise that despite its relative simplicity there's a bit too much going on in Half-Life to make it an easily-repeatable formula. Call of Duty (especially CoD2) meanwhile offered an absolutely perfect formula for worse devs to just use over and over.

It'd actually be quite nice if it were easy to ripoff good complex things. Everyone was allegedly trying to make Halo, but nobody got it. Only I'd say even Call of Duty was never even copied too successfully. The 2000s is a retrospect graveyard of failed "fps" titles. The big ones were Call of Duty and Battlefield, which always had their own agendas. Nobody really successfully butted into that. I don't even think there was a single successful rip-off. Was there? I can't think of one.

Jesus. How long is this thing?

It goes on absolutely forever, like realistically could be 25 hours or more. It drags like few other games. It's even funnier because all the enjoyment is concentrated into the first few hours. I kind of like it though but if you play it you'll see it actually is in essence just a pretty screensaver, especially if you have the expansion installed which adds tons of overpowered shit to the loot tables and scatters it through the base game.

I'll pass. Maybe if I got it when it was new I'd have had a fun time.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Eh, what software are you using to do so? Or native support? Eduke engine doesn't have great native support.

I've played all three of them on both a 3DS and an Android handheld. The 3DS controller doesn't really suit first person shooters, and the eDuke3D port to the 3DS is an attempt to map those controls to the 3DS as though it were an XBox controller rather than using the touchscreen for the mouselook like they did with the DS first person shooters. The Android handheld has a more traditional XBox like controller, and it's probably more of a matter of fine tuning the sensitivity of the analog sticks. Out of the box, though, it's not a good experience. Doom/Doom 2 is much more smooth.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Write me an essay about the Euroshmup's simulationist tendencies compared to Japan's high-level-abstracted arcade design culture and the implications it has on my boner