Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

First FPS better than Doom?

anvi

Prophet
Village Idiot
Joined
Oct 12, 2016
Messages
7,530
Location
Kelethin
They were so inventive, new gamers probably don't know you couldn't aim up or down in the early FPS. Wolf3d was completely flat, no hills, no stairs, no ledges. People played with left hand on cursor keys, right hand on the mouse, and the mouse only turned you left and right. Felt a bit like driving a turret, but it was still awesome. Unless I'm remembering wrong I think in Doom people still played the same way, cursor keys and mouse just did left and right. But they added some verticality to it with ramps and ledges, but you just had to aim left right with the mouse and the game would auto do the y axis if you got the x axis right. By System Shock 1 you could aim up and down but not with the mouse, and it wasn't even good keys. Again people still played with left hand on cursor keys which did forward backward and strafing so there were no nearby keys for look up/down. So I think they went with PgUp and PgDn.... Amazing game but damn, it's still a bit like driving a tank.

I remember playing Quake and having full mouse look with one hand, it felt great but it took some getting used to. It was also in Quake that I first saw people talking about switching to WASD. That took some getting used to as well, but it's better and more comfortable. The perfect control method sort of evolved with the games.

I recall most people actually played with keyboard-only, and various kinds of fucked up control schemes until WASD was standardized. Then later mouselook.
Yeah it was weird. Even cursor keys were better than the super old days of QAOP :P I love how each of those games did something new that moved things forward. Like at first you couldn't interact with the environment at all apart from doors. But in Doom, exploding barrels! Amazing. And then some game adds key cards, something adds an inventory, another game adds grenades and NPCs, it was like a global effort to perfect the fps and now it can be made into anything.

I do remember thinking System Shock was years ahead of other games though. And I remember finishing Duke3d and thinking that was the most fun ever.
 

Ash

Arcane
Joined
Oct 16, 2015
Messages
6,226
Overall System Shock was highly ambitious, but if you ask me it fucked up the fundamentals (combat, level design, among other things). Most enemies are just a slight variation of slow-moving turret and blur together in memory as one for example. And of course the lean exploit is retarded.
 

anvi

Prophet
Village Idiot
Joined
Oct 12, 2016
Messages
7,530
Location
Kelethin
I love it but yea it was weak in parts, combat was especially clunky. But I was blown away by the depth of it. I loved the different ammo types affected different enemies, so anti personnel type ammo mostly bounced off robots but tore the zombie stuff up. And vice versa with lazers and stuff. And I loved that it had grenades! I wish every FPS had grenades! They had some depth too with emp grenades and frags and stuff. But they were weird to throw.

I thought of another game that stood out for me. I think it was this:


Although the game that is in my mind the most is Hidden & Dangerous 1/2 which probably can't be included as an fps :C I would want a sequel to that over almost anything though.
 

schru

Arcane
Joined
Feb 27, 2015
Messages
1,131
They were so inventive, new gamers probably don't know you couldn't aim up or down in the early FPS. Wolf3d was completely flat, no hills, no stairs, no ledges. People played with left hand on cursor keys, right hand on the mouse, and the mouse only turned you left and right. Felt a bit like driving a turret, but it was still awesome. Unless I'm remembering wrong I think in Doom people still played the same way, cursor keys and mouse just did left and right. But they added some verticality to it with ramps and ledges, but you just had to aim left right with the mouse and the game would auto do the y axis if you got the x axis right. By System Shock 1 you could aim up and down but not with the mouse, and it wasn't even good keys. Again people still played with left hand on cursor keys which did forward backward and strafing so there were no nearby keys for look up/down. So I think they went with PgUp and PgDn.... Amazing game but damn, it's still a bit like driving a tank.

I remember playing Quake and having full mouse look with one hand, it felt great but it took some getting used to. It was also in Quake that I first saw people talking about switching to WASD. That took some getting used to as well, but it's better and more comfortable. The perfect control method sort of evolved with the games.
System Shock had much more elaborate controls than other first-person games, actually, and the default was ASDX, so something close to WASD. The keys for looking up and down were also quite conveniently bound to R and V. It was also probably the first game to use Q and E for leaning.

SiYH5Gv.jpg


As for Quake, it didn't have mouse-look enabled by default, actually; normally, it's only accessible by pressing and holding the middle or right mouse button, and it can be enabled fully only in the console.
 

Blutwurstritter

Learned
Joined
Sep 18, 2021
Messages
875
Location
Germany
If we also allow multiplayer focused games I'd say Unreal Tournament. Pretty much the best multiplayer shooter up to this day. I spent countless hours with my clan back then. Much more frantic and action packed than Doom with a brilliant arsenal, maps and modes. The original Doom feels tame in comparison.
 

mogwaimon

Magister
Joined
Jul 21, 2017
Messages
1,079
If we also allow multiplayer focused games I'd say Unreal Tournament. Pretty much the best multiplayer shooter up to this day. I spent countless hours with my clan back then. Much more frantic and action packed than Doom with a brilliant arsenal, maps and modes. The original Doom feels tame in comparison.

my man, UT99 is the shit. I loved that game back in the day, it's the whole reason I wanted a PC with more than 8MB of RAM, kek. my starter rig was a 486DX with 8MB of RAM (struggled to run Duke3D, which needed 16) and I was fortunately able to upgrade to an Athlon 1Ghz with 512MB of RAM with Unreal Tournament. I didn't play a whole lot of online multiplayer since I was one of those kids who was still on dial-up in the late 90s (using the free trial phone number of that old K-mart ISP that disconnected you once an hour because I couldn't afford actual net, too) but I still got a lot of mileage out of that game especially with the classic mods like U4E and the like

Still, in my old age I find myself gravitating more towards Doom than UT99 nowadays. UT99 is fun to dive into, sure, but Doom is more satisfying for a single player IMO.....especially now that I got the full game and ain't limited to the shareware episode anymore like I was when I was a kid, kek
 

anvi

Prophet
Village Idiot
Joined
Oct 12, 2016
Messages
7,530
Location
Kelethin
They were so inventive, new gamers probably don't know you couldn't aim up or down in the early FPS. Wolf3d was completely flat, no hills, no stairs, no ledges. People played with left hand on cursor keys, right hand on the mouse, and the mouse only turned you left and right. Felt a bit like driving a turret, but it was still awesome. Unless I'm remembering wrong I think in Doom people still played the same way, cursor keys and mouse just did left and right. But they added some verticality to it with ramps and ledges, but you just had to aim left right with the mouse and the game would auto do the y axis if you got the x axis right. By System Shock 1 you could aim up and down but not with the mouse, and it wasn't even good keys. Again people still played with left hand on cursor keys which did forward backward and strafing so there were no nearby keys for look up/down. So I think they went with PgUp and PgDn.... Amazing game but damn, it's still a bit like driving a tank.

I remember playing Quake and having full mouse look with one hand, it felt great but it took some getting used to. It was also in Quake that I first saw people talking about switching to WASD. That took some getting used to as well, but it's better and more comfortable. The perfect control method sort of evolved with the games.
System Shock had much more elaborate controls than other first-person games, actually, and the default was ASDX, so something close to WASD. The keys for looking up and down were also quite conveniently bound to R and V. It was also probably the first game to use Q and E for leaning.

SiYH5Gv.jpg


As for Quake, it didn't have mouse-look enabled by default, actually; normally, it's only accessible by pressing and holding the middle or right mouse button, and it can be enabled fully only in the console.
I remember that with Quake it was shocking! I was playing it with cursor keys and just horizontal mouse. Someone showed me how to turn mouse look on and they said to switch to WASD. It was hard to get used to! But just so good, it's second nature now. I forgot about ASDX, I think SS2 was similar, and that game let you lean forward which I never used. Pretty cool though.
 

Lagi

Savant
Joined
Jul 19, 2015
Messages
726
Location
Desert
better than Doom?

Doom 2 - berserk and ssg improve the gameplay (solve worthless punch and abundance of shotgun shells), new monsters (much needed tier of sub bosses like Revenant, Mancubus, Archvile - they are clearly missing in Heretic custom levels, everywhere is floating head of Ironlich to fill this gap :/ )

----

but not trying to be a smart ass, and by stretching the genre definition a lot I would say Thief.
 

Blutwurstritter

Learned
Joined
Sep 18, 2021
Messages
875
Location
Germany
If we also allow multiplayer focused games I'd say Unreal Tournament. Pretty much the best multiplayer shooter up to this day. I spent countless hours with my clan back then. Much more frantic and action packed than Doom with a brilliant arsenal, maps and modes. The original Doom feels tame in comparison.

my man, UT99 is the shit. I loved that game back in the day, it's the whole reason I wanted a PC with more than 8MB of RAM, kek. my starter rig was a 486DX with 8MB of RAM (struggled to run Duke3D, which needed 16) and I was fortunately able to upgrade to an Athlon 1Ghz with 512MB of RAM with Unreal Tournament. I didn't play a whole lot of online multiplayer since I was one of those kids who was still on dial-up in the late 90s (using the free trial phone number of that old K-mart ISP that disconnected you once an hour because I couldn't afford actual net, too) but I still got a lot of mileage out of that game especially with the classic mods like U4E and the like

Still, in my old age I find myself gravitating more towards Doom than UT99 nowadays. UT99 is fun to dive into, sure, but Doom is more satisfying for a single player IMO.....especially now that I got the full game and ain't limited to the shareware episode anymore like I was when I was a kid, kek

They tickle different needs so its great to have both of em. And I also didn't play online. In my area of rural Germany we had no internet. We played exclusively in local area network on weekends. I think the first time I had access to internet at home was late 2003 or 2004. I never tried all the wads and updates that Doom got over the years so my comparison is based on the original release back then and my probably diminishing memories of it. I also enjoyed Blood (partly due to the fact that it has LAN-coop) more than Doom, again comparing the unmodded games.
 

Sjukob

Arcane
Joined
Jul 3, 2015
Messages
2,052
why do people on this website hate half-life? you people are zoomers
People who enjoy proper FPS gameplay are disgruntled to see a game, that traded it off for a set piece sightseeing, while turning out to be largely successful among general audience and having majority of the developers trying to copy it's style for years.

The better question would be is why don't people notice that this thing actually started with Build Engine games, Duke Nukem 3D specifically, at least I don't know any earlier examples. When I tell them about it they usually enter full denial mode, may be because the decline wasn't as severe as with Half Life, or may be it's just nostalgia or lack of experience.
 

Ash

Arcane
Joined
Oct 16, 2015
Messages
6,226
*Enters full denial mode*

Nukem 3D's only parallel to Half-Life in this regard is its realism-inspired level design, and even then it's still knew when to be abstract in favor of gameplay (i.e often). Half-Life isn't very abstract at all.
If you think it's the event scripting then I disagree, as it is never intrusive and rigid in Nukem 3D. When you enter the pipe in Half-Life and a dude tosses in a satchel charge, you can do absolutely nothing but back up into the water, can't even kill the marine as he tosses it in to prevent the event. Nukem 3D has nothing like that, it's executed way better like blowing up buildings or scripted earthquakes that completely change the level design (The Abyss). It never impedes on the gameplay, only enhances it.
 

Sjukob

Arcane
Joined
Jul 3, 2015
Messages
2,052
Ash
It's primarily about combat and enemy design.

Remember when I told you that enemy design in Doom is still unmatched and that it allows you to create encounters and levels that no other FPS is capable of? When it comes to Duke 3D (and Build Engine games in general) all of this greatness gets completely replaced by agressive use of hitscanners or other poorly designed enemies that can never offer you a gameplay that could compete with ID games. Essentially, the purpose of enemies in Duke 3D is to look cool and die with hilarious visuals, not to offer deep and varied gameplay. However, in return those games came with better visuals and more detailed and interactive environment, too bad that the very core of the gameplay took the massive hit for that. That's why I say that Duke 3D is the game that started this "set piece FPS" thing.

There should not have been a trade off between these too in the first place, if you play some modern Doom wads you can can see some very pretty levels that also come with very strong gameplay.

I'm being vague here, because I'm not feeling like going on a rant right now and I'm typing this on the phone, but I hope you get my point.
 

Sjukob

Arcane
Joined
Jul 3, 2015
Messages
2,052
Quake is guilty of similar thing too. Allowing for a free 3D movement does not compensate for weaker enemy and weapon design. That's why I called it "watered down Doom". Still is a great game though.
 

Jack Of Owls

Arcane
Joined
May 23, 2014
Messages
4,269
Location
Massachusettes
There were several FPS games (i.e. Duke 3D, Blood, Heretic, etc) that I actually enjoyed more than Doom I/II when I first played them way back when but were they better than Doom? No way, junior. There was just too much greatness, efficiency of coding and innovation going on with Doom, and with the modern Doom modding community, it is still absolute master of all it surveys.
 

Ash

Arcane
Joined
Oct 16, 2015
Messages
6,226
Ash
It's primarily about combat and enemy design.

Remember when I told you that enemy design in Doom is still unmatched and that it allows you to create encounters and levels that no other FPS is capable of? When it comes to Duke 3D (and Build Engine games in general) all of this greatness gets completely replaced by agressive use of hitscanners or other poorly designed enemies that can never offer you a gameplay that could compete with ID games. Essentially, the purpose of enemies in Duke 3D is to look cool and die with hilarious visuals, not to offer deep and varied gameplay. However, in return those games came with better visuals and more detailed and interactive environment, too bad that the very core of the gameplay took the massive hit for that. That's why I say that Duke 3D is the game that started this "set piece FPS" thing.

There should not have been a trade off between these too in the first place, if you play some modern Doom wads you can can see some very pretty levels that also come with very strong gameplay.

I'm being vague here, because I'm not feeling like going on a rant right now and I'm typing this on the phone, but I hope you get my point.

You understate the quality of Duke 3D AI. There isn't that many hitscanners, though those that are are often common enemies yes (Pig Cops and Enforcers), yet there is some pretty elaborate enemy behaviours that do result in cool and deep gameplay, like the Assault Captains. But yes there is less cohesion between all the enemy types and the arsenal than Doom. Most notably the shrinker trivializes all the flying fat commander enemies (which are a pretty solid enemy type) and is way too gimmicky.

Yes Doom has better combat than Duke, but Duke does nearly everything else better so it rivals if not surpasses Doom for me (vanilla vs vanilla), as while combat is the most important factor to an FPS, it is far from the only factor. It's also worth noting that Shadow Warrior is probably an improvement in the combat front over Duke 3D and closer to Doom's golden standard.
 

JDR13

Arcane
Joined
Nov 2, 2006
Messages
3,930
Location
The Swamp
Funnily enough I returned to Doom this past week for the first time in 30 odd years, and it was more enjoyable than 9/10 FPS games which I've played since (Quake 2, Hexen 2 and Fear 2 are the only 3 which come to mind which I enjoyed as much).

I'm not a huge fan of the genre anyway, but Doom's jump-scares and no-nonsense, arcade style action just make for a more intense experience. It's not fucking about trying to be a sim or a story, it's just a kill and scare fest backed with some nice-ish maps.

You enjoyed Quake 2 and Fear 2 more than Doom.

:hmmm:
 

Falksi

Arcane
Joined
Feb 14, 2017
Messages
10,538
Location
Nottingham
Funnily enough I returned to Doom this past week for the first time in 30 odd years, and it was more enjoyable than 9/10 FPS games which I've played since (Quake 2, Hexen 2 and Fear 2 are the only 3 which come to mind which I enjoyed as much).

I'm not a huge fan of the genre anyway, but Doom's jump-scares and no-nonsense, arcade style action just make for a more intense experience. It's not fucking about trying to be a sim or a story, it's just a kill and scare fest backed with some nice-ish maps.

You enjoyed Quake 2 and Fear 2 more than Doom.

:hmmm:

No. Like I said in the post, I enjoyed them as much. I think Doom's the better game, but each of those others offered me an experience which was as enjoyable in it's own way.

The only one I'd say I may prefer is Hexen 2, because I just love the fantasy theme. Unfortunately that's not a front which Doom can ever satisfy on, even though the combat itself is probably better.
 

Jenkem

その目、だれの目?
Patron
Vatnik
Joined
Nov 30, 2016
Messages
8,846
Location
An oasis of love and friendship.
Make the Codex Great Again! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I helped put crap in Monomyth
People who enjoy proper FPS gameplay are disgruntled to see a game, that traded it off for a set piece sightseeing, while turning out to be largely successful among general audience and having majority of the developers trying to copy it's style for years.

The better question would be is why don't people notice that this thing actually started with Build Engine games, Duke Nukem 3D specifically, at least I don't know any earlier examples. When I tell them about it they usually enter full denial mode, may be because the decline wasn't as severe as with Half Life, or may be it's just nostalgia or lack of experience.

"proper FPS gameplay" is what exactly? besides a true scotsman...

just because people copied it doesn't mean it's bad, half-life still holds up today and it's not as "sightseeing" as people claim, you might be thinking of HL2, but HL1 is well paced.
 

Curratum

Guest
The only one I'd say I may prefer is Hexen 2, because I just love the fantasy theme. Unfortunately that's not a front which Doom can ever satisfy on, even though the combat itself is probably better.


 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom