OP I feel like you have realised all the necessary preliminary steps to answer this.
The old games you name had things going on other than shooting. Rather important historic detail, DOOM was actually conceived of as something more like an adventure game before its premise was eventually refined down to being an "fps". The reason it seems to have so much character is because the game was built to lean on and place far more importance upon these elements earlier in its production. It's a simple game made of parts that were intended for a far more complex one. They would perhaps not have created such rich and nuanced background elements if from the start their intention was
fps.
And though the other old titles don't share this exact production story, similar principles play out each time. At this point in the history of video games people weren't really interested in making
fps just
as fps. Each example you give, you can describe the premise. And I would say in each case that's because the nature of what the game is to a certain extent grew from that premise.
The difference between older and newer "fps" is that an old "fps" was using the form as a tool to realise a greater aesthetic vision. The experience of fighting through demonic Mars, of being the evil avenging revenant cowboy, the absurd cartoon action hero, the survivor in an alien jungle. These are all premises which are interesting before you learn that you'll be playing through them via a first person visual perspective and shooting things with a gun.
Interestingly, the last game in your list is Half Life. Half Life is interesting because it's a very self conscious
fps. And it's obvious that while it was being made they realised something. That the incidental form of the "fps" genre was not actually inherently that useful for the kind of vision they wanted to realise. They wanted to make a cool science fiction disaster story about a place falling apart and becoming dangerous. Being able to shoot a gun was obviously handy at points, hazards you need to
shoot are an essential part of the experience they had in mind. But there are also lots of other things that aren't shooting which will really bring this experience to life.
Half Life was not built around doing things to be a faithfully rendered "fps". It was built around what was necessary for the realisation of the idea of Half Life. Some elements of "fps" were useful for that. Some were not. Inorganic environmental mazes? Out. Minimalist no-drag story presentation? Out. Immediate action? Out. Naturalistic
"level design"? In. Downtime with talking characters? In.
You can still swap spastically between 8 different weapons and hop around like an autist, but Half Life is clearly in the process of evolving from the form of something like Doom to something more like an adventure game that happens to be in first person.
And I think that was very good. One can readily ask why any particular element of
fps was necessary for realising the cool parts of a game like Half Life. And I think the game definitely could have been even less of a
boomer shooter and worked just as well if not better. What if we only had one gun at a time? Or a STALKER/rpg style inventory? What if we had a conversation screen to talk to scientists? Any of this
could have worked. My point is that Half Life was not essentially an "fps". It was selectively using elements of the form for its own purposes. And that in fact this is what all classic "fps", or "boomer shooters" were doing.
And that this stale and pointless era you complain of is a consequence of a thoughtless retroactive formalisation of existing works that took place in a cargo cultish manner. What you're witnessing when you play a self proclaimed "boomer shooter" that's a bunch of spazzy movement, empty abstract
arenas, and no plot or greater purpose, is a cargo cult. And I can tell you where that cargo cult orginates.
The absolutely graceless, absurd, uncomprehending and horrified reaction of bald gen-xers and millennials toward the evolution of
fps away from vestigial elements of form towards new ideas which were far better suited to expressing the idiosyncratic desires and visions of their creators. This is how we got the
Boomer Shooter cult. Oldfags who prided themselves on being obsessed with old things pulling rank with the only thing they had over the younger gamers coming to displace them, their age and the fact they were
there for the past, to bully and shame everyone and everything new and retroactively spin absurd self-serving and arbitrary theories on
gamedesign and
true hardcore fps solely to exclude new things and elevate old ones. Because they were
there for the old things. And if the rules are written to say having been there for the old things makes you the coolest person ever, they win.
And young people are anxious, insecure, and looking for approval and direction, so these memes took.
Now 20 years after Halo, we're living through the consequences. A bunch of pointless abstract arenas in which you hop around in circles, switch guns, and shoot big things until they die. Are you proud of us Gen X? Did we do good? Is the finasteride treating your balls well today? Was it all worth it?
If Half Life was
fps starting to evolve into something more like an adventure game, Halo was the one with the experience, self-awareness, and bravery to go all in. Like Doom it started as something else. Halo was going to be a strategy game. A 3d successor to Bungie's
Myth games. But they experimented with unit possession and realised that was just so fun it should be the whole damn game (an aversion to just letting fun stuff happen was the great weakness of their older games).
Halo is
very rich in intentional detail that's not explicitly placed right in front of you. It released alongside a very seriously written novel which dovetails beautifully with the themes
and experience of playing the game itself. Bungie at this time were nerds, but they were also artfags. Giant ones by the standards of American gaming. Halo does not exist to succeed Quake. Again, it wasn't even an "fps" when first conceived. Halo exists to be Halo and to represent a few entertaining general video game concepts. Halo exists to show off reactive actors in combat (AI of both covenant and marines), it exists to show off and let you play with entertaining physics and reactive ballistic and explosive elements, this is all stuff Myth had already done.
And Halo existed to be a vehicle for a rather serious science fiction story and universe, much like the one they already portrayed in their
Marathon trilogy, but again, choosing to err on the side of fun and simplicity this time. I actually don't believe that Halo is any less complex thematically than Marathon, it's just far more content to let you miss everything that it's doing for the sake of your own good time.
A true appreciation and appraisal of Halo requires an appreciation of what its creators were trying to do. And even a fairly casual investigation should reveal that the historic
fps genre was far from their minds all the way through this. They were building for purpose. The resemblance to "fps" let alone "boomer shooter" is slim, and arguably even incidental. First person happened to feel a bit better than third, they were weighing up both. And there are guns, sure. Really Halo is its own creative geneaology primarily drawing upon their own prior work.
With Marathon they tried to make their own vision work
within fps. And it
kind of works. With Halo, arguably for the first and last time, they built their game entirely to fit what they wanted to do as artists and pioneers in gaming technology.
They did that, and people called the game slow quake. And those "people" won. Their memes dominated the
gamer consciousness. People are still somewhat ashamed of liking the elements that define Halo: Combat Evolved, and feel like they have a duty to defend carrying ten weapons at once, arenas full of enemies, hopping, quickly switching weapons, this stuff is good because it is hardcore first person shooter and we want to be hardcore first person shooter or else the older gamers will get upset and yell at me and call me stupid.
OP, how do you feel about Halo?
And how do you feel about your old favourite
fps games? What is it you like about them? Is it the particulars of the "fps" form as they existed in that time and place? Or is it for the totality of the creative vision behind them, which was perhaps
incidentally expressed through that old form of "fps" at the time?
