Vapourware 2000s First-Person FPS Shooter Games

[Paladino]

F.E.A.R. is also better than all shooters released in the nineties. But Ash probably dont want to hear that. The game is pure 100% FPS combat goodness.

Besides the excellent gameplay and AI, above all I simply like the mundane corporate/industrial environments.

 

[Goldschmidt]

F.E.A.R. is also better than all shooters released in the nineties. But Ash probably dont want to hear that. The game is pure 100% FPS combat goodness.

Besides the excellent gameplay and AI, above all I simply like the mundane corporate/industrial environments.

Yeah I really liked this as well. A lot of gamers didn't as they rather play games with interesting locations and subpar gameplay. They seek a walking simulator. One of the lore reasons for staying in the same city is that the entire game takes place during 1 day. Wastewater Treatment plant (daylight) -> Armacham HQ (nighttime) -> Auburn District + Armacham Secret Facility (nighttime) -> Nuke explosion (morning).

 

[Average Manatee]

F.E.A.R. is also better than all shooters released in the nineties.

Very different beasts.

In the sense they are clearly inferior. It was good for the nineties but quickly grew outdated. Yes if you love zoomfest, it got speed but the combat is pretty bad.

FEAR is enjoyable for ~5 hours. Doom has remained fun for 30 years thanks to community WADs and it has continually gotten better over time. There's no comparison. DOOM enemies combined with map design has near infinite different strategic and tactical possibilities. FEAR boils down to leaning past cover in slo mo and quickly killing everything in 2-5 shots with whatever barely different from the rest hitscan weapon you prefer.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Don't forget the portable tower of medkits they let you have. FEAR is cool but it's mainly just corridor shooting with an easy button (or two).

 

[Goldschmidt]

Original DOOM is just strafe and your guns have no verticality. Might and Magic 6 is a better shooter than Doom.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Original DOOM is just strafe and your guns have no verticality. Might and Magic 6 is a better shooter than Doom.

and yet doom is more vertical than fear

 

[Goldschmidt]

Original DOOM is just strafe and your guns have no verticality. Might and Magic 6 is a better shooter than Doom.

and yet doom is more vertical than fear

Verticality in a shooter does not necessarily make it great. It suits some games but others are worse off if they include it. Shooter is about gunplay, awesome combat and AI.

IF Doom was slow as a turtle, hardly anyone would play it these days.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Original DOOM is just strafe and your guns have no verticality. Might and Magic 6 is a better shooter than Doom.

and yet doom is more vertical than fear

Verticality in a shooter does not necessarily make it great. It suits some games but others are worse off if they include it. Shooter is about gunplay, awesome combat and AI.

First-person shooters are actually just an evolution of dungeon crawlers.

 

[Morenatsu.]

IF Doom was slow as a turtle, hardly anyone would play it these days.

and yet fear is slower than doom

 

[Multidirectional]

I'm surprised no one's mentioned Left 4 Dead 2 yet. Playing under the realism ruleset provides a tense and rewarding experience, and a considerably deeper one than a lot of the rather bare 90s stuff.

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.

 

[soutaiseiriron]

F.E.A.R. is also better than all shooters released in the nineties.

Dear God no. Terrible fucking game, worst level design ever put into an FPS, insanely overrated AI that's no where near as smart as people say it is, mindlessly easy on the highest difficulty, horrible sound mixing, and the enemy designs are just bullet sponge after bullet sponge.

 

[Lemming42]

Original DOOM is just strafe and your guns have no verticality.

It's also got:
- A varied pool of enemies who have different attack styles and require different approaches to defeat
- A varied pool of weapons that feel distinct and have different applications
- Great art direction in the first episode and third episode, second is debatably a bit shit-looking
- Generally good level design, moreso in the first episode than the subsequent two (let's keep it vague to avoid this becoming Sandy Peterson Hate Thread #32932)
- A soundtrack that people fondly remember

etc.

 

[HansDampf]

I can't think of any FPS game with more fun movement than Doom or a more interesting weapon than the BFG, a weapon which, admittedly, doesn't really get to shine in the original maps. But since we're posting videos of Speed of Doom, I guess custom WADs are considered to be included.

 

[NecroLord]

I can't think of any FPS game with more fun movement than Doom or a more interesting weapon than the BFG, a weapon which, admittedly, doesn't really get to shine in the original maps. But since we're posting videos of Speed of Doom, I guess custom WADs are considered to be included.

Doom 3 BFG is also DOPE.
Quake 2 also had the BFG.

 

[Average Manatee]

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.

L4D 1 and 2 are the only team FPS games that I've played competitively. Truly excellent stuff.

I think the best FPS games are those that maximize your ability to employ what in the military is called the OODA loop. Fast, complex, unique situations thrown at you that need an intelligent immediate response to or you lose. L4D2 vs hits that extremely well. To an extent games like DOOM do as well as long as you are playing new levels consistently. I also play Vermintide which while sadly not having a vs mode (which would make it possibly the best game ever), is essentially L4D2 with a vastly more complex combat system and set of enemies and with heavy melee focus so it kind of hits the same niche.

 

[ind33d]

FPS as a genre is dead until there are ways to solve aimbotting. CSGO would probably be the best game of all time if there weren't morons openly wallhacking

 

[Morenatsu.]

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

 

[JarlFrank]

I can't think of any FPS game with more fun movement than Doom

Quake.

 

[Modron]

I can't think of any FPS game with more fun movement than Doom or a more interesting weapon than the BFG, a weapon which, admittedly, doesn't really get to shine in the original maps. But since we're posting videos of Speed of Doom, I guess custom WADs are considered to be included.

Starsiege Tribes, Renegade mod in particular since it gave a bullet sniper rifle so you could perform headshots hurdling across the skies at 500 miles per hour from a ski jump.

 

[Ash]

Original DOOM is just strafe and your guns have no verticality.

It's also got:
- A varied pool of enemies who have different attack styles and require different approaches to defeat
- A varied pool of weapons that feel distinct and have different applications
- Great art direction in the first episode and third episode, second is debatably a bit shit-looking
- Generally good level design, moreso in the first episode than the subsequent two (let's keep it vague to avoid this becoming Sandy Peterson Hate Thread #32932)
- A soundtrack that people fondly remember

etc.

-Puzzle elements, traps, environmental hazards, which also often factor into combat.
-Various powerups (berserk pack, invisibility, invulnerability, backpack etc).
-Secrets, non-linearity, exploration/navigation challenge, large-scale diverse levels.
-A proper arsenal to manage, not a three weapon limit.

You can also mod it to have FEAR mechanics like vertical aiming, OP slo-mo and jump kicks if you want.

Guy's likely a zoomer that bases his understanding from watching some videos of 90s games.

 

[Goldschmidt]

Original DOOM is just strafe and your guns have no verticality.

It's also got:
- A varied pool of enemies who have different attack styles and require different approaches to defeat
- A varied pool of weapons that feel distinct and have different applications
- Great art direction in the first episode and third episode, second is debatably a bit shit-looking
- Generally good level design, moreso in the first episode than the subsequent two (let's keep it vague to avoid this becoming Sandy Peterson Hate Thread #32932)
- A soundtrack that people fondly remember

etc.

-Puzzle elements, traps, environmental hazards, which also often factor into combat.
-Various powerups (berserk pack, invisibility, invulnerability, backpack etc).
-Secrets, non-linearity, exploration/navigation challenge, large-scale diverse levels.
-A proper arsenal to manage, not a three weapon limit.

You can also mod it to have FEAR mechanics like vertical aiming, OP slo-mo and jump kicks if you want.

Guy's likely a zoomer that bases his understanding from watching some videos of 90s games.

If you want a pool of enemies that is more varied than Doom, or more interesting puzzle elements, or various powerups and secrets, non-linearity and large levels you are better off playing 90's Might and Magic 6: Mandate of Heaven. All of these elements can make a great rpg but are not the dna of a combat shooter. I never really liked Doom in the 90s; it is a boring game.

 

[Ash]

They are the DNA of a FPS. Doom set that standard and it is what all 90s FPS followed, until the shit sellout 2000s where it became about realism, graphics, hitscanning, story, linear level design and likewise bland boring bullshit instead. You clearly don't mind, but I don't want to pop moles in bland straightforward corridors over and over and nothing else. I expect multi-layered gameplay, as is the case with all the best games.

 

[Goldschmidt]

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.

 

[Lemming42]

It's not just about combat, though, there's all kinds of stuff going on in older FPS games. Combat is obviously key but plenty of other aspects play a role.

Doom might be remembered these days as "rip and tear huhuhuhuh" but it's just as much about finding your way through mazes and evading hazards as it is about combat. System Shock and Hexen are probably two of the best examples of early FPS games that still have a very obvious dungeon crawling focus, where the combat is arguably secondary to the exploration and navigation aspects.

Then of course one of the most acclaimed 90s shooters was Half-Life, which completely de-emphasised combat in favour of storytelling and level design. People don't fondly remember shooting unreactive Vortigaunts in the face with the shitty glock, but people do remember non-combat shit like dodging the Blast Pit tentacle or scaling the side of the canyon in Surface Tension. Combat is basically used as seasoning in Half-Life - the soldiers on the canyon are there to add to the existing risk of you trying to get to the other side, rather than to act as a satisfying straight-up combat encounter in and of themselves. Again, goes back to Doom, or even pre-Doom - Wolfenstein 3D loved to put keys in your line of sight and then have bastards pop out at you as an ambush when you went to pick them up. Navigating the maze to find the elevator is the focus; the combat is there to complicate things.

Obviously the combat mechanics should be strong in any FPS game but I don't think the fact that F.E.A.R. technically simulates the act of shooting more viscerally than Doom makes it a better game than Doom by any means (especially when you factor in F.E.A.R.'s samey enemies and limited arsenal).

 

[Ash]

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.