FPS essentials

[Morenatsu.]

But Far Cry 2 is worse.

 

[Zlaja]

Am I the only one who really enjoyed Halo: Reach? I thought the game had both decent shooting, fun diverse levels, and an enjoyable campaign storyline. Add to that the ability to customize your own character that features in the game's cutscenes, satisfying progression system that carries across both MP and SP, and non-annoying side characters who you don't wish to strangle.

 

[Cassar]

Far Cry 1 has nothing to do with Ubisoft design, it's not even an open-world game.

It does actually, but thats more to do with ubisoft and their goals, it doesnt mean FC 1 is bad. When you think about it, FC1 ends up being one of the most influential games ever - Ubisoft lifted a lot of its concepts from here and then the rest of the industry just copies ubisoft. Wild.

The open nature of the levels, the freedom in FC1, that lead Clint Hocking to want to expand on that in FC 2. That in turn led to FC3 and the core design of FC3 went to be copied industry wide.

The fort concept that ubi employed in all its franchises later comes from FC1. The enemy tagging where it shows the enemies on your radar wasnt a dumb-ification concept in FC1 - the game was hard as fuck and being set in the jungle, enemies could be hard to see. So this was to help you a little bit. What we ended up with in the industry though is xray vision where you see enemies through the walls.

Biggest problem with ubisoft is that they cant let you have any sort of difficulty playing. They want to catter to every breathing organism in the world. Where in FC1 you're the prey, hunted, weak, always on the brink of death - in ubisoft games you're the ultimate predator. Overpowered and almost invincible.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Far Cry has nothing to do with Ubisoft, but Ubisoft has something to do with Far Cry (but not really). Just like how scripted FPSes are Half-Life except not at all.

 

[Cassar]

Far Cry has nothing to do with Ubisoft, but Ubisoft has something to do with Far Cry (but not really). Just like how scripted FPSes are Half-Life except not at all.

FC 1 was published by Ubisoft and FC 2 and 3 are dirrect responses to the ideas and design of FC1. The director of FC 2 is on record with these things. Also, influence doesnt mean you're doing a 1:1 copy/paste job. You're selecting bits and pieces and you're having ideas of your own that come from looking at other games

 

[what am i doing]

Am I the only one who really enjoyed Halo: Reach? I thought the game had both decent shooting, fun diverse levels, and an enjoyable campaign storyline. Add to that the ability to customize your own character that features in the game's cutscenes, satisfying progression system that carries across both MP and SP, and non-annoying side characters who you don't wish to strangle.

I loved Halo: Reach, and I'm sad Bungie moved away from the series when it was basically at its best state. Reach had a different flavour from the other Halo games, being less space epic and more sci-fi war story, and I liked the direction it had gone. More games like Reach, and not continuing the Master Chief storyline, would have been great.

Would have liked if they'd built on the fireteam mechanic, though.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Far Cry has nothing to do with Ubisoft, but Ubisoft has something to do with Far Cry (but not really). Just like how scripted FPSes are Half-Life except not at all.

FC 1 was published by Ubisoft and FC 2 and 3 are dirrect responses to the ideas and design of FC1. The director of FC 2 is on record with these things. Also, influence doesnt mean you're doing a 1:1 copy/paste job. You're selecting bits and pieces and you're having ideas of your own that come from looking at other games

doom 2016 was made by id software and was a direct response to doom



Wait, what. Which one is it? UbiCry is actually just like Far Cry, or actually it isn't really? Why should I listen to what an Ubisoft director thinks about his own game, anyway. That's like trusting that a criminal doesn't commit crimes because he said so. What exciting truisms.

 

[luj1]

Am I the only one who really enjoyed Halo: Reach? I thought the game had both decent shooting, fun diverse levels, and an enjoyable campaign storyline. Add to that the ability to customize your own character that features in the game's cutscenes, satisfying progression system that carries across both MP and SP, and non-annoying side characters who you don't wish to strangle.

Only the first Halo is worth playing... maybe

 

[Curratum]

Imagine going from making unique, absolute gems like Myth to making HALO of all things...

 

[Morenatsu.]

Because Marathon doesn't exist obviously.

 

[Nutmeg]

Hello FPS nerds.

I have a question. What was the first "corridor shooter"?

I mean in the FPS genre, not like Space Harrier lol.

I know Half-Life is the game that popularized this kind of level design, which was released Nov 19th 1998. SiN was kind of like that, and it was November 9th 1998, so had Half-Life beat by 10 days, but essentially simultaneous.

Was there anything earlier?

 

[Valestein]

Hello FPS nerds.

I have a question. What was the first "corridor shooter"?

I mean in the FPS genre, not like Space Harrier lol.

I know Half-Life is the game that popularized this kind of level design, which was released Nov 19th 1998. SiN was kind of like that, and it was November 9th 1998, so had Half-Life beat by 10 days, but essentially simultaneous.

Was there anything earlier?

The first ever fps?

 

[Nutmeg]

The first ever fps? *maze war*

This is a good counter example to what I mean by corridor shooter.

When I say corridor shooter, I mean like the amount of branching paths and back tracking, not how claustrophobic the environs are. Mazes obviously have a lot of both branching and back tracking so this kind of level design is the opposite of what I was asking about.

 

[ultimanecat]

If you’re talking about mostly linear levels with little branching, then GoldenEye for the N64 in 1997 might be one of the earliest.

 

[Zenith]

What was the first "corridor shooter"?

If you want an extreme example:

But I think it's kind of a weird term historically, and wasn't used the way you're using it.
The way I remember it, at first it might have been a term like "Doom clone" before "FPS" became widely used. In the early 00s journos started using it to refer to the classic shooters, and contrasting them to then-modern Far Cry, Halo and Half-Life 2 - i.e. a more literal "those old games were set in sci-fi corridors, while these new games have open spaces". Classic FPS gameplay was made into a strawman "run forward while holding the trigger", so those old games were "dumb corridor shooters", so simple they don't even have any cutscenes.
The gamepad-centric health-regen aim-down-sights era came later and I think the term fell out of favor by then. After the 10/10s dried out a bit, and the linearity of the console shooters became more acknowledged, the phrase came back in this new mutated form, now referring to cutscene-corridor-cutscene scripted structure. Though I'm not even sure it's used that much anyway.

 

[Nutmeg]

Yeah I might be using the term incorrectly. Basically, I just mean Half-Life style level design in FPS. I'm just wondering if Half-Life was indeed the first, as I expect there will be some obscure precedent, or a more gradual transition.

I've never actually played Quake 2 or GoldenEye except multiplayer, but the latter does indeed seem to fit the bill.

 

[Arbiter]

Star Craft: Republic Commando

I am sure you meant Star Wars: Republic Commando. A StarCraft shooter never materialized.

 

[Nutmeg]

Ok so, I finished Quake 1, played through the first 5 levels of GoldenEye (so, 1/4 of the game), and three levels of Quake 2.

After playing through the first episode of Quake for the second time in my life a couple of years back when trimming my backlog, I concluded Quake was what I call an "action mood crawler" i.e. a moody dungeon crawler, but without all the trappings of numbers go up and interruptions to play that come as baggage with the RPG genre proper. To test this hypothesis I preceded Quake 1 with an actual turn based Japanese Wizardry, the moodiest most 3D dungeony one I could find, which was Wizardry Alternative (or Tales of the Forsaken Land). Of course, there is no comparison in e.g. the combat, but I was more eager to compare the level design and navigation. Here too the differences were significant.

Firstly, in Quake, there is no attrition. An ample reward of healing and munitions awaits after every encounter. In comparison dungeon crawlers proper are all about attrition.

Secondly, in Quake, everything loops back to everything to maintain forward momentum. In Wizardries, shortcuts are hard earned. The corollary of this is that I never ever got lost or had to check the map in Quake.

Curiously, power pellets, in the form of quad damage or the pentagram in Quake are present in the Might and Magic open world blobbers in the form of fountains, and perhaps if an RPG equivalent to Quake is sought there's where you'd find it.

So, seeing as this hypothesis (that the dungeons in boomer shooters are not so different to the dungeons in wiz clones) failed, I instead asked "do labyrinthine levels add or take away from the action".

One consideration here is that Quake, the way it is meant to be played, is as a technical time trial game. By technical I mean there's certain waypoints you must hit, rather than follow a track or circuit. This is evident in how the game scores you at the end of every level: time taken, enemies killed, and secrets found (the latter two being the waypoints). From this point of view, Quake seems to succeed marvelously. However I'm not looking at it from this point of view, instead I'm simply considering the quality of the action in the basic play of going from entrance to exit in the path of least resistance.

So to test this second hypothesis, I looked for early examples of FPS that didn't have labyrinthine levels. Which is how I came across GoldenEye and Quake 2 as possible pre Half-Life candidates.

Will post my thoughts on these later.

 

[Eisen]

i love QUAKE that much

 

[d1r]

Wolf 3D

Fast paced gameplay, deadly weapons and enemies, sound, atmosphere, level design (yes mazelike level design is far from optimal but it's still miles better than linear action corridors).
If anything, it's more worth playing today than it was in mid-late 90s- early 2000s when proper FPS games were still being made and the competition was fierce in that genre.

Take off your nostalgia goggles, jesus christ.

 

[Zenith]

Firstly, in Quake, there is no attrition
...
So, seeing as this hypothesis (that the dungeons in boomer shooters are not so different to the dungeons in wiz clones) failed, I instead asked "do labyrinthine levels add or take away from the action".

If you want attrition in Quake, play WarpSpasm.
As for vanilla levels, their balance is in part a product of performance considerations. Can't have open spaces, can't render dozens of enemies at once, etc. Even as it is, you would have been playing them at like 15fps, possibly without a mouse. So if anything, the fact that they don't turn into a total cakewalk decades later is an achievement in itself. If you're playing on hard anyway, which you should be (for the higher enemy counts).

I don't really see how your hypothesis "fails" anyway, not in principle. The missing links between grid dungeons and FPS levels would be UUW, Shock1 and Thief. Compare Doom/Strife levels to Underworld, or Quake/Hexen2 levels to Thief. There are clear differences, but the similarity should also be obvious.

I dislike Quake2, but I don't think structurally it's that much different from Q1. Just a more stilted flow and a bit more window dressing.

 

[Nutmeg]

I don't really see how your hypothesis "fails" anyway, not in principle. The missing links between grid dungeons and FPS levels would be UUW, Shock1 and Thief. Compare Doom/Strife levels to Underworld, or Quake/Hexen2 levels to Thief. There are clear differences, but the similarity should also be obvious.

I'm yet to deep dive into UUW and similar Japanese games like King's Field and Baroque. My hypothesis here is similar, but slightly different: if you don't care much for the trappings of the RPG genre (as I resolutely do not), these are just bad FPS games.

You're also right to point out Strife and System Shock as possible half way points to UUW, which is itself a half way point (so quarter way points, lol). I never really doubted that there's a whole spectrum of possible game design between Wizardry and Quake, it's just that for now I'm more interested in comparing extremes.

Anyway my thoughts on GoldenEye (first 5 levels)

The levels are incredibly small. They somewhat disguise this with relatively large open spaces (relative to the incredibly sluggish movement speed) at the expense of complex geometry. The levels contain some dead ends and unessential points of interest, assumedly in the interest of making the geometry better mimic real world functional locales. There are also some simple loops and branching paths, but no more than a couple per level.

I learned that GoldenEye started as a Virtua Cop clone, and it certainly shows in the aiming mode, where you control a cursor on the screen and your view is otherwise fixed, save for the ability to side step in and out of cover. It also shows in how you temporarily stun enemies when you shoot them if you don't kill them. However, the action falls well, well short of Virtua Cop. It is though, at its best in constrained hallways full of boxes, and absolutely at its worst in more typical FPS like multiple level geometry. A useful datapoint, but in no way generalizeable to typical FPS action, as GoldenEye's action is anything but. The conclusion I reached here is simply that making light gun style shooting action work with freedom of movement is very difficult.

Another thing claimed by some fans of GoldenEye is that it was the first FPS to have objectives. I strongly doubt it was the first FPS to have objectives (Didn't the first Dark Forces have objectives? My memory fails me). Anyway whether or not the claim is true, functionally, objectives are similar to Quake secrets, but mandatory and enforced for basic play and lack the "woot!" (as in wow! loot!) factor. Also many require you to open the menu to select an item, which interrupts the play and is annoying and could have been replaced with an interact button (at the cost of some "immersion"). In any case, objectives in addition to secrets did make their way into Quake 2, possibly from GoldenEye's influence (?).

The score card you get at the end of each mission does give you a time, so combined with the objectives high level play here is also technical time trial, just like Quake. From this perspective, the level design cannot hold a candle to Quake's.

I am dropping this game as it just isn't very good at all. I might give Rare's later Perfect Dark and Time Splitters 2 a brief spin later to see how the design lineage evolved.

 

[jebsmoker]

Cryostasis is a spooky shooter like Doom 3. It's slow paced and jump scare reliant like Doom 3. If you only judge the gameplay, it's subpar like Doom 3. But the story in Cryostasis is on a completely different level. Instead of getting audiologs, you get excerpts from a Maxim Gorky short story. The deeper you go, there more you start to ask yourself what the game is actually even about. It's really, really cool and deserves to mentioned more often

cryostasis is one of my favorite games that has been lost to time. i'm lucky i managed to get a second copy on steam before it got taken down. i remember pirating it in late 2008 and getting a english translation from the 1c forums. i played the entire game from start to end even though it played at a choppy framerate because the game the terribly optimized. it's still one of my all time favorites

 

[Nutmeg]

Ok, finished Quake 2 (on hard).

I guess the Kodex Kritical Konsensus in recent years is that Q2 is somehow decline compared to the original. I don't agree with that at all.

For one, Quake 2 has better weapons, IMO. The shotguns, rocket and grenade launcher are much the same in both, but the very samey nailgun and super nailgun get replaced with the SMG and chaingun respectively, which differ in cool down, recoil and startup. The pistol is a good switch hitter and dark space light, so a good replacement for the useless axe. There's no real equivalent to the lightning gun (which itself isn't too differentiated from the nailguns, just has limited range, different ammo and you can't use in water), instead you get the instant hitscan, pinpoint precise railgun and the return of Doom's BFG and plasmagun (now called the "hyperblaster"). As an added bit of resource management, one type of armor, the BFG and the hyperblaster all share ammo.

Like the aresnal, the level design also goes half way back to Doom. Or rather starts from Doom, and goes a different direction than the first Quake. Tightly packed loops and teleporters at the end of hallways are eschewed in lieu of tall elevators and open rooms with platforms adorning their perimeter at multiple levels and connected with bridges. Sprawl is back, albeit broken up with loading screens. Another myth I've heard is that Quake 2 levels are somehow linear, which is not at all the case. There's plenty of forks and loops, key and (effective, not always actual) switch hunting and backtracking. There is an F1 menu that will let you know how the switch you're looking for is dressed, and in which map (i.e. area broken up by loading screens) it's found in. It's a hint, but not a quest compass. You also don't have to listen to it, a few times I did some things "out of order".

Along with the return of the more Doom-like levels are the return of some of the same (arguable) flaws. Namely, when lost and (less so) when backtracking, you'll be meeting little to no resistance. Quake 1 solves this problem with plenty of spawns and the aforementioned tightly packed looping.

Enemy design is a mixed bag. More precisely, the encounter design (i.e. the intersection between the level and enemy design) is. The enemies themselves are Quake 1 enemy equivalents, plus a few new types. The problem is most enemies sign post their attacks either audibly, with an animation, or you just figure out the rhythm, in all cases giving you ample time to duck around a corner, and there's almost always a corner to duck around. Even would-be open spaces and arenas of battle are littered with boxes to this end. Paired with the fact that many enemies are absolute bullet sponges, makes for some boring shooting. Shoot, duck behind cover wait till the enemy stops shooting, come out of cover, repeat. Popamole. This is probably the biggest flaw of the game, albeit shared to some extent with Quake and a lesser extent with the first Doom.

That said, there are good sections too. Usually long, semi open winding paths littered with enemies both blocking your way forward while others snipe you from the flanks.

Finally, while I don't mind that levels are now broken up into "maps" (or combined into "units" as per your perspective), I do miss the score card at the end. Sure, a score card at the end of a map no longer makes sense, but they could have given one for the whole unit. I suspect and it certainly feels as though this is reflected in the level design, which while I'm sure is fun enough to "speedrun", is no longer built around technical time trial as was the first Quake.

Finally, finally, I have mixed feelings about the "inventory" system. Quad damage and invulnerability are no longer pacman power pellets that have you frantically looking for blood when you pick them up, but a more strategic resource. While this is a reasonable trade-off on paper, it is probably not the right trade-off in the context of an action game.

Playing Quake 2 did not give any real data that could falsify my hypothesis that more constrained level design leads to better action as the levels are anything but. However I did learn that enemies sign posting attacks, long cool down times, spongey enemies, and plenty of opportunity for cover leads to some boring action.

 

[Lemming42]

Yeah, not a big fan of Quake 2, chiefly due to the things you mentioned - the spongeyness of combat and the drudgery of the levels, which are really boring and unimaginative by the standards of the time. The backtracking between them is just a big pain in the cock too. But playing Quake 2 RTX is making me go "oooooh" at the lighting every 3 seconds, so there's that at least.