Anime The mistake a lot of modern boomer shooters make

[Hell Swarm]

When they were released not only were they technological marvels but every single element besides the scant bits of writing recieved the utmost attention.

People give too much credit to the early devs. Things didn't receive the upmost attention like that. Doom's story likely wasn't given weeks of effort. It was probably an afternoon of writing and move on. A bunch of Doom 2 maps are pretty awful and needed a couple of revisions to be considered playable. I love old shooters but lets not pretend older stuff didn't have issues. Even the peak of their eras still had some lazy levels.

And you don't need the upmost attention to make something great. Halo 2 was made in a year after the first prototype failed to run well on Xbox hardware. So you can still rush quality out the door.

Games like Blood and Shadow Warrior can be ball bustingly hard.
This is just too much for the average zoomer to deal with.

By the end of the build engine games you had this mess of supposedly hard games trying to one up one another with exaggerated difficulty, while Shadow Warrior was fun it suffered a lot from this.

Later build engine games become near impossible to enjoy without save scumming. Duke 3D can get rough in places with it's hit scanners but you always had something to deal with it. Blood and Shadow Warrior both start you out feeling under equipped and don't even ease you into the difficult enemies.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

When they were released not only were they technological marvels but every single element besides the scant bits of writing recieved the utmost attention.

People give too much credit to the early devs. Things didn't receive the upmost attention like that. Doom's story likely wasn't given weeks of effort. It was probably an afternoon of writing and move on. A bunch of Doom 2 maps are pretty awful and needed a couple of revisions to be considered playable. I love old shooters but lets not pretend older stuff didn't have issues. Even the peak of their eras still had some lazy levels.

And you don't need the upmost attention to make something great. Halo 2 was made in a year after the first prototype failed to run well on Xbox hardware. So you can still rush quality out the door.

Games like Blood and Shadow Warrior can be ball bustingly hard.
This is just too much for the average zoomer to deal with.

By the end of the build engine games you had this mess of supposedly hard games trying to one up one another with exaggerated difficulty, while Shadow Warrior was fun it suffered a lot from this.

Later build engine games become near impossible to enjoy without save scumming. Duke 3D can get rough in places with it's hit scanners but you always had something to deal with it. Blood and Shadow Warrior both start you out feeling under equipped and don't even ease you into the difficult enemies.

Duke was pretty acceptable, i just had problems with ammo economy but that's on me. Blood was a significant escalation, and it mostly felt like you had to throw grenades into every room you went into, which kinda killed the fun. I remmeber some bugs about enemies being damaged too. Shadow Warrior, though, was ridiculous in this regard, and an example of a game I'd call absolutely unfair in a lot of places.

 

[Hell Swarm]

Duke was pretty acceptable, i just had problems with ammo economy but that's on me. Blood was a significant escalation, and it mostly felt like you had to throw grenades into every room you went into, which kinda killed the fun. I remmeber some bugs about enemies being damaged too. Shadow Warrior, though, was ridiculous in this regard, and an example of a game I'd call absolutely unfair in a lot of places.

Sounds like we had very similar experiences. Too much whack a mole in later build engine games because they have high damage hit scanners every where. I'm still not sure why Blood has a reputation as one of the best shooters made. It started in the last few years and doesn't reflect the majority of people's experiences then or now. Think of how look it took Blood to get a source port while the actual classics had them decades before.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Top fucking kek as the kids say. Halo wasn't designed as some high art sci fi project. It was designed as a fun game. Everything in Halo design wise was designed to be fun to shoot in the face. That's Bungies own words as well. The novels were a secondary thought and barely relevant at the time. It's not until Halo 2 and 3 where the novels start to become a core part of Bungie's design. Bungie's core focus was to make a fun game and once they discovered Warthogs were more fun to drive than order around Halo evolved from there. Once they were at that point they designed fun things to shoot and everything else falls in around it. The lore isn't deep or interesting until much later in the series because Halo was never intended to be any thing more than a fun game set on a ring world. The original game barely even touches on the covenant or what they want. I might be wrong but I don't recall the prophets being in the story at all.

From the creators of Marathon, a game totally known for fun shooting and no story. Bungie could have spent the five seconds they had to make Gaylo on loar but they just decided not to! If they really cared they would have dumped a ton of loar into the first gayme where the audience doesn't even know what a hey-low is.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Zoomer shooters are full of arena encounters. No exploration, only mindless linear arena popamole. Zoomers are enjoy first personal platform jumping and switching weapons epilepsy LOL

Never played Hedon, huh? Literally one of the best exploration-heavy shooters created by some kid.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Doom's story

Fuck the story. Nobody gives a shit about the story and i already specified the game takes itself very seriously EXCEPT for the story, which, for the record, is intentionally treated as a joke because Carmack believed games shouldn't have stories in the first place, which i would agree if we are talking about action games. The very fact everybody in this thread is focusing on the story so much shows just how much we have forgotten what gaming as a medium actually is.

If we ignore those bits of writing which are treated as irrilevant, everything else in the game recieved every ounce of creativity and talent id soft was capable of. All those "ironic" retro zoomer devs have no understanding of this. They threat those older classics as if they were jokes even in their own time and thus completely underestimate just how much talent went into making them. There's a level of hubris in those boomer shooter developers in thinking all they have to do to create a classic shooter is use pixelated visuals and pay some kind of lip service to old school principles a lot of them neither understand nor would they have the talent to actually replicate.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Zoomer shooters are full of arena encounters. No exploration, only mindless linear arena popamole. Zoomers are enjoy first personal platform jumping and switching weapons epilepsy LOL

Never played Hedon, huh? Literally one of the best exploration-heavy shooters created by some kid.

Yeah but it was made by a tranny so hard pass for me.

 

[Ravielsk]

They have no stories, or coherent settings, or clear visual themes at all. Why is this?

I think a huge chunk of the problem is the very genesis of the genre. "Boomer shooters" even before they were called that came about as a reaction to the extremely slow and brain dead cover shooter craze of the 7th gen console generation. Hence most of them prioritize not being "modern" shooters and being oldschool over being actually good games.

The end product are games that draw blindly copy from the very early FPS games like Doom, Heretic or Duke3D without much regard for why those games were the way they were and in the process they are repeating all the same mistakes Doom clones of that era made themselves. That is they assume the path to success is to make a Doom(1993) level pack with some custom graphics and call it a day.
Obviously this initially worked because compared to Gears of Bore even the most mid doom levels are a step up but its a high that does not last. Because there is a very good reason why nobody really stuck with this basic formula past the year 2000. That reason being the same as with cover shooters, that its a supremely simple premise. There is only so much demon/skeleton/nazis/whateverthefuckelse blasting before it looses its charm.

This is why in the early 2000s even ID realized that they have to try and move the genre towards something other than just mindless maze shooting and like GamerCat_ pointed out started making games that were more FPS titles because it accidentally meshed well with what they were trying to do rather than because they set out to make another FPS. That is the moment where "Boomer shooters" should have picked up the torch because that is just a genuinely unexplored branch of design philosophy that was abandoned because of the 2007 financial crisis.

But instead they choose to start at the long outdated early years phase of the genre while also viewing it entirely through a modern lens. Which inevitably warps what they see because in 1998 nobody really thought of Doom or Half-life as parody games. That is a perception born from contemporary memes and the technological gap making these previously old titles seem silly by comparison. Its the same story as with early survival horror which is seen these days by many faggots as being intentionally ironic when in reality it was simply a lack of production resources that made it all seem silly if not comedic at times. The notes were clearly written down its just that the pianist was not hitting every note jus right.

 

[MiguelSerranoFan]

Halo is a game about a Spartan (the Indo-European warrior ideal) lead by an intelligence sprung from the mind of her own creator (Athena) locked in an existential battle over the mantle of civilization (here represented by the Index and the Forerunner's legacy more generally) with a hysterical, Oriental-style theocracy heavily borrowing from a bunch of Semitic religious traditions, who are biologically incapable of taking up the aforementioned mantle of civilization themselves. It does not "lore dump" about these allegories because Halo was made by intelligent Harvard artfags who were capable of exercising restraint and didn't really care that most of this theming would fly straight over the average normalfag's head. It is fundamentally one of the most right wing games ever made. Call GamerCat and I crazy if you like -- it's all there in the book and the game, if you know what you're looking for.

That Halo is also a very fun game to play is a symptom of the team that made it. Joseph Staten, who was hired through Myth multiplayer lobbies, was (probably) the primary driving force behind the narrative and themes, but people who had been previously working at Bungie by that time, i.e. Jason Jones, were already very fascinated by physicality and reactivity in their games. Myth was a game where the dwarf's Molotov cocktails bounced around and could extinguish themselves at random, only to be blown up later in a devastating chain reaction. They very quickly realized that stuff like this was the most fun part of the game, but they were in too much of a retrograde and reactionary mindset to let Myth be solely about that; instead, they had to make it more "game-like", so it has a ton of hair-tearingly frustrating levels where one bad cocktail throw means you might as well reload a save. That's what a balding Gen X "game design" mindset gets you. Halo was Bungie setting itself free of this tyranny and letting themselves make a game where you can fling stuff around with massive chain explosions and have fun -- and it worked. X-Boxes were basically Halo machines for most of their existence.

No doubt some of you will have said at this point, "but Doom also has big chain reaction explosions!" Yes, indeed it does, but how many "boomer shooters" actually identify that as something fun that id Software were playing around with and replicate it? I don't mean to put too much focus on "chain reaction explosions" specifically, I'm just using it as an example of the wide berth between what these games were and what people seem to think they were. id Software and the team behind Doom did not go on making "boomer shooters" with "weapon sandboxes" and "well-designed arenas" for the rest of their careers. The same creatives made Quake, which was a fundamental shift from Doom, and then Quake II, which was another shift from the first one. Carmack's last few projects were games like Doom 3. Romero's projects after being fired from id Software weren't really like Doom at all, besides the fact that you were occasionally in first person and shooting things. They knew how to make these types of games, they just didn't care to because they had evolved past them. They were of their era, and some of them, like Doom, were pretty good, but they were superceded. Halo proved you can do so much more with games of this "genre", and, so far, it has yet to be superceded by anything from the West more than two decades later.

Fuck the story. Nobody gives a shit about the story and i already specified the game takes itself very seriously EXCEPT for the story, which, for the record, is intentionally treated as a joke because Carmack believed games shouldn't have stories in the first place, which i would agree if we are talking about action games.

It's odd that you say this, considering you seem to be a fan of FromSoftware's games, where story and theming are very important, even if it doesn't "lore dump" at you because Miyazaki is also an intelligent creative capable of restraint. Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, and Sekiro are games where the gameplay is bent to the whims of the story and themes. They are also compelling to play, because the Japanese don't hire tasteless retards and take games seriously. This hasn't been the case in the West for a while.

 

[Ravielsk]

Sounds like we had very similar experiences. Too much whack a mole in later build engine games because they have high damage hit scanners every where. I'm still not sure why Blood has a reputation as one of the best shooters made. It started in the last few years and doesn't reflect the majority of people's experiences then or now. Think of how look it took Blood to get a source port while the actual classics had them decades before.

Blood is really just the most modern build engine game. In essence its like Duke3D but better gameplay wise and arguably funnier but if build engine shooters are not your thing then its nothing out of the ordinary.

 

[Lyric Suite]

It's odd that you say this, considering you seem to be a fan of FromSoftware's games, where story and theming are very important, even if it doesn't "lore dump" at you because Miyazaki is also an intelligent creative capable of restraint. Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, and Sekiro are games where the gameplay is bent to the whims of the story and themes. They are also compelling to play, because the Japanese don't hire tasteless retards and take games seriously. This hasn't been the case in the West for a while.

I personally believe a lack of story wouldn't hurt FromSoft games much.

Note that you are bundling "theming" with story but the two are not synonimous with one another and there's plenty of "theming" in Doom (and as a kid i had no problem filling it all up with my own narratives).

Bad story can also hurt a game even when it is optional. Doom 2016 had decent "theming" all considered, at least on the visual side of things, but the writing was beyond dog shit and the game would have been far better without any of that retarded try hard doom slayer shit and all that pseudo-fantasy "lore". Both the nu-Doom games would have been much better recieved in this forum if they didn't have a single ounce of writing or story in it, even given the arena spazzy zoomer gameplay.

 

[Ravielsk]

-snip-

As much as I agree with the first half of the post the second part is just another case of terminal Halo fanboysm. The lore and depth you are referencing exists almost entirely externally outside of the game. Its one thing to applaud Bungie for the work they did in Marathon or for how things nicely came together in the end but pretending the core or majority or even the most important bits of the depth and lore were in the games is both a cope and a straight forward lie.

A lie I doubly detest because it was this exact lie that made me buy the master chief collection for the sake of this "masterful" story the games were supposed to have only to receive a mostly mid space opera punctured by a couple of highlights. Nothing more, nothing else.

 

[Lyric Suite]

This is why in the early 2000s even ID realized that they have to try and move the genre towards something other than just mindless maze shooting

And they gave us Doom 3 as a result, demonstrating that they would have been MUCH better off sticking to the mindless maze shooting, which is what Doom 3 is anyway, except the mazes are like two feet by two feet in size, the shooting is slow as molasses, and the "story" they added is if System Shock 2 was written by retards.

Great evolution nigga.

 

[Ravielsk]

This is why in the early 2000s even ID realized that they have to try and move the genre towards something other than just mindless maze shooting

And they gave us Doom 3 as a result, demonstrating that they would have been MUCH better off sticking to the mindless maze shooting, which is what Doom 3 is anyway, except the mazes are like two feet by feet in size, the shooting is slow as molasses, and the "story" they added is if System Shock 2 was written by retards.

Great evolution nigga.

Evolution is a process of mistakes and corrections not of just straight up upgrade over upgrade. Inevitably it will always make have its winners and losers. Besides Doom 3 is quite literary the one game of that whole generation that was, pardon the pun, doomed from the start to fail no matter what they did with it.

 

[destinae vomitus]

Halo and FPS games as a whole would've been better off if it had stuck to being the Starcraft inspired 3D Myth successor that it was originally supposed to be, or at the very least had maintained more of its RTS dna beyond the trio of asymmetrical factiions by letting you act like a first-person commander of sorts, which would've accentuated the game's unique strongpoint (the AI sandbox) and on top of being thematically in line as well. Instead Bungie went and inadvertently lobotomized the genre with their arbitrary weapon limit (which even goes against their own game's supposed sandbox design with weapons that have specific and often situational roles, forcing in token "this is where you have to carry the sniper/shotgun/RPG now" sections) along with regenerating shields that reward total passivity and fundamentally screws up how enemy lethality has to be balanced due to damage now being an entirely immediate concern. All the undue praise for being it a revolutionary shooter is suspect to say the least when taking into account how most of the game is completely banal corridor shooting with level geometry constantly getting recycled wholesale, while its highlights stem from its RTS and PC/mac exclusive roots that never got properly extrapolated upon even in its sequels.

 

[Ash]

I am a big fan of 90s shooters. Played the vast majority on PC and consoles. From that love, I also suffered through endless amounts of garbage 2000s era FPS looking for the good stuff, with almost nothing to find. I have not played a single one of these modern indie "boomer shooters". They're seemingly reductive, offer nothing new, and fail to capture what even made the OGs great in the first place, not in gameplay, art, music, themes. That's my impression, of course I cannot definitively say that's objectively what they are without playing them and passing monocled judgement.

What more recent FPS I have played, and greatly enjoyed, is:

1. Ashes: Afterglow, which is an evolution/one possible branch of the 90s shooter that answers the question of "what if all those 2000s era shooters didn't suck complete ass?". Basically, it is a merging of 90s standards (grand scale level design, gameplay-centricity and challenge, awesome soundtrack) with some 2000s trends (a degree of realism, set pieces).

2. Doom Eternal, which isn't a 90s shooter but an arena shooter e.g Serious Sam, Painkiller, and the best of that style (not hard to accomplish). This of course has connections to 90s games, but isn't it. Dumb arena shooters were a 2000s thing largely. Of course!

3. Immortal Redneck which combines core 90s combat design (lots of weapons, speed, platforming, lots of enemy types) with arcade and roguelite elements.

4. Overload. Ok this one is a pure spiritual successor to Descent, even made by the original devs, and it doesn't offer a great deal new. But it is executed well to a professional standard, and there aren't many 6dof FPS so that increases its value.

5. Everspace. This game rocks. Descent freespace origins/inspirations, mixed with roguelite.

All offer something new and fresh, with a variably 90s FPS base. I highly recommend all five. Cultic, Dusk, Ion Maiden, Viscerafest, Amid Evil, Turbo Overkill and many more....no thanks. Not unless you persuade me I am wrong about them. They don't necessarily HAVE to offer something new, but they do at least need to meet 90s standards, and that isn't easy.
At the end of the day they still seem like fairly decent games, and I should support them for not being typical modern trash walking sim storyfaggot cinematic braindead garbo, but I don't feel like playing lesser "good for what it is" games if I dont have to.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Doom Eternal, which isn't a 90s shooter but an arena shooter e.g Serious Sam, Painkiller, and the best of that style

They are not really the same thing.

Seriums Sam felt more like if Doom was Space Invaders.

nu-Doom feel more like deathmatch with monsters instead of human players. You have to constantly run around in a circle, memorizing spawn locations and switch weapons constantly, much like you would if you were playing Quake Arena or something. I don't mind that idea in principle and if it wasn't for the braindead decision to limit ammo capacity and use monsters as ammo and health pignatas i would consider it a fairly well done implementation of that concept. Well except for the shit sound design which sinks the whole thing. The fact you can't pin point where enemies are from the sound alone is part of the reason you are compelled to run around like an headless chicken. Since you can't even hear when a Baron of Hell is about to stomp on your head because the game is busy channeling the imp 20 yards away your only option is just keep moving and hope you don't run into an enemy attack by mistake.

 

[MiguelSerranoFan]

I personally believe a lack of story wouldn't hurt FromSoft games much.

Note that you are bundling "theming" with story but the two are not synonimous with one another and there's plenty of "theming" in Doom (and has a kid i had no problem filling it all up with my own narratives).

Bad story can also hurt a game even when it is optional. Doom 2016 had decent "theming" all considered, at least on the visual side of things, but the writing was beyond dog shit and the game would have been far better without any of that retarded try hard doom slayer shit and all that pseudo-fantasy "lore". Both the nu-Doom games would have been much better recieved in this forum if they didn't have a single ounce of writing or story in it, even given the arena spazzy zoomer gameplay.

I simply cannot agree. Would fights like Radahn, Gwyn, Oceiros, or Gehrman have been remotely as impactful if they had not been built up through those games' respective stories and theming? As visual spectacles, maybe, but it's a moot point because those bosses are there to serve Miyazaki's creative vision first and foremost and to serve as cool bosses to fight second. Miyazaki has had "gimmick" bosses that are relative pushovers for the sake of theming and story since Maiden Astraea.

Story, theming, and gameplay are only distinct in games where there is no unified direction, i.e. not Miyazaki's work. Western games like Doom 2016 are made by committee and so have a bunch of nonsense slammed together by various artslaves, loosely fit together with a generic anti-capitalist story written up by some industry hack. The "themes" and the gameplay are completely incongruous. How does violently ripping apart demons as a cyber-crusader, tapping into the righteous anger against foreigners and degenerates of the 2015-2016 era, fit in with themes of evil capitalist CEOs summoning hell because they don't protect black trans folx enough? Not at all. Everything is decentralized and communitarian, which is how Western game companies operate now, instead of concentrated beneath one person with a strong vision. That's how you get disarticulate messes like the modern Doom games.

 

[Hell Swarm]

Zoomer shooters are full of arena encounters. No exploration, only mindless linear arena popamole. Zoomers are enjoy first personal platform jumping and switching weapons epilepsy LOL

Never played Hedon, huh? Literally one of the best exploration-heavy shooters created by some kid.

Yeah but it was made by a tranny so hard pass for me.

Most the boomer shooter crowd devs are trannies or tranny supporters. Doom World had to clean house when a tranny sex pest got discovered and was knowingly protected by the mods. And this week we saw another controversy where the Doom World staff defended a mod where they were actual pictures of children inside a sex dungeon, with sex toys in a wad on there. You cannot imagine how bad things are in boomer shooter circles.

I think a huge chunk of the problem is the very genesis of the genre. "Boomer shooters" even before they were called that came about as a reaction to the extremely slow and brain dead cover shooter craze of the 7th gen console generation.

The genesis of the genre is Dusk and Brutal Doom. They got popular with the younger generation and went viral. Everything we see today grows out of not!Quake and Doom but edgy.

It's odd that you say this, considering you seem to be a fan of FromSoftware's games, where story and theming are very important,

You could strip all the story (lol) from a From game and you miss... an intro cut scene and an ending cut scene. Literally everything else would be the same.

Sounds like we had very similar experiences. Too much whack a mole in later build engine games because they have high damage hit scanners every where. I'm still not sure why Blood has a reputation as one of the best shooters made. It started in the last few years and doesn't reflect the majority of people's experiences then or now. Think of how look it took Blood to get a source port while the actual classics had them decades before.

Blood is really just the most modern build engine game. In essence its like Duke3D but better gameplay wise and arguably funnier but if build engine shooters are not your thing then its nothing out of the ordinary.

I would argue blood is not funny and not fun to play. As myself and the gentleman above said, the hit scanners and need to spam grenades is not what I play FPS games for. It's okay occasionally like in Duke 3D but it shouldn't be the core gameplay focus as it is in Blood.

A lie I doubly detest because it was this exact lie that made me buy the master chief collection for the sake of this "masterful" story the games were supposed to have only to receive a mostly mid space opera punctured by a couple of highlights. Nothing more, nothing else.

Halo was never about the story. It was always the sand box and fun enemies to kill. It's why 343 has derailed the series so hard. They keep trying to tell stories about a green robot and his blue chick sidekick instead of focusing on new weapons and vehicles. I really hope the boomer shooter fad eventually grows into a halo clone fad. I want to see a return to vehicle and on foot combat work like it does in Halo. I bet a lot of cool vehicles could be made but no one uses vehicles outside of open world transport or set on rails missions.

And they gave us Doom 3 as a result, demonstrating that they would have been MUCH better off sticking to the mindless maze shooting, which is what Doom 3 is anyway, except the mazes are like two feet by two feet in size, the shooting is slow as molasses, and the "story" they added is if System Shock 2 was written by retards.

Great evolution nigga.

Better then Quake 4.

3. Immortal Redneck which combines core 90s combat design (lots of weapons, speed, platforming, lots of enemy types) with arcade and roguelite elements.

Good game.

Fuck Doom Eternal. Lyric is spot on with every point about it. Serious Sam is a LAN game and modern shooters seem to have forgotten the Horde mode entirely.

Would fights like Radahn, Gwyn, Oceiros, or Gehrman have been remotely as impactful if they had not been built up through those games' respective stories and theming?

Yes, I didn't read the lore or care about any of their stories when playing through the games. Radahn is a big gimmick fight where you rush him as a team. The intro sets up the fight better than any story does. Gwyn is just the last boss and he's not very special. Oceiros is the dragon right? Again no reason to care about a story there. Shame they removed the baby he was supposed to smash. Gehrman is impactful because he's your ally turned traitor. The story is irrelevant.

You really over estimate how much people enjoy reading weapon descriptions and how many NPCs they interact with. Most people watch the intro and use youtube or wikis to read the lore after they finish the game or if they find an especially interesting boss/NPC. There is a reason why the lore industry for souls games exists and it's not because the story is told well ingame. They're hack and slash games and people treat them as such.

 

[Beans00]

If anyone here is wondering, Ash only played doom for the first time in like 2007. Literally just a poser trying to look cool after he 'quit' the codex a dozen times in the last 3-4 months lol.

 

[Lyric Suite]

And they gave us Doom 3 as a result, demonstrating that they would have been MUCH better off sticking to the mindless maze shooting, which is what Doom 3 is anyway, except the mazes are like two feet by two feet in size, the shooting is slow as molasses, and the "story" they added is if System Shock 2 was written by retards.

Great evolution nigga.

Better then Quake 4.

I don't remember much from Quake 4 but the shooting in Doom 3 is so bad i cannot imagine how it could be worse.

 

[Ash]

Sorry guys, I shamelessly support Doom Eternal. It's a classic challenge especially with no quicksave faggotry. It goes above and beyond other arena shooters, with a lot of variety to arenas, it brings back meaningful platforming into the AAA FPS space (not so much the platforming gauntlets between arenas, but the platforming in the arenas during combat itself). For a AAA singleplayer straight FPS, well when was the last one even half as good? The ammo and health management, art direction, soundtrack, laughable progression systems, all that is indeed a shame, and it is absolutely no doom 1993, but I'll take it any day over Painkiller, Doom 2016, Hard Reset, Serious Sam...

 

[Hell Swarm]

And they gave us Doom 3 as a result, demonstrating that they would have been MUCH better off sticking to the mindless maze shooting, which is what Doom 3 is anyway, except the mazes are like two feet by two feet in size, the shooting is slow as molasses, and the "story" they added is if System Shock 2 was written by retards.

Great evolution nigga.

Better then Quake 4.

I don't remember much from Quake 4 but the shooting in Doom 3 is so bad i cannot imagine how it could be worse.

It's Doom 3 but they add more enemies and a light source to the map. It runs worse and it plays worse but it's the same game other wise.

. For a AAA singleplayer straight FPS, well when was the last one half as good?

Halo Infinite was better. Which is saying something..

 

[Ash]

Not played that one, but consider me a massive skeptic. In the last 24 years I respect like 2 non-indie singleplayer FPS, one of them being eternal. Not including those that are action RPG hybrids.

Doom Eternal, which isn't a 90s shooter but an arena shooter e.g Serious Sam, Painkiller, and the best of that style

They are not really the same thing.

Seriums Sam felt more like if Doom was Space Invaders.

Sure, there are of course differences in design direction, but they're still both arena shooters. Constantly locked in arenas fighting swarms of enemies, arcade-like elements (traps, jump pads and such everywhere that don't make realistic sense), and that's it. All the nuances of classic FPS put to the wayside. Eternal is like that, but offers a little more to the arena formula.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Modern zoomer: Doom is about being br00tal and shit rip and tear motherfucker!

Meanwhile actual Doom:




I don't know, seems like something was lost in translation here. Even Duke3D which was explicitly comedic in nature had plenty of atmosphere.

Again, the people making those older games were taking it seriously. They were clearly wearing their influences on their sleeves and genuinely liked the things that ended up inspiring their games. It's a different kind of mentality between "ha ha look i'm doing silly retro shit look how meta i am" to "i'm going to design the best monsters or levels ever while being inspired by my favored horror or sci-fi books and movies". Sandy Petersen was genuinely in love with Lovecraft and that's why Quake ended up being what it was. It wasn't "ironic" to him.

Boomer shooters are too infected by the post-modern relativism to truly succeed.