Anime The mistake a lot of modern boomer shooters make

[Clockwork Knight]

I get the feeling that ULTRAKILL attempted the same thing, most of what fans seem to discuss online is that it's a "femboy game" (???) and that the developers released some kind of official anal sex toy that vibrates in time with the action or whatever. Puts a great many people off the game, but draws in a hardcore subset of people who want to put things up their rectums while playing otherwise fairly average and unremarkable games.

I am once again asking people to stop falling for /v/ bait.

 

[Ash]

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.

Doom Eternal isn't Doom. You have to let that go. It is a different spin on the arena shooter, and should be judged on that merit. To which it is better than all of them. Again, not that that was hard to accomplish.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Sure i can judge the game on its own merits but that still isn't gonna change the fact arena shooter are intrinsically inferior to classic shooters and that the lack of proper level design doesn't hurt the game, because it does.

Also, Doom Eternal isn't a boomer shooter. It's AAA mainstream slop.

 

[Ash]

You're not wrong. We aren't getting any high profile classic shooters though. It's been 24 years since any worthy.

 

[Hell Swarm]

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.

You don't understand FPS if you think Doom Eternal is remotely like Serious Sam. Eternal is more like Peggle than SS. Serious Sam is about freedom and mayhem. Eternal is the complete opposite where it's got very strict gameplay and forces a play to play exactly that way.

 

[destinae vomitus]

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).

A "classic challenge" where you replenish health plus armor (which is now just an extra layer of health) on a dime from respawning literal fodder, and on top of that have infinite ammo for your heavy weaponry thanks to the chainsaw along with devastating grenades bound to mere cooldowns, that retarded mindless spamfest makes even Halo look positively cerebral in comparison. Besides that, enemies in nuDoom (both 2016 & Eternal) don't pose a modicum of a threat if you simply make use of all the jump-pads or the z-axis in arenas in general because they were tuned by and for people who've never played an arena shooter or really anything where you have access to more mobility than you do in modern popamole, which is reflected also in the completely perfunctory platforming bits that any retard would be able to coast their way through. Imagine applauding this corporate committee designed piece of shit with "a lot of variety to arenas" while dismissing Serious Sam.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Doom 2016 was ultimately boring for me. I'm going to assume Eternal is more of the same.

 

[Ash]

@hellswarm Jesus bro, I am largely referring to focus and level design. Again, there are differences in design direction between DE and SS, but the focus is constant combat and locked-in arenas, that's what makes them fall under the same sub-genre. You don't need to cry and be a pedant about such a classification. They are both arena shooters, that's a fair logical conclusion.

Also...Eternal doesn't force a strict way lol. SS often does that via ammo pickups, funnily enough. It has the minigun arena, the Cannonball arena and so on.

A "classic challenge" where

Yes. Go beat the master levels if you think you can. Zombie enemies are essentially respawning pickups. Pickups respawn in a number of old FPS, including Serious Sam. Not that I am defending the concept. Not a fan either.

Doom 2016 was ultimately boring for me. I'm going to assume Eternal is more of the same.

It's quite different. D2016 is just plain mediocre. Eternal takes it in a new direction and iterates.

 

[Hell Swarm]

I am largely referring to focus and level design. Again, there are differences in design direction between DE and SS, but the focus is constant combat and locked-in arenas, that's what makes them fall under the same sub-genre. You don't need to cry and be a pedant about such a classification. They are both arena shooters, that's a fair logical conclusion.

Also...Eternal doesn't force a strict way lol. SS often does that via ammo pickups, funnily enough. It has the minigun arena, the Cannonball arena and so on.

Serious Sam barely has level design. It's almost all wide open arenas and herding enemies around while you and 10 other dudes shoot them. It's a multiplayer game at heart and it's design is all focused on multiple players dealing with swarms of enemies. Doom eternal constantly puts bad jumping puzzles between fights which changes the flow from Sam in a big way.

Eternal forces you to use weak enemies to restock ammo/health. Then it has enemies you can 1 shot with some weapons so it's dumb not to do it and enemies you have to hit in very specific windows. Nothing like that in Serious Sam.

 

[destinae vomitus]

Yes. Go beat the master levels if you think you can.

I think I can. Now go beat Sunlust on ultra-violence with pistol starts, O challenge enjoyer.

Spoiler

 

[Ash]

Already played Sunlust on UV a long time ago. Not interested in pistol starts though for its elimination of long-term resource management and weapon (combat) variety. Also can quicksave any time. Loot Pinatas is better than that lol.

 

[Ash]

Yes. Go beat the master levels if you think you can.

I think I can.

I don't think you can. I've played a lot of FPS over the decades. The only FPS level/game I ever rage quit in defeat was Doom Eternal's Gore Nest Master level on nightmare.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

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.

It's more of a natural evolution of developers making games with the expectations and experience of the audience in mind than any form of try-hard-ism. Neither Blood nor Shadow Warrior was too hard, you could just lower the difficulty to baby mode if you were a first timer, but they were games made for veteran FPS players and even all these years later it gives someone like me a challenge to bite into on the highest difficulties. Same reason why people are gushing over Ninja Gaiden Black even now, they the most refined examples of what they attempt to do, and that comes with a higher skill ceiling due to increased complexity and making the most of the systems available.

Despite Fromsoft making their game more casual friendly over time, they also do the same and if you come into their games with Elden Ring you'll probably think the bosses are total bullshit, because they are trying to throw curve-balls at the existing playerbase. It's not like things are any different with the Codex favorite genre, where games like Grimoire and even trashy games like Owlcat's Pathfinder offerings demand more familiarity with RPGs and you can really fuck yourself with a poor build. Happens all the time as conventions and established systems are tweaked and stacked on top of one another over time in a genre as they home in on creating the best version of whatever it is supposed to be.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

OP, how do you feel about Halo?

I'm both Over Powered and an Original (quality) Poster, so I'm glad you asked. The space toucan making a rare flyby visit to us proles shat on you for making Halo the backbone of your argument, but I find that discussion much more interesting than the pedestrian observation that duct taping a tube to your asshole and popping a laxative before sucking on the other end isn't going to be an infinite energy generator, or the amateur enthusiast psychology hour. The other brunt of your post can be summarized in the immortal words of Chris Taylor; "You're not making a video game, you're selling a fantasy." So let's talk about Halo, shall we?

If there ever was a video game that cemented the medium as a ghetto it was Halo. Not that the furry homosexual intellectuals in this thread aren't technically correct, but they are also fundamentally wrong about what Halo was. Because it was a capitulation, not a secret triumph that only guys in the secret cool club will get.

I'm a big fan of Marathon, you might even say I LIKE MARATHON THIS MUCH, a janky game with a lot of jumping for a game without an implemented jump function. The distinct soundtrack by Alexander Seropian, unique enemy and weapon designs as well as genre innovations like dual wielding as well as the health stations before HL did it, with a memorable if frustrating level design, would on its own be enough to set it apart from at least the middling offerings of "Doom clones" of the period.

But just like Looking Glass aimed for higher targets with System Shock, so did Bungie with Marathon, if clumsier. In a premonition of things to come they had ambitions far beyond their means and put computer terminals all over the levels injecting a science fiction narrative with a scope impossibly larger than the virtual space of the game would allow for, and injecting a metaplot as well as eventually more literary minded attempts further on. Some of it was easy to miss, but even for the standard player it gave the gameworld some versimilitude. If you did read it all you'd get meta commentary on the genre conventions through a functional science fiction plot, as well as some lore and explorations of hero myths in the action hero shooter game and some big concepts like AI and the like. It was cool and all, and it relates to the topic of this thread very much, and continued through the entire trilogy.

Honestly, the Marathon games makes Fromsoft look like a joke in comparison. In the first two games you could ignore much of the story and world and play it fairly mindlessly, but in the third and final game, Infinity, the writer of the previous two games had splintered off to form a separate studio and was banking on that the audience was half as highbrow as the devs were. The game came with a level editor so the community could make their own maps, and so the narrative was a rare case of a justified multiverse. All the player content is canon, the gameworld breaks down into infinite possible realiites, just as the game does when you grab another map pack. The computer terminals had become increasingly indulgent and more literary than functional, and for one reason or another the game flopped.

We never got to see Double Aught's Duality and what Greg Kirkpatrick might have done with that game, but we do know that Bungie ended up making Halo, first as a Mac exclusive, and then an Xbox one. You might call it selling out, you might call it losing all respect you had for the medium and your audience, but Halo was the game where they stopped trying. Instead of fusing together the gameplay and the more highbrow science fiction lit, or any ambitions of giving games the unimaginable: good game writing, they reheated the most base aspects of the Marathon games, dumbed them down, and banished anything bigger than Master Chef the Spess Muhreen Not Doomguy We Swear into official video game novels or other multimedia junk.

Yeah, whatever, they snuck in some things in there under the radar and most missed it, big deal, but wouldn't it be cool if they actually made a video game out of what they are really into? Here's where I gather my open fist into the Judo chop that will break Catboy's back. Are you really telling me that a mid shooter tech demo is the best way of delivering the metaphysical mytho-poetic science fiction space opera they want to explore? Because something good hiding as trash isn't the maximum pwnage that some seem to think it is, and furthermore, Halo is the epitome of staying within the rigid structures of a genre despite making every attempt of escaping it before.

Halo isn't just a degeneration of shooters, it's a betrayal of Marathon, and in a better timeline Bungie would have stayed a small studio that went on to develop the Western nerd version of Pathologic.

 

[JB_0x0003]

It's more of a natural evolution of developers making games with the expectations and experience of the audience in mind than any form of try-hard-ism. Neither Blood nor Shadow Warrior was too hard, you could just lower the difficulty to baby mode if you were a first timer, but they were games made for veteran FPS players and even all these years later it gives someone like me a challenge to bite into on the highest difficulties. Same reason why people are gushing over Ninja Gaiden Black even now, they the most refined examples of what they attempt to do, and that comes with a higher skill ceiling due to increased complexity and making the most of the systems available.

A genre that notoriously calls its easy modes "Tiny Grasshopper" or "Thou needeth a wet nurse" might be shaming the player for choosing it. It being a hard niche experience is fine, but it obviously takes pride in that and wants to shame people for not playing it on harder difficulty settings. Whether or not that's a good thing can be debated, but it's obviously something that they're doing.

Same reason why people are gushing over Ninja Gaiden Black even now, they the most refined examples of what they attempt to do, and that comes with a higher skill ceiling due to increased complexity and making the most of the systems available.

Outside of a couple of difficulty spikes, Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry 3's normal difficulty modes are actually very approachable if you aren't used to that kind of game, because they're made to be broadly enjoyed. They don't have to compromise anything to achieve what you're talking about. They offer scenarios that require difficulty to be fulling interesting, but difficulty is only instrumental for that. Meanwhile, a lot of Build Engine games just have increased numbers because they cargo-cult difficulty, then it calls you a gay pussy faggot for not enjoying it. Hardcore!

 

[Hell Swarm]

It's more of a natural evolution of developers making games with the expectations and experience of the audience in mind than any form of try-hard-ism. Neither Blood nor Shadow Warrior was too hard, you could just lower the difficulty to baby mode if you were a first timer, but they were games made for veteran FPS players and even all these years later it gives someone like me a challenge to bite into on the highest difficulties. Same reason why people are gushing over Ninja Gaiden Black even now, they the most refined examples of what they attempt to do, and that comes with a higher skill ceiling due to increased complexity and making the most of the systems available.

Veteran FPS players were not asking for more hit scanners and it's a very poor way to make a game hard. There are so many better ways to challenge a good player and none of them involve gotchas with shotguns. It was the worst park of Duke 3d and designing a game around it is stupid. I could easily beat Blood if I wanted to, but I wouldn't enjoy it and I know the quick save button beat the game not me if I did.

 

[GamerCat_]

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?

I think Halo is okay. That's pretty much the entirety of my opinion on it, which I know is an anticlimax after your big post about it. The story never grabbed me but the games, at least Halo 1 and 2 (nothing against 3, I just barely remember it) were fun. I do think the first Halo is an interesting moment in the history of the FPS genre, sitting between Half-Life and Call of Duty both chronologically and in terms of design philosophy.

Fair.

-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.

Motherfucker I am not a liar. Go to Hell.

I figured out Halo's deepest thematic intentions just by looking closely at Combat Evolved and seriously considering that its creators had serious intentions. Everything Fall of Reach says explicitly is implicit in Combat Evolved. And even then, Fall of Reach implies more than it says outright. There are plenty of Halo fans who memorise every incidental detail but it's all meaningless to them. They don't know what's actually going on or why Halo is what it is.

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.

I don't know if the "strategy" incarnation of Halo would have been better, but I would have loved to see Bungie or someone else try this still.

It's an idea that's been on the table ever since. Bungie didn't just fail to capitalise on this potential. Everyone has. Different games roughly capturing this appeal in some form exist out there. I think Battalion Wars is really cool, for example. Scale, chaos, lively action and virtual actor autonomy. These are beloved elements of many games, but since obnoxious Gen-Xers never forced memes about how liking these things makes you a superior person they died out. "Strategy" games still exist, but basically everything I ever found interesting in them is dead. In 2024 you can have all the strategy you want, as long as it's an Agecraftheroesvaniabornelike. Again, bald gen-xers, the loudest and shrillest vocal minority in existence, pulled rank with their oldfaggotry and accused everyone interested in anything but their oldfag taste of being an inferior coward retard. And now they won. Strategy Game extinction bottleneck. They killed everything but Starcraft.

As for your comments on Halo itself, I don't believe that they "lobotomised the genre", even inadvertantly. People who were already lobotomites tried and failed to copy them, not understanding why the parts of Halo were what they were. These people would have made shit regardless of where they were looking for inspiration. The displacement of artfags following vision with stemdrones making "video games" naturally led to everything becoming awful.

The two weapons in Halo is a very physical thing. Weapons are physical objects which drop and bounce when their wielders die. And the fact you can only carry two means you are constantly dropping and picking up new ones. You are through the entire game conscious of what weapons are dropping to the ground as weapons, not merely ammo pickups that look like weapons. This creates a very distinct impression compared to the hold everything approach in which every weapon is only meaningful to you once, from which point onwards all future incarnations of that weapon are a dressed up ammo drop.

And yes, some of the weapons are rather situational. This creates another unique dynamic. The two weapons create a strange configuration game of how you're going to deal with the current situation and prepare for what's coming. The the dual wielding in Halo 2, the two weapon system works sort of like building a combo. You get a totally different capacity for violence based on which two weapons you're holding. This is both practically and aesthetically interesting. I often just mess around with different weapons because they're interesting. Some moron on /v/ was telling me that the Needler shouldn't be in the game because it has no place in the "sandbox". It's place is that it's the purple alien gun that shoots pink homing needles.

And the shields thing I think is another Xer meme. The greatest incentive for passivity in fps is having your HP bar burned down to near zero and having more stuff to fight between you and the next heal. Time to plink from around corners and exploit the dumb computer-logic of the bad guys until I find a medkit-thing. The Halo shield was obviously an innovation to to allow you to play more actively and aggressively. You can only be so close to the verge of death, while you can also still take attrition over the course of fights. It's a very elegant system.

The praise for it being a "revolutionary shooter" is retards who think in memes, like everything said in the gaming press. It feels like a revolution in shooters because it's only incidentally a "shooter". I don't like Halo because it's a superior "fps". I like it because it's Halo. Virtually everything I like about it is totally absent in every other "shooter".

 

[GamerCat_]

OP, how do you feel about Halo?

I'm both Over Powered and an Original (quality) Poster, so I'm glad you asked. The space toucan making a rare flyby visit to us proles shat on you for making Halo the backbone of your argument, but I find that discussion much more interesting than the pedestrian observation that duct taping a tube to your asshole and popping a laxative before sucking on the other end isn't going to be an infinite energy generator, or the amateur enthusiast psychology hour. The other brunt of your post can be summarized in the immortal words of Chris Taylor; "You're not making a video game, you're selling a fantasy." So let's talk about Halo, shall we?

If there ever was a video game that cemented the medium as a ghetto it was Halo. Not that the furry homosexual intellectuals in this thread aren't technically correct, but they are also fundamentally wrong about what Halo was. Because it was a capitulation, not a secret triumph that only guys in the secret cool club will get.

Interesting start.

I'm a big fan of Marathon, you might even say I LIKE MARATHON THIS MUCH, a janky game with a lot of jumping for a game without an implemented jump function. The distinct soundtrack by Alexander Seropian, unique enemy and weapon designs as well as genre innovations like dual wielding as well as the health stations before HL did it, with a memorable if frustrating level design, would on its own be enough to set it apart from at least the middling offerings of "Doom clones" of the period.

But just like Looking Glass aimed for higher targets with System Shock, so did Bungie with Marathon, if clumsier. In a premonition of things to come they had ambitions far beyond their means and put computer terminals all over the levels injecting a science fiction narrative with a scope impossibly larger than the virtual space of the game would allow for, and injecting a metaplot as well as eventually more literary minded attempts further on. Some of it was easy to miss, but even for the standard player it gave the gameworld some versimilitude. If you did read it all you'd get meta commentary on the genre conventions through a functional science fiction plot, as well as some lore and explorations of hero myths in the action hero shooter game and some big concepts like AI and the like. It was cool and all, and it relates to the topic of this thread very much, and continued through the entire trilogy.

Yeah, it's pretty neat. But at the same time the assault rifle is hideous and retarded, the aliens look funny, the colour palette is still questionable, the levels (especially in the first game) have Bungie's vestigial "Oh it's a video game so you need to stop having fun and get kicked in the balls for a while" problem (switch puzzles, "jumping", etc).

I really like firing the handgun, I like that the characters are used as actors and props for staging scenes rather than merely obstacles in a death maze. I like that they're trying to realise a physical world rather than contriving puzzle spaces for levels. I like that they had a serious story in mind and took their work seriously. But... I believe that a serious and mature perspective will only be so impressed with this work. Their ambition is admirable, and the execution is very good for the time. But the game's renewed reputation today (via those stupid videos by that moron Mandalore who basically laundered the games into a creepypasta) rests on people being wowed by what are not particularly novel elements in the history of art and media, but feel stunningly new to the kind of person who watches youtube video essays (a rube with some status anxiety).

Honestly, the Marathon games makes Fromsoft look like a joke in comparison. In the first two games you could ignore much of the story and world and play it fairly mindlessly, but in the third and final game, Infinity, the writer of the previous two games had splintered off to form a separate studio and was banking on that the audience was half as highbrow as the devs were. The game came with a level editor so the community could make their own maps, and so the narrative was a rare case of a justified multiverse. All the player content is canon, the gameworld breaks down into infinite possible realiites, just as the game does when you grab another map pack. The computer terminals had become increasingly indulgent and more literary than functional, and for one reason or another the game flopped.

And this makes From a joke because...?

You forgot to make your comparison. Though considering the trajectory of the post so far I imagine you probably ascribe to the /v/ school of "[describe thing you like, describe thing you don't like] therefore my thing is better".

We never got to see Double Aught's Duality and what Greg Kirkpatrick might have done with that game, but we do know that Bungie ended up making Halo, first as a Mac exclusive, and then an Xbox one. You might call it selling out, you might call it losing all respect you had for the medium and your audience, but Halo was the game where they stopped trying. Instead of fusing together the gameplay and the more highbrow science fiction lit, or any ambitions of giving games the unimaginable: good game writing, they reheated the most base aspects of the Marathon games, dumbed them down, and banished anything bigger than Master Chef the Spess Muhreen Not Doomguy We Swear into official video game novels or other multimedia junk.

I see you are also a rube with status anxiety. Yes, Halo does not have LITERARY elements. You cannot imagine yourself showing it to your high school english teacher to some kind of approval.

Halo was Bungie's respect for the medium growing. They stopped trying to crowbar a science fiction novel into a first person shooter video game and instead made a science fiction video game. You clearly got mindraped way too hard by high school English to get this. What is "good game writing"? Do you believe that you're allowed to respect any piece of media that doesn't resemble garbage you were forced to "study" when you were 15 by bald old people and mean women? Halo does not resemble a novel. That does not mean it is devoid of ideas. The ideas are instead diffused and depicted far more organically across the more video game parts of the work which we engage with effortlessly and naturally. You learn what Halo is about by playing with it, looking at it, it emerges naturally. There is no stark division between "game time" and "serious prestige media zone". In Halo these elements were successfully integrated into each other. This is much harder to appreciate because we don't have words for it. It doesn't resemble past forms of prestige media. Nobody is telling you that you should be appreciating it. Meaning it is a far greater filter than anything that existed in video games up to this point, and arguably since. Halo is a brilliant simple fun shooting things game with brilliant artfag subtext. And it's not Bungie's fault you failed to see that.

And what's junk about multimedia? That stuff is cool. What, you like Marathon but are averse to the idea of reading a novel? What's wrong with novels?

Yeah, whatever, they snuck in some things in there under the radar and most missed it, big deal,

They snuck in a lot and virtually everyone go filtered. Including you. Yes this is a big deal. If you accept this then the history of American video games is completely recontextualised.

but wouldn't it be cool if they actually made a video game out of what they are really into?

They did.

Here's where I gather my open fist into the Judo chop that will break Catboy's back.

Oh spaaaaare me, please.

Are you really telling me that a mid

You will never be black.

shooter tech demo is the best way of delivering the metaphysical mytho-poetic science fiction space opera they want to explore?

Yes.

Because something good hiding as trash isn't the maximum pwnage that some seem to think it is

Halo isn't trash. It was very commercially successful and very much appreciated by extremely intelligent people like me.

, and furthermore, Halo is the epitome of staying within the rigid structures of a genre despite making every attempt of escaping it before.

Halo being the epitome of rigid adherence to form is a more radical statement on the internet than my suggestion that it's an artfag masterpiece to a discerning audience. You're going to need to qualify this statement if you mean it. More likely you're just being a petty faggot and throwing thoughtless contrary remarks at me because I already have you scared and confused.

Halo isn't just a degeneration of shooters

You just said it stays with the genre. Now it's a degeneration.

, it's a betrayal of Marathon,

It's an evolution and successor.

and in a better timeline Bungie would have stayed a small studio that went on to develop the Western nerd version of Pathologic.

Scale and success didn't kill them. Microsoft did. They were worked to burnout by people who didn't respect them as artists. And it's funny that you'd name Pathologic of all games at the end here. You have such striver sensibilities. Anything which does an identifiable SMART thing you identify with. "Woah, it like, knows it's a game and stuff. It's like I'm reading House of Jest, but it's a game! I'm so smart for understanding this."

 

[Ash]

Halo is decline, but there are definitely worse shooters out there. It was one of the earliest I remember in a long line of 2000s era shooters where I noticed a lack of content and general boring gameplay direction (among other things), but I'd reluctantly play it over almost any brown-grey "realism" military shooter of the early 2000s and beyond, of which there was many. And yes, it IS a unique game, mediocre as it may be.

This is why I can't leave the codex, people are threatening to karate chop each other and no one is getting banned And people have played BOTH Marathon and Halo. Or 90s and more modern games both. Even if informed posters are the minority, at least they exist at all.

 

[GamerCat_]

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.

Trannies love these games because they are for insecure autists with massive hangups about their identities. "Boomer Shooter Player" is an identity you can find comfort, solidarity, and confidence in. Sort of like "cool quirky trans girl".

And allow me to play ally here, the doom world tranny was not a "sex pest", he was basically being harassed and led on by a basket case who got a kick out of pursuing and leading people on and creating drama.

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.

Brutal Doom's success is more to my point. It was the great icebreaking innovation to cut through the pointless sterility of the call of duty mania and everyone else having forgotten what could be done in a "first person shooter". SergeantMarkIV made Brutal Doom not to innovate upon the form of "fps", he made it because he wanted to make a maximalist edgelord experience. Brutal Doom is the fulfillment of the idiosyncrasies of Mark's taste. That is the source of innovation. And since then we got a repeat of the old pattern. Building for taste was misinterpreted and cargo-culted as form. Leading to imitators with no organic drive to tap into for their own innovations. The source of Brutal Doom's ideas was Mark's personality and imagination. The source of the Brutal Doom successors is Brutal Doom (interpreted as "first person shooter"). So they're all boring and pointless. Sensation gives way to form, and everything becomes boring.

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.

You're such a vulgar eater of dirt. How did you get into big video games, let alone a forum for long form posting about them? Did you get lost on your way to old people tiktok?

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.

343's problem is that they're retarded. Very bad stories presented very badly. It feels like there's more story now because what they have presented so explicitly (because they are retarded), but there's far less going on in these games than the bungie ones.

But otherwise yes, at the bare minimum just making a game that tries to copy how Halo feels and handles would probably succeed and be more fun than most games. For all the hysteria about "halo clones", there is not actually a single game which has replicated how Halo feels and plays. The closest we have is Slipgate cloning Halo 3's multiplayer (minus vehicles). When Microsoft got Staten back to rescue Halo Infinite from development hell what they settled for was basically dropping the fundamental Halo parts in open space strung together by some dumb cutscenes. And it's playable. Halo as a bare gameplay idea works really well. But even just that is too much for anybody to deliver apparently.

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.

Irrelevant to you. Because you are dumb.

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.

The few English speaking From fans with taste are well aware that most people mistake Elden Ring for World of Warcraft and enjoy its parts in pointless isolation, completely nullifying their intended impact as organic pieces of a whole experienced at the pace of the game's unfolding. People prefer it their way not because the story is told poorly, but because they are a poor audience.

 

[Morgoth]

Hadn't Bungie sold out, it would have likely sunk Xbox. This is why Bungie also deserves to sink.

 

[Ash]

Sometimes you are based, Morgoth.

Man would the gaming landscape look a hell of a lot different today if the Xbox bombed. But still, I can only try to remain grateful of the golden gaming years that is the 90s. Lucky we got that at all.

 

[destinae vomitus]

The two weapons in Halo is a very physical thing. Weapons are physical objects which drop and bounce when their wielders die. And the fact you can only carry two means you are constantly dropping and picking up new ones. You are through the entire game conscious of what weapons are dropping to the ground as weapons, not merely ammo pickups that look like weapons. This creates a very distinct impression compared to the hold everything approach in which every weapon is only meaningful to you once, from which point onwards all future incarnations of that weapon are a dressed up ammo drop.

And yes, some of the weapons are rather situational. This creates another unique dynamic. The two weapons create a strange configuration game of how you're going to deal with the current situation and prepare for what's coming. The the dual wielding in Halo 2, the two weapon system works sort of like building a combo. You get a totally different capacity for violence based on which two weapons you're holding. This is both practically and aesthetically interesting. I often just mess around with different weapons because they're interesting. Some moron on /v/ was telling me that the Needler shouldn't be in the game because it has no place in the "sandbox". It's place is that it's the purple alien gun that shoots pink homing needles.

And the shields thing I think is another Xer meme. The greatest incentive for passivity in fps is having your HP bar burned down to near zero and having more stuff to fight between you and the next heal. Time to plink from around corners and exploit the dumb computer-logic of the bad guys until I find a medkit-thing. The Halo shield was obviously an innovation to to allow you to play more actively and aggressively. You can only be so close to the verge of death, while you can also still take attrition over the course of fights. It's a very elegant system.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree a little bit. I wasn't advocating for being able to carry every gun mind you, even merely being able to carry three rather than two would go a long way in alleviating how at times you really only one choice to make in terms of what to carry (unless you choose to go against the designer's obvious wishes and ignore the sniper rifle that'd make your life easier) and would still maintain those moments of scrambling to pick up say a plasma pistol temporarily in the middle of a firefight. And on the shields front I really can't see how just sitting behind cover and simply waiting isn't the very definition of passive and more importantly Fucking Boring. The extreme example you raise is one brought about by the player, at the end of the day HP is your allowance for mistakes after all, conversely Halo doesn't have that outside of your pittance of a health bar in the first game. Technically it does with the shields, but because of them regenerating the game has to be balanced like a do-or-die affair where threats are only ever an immediate concern and potentially kill you instantly, which in my experience hardly fosters an aggressive playstyle, it just makes me play conservatively since trying to be gung ho often meant reloading at a checkpoint.

 

[Ash]

Oof, the gamer cat is defending two weapon limits and regen health in the context of a singleplayer shooter. Karate chop away I say!

Both actually work pretty great in multiplayer so that map control, movement and combat isn't dominated by camping pickups, and that every encounter begins on an even playing field, but in singleplayer the results have never been good.

I think we'll have to agree to disagree a little bit. I wasn't advocating for being able to carry every gun mind you, even merely being able to carry three rather than two would go a long way in alleviating how at times you really only one choice to make in terms of what to carry

Indeed. Even three or four makes a huge difference in tactical options, reducing repetition of engagements, creating more variables to consider and manage in combat...two is simply inexcusable. 90s shooters were never the most cerebral genre as it was, often far more so than they were given credit, but definitely not something that would benefit from streamlining at all. What Halo did was simply inexcusable. It didn't even simply just streamline either, but threw the baby out with the bathwater. But again, Halo was not the only culprit. Many devs wanted this to match their misguided desire for increased realism.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Doom 2016 was ultimately boring for me. I'm going to assume Eternal is more of the same.

It's both worse and better.

Some elements of the gameplay have been improved in Eternal. Arenas feel more treacherous with some enemies bringing some kind of DMC vibe in the game, namely the Marauder. Bosses are also better in Eternal for whatever that's worth. But mainly the arena fights are more tight in Eternal but they lowered ammo capacity even more and locked you into how the devs WANT you to play the game, meaning you have to constantly switch around weapons according to their arbitrary paper/rock/scissor design.

They also added a whole bunch of verticality in Eternal where even during down times you have to jump around and climb walls like Spiderman or some shit. Because of this, whatever vague semblance of traditional level design Doom 2016 has is now gone for good in Eternal. This is compounded further by the fact they did something to the lighting in Eternal that makes the game look more pastel and less immersive than 2016, so unlike the latter you don't even get the ambiance.

Lastly, if you thought the writing and "lore" in Doom 2016 were bad, get ready because Eternal is much, much shittier in that reguard, which is really something.

Basically, if you are still clinging to the older concept of what a shooter ought to be or what a Doom game should be, Doom 2016 is better. If you accept the new gameplay style, Eternal is better just by virtue of having tougher and better refined gameplay.

One thing i liked about both games is that the engine is the best optimized shit i've seen in a modern AAA game. There's some real technical wizardry going on here because both games look state of the art visually but the performance is excellent. Also, the way the game feels in motion has that smooth old school id soft vibe to it. Even the way all the post processing effects blend toghether it's just masterful and despite the gazillion of effects you can get over 100 FPS even old ass hardware it was kinda of impressive. It just sucks their coding talent didn't extend to the sound design.