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Which game killed the shooter genre?

Morpheus Kitami

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Nothing really killed shooters. But like many things the PC boom of the '90s stopping cold in its tracks in the early 2000s didn't do it any favors. There was still stuff in that time like No One Lives Forever, Clive Barker's Undying. Serious Sam, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Soldier of Fortune 2, Painkiller, Battlefield 1942, and a very buggy (which probably stopped a lot of people from trying it on release) STALKER...but outside of a Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 (and maybe Far Cry) all those PC FPS games may as well have been niche. And them falling into being more and more niche got worse and worse as the 2000s went along.
I'm not saying this in disagreement of your point, but most of those were on consoles too.
 

Derringer

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Indieshit like Terraria and Minecraft are partially popular due to marketing by the producers but they also allow the player the freedom to explore and build stupid shit, as soon as shooters adapted to consoles and gradually turned to linear hallway sims with experience points they took away the freedom of the player to modify player-made content, one of the big things that western games did better than the Japanese ever did. About the most entertaining thing about video games is the player-made content made with editing tools and the interactivity of the software like with Looking Glass games.
 
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Half Life was never good.
As bad as COD, Halo, Goldeneye, Quake 2 and other popamole garbage.

Serious question - what's the fundamental difference between Half-Life and Duke 3D? I'm not trying to claim they aren't notably different, because they clearly are in goals, gameplay and design, but what is it that makes Half-Life popamole while Duke presumably isn't?

As Lyric Suite said earlier, Duke 3D represented part of a wider push towards "realism", which I take to mean setting the game in semi-believable locations and placing enemies in semi-logical locations. The only big differences in Half-Life are that there's less combat because the game often switches to platforming or puzzles (also a feature in Duke, but less pronounced), and the game has more movie-like elements (getting knocked out and thrown in the trash compactor of doom, occasional brief sequences where people talk to you to tell you plot details, and so on), while Duke conveyed those mostly through text between levels and very, very brief setpieces ("WE'RE GONNA FRY YOUR ASS, NUKEM!").

Similarly, what are the key differences between Quake 2 and Duke 3D? I agree Quake 2 sucks shit, but that's down to unappealing visuals, clunky and boring combat, and occasionally awful bits of level design.

I can't help but wonder if Half-Life had come out a year and a half earlier on the Build engine and been more or less the exact same game, only with like 5% more enemies and NPCs speaking to you in text rather than voiced dialogue (as in Duke 3D or NAM or whatever), the same people who shit on it would be praising it as a high point of the FPS genre and the best of the Build games.

I do sometime miss that original cartoonier looking Half-Life I first saw in Next Generation magazine with big beard Gordon Freeman.

NEXT_35_Nov_1997_00045.jpg
 

anvi

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Duke3d and Unreal Tournament. There was no point making FPS after that, they were never gonna be beaten. It's the Beatles and Stones of FPS and we live in an age of Taylor Swift. Hail to the kings. (Quake was cool too but.... Quake is Chuck Berry).
 
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I never really gave much of a shit about Quake until Quake 3 Arena. Like it was cool and all that it was in 3D, it looked nice at the time, and it was cool that there was like this Doom with 3D models...but I just kind of didn't give a shit about it until that third one and even then I played Unreal Tournament and Tribes way more.
 

Derringer

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UT's 'mutation' mods felt a lot more natural to use compared to Quake 3's full-on conversions, they really had to push with the esports marketing to keep people's interest in the base game.
 
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Ravielsk

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What are good pure shooters then? Cite, say, a handful ones.

Good job dodging the question.
tenor.gif


I refuse to list any. Based on the criteria you outlined by declaring "Shogo, SiN, Hexen, No One Lives Forever or that shoddy Malaquias angel one" to be shit you have effectively out-ruled 100% of all remaining shooters in existence. Based on that standard not even Doom can be considered to be a good shooter(neither the 1995 or 2016 and onwards).

I instead asked you what other "hybrid shooters" can YOU name to support the claim that the genre evolved via hybridization because as far as I am aware games like "Rainbow Six, Flashpoint or Stalker" are absolute outliers and can be hardly considered as representative of any kind of evolution or improvement.

It would be like taking sacrifice and pretending that it became a template for future RTS games when in reality its everything but that.
 

Morenatsu.

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Duke3d and Unreal Tournament. There was no point making FPS after that, they were never gonna be beaten. It's the Beatles and Stones of FPS and we live in an age of Taylor Swift. Hail to the kings. (Quake was cool too but.... Quake is Chuck Berry).
Duke 3D is cool, but I always thought the combat was actually kind of weak.
 

samuraigaiden

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I never really gave much of a shit about Quake until Quake 3 Arena. Like it was cool and all that it was in 3D, it looked nice at the time, and it was cool that there was like this Doom with 3D models...but I just kind of didn't give a shit about it until that third one and even then I played Unreal Tournament and Tribes way more.

For me it was the exact opposite. I was exactly the kind of angsty kid that was sold on the gothic look and the Trent Reznor OST.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Duke3d and Unreal Tournament. There was no point making FPS after that, they were never gonna be beaten. It's the Beatles and Stones of FPS and we live in an age of Taylor Swift. Hail to the kings. (Quake was cool too but.... Quake is Chuck Berry).
Duke 3D is cool, but I always thought the combat was actually kind of weak.

To many hitscanners, meh weapons (other than the gimmicky ones). Yeah it's not even the best of the Build engine games.
 

HansDampf

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"Environmental storytelling", lol. Best part about Duke3D are the exploshuns.
Only 5 years ago, I would have listed Duke3D in my top 10 of all time. Since then, I've played a lot of other FPS games - new and old - including a shit ton of Doom WADs, and now I'm afraid to revisit the Duke because I can tell, the combat is more on the meh-side in comparison. Still fun to look at.
 

Silva

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What are good pure shooters then? Cite, say, a handful ones.

Good job dodging the question.
tenor.gif


I refuse to list any. Based on the criteria you outlined by declaring "Shogo, SiN, Hexen, No One Lives Forever or that shoddy Malaquias angel one" to be shit you have effectively out-ruled 100% of all remaining shooters in existence. Based on that standard not even Doom can be considered to be a good shooter(neither the 1995 or 2016 and onwards).

I instead asked you what other "hybrid shooters" can YOU name to support the claim that the genre evolved via hybridization because as far as I am aware games like "Rainbow Six, Flashpoint or Stalker" are absolute outliers and can be hardly considered as representative of any kind of evolution or improvement.
Ok, if I grok what u saying, good shooters are those arcade "shoot everything that moves" 90s games like Doom or Shogo with some veneer of story or realism or something. If you put enough story/realism/sim/tactics it's not a shooter anymore. Which nowadays would mean brainless run'n'gun shit like that future nazi one or that Shadow Chink shit or BF or whatever. Stuff with little to no interaction whatsoever besides run and shoot.

Well, and you're still wondering why it died?

:hmmm:


I posit this genre deserves to be face in the mud under the boots of actual rich videogame experiences like Stalkers and Thiefs and Dishonoreds. Lest we go back to mid 2000s and the dark age of videogames led by CoD and HL2 and HALO casul shit.
 
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Jack Of Owls

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May 23, 2014
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"Environmental storytelling", lol. Best part about Duke3D are the exploshuns.
Only 5 years ago, I would have listed Duke3D in my top 10 of all time. Since then, I've played a lot of other FPS games - new and old - including a shit ton of Doom WADs, and now I'm afraid to revisit the Duke because I can tell, the combat is more on the meh-side in comparison. Still fun to look at.

I remember when I rented a room and the landlord's bedroom was below mine, and I was playing Duke3D late at night with what I thought was at a low, reasonable volume, and then an entire building comes down during a scripted event after an explosion and the decibel level soared gloriously and I heard a thump downstairs of my landlord probably falling out of bed, and a couple of minutes later he roared from the bottom of the stairs, "Damn, will you turn that thing down please?!!" He was a timid, meek fellow (non-euphemistically known as a "pussy") and it was out of character for him to do that. Yup, great explosions alright :lol:
 

Jack Of Owls

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Half-Life was the first FPS for me (I played it at the time of release) where certain placed AI was designed to stop you dead in your tracks, forcing you to reload again & again, so that, in a way, was the death of FPSs as we knew them, or at least for me it was. Prior to that all FPS games I played where mellow, easy, free-wheeling zapping-them-like-bugs shooters in the style of Doom where you didn't have to think much or use any type of tactics, just exercise a reasonably good twitch reflex. I heard later versions of HL toned down the difficulty somewhat.
 

anvi

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I never really gave much of a shit about Quake until Quake 3 Arena. Like it was cool and all that it was in 3D, it looked nice at the time, and it was cool that there was like this Doom with 3D models...but I just kind of didn't give a shit about it until that third one and even then I played Unreal Tournament and Tribes way more.
Tribes would have been the best FPSseses ever if that could have continued but it was always low budget.

Duke3d and Unreal Tournament. There was no point making FPS after that, they were never gonna be beaten. It's the Beatles and Stones of FPS and we live in an age of Taylor Swift. Hail to the kings. (Quake was cool too but.... Quake is Chuck Berry).
Duke 3D is cool, but I always thought the combat was actually kind of weak.

To many hitscanners, meh weapons (other than the gimmicky ones). Yeah it's not even the best of the Build engine games.
I never played them, but I played Duke to death, it was amazing. Then I got to play it in multiplayer and it brought it to life again maybe as fun as the single player. Quake the same deal but only because of a mod, the concept which got copied and turned into Team Fortress.
 

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