Sjukob
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2015
- Messages
- 2,067
So I wanted to share my opinion about this for a long time, I've finaly got enough patience to write it up.
I've played 90s FPS games for the first time somewhere in 2013-2014 and I've kept playing them regularly up to this day. I'm not usually interested in these so called "boomer shooters", that get released today, for one reason primarily - they usually have nothing to offer outside of little novelty of not being Doom, Quake, Blood or whatever. Let me elaborate this.
When you develop a game you have to deal with deadlines, at least most of the people have to. The limiting factor can be money, time, fatigue or something else, at certain point you realize that you have to shit something out or give up on the work entirely. This means that you have very limited timespan to figure out gameplay related nuances and craft something original within your system. You generally don't see something like archvile carousel from sunlust or mancubian candidate from valiant in these games. The developers have to spend a good amount of time on technical stuff: coding, making graphics, polishing systems etc. And the stuff they create is new, as I've just said, it's very likely that nobody had enough time to figure out neat details during the development and put them to good use. In comparison, people who make maps for classic FPS have years or even decades worth of experience with those games and they can even ask other likeminded nerds for help, they can dedicate almost all of their time to fine tuning the gameplay, because they don't have to invent new systems or heavily occupy themselves with technical issues. On top of it, those classic games, primarily Doom, have nearly flawless gameplay that remains unmatched even 29 years after it's release. So when you try to make something resembling those classic FPS you are already playing a lost game, because their systems are very likely to be better than yours and they had decades of time for things to be built on top of them.
The next thing, which makes it even worse, at least for me it does, is a catastrophic lack of difficulty. I guess it happens either because the developers are afraid of making the game difficult or because they lack experience and understanding of their systems to make a good challenge. If you've tried playing those boomer shooters you know tha usually they are pretty easy even on the hardest difficulty setting, meanwhile if try to play some hardcore wad for Doom, like sunlust or stardate for example, you are very likely to find yourself reloading a lot due to many deaths even in the early parts of the wad. However, I'm not rooting for unfair "fuck you" type of shit. Look at something like Ancient Aliens, for example. It's not even that tough of wad, but you have to face a cyberdemon on level 1, the map itself is designed around this cyberdemon, he's the main feature of it. You never see something like this in boomer shooters, they can't really challenge experienced players, they lack a bite. Instead of providng a good challenge they usually introduce some gimmicky shit instead, like death in one hit or ironman mode, meanwhile classic FPS can be very hard even without such nonsense. I would've really liked to see games being designed around hardest difficulty setting with other options simply serving as downscaled versions, I think that the casuals wouldn't even notice this, majority of players don't even go further than half of the game, just look at the achivements in steam, but at least there will something on the table for the nerds.
These two issues make boomer shooters uninteresting for me, they don't offer anything substantial in comparison to 90s FPS and are trivial to play, I get bored of them pretty quickly. I don't know how many people feel the same way, but I personally don't understand how can such games ever be popular. The hardcore nerds, the ones that create content for the game, be it maps, videos, guides or something else, might play them on occasion, because they want to take a break from Doom, Quake or whaterver their FPS of preference is, but they are very unlikely to stay, because the classic FPS are simply all around better. They won't attract a lot of casual players for obvious reasons. So lack of popularity seems obvious to me. Also, I'm not even digging that deep, there are way more problems with those boomer shooters: lack of proper modding support, inferior soundtrack, artstyle, optimization and more.
You know, Doom Eternal has caused a lot of screeching here, but personally I can respect that game for trying to do it's own thing. I don't think that somebody will ever successfully improve the 90s FPS formula, so trying to create something new seems like the best idea to me. And at least it tries to be difficult, I genuinely found some parts of it, like certain master and DLC levels, to be tough, there's also a decent number of things to master in Eternal, but of course it will never ever be comparable to classic Doom.
