What Makes A Good First Person Shooter: A Series
 

Since 1994 when I first played Doom II on my dad's PC I have always been a fan of first person shooter games. However at the same time I dedicated a lot of my time to the LucasArts adventure games like Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Day of the Tentacle, and ToonStruck (not made by LucasArts). These games helped utilize my inquisitive nature and love of puzzles, while games like Duke Nukem, Doom, and Quake helped vent my anger and essentially allow my brain some rest while I just let follow a simplistic instruction of "shoot everything on screen". All this changed in 1999 when I got valves masterpiece Half-Life for Christmas, along with a computer capable of running it. Half-Life channeled my First-Person-Shooter action craving, but also brought to the table platform gaming, as well as the odd puzzle. Not only that, but it forced me to rethink my strategy of killing everything on the screen, now there were friendly A.I's who were detrimental to my survival, by either offering offensive assistance or giving me access to the next area. For the past decade now I have been a die-hard Half-Life fan, playing almost every expansion that has come out for it (I missed out on the PS2 one). Not only that, for the past 10 years I've been trying to figure out what makes a good FPS and the trends I've observed. Here are a few games that I felt have really had a profound effect on the genre of gaming, along with a quick explanation of why.

Half Life Series

I'm not sure if there's any series out there that even comes close to hitting as many points as this series does. It's got a compelling story that is shrouded in mystery, likable characters who actually feel like they all contribute, and a protagonist who's well received by almost everyone despite the fact he never says a word. Yes, the silent protagonist approach seems to have really worked out well for Valve as Gordon Freeman has reached almost mythical status and become a loved character, despite the fact he has never uttered a word. The fact that Gordon isn't a macho soldier that leaks testosterone out of every pore really helps this series differentiate itself from the rest. While like everything else it's not infallible, the long waits between games coupled with the fact it does tend to follow a bit of a pattern, I mean how many times are Valve going to make us do a see-saw puzzle? Regardless of a few minor complaints, the fact that Valve have managed to work a well written story with amazing voice acting and action sequences but with slow down periods that involve platforming and puzzles really help push Half-Life to it's own.

Call of Duty 4

I'm sure a few people are scratching their heads and wondering why I chose this title of say... Call of Duty 1 or Call of Duty 2. While I can say that I really enjoyed both titles, by the time I played them I was already bored to tears with World War II first person shooters. I did like the teamwork aspect in the first Call of Duty, for the time, the A.I. was fantastic. The thing I loved most about Call of Duty was that it completely disregarded the "Lone Wolf" approach that games like Wolfenstein 3D and the Metal of Honor series went for. Call of Duty also let you experience the War through the eyes of a British and Russian soldier, escaping the tiresome "America Won The War" feeling that every other game seemed to encompass. Call of Duty 4 took all that and put it on a grand scale. It changed up the timeline to the not too distant future, and gave a far more unique vision of what War is really like. After the incredibly starting tanker mission, I was then jumped into the body of the President of an unnamed Middle Eastern country that had just staged a coup. The only control I have is the ability to move my head as I'm driven across this city as tanks and soldiers start rolling out. Innocent civilians are being shot in the street. I know my fate is sealed, then I'm tied up to a post and a Desert Eagle is pointed in my face, then everything goes dark. The thing Call of Duty 4 does best though is giving off the feeling that WAR IS BAD. In most War FPS' you're this unstoppable bad ass who can take legions of bullets without even breaking a sweat as you triumph over an unmistakable evil. In Call of Duty 4 both sides that you play (American Marine and British SAS) are portrayed in less of a positive light and in what I can only imagine is far more realistic. Not only that, but there is a certain element of danger in it as SPOILER the American Marine you play, Sgt. Jackson, gets killed off halfway through the game in a nuclear explosion. You had just committed a heroic act of saving a downed helicopter pilot and you're flying away in your own when a nuclear blast goes off, downing your helicopter and killing the entire crew. The screen turns a crimson red and you're left dragging your body around, looking at your strewn comrades, the vacant and lifeless looks on their faces, until you yourself finally succumb to your wounds and radiation poisoning and die. Never before had I played a game where the main character actually died right in front of me despite me doing everything the game told me to do. I was completely helpless, I couldn't save him, no matter how well I played the game, I was doomed to an untimely death. There is no patriotism being shoved down our throats, there's nothing but a pile of digitally rendered dead bodies, including our own. Even the end of the game ends on a sour note as SPOILER your British SAS members, people you get attached to, are executed right in front of you, and even your own fate is left in the unknown. No game had ever really put these main characters in any real danger, especially when they're right in front of you in the game and not a cut scene. Call of Duty 4 really leaves a sour taste in your mouth as far as war is concerned.


I'm going to continue this series, but as there's quite a bit already there, I'll let you sit and digest it, comment on it, your own observations, and your arguments against me.

Enjoy!

I'm playing through Half Life 2 now (slow off the mark) and i'm still at the sewers but it's shaping up to be brilliant. What you said about shooters being all macho-marines is very correct and puts me off the genre on the whole, maybe i've been playing too much Nintendo but i ask for a bit more charm and uniqueness than that.

Ever played Postal 2? Technically not the best but it's a laugh.

No I missed out on the postal series, not by choice though I just was never able to find them and figured that they were only really good for a laugh. I have Redneck Rampage for when I need a good laugh.

what makes a good first person shooter?

the same thing that makes any game good. an achievable goal that can only be reached by completing increasingly difficult challenges that rely on logic and reason far more than luck and reflexes to overcome.

your comments (especially in regards to CoD4) are on par with commenting on the details of the frosting on a cake as an attempt to describe the taste of the batter.

Call Of Duty games are magnificent. I've been a fan of the series since I played the exciting and groundbreaking original game.

Call of Duty 4 was the first version I'd ever played, and up until that point the only FPS I'd played was Halo 2 and 3. Your description is right on though, and I also like how when you're playing team death match online you're team isn't always American or Russian or what have you. It's switched up. (I've only played on Xbox live, not the campaign). COD: WaW took some getting used to for me, but once I got into it I absolutely loved it too. 'Dome' is my favorite map...I always score major points on that one. :D

Anyways, I look forward to reading the rest of the series!

How was the first original or groundbreaking? Haven't you ever played Medal of Honor?

Anyway, Half Life 2 and Portal are great first person shooters with amazing story lines and fun puzzles, even though both are lacking in what I think helps make a great FPS, multiplayer they more than make up for in story and gameplay. Where as the Halo series has a pretty average story line it makes up for in amazing multiplayer I used to stay up till 3 am playing it, until COD4 came out which has just as good multiplayer if not better but add an interesting story and you have a very memorable FPS. I'm very glad they are making a sequel/ spin off series which is good for the COD series because WW2 games are about as old as the war itself.

The first Call of Duty was one that actually give off the feeling that you were a part of a group with friendly A.I. In Medal of Honor: Frontline, you play throughout a good portion of the game by yourself, save for the amazing Normandy Beach landing and further assault on Saint-Mathieu you're pretty much alone for the game. It also doesn't help that the Medal of Honor series has been going on for longer than the war itself, then again Call of Duty hit that mark this year as well.

As far as multiplayer is concerned, while I think that it's pretty ignorant to say that multiplayer isn't an important part of gameplay, I feel that developers are using that as an excuse to work less on an actual story and character development in favor of tapping the multiplayer market. Besides Real Time Strategy games like Starcraft and Warcraft 2, I didn't play any FPS's online til 2001 when I got Counter-Strike. By 2001, I had already been playing FPS for 7 years and grew so use to the computer A.I. that when faced against players, I couldn't seem to get any better. I think developers need to acknowledge the fact that not everyone plays online and actually put some more effort into formulating a story that's actually worth the play time.

+A million for props on Half-Life series. You summed it up very nicely. One of my all time favorites.

Half-Life is without a doubt my favourite FPS series so far. I was blown away by the first game when it came back in the late 90s and the Half-Life 2 series was equally amazing. Episode 2 blew me away .. I also like HL2 multiplayer and Counter Strike (although not part of the HL story) being so popular, I can't say I agree with sweet_nothing about the HL series lacking multiplayer.

I play a lot of FPSes and aside from CoD4, a couple of other games that made impressions on me were Crysis and Bioshock, both of which I liked a lot. I'm especially looking forward to Bioshock 2!

The original Syphon Filter for PS1 and the first few James Bonds were my fave, but then again I'm not really that into video games.

Yeah Goldeneye is going to have to make an appearance, pretty much summing up all the shooting games i like!

Half Life series is definitely my favourite of all time. I'm not sure whether I prefer the original or sequel. One the one hand, HL2 is overall more polished and has the grav gun, and I'm one of the few who really enjoyed the vehicle sections.
But the original just feels more intense when you play it, for some reason the combine troops actually feel like a step down from the marines. Basically because you can kill them so quickly they don't get a chance to do much cool stuff, whereas the marines could live long enough to flank you and flush you out.

Will the Thief series or Deus Ex make an appearance? Or are you going to focus on the strictly 'shooter' games?

I have to admit a lot of first person shooter games make me nauseous. It's weird because I don't get motion sickness very easily in cars, planes, boats, etc., but some of those games—woah. At any rate I kind of avoid them because of this but I do own a couple and Metroid Prime is a pretty cool one.

Metroid Prime 3 is an excellent game and one of my favorite first person shooters, if it counts (a lot of it is based on puzzles and exploring).

I really want to get Bioshock. I played through the demo and it's fantastic.

I think that instead of just talking about a game, I'll talk about what makes a first person shooter great, then use an example to further prove my point.

Fear

No not the game (I will get to that in a bit), but the use of fear in video games is detrimental to creating an enticing atmosphere. When the original Doom came out, their use to "Closet Monsters" appearing seemingly at random. I still recall the second level of the original Doom scaring me when I was forced to go into a darkened room in search of a key to open a door.

No game gives off the same level of fear as the Condemned series. Condemned: Criminal Origins was one of the launch titles and met to some critical acclaim, but also a lot of well deserved criticism. Before I get to the criticism, I just want to talk for a moment of all the things Condemned does right. For one, it is one of the few first person shooters that puts the emphasis on melee combat rather than guns. While guns are present in the game, they are actually quite ineffective as they all have extremely limited ammunition and the sporadic movements of the enemies make it hard to actually hit anything. Limited ammunition is something the Resident Evil series is known for (well that is until Resident Evil 4), putting you alone in a setting, surrounded by people all wanting to kill you and with very little in the way of defending yourself. Rather than using firearms to dispatch your foes, you can clobber them to death with blunt objects like 2x4s, conduits, lead pipes, and the occasional fire axes, sledgehammers, and wrecking bars. The use of melee weapons isn't exactly new to First Person Shooters, in Doom you had your fists, in Duke Nukem you had your boot, and in the Half-Life series you have your crowbar, but none of them actually feel like you're making an impact. In Condemned, you can almost feel the impact up your arm as you whack clouds of blood and teeth from a teenager runaway's face. It only gets better when the enemies drop to their knees and you can deliver fatal finishing blows, like snapping their necks or giving one final punch to the face. It only gets better in the second game Bloodshot, where there are environmental finishes, such as snapping their necks in a toilet bowl, throwing them face first into a TV, or putting their head in a vice and crushing it into a gooey mess.

There's far more to this series than just gratuities violence though, one, and quite possibly the most important is the setting. Each of the levels take place in poorly lit decrepit buildings that are inhabited by murderous junkies and people suffering from schizophrenia. The enemies are often lurking the shadows, muttering threats or random babbling. The levels range from abandoned buildings to unused subway stations and tracks, to an old abandoned department store, a school, and finally a farm. The limited lighting makes it hard to anticipate when an enemy is near, forcing you to rely on your ears more than your sight. When you do get to see an enemy in some kind of light, their appearance is anything but wholesome. Missing teeth, facial cuts and suffering from malnutrition the enemies put a whole new level of uneasiness, as they're not the legion of identical enemies most games give us. All these aspects help to create a truly eerie atmosphere that has you sitting on the edge of your seat, reveling in both fear and anticipation of what's going to happen next.

Earlier I stated as to why I didn't use the game F.E.A.R as my example, as it usually gets lumped into the horror genre. There really isn't much horror to the game, as misleading as title may be. The game plays as your standard military shooter in which you play some random soldier who was just assigned to the unit. You have a super power that lets you slow down time (Because bullet time hasn't already been done to death) which gives you an incredibly unfair advantage over the enemies. The enemies are nothing more than a clone army of super soldiers (Because that's never been done before). Occasionally the game remembers that it's trying to be a horror game and the screen will get dulled, some weird sounds will start to play, a blood splat will be thrown randomly on the ground and a few more surreal things happen, but then you're back to dreary old reality in which you get to clear out another room of enemies. Those surreal moments were really the only part of F.E.A.R. that I liked, but they were so few and far between it really makes it hard to call it a horror game. It's a competent first person shooter, but it brings nothing new to the table, and doesn't deliver the same feeling of well... horror that the Condemned series delivers.

Bioshock is great.

I've never really been a fan of FPS games but BF1 Desert Combat and BF2 have always been favourites of mine. I've spent a large portion of my life playing DC with mates.

Postal is fun as well - have you ever played multiplayer with low gravity settings?

To this day, Desert Combat is still my favourite mod for any game. I'm hoping that when Black Mesa comes out it'll knock it out of place, but until that comes out, DC is still up there.

Hehe yeah, i'm glad they didn't tone down the stupid amounts of gore for multiplayer as well. Anti gravity reminds me, i do have a soft spot for Unreal Tournament too.

BF2 is a fave of mine as well.
I recently downloaded the AIX 2.0 singleplayer mod, and it's such an improvement over the original game. More vehicles, jets, choppers, weapons, capabilities, maps.. The AI is overhauled so well, you'd think you were playing against real people.
I think you can use the mod on private servers with your friends, but you obviously won't have it on ranked servers.


I played Crysis not too long ago and was pretty impressed. I didn't like how short the game was, but there's some awesome gameplay dynamics in that game. The graphics are amazing as well.

to talk about fear in a FPS genre discussion and to not mention System Shock is like talking about hard rock and never mentioning Led Zeppelin.

After playing through everything in the Orange Box, doing all of the developer commentaries, playing Left 4 Dead, it really is interesting to get a good idea on how Valve approaches games. Throughout the past year, when I really started to get into Valve's games, they have become one of my favorite developers.

Anybody else here like Timesplitters 3? Nothing about it is all that groundbreaking, but the multiplayer was so simple and fun. Me and my friends never even played online, we just had tons of fun playing 4 player splitscreen against bots. It just had so many weapons and features, like the map editor that made it replayable. I kind of think of it as a FPS party game, its simple, fun, mindless killing that pretty much anybody can play.

Timesplitters 2 is better.

I just bought that one fairly recently but I have to say I'm having a hard time getting into it. The controls are really annoying and honestly I find it too hard to be very enjoyable.

It's basically only good as a co-op. I'd play it with a friend. It is really hard, but I think you can tone down the difficulty if you want.

Is that the one with all the zombies and you gotta fight your way out of some ridiculous situations?

No.
TimeSplitters 2 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Time splitters 3 is better then 2 simply because the controls aren't so ****ing annoying.

They announced TS 4 i think.

I would definitely buy it.

I really hate FPS games but the select few that I have liked along the way would have to be GoldenEye on N64 and Perfect Dark. I also liked Duke Nukem

what makes a good fps = amphetamines?

Have you played Bioshock?
cause it is the best FPS I have ever played.

It basically changed the way I thought of games,
story telling wise and atmosphere wise.

if you haven't played it yet please buy it especially if you are a fan of FPS games.

I could have sworn I was replying to someone who was talking about "Left 4 Dead".
Weird.

What Makes a Good FPS: Good Ol' Fashioned Genocide

It seems that as games have evolved over the years, the focus has been more on showing off the designer's friendly A.I. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, I mean I loved traveling with Alyx through the ruins of City-17 and White Forest in the Half-Life Episodes, but at the same time, newer FPS's haven't been that great at feeding my primal need to just kill everything on the screen. Gone are the days of being totally alone on a level with a bunch of guns and the population of a small European village between you and the exit. Since the mid to late '90's, games have begun to focus more on team based tactics, the installment of a friendly A.I. partner, and multiplayer. There are a few games however, that continue my love of carnage and endless and mindless murder, two of which are Painkiller and Postal II.

Painkiller is a game developed by Polish Developers "People Can Fly" which is pretty amazing as it's their first game they've ever done. The story is a steaming pile of shit and essentially reads like "Guy has sexy wife, he and sexy wife get killed in a car accident caused by Guy, sexy wife goes to heaven and Guy is tasked with killing four of Satan's generals". You're not really given much of a choice in the matter and then you're given the titular "Painkiller", a bladed rotational device thingy that can sever enemies into several bloodied limbs. Next to the Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2, it's probably my second favourite melee weapon. The game also includes a gun that shoots small logs that impale enemies to walls and a gun that shoots shirukens and lighting. Other than that I'm not sure what there is to say, you're given an arsenal of some truly impressive weaponry and a lot of things to kill. The game may be primitive, but sometimes we need to be reminded that we are too. If stripped of our luxuries like electricity, food, and sex, we'll revert to our primal urges, and this game lets me do it with out consequence.


I will do a write up for Postal II tomorrow as I am not feeling particularly well tonight.

You forgot to mention that the stake-gun also shoots grenades. It's beautiful.

Alright after a week of procrastination the guilt has finally caught up with me and I'm hopefully going to breath life back into this potentially dead thread.

In my last post I stated that I was going to do a write up for Running With Scissor's 2003 controversial game Postal 2. However after playing for a good day and a half I found that I really didn't have much to say. I'm even questioning whether or not this is a game that encourages genocide (by genocide I mean enemy genocide, not the real life kind). I mean yes, the residents of Paradise Arizona do everything within their power to make me kill them, but it's technically not required. The other two games I mentioned in my last post, DOOM and Painkiller, not only encourage but almost force you to kill all the bad guys on the screen. I mean with weapons like the titular painkiller (a kind of swivel death blade thingy that quickly reduces enemies to piles of mush) and the stake gun, it seems kind of like a waste of time to create such unique weapons without the incentive to use them. Other than that, the only thing I can really say about Postal 2 is that it's a great way to blow off steam, even better than doing rampages in the Grand Theft Auto series.

Anyhow my next entry into this series is one that I can't say I've been looking forward to, but it needs to be said so without further ado here's the next entry on:


Like it or not online gaming is pretty much the direction that all first person shooters are going. I for one am not a big fan of online gaming for a number of reasons, which I will name. Firstly I find a majority of the gamers to be loud, annoying douche bags with the intelligence and maturity of a doorknob. Secondly, I never really felt like I was getting any better at the games no matter how long I played, I always just felt like a running target only to fall prey to some AWP using pussy. Lastly I feel that the online multiplayer gaming is starting to subtract from the single player game, with more effort going into tarting the multiplayer up, whereas the single player is just plonked on for antisocial rejects like myself with very little effort actually put into it.

Now that I've got that out of the way, I can talk about some of the good things I've found in multiplayer games, one in particular, EA's 2002 World War II entry Battlefield 1942. Battlefield 1942 (BF1942 as it will now be known) does just about everything differently from my other online game, Counter-Strike. Instead of a small map that focuses more on intense and adrenaline oriented left mouse clicking, BF1942 focuses more on map exploration and ambushing, as well as the use of it's many many different vehicles. You get a friend that can actually fly a plane while you man the gun turret, you can do some incredible damage. Some people say that it's the equivalent of AWP users in Counter-Strike, however I disagree. AWPing requires you to stay in one place looking through a scope while striking down enemies in one shot. Using a vehicle in BF1942 requires you to hone in on your accuracy while in a moving vehicle. There is also the possibility of getting shot down by anti-aircraft guns or a well placed RPG. The other major selling point for me is the fact that you respawn after 15 seconds, rather than waiting for the last person on your team to either be killed or be triumphant. I often found myself rooting for the enemy to kill the player on my team just so I could actually start playing the game instead of reading Playboy (For the articles of course). Then when I somehow managed to survive whilst all my teammates were slaughtered I became very self-conscious about my playing ability, much like when we played baseball in P.E. and all eyes were on me. When video games bring back the same feelings that P.E. use to bestow on me, something has gone very wrong.

I know what some people are going to say, "What? a post on Online Gaming and no mention of Halo! WTF mate?" Let me say this, I HATE the Halo series. My first exposure to it was on PC back in 2003 when it was ported by Gearbox (makers of Half-Life: Opposing Force and Blue Shift) so I thought it would be good, however I was sadly disappointed (and out 20 bucks). The story was fairly uninteresting and gave me no real insight as to why the Covenant wanted to kill us. I found the game to be a little schizophrenic, especially with their enemies. You had the little enemy midgets running around with their pathetic weapons and dialogue, then the tougher enemies who still managed to succumb to a single rifle butt to the back. On the levels where you did have friendly A.I. I never really noticed them helping at all, except when they died and I could pick up their ammo and/or health kits. After reading some reviews on the PC version I saw that most sites gave it a rather mediocre review, so of course I just assumed all the issues I had with it were just because it was PC. So when I got my 360 in 2006 one of the first games I picked up for it was the original Halo because it was 10 bucks and still found the same problems. I did play it a little further than I did on the PC, but when I got to the part where you're being chased by the Flood while following Guilty Spark 343 going through the same fucking room again and again in what is one of the most blatant uses of copy and paste I've ever seen that I just said "fuck it" and turned it off.

With an experience like that, it is pretty understandable as to why I never bothered with playing it online. The game did do things right, I'll admit that, I like the fact that it was one of the few to introduce the limited arsenal which is more realistic than carrying a melee weapon, pistol, stronger pistol, shotgun, machine gun, grenades, some kind of exotic weapon that you never use till the boss, and rocket launcher. Actually that's about the only nice thing I can say about it, so yeah that's where I'm going to end this. I've watched people play it online and to be honest it looked just like Counter-Strike but with different guns, locales, and skins and seeing as how I only played Counter-Strike to try and keep my distancing friendships with people back in Vancouver in tact, but eve that didn't work and instead I lost three years of my life getting killed a lot and never getting better.

Pete... get all the BF games. They're all teh kewlz.

The controls really bother me in that game as well. Luckily they are much better in Timesplitters 3. The controls are much more similar to what you would expect from a FPS (I'm assuming what bothers you is the way your aiming reticule gets sucked back to the center of your screen while trying to aim...)

The Halo series has always been known for its lackluster single player. The only time I find it fun is to play it co-op, and even still other games that focus more on single player such as the Half Life series do it much better and offer a much more rewarding experience. Halo 2 and Halo 3's co-op campaign is basically a fancy way to fight bots when you are bored of the online. I'm a huge Halo fan (mostly Halo 2 and 3), its annoying when people judge the game based on the single player alone, or by Halo 1's multiplayer, which can be fun but lacks the better support in the other 2 titles. If you have a 360 and if you are going to get a Halo game, get either Halo 2 or Halo 3 (I'd recommend Halo 3, its online support is much better and its still being updated), and get the game for the online multiplayer.

What I like is Halo 3's multiplayer has tons of variety that appeals to everything from casual gamers to those annoying hardcore players that yell at you. You can either go into ranked matchmaking where it pairs you up with a team based on your global rank and all of that stuff, or you can go into the casual matchmaking playlists where rank isn't tracked and the game variants and maps are much less casual and more focused on casual fun then competition. When people think of online gaming, they think of that hardcore trigger finger that "pwnz all t3h n00bz," while Halo3's multiplayer is designed for both casual and hardcore gamers.

Also, since you have a 360 I'd suggest checking out the new Battlefield games on it. Battlefield: Bad Company is great and has been about for about 2 years, so you can find it for about $20 in most stores. Battlefield 1943 is also good, its somewhat of a sequal to 1942, although it has less maps and weapons (hence the lower price for a game that just came out). Battlefield 1943 might be best because its cheap and you would probably be more familier with it since you played 1942. Both games have destructible environments as well.

The Halo series, multiplayer and single player has innovated the genre in tons of subtle ways. Play an average pre-Halo era game like JK: Outcast and you'll know what I mean. The single player has always been fun (aside from some of the flood moments) and the appeal of the game isn't simply in the multiplayer, that's the most common, overused argument I hear when people talk about Halo.

Even if you don't like the game, pay your respects to it.

Also, I've got to agree the Battlefield series has some fantastic online. Also if you want something with a slightly higher learning curve, I'd recommend WWII Online: Battleground Europe.