E3 2005 First Person Shooters

John Callaham writes "Computer Games Magazine takes a quick look at the upcoming first person shooter games that are expected to be show at this May's Electronic Entertainment Expo." From the article: "Today we start to look at all the games that have been announced and are out in the open and are likely to be show at E3 this May. First up: first person shooters. 2004 was truly a banner year for this genre; how many years can we have that contain UT2004, Doom 3, Painkiller, and Half-Life 2? Will this year be any different?"

Comments

One?

[yotto]

...how many years can we have that contain UT2004, Doom 3, Painkiller, and Half-Life 2?

One?

Or, to be even more pedantic, all of them after 2004?

stalker..

[gl4ss]

..is the one i'm really waiting for, seems like the one of the bunch with potential to have some real depth in it. you know, the kind of depth that makes you immersed in the world, the kind of depth that gives you some OPTIONS in how to advance rather than something tha makes you just scale the walls looking for the hole to the next room(or in the case of dull ww2 shooters.. something else than a shooting alley with invisible insta-death walls - it's fucking boring to play the same part over and over again to find the 'right' way out of the pothole).

(fuck the dots- you'd have to be braindead to not make the connection between stalker and s.t.a.l.k.e.r)

Re:I see unhappy fanboys

[Toddarooski]

They might understand why a magazine called [b]Computer Games[b] Magazine might not be mentioning Halo 2.

Any innovation left?

[KDR_11k]

I'm pretty tired of the standard FPS formula by now, those games don't seem to offer much in terms of new gameplay. The only one that even tries is Timeshift and even there you could argue that idea has been seen before and overdone.

Is there something about first person shooters that requires them all to play the same plus/minus squad tactics? Some break the mold by adding character development and multiple playstyles but those are few and rarely the ones that get all the hype. How many different takes on "run into room, kill everything that moves, repeat" do we need? Yes, economists would say a whole lot because that's profitable. Or even better, make the game stealthy so the player moves much slower and your content lasts longer. But hell, what if I don't want any more of that? Usually people tell you to go with indy games then but the singleplayer FPS is one of the hardest arenas for independant development and quite frankly I don't know of any indy FPSes.

Another point: What happened to the more freeform level designs of "back then"? Back when people played Doom or Descent levels weren't just one long path with obstacles strewn in, they were always areas with keys and switches, making you stay in a level much longer (and making them better for deathmatches) and sometimes run through familiar areas again. Especially with no clues about where to go these levels just felt much more non-linear than those found in HL2 or Doom 3. It worked back then with small dev houses and primitive graphics, why doesn't it work with today's huge dev houses and impressive graphics anymore?

Re:Any innovation left?

[KDR_11k]

If you can't, what makes you think someone else can?

I would never have thought of doing e.g. Katamari Damacy.
There are some ideas I have, though:

1. We haven't seen something like Uprising/Battlezone "Remake" for quite some time now.
2. How about, instead of having enemies die when you pour enough lead into them, have them have weak points you have to hit in a certain order to destroy them (more suited for a slower, perhaps horror game)?
3. Alternative modes of attack. E.g. all enemies have cybernetic enhancements and you can use some special power to hack them and disable/control/hurt/whatever them as an integral part of gameplay.

I've got some more ideas but many of them are pretty much entire games and I don't feel like writing out design documents here :p.

Re:Any innovation left?

[Ford Prefect]

The sad thing is, there's not much left that can be done with an FPS other than increase the graphics, level size, number of players/monsters, and fiddle with controls and play styles.

Treat the 'FPS' thing merely as a user interface, and there are loads of possibilities. Wild examples: Deus Ex, System Shocks 1 and 2, Oni (okay, third person but used an FPS control scheme), Natural Selection (a semi-conventional FPS crossed with an RTS), Darwinia (absolutely not an FPS, but uses WASD and mouselook!) - and these are existing examples I've actually played.

I've got an idea for a single-player HL2 mini-mod with no combat whatsoever. First-Person... Something?

I realised a while ago that I can't stand most conventional FPS games. Some I do like - for plot, adventure and setting. You can't really get much more immersive than an FPS, and the control system both is intuitive and can be extended in many different directions. I wouldn't dismiss the FPS so quickly... ;-)

Re:Any innovation left?

[yotto]

There's a lot that could be done with gravity, actually. Like gravity toward (or away from) a point source, or multiple point sources. Imagine having gravity point away from a point in the middle of a hollow sphere, at some intensity that rose as you got farther from the sphere? In the middle, you would be nearly weightless, and out the outside you'd be running around in a kind of space station type atmosphere. Hell, chop most of that sphere out and you'd have a space station.
Do the same thing with gravity the opposite way, and you could be fighting on a asteroid instead of a boring flat surface.

But I don't think these count as innovations in the same way that true 3d (quake and the like) counts as an innovation.

Sad but true

[El]

Business types are doomed to only release remakes of games that made money. Nobody will touch the first game in a new, unproven genre. And unfortunately, the time when somebody could design and implement a decent game in their basement is long gone. So I suppose we're stuck with remakes of Doom, Quake, Unreal and Halflife for the forseeable future. Unless some talented group of designers, graphic artists, and programmers is willing to work for free for about a year to come out with a really killer game that isn't a FPS.

What I would like to see is a multiplayer game that rewards cooperative play and good moral judgements, instead of rewarding a "shoot anything that moves" approach.

Re:it can only get better

[UWC]

Console vs. PC games will result in either console players getting outmaneuvered by mouse-and-keyboard users or the PC players complaining about the cheapness of the auto-aim assistance the console players will need if they want to be competitive. That's, of course, if you're talking about FPS-type games.

I am definitely eager to see what the new round of consoles is capable of, though.

This is the year...

[mrbaggs]

I'm sure this time, this is the year Duke Nukem Forever is released! You'll all see...

I hope so

[soniCron88]

"Will this year be any different?"

Well, god I hope so. A year in which every major hit was a sequel? Originality would be a nice change of pace.

What about Far Cry?

[osmic234]

Surely it would have to be included in the top pc fps releases of last year. At least it gave the illusion of being sightly non-linear at times, unlike the big name games. And it was much easier on the eye, without needing such top-end machine. I'd much rather see an expansion pack for Far Cry than one for Doom 3 or Half-Life 2.