'Quantum Leap' Awards For FPS Games Revealed

simoniker writes "As voted by game industry professionals, the results of the Quantum Leap Awards for the first-person shooter genre have been revealed, honoring the titles which 'brought the FPS genre forward' in the biggest ways. The winner is a truly classic title, but there's at least one seminal FPS that, surprisingly enough, didn't make the top 5." The top 5 are, from 1 to 5, Half-Life, Quake, GoldenEye, Wolfenstein, and System Shock 2.

Comments

Doom

[th1ckasabr1ck]

Of course Doom not being #1 is beyond ridiculous. For full disclosure I program games for a living and started with Doom mods, looking at the source, etc. - if it wasn't for Doom I would probably have a different job right now.

Doom was the first game with graphics good enough for non-gamers to understand what I was so excited about. It basically had the first big mod community, started deathmatch, brought LAN parties and big gaming tournaments into reality, etc.

Think of it this way: There were games before Doom and there were games after Doom. This division is more clear than probably any other game in history. 13 years later (or so) we're still running around in a 3D-ish world and pointing at what we want to die.

Re:eh?

[Shaper_pmp]

For games which "advanced the genre" this is a terrible list.

How can you put System Shock 2 in the top five when SS1 was the game that first introduced role playing/immersive elements into FPSs? Even the review basically admits SS2 just continued the direction SS1 had set and added more polish to the idea!

Now, SS2 might have been a better game, but it didn't "advance the genre" for shit compared to the original.

Likewise Goldeneye - what the fuck? So it was the first FPS on consoles, big whoop - it wasn't exactly groundbreaking at the time compared to what the PC was doing.

Sure it kick-started the market for FPSs on consoles, but "FPS market in consoles" != "FPS genre".

"Games such as Halo could only have been done thanks to Goldeneye" is complete bullshit, too. Halo was originally being developed for the PC before Microsoft bought Bungie, so we clearly would still have seen Halo, just on a different platform.

If, as they claim, we're rating "what pushed the genre forward", the list should have looked more like:

Wolfenstein 3D (invented the genre - try pushing harder than that!)

Doom (first made FPSs widely popular, kicked off the modding scene, invented "Deathmatch" multiplayer)

System Shock One (introduced the idea of "plot", and first to make an effort to immerse the player in a story)

Quake or Descent (first entirely true-3d games. Descent because it was the first, Quake because it was also massively popular and upped the bar for graphics/physics for all games to come)

Half-Life (upped player-immersion to truly cinematic levels, and pioneered playing the story rather than "play a bit/read some story/rinse and repeat")

Don't get me wrong - System Shock 2, Goldeneye and the rest were brilliant games (some better games than those above, but they didn't "push the genre forward" for shit.

actually, I'd put it on

[Travoltus]

because UT2004 brought everything together: maturity of genre, absolute adrenaline-raising fun, balanced weapons, great team play mechanics (exemplified at the next level by Onslaught, originally "invented" by threewave CTF for Quake), it made connecting to games a snap, player models worked perfectly (IME), etc etc...

UT2004 should be in the halls of fame for getting everything right and balanced, and for looking good doing it.