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Ten Maxims Every FPS Should Follow
The Game Career Guide site has up a story that tries to lay down some rules for a good First Person Shooter. The article advocates in favour of player choices, fast action, and rich environments; keep the boring cutscenes and make sure the players are getting a great bang for their buck. From the article: "Don't allow the player to play the game half-heartedly, which is a dangerous stumbling block at any point of the game. Example: Half-Life 2. While the introduction presenting the environment of City 17 was much more effective than the tram sequence of Black Mesa from the game's predecessor, the sheer length of time between point insertion and getting the crowbar would never have worked in any other game."
HL2 worked because you still had things to play with and see. You could still throw cans at the CP or make that hoola girl dance. It had enough small things we were entertained until the "main game" started. Plus at the time HL2's graphics were (and maybe still are) amazing, so when you saw all the tiny details you drooled instead of going "I need a gun!"
HL2 was deeper than gun and run even if that is the game play in effect. That is why it could do stuff without a weapon.
I like muppets.
Examples: Red Faction, Quake 4, and too many others
Examples: RTCW, MoH:AA
Examples: HL2, Jedi Knight - Jedi Outcast, Prey*
* = Although the gravity & portal puzzles made a welcome change, they were used as a substitute for jumping puzzles.
In FPS games, some of my pet hates are:
Enemies who shrug off massive damage
It's (borderline) bearable in something like Doom. Who knows how a demon from Hell would react to a shotgun blast to the face? But in a game like Black, which is supposedly 'realistic', it pisses me off. If you take 10 M-16 bullets to the head at a range of four feet, you are dead, and I don't care if you happen to be wearing body armour.
Super-accurate snipers
Black again (though it's not the only example). If you can see some much as a single pixel of a bad guy, not only can they see you, but they can instantly snipe you while you're still bringing up your rifle. Fuck off.
Boss battles
Yes, I know bosses are now an unavoidable part of gaming, however much one despises them. But there's a tendency in FPS games to go for the R-Type approach - namely that some tiny and obscure weak point has to be hit repeatedly with pinpoint accuracy before the boss suffers any kind of damage, then another, then another... Come on! (Even worse are the kind where some weak point has to be hit repeatedly within a time limit, and any error resets everything.) At the very least, offer a brute force alternative - let players just hit them with everything they have. Players who find the weak point can be all smug that they saved some ammo. Everyone else can go 'Well, killed that fucking annoying obstacle. Now I can get on with the game.'
All these things have made me give up on games that I'd enjoyed up to a certain point, simply because the annoyance and frustration factor outweighed the fun. If I'm not enjoying a game, I'll stop playing it. And I sure as hell won't buy the sequel.
You must think in Russian.
I couldn't disagree more. The industry is suffering a crippling dearth of innovation and risk-taking, and suggesting that everything has to match up to some prescribed formula as described could not be more damaging for the industry. How about instead of adding more restrictions, we remove the crippling existing ones that make every darn game the same? How about a FPS with no fecking guns in it, just once?
Music. Nobody ever mentions the contributions that the musical composition in a game (or even the soundtrack's implementation in the game's sound design) even though humans are intrinsically affected by music. Evidence of this pops up all over the place. Sociology experiments ask strangers to socialize find that they talk about what most and first? Music. Surveys ask (admittedly sometimes self-selected) respondents how important music is to them? They say 'very'. The human predisposition for music is very thoroughly tied to the organization of our brains. Still, many otherwise competent game directors, and movie directors, barely think about the powerful effect of music on the "feel" of the work in question.
Examples:
How much a part of the Megaman universe is rounded robots, and how much is the beepy/boppy music? How much of the mood of Metroid is due its visual design, and how much due its music? The Final Fantasy musical scores are varied, moody, and well-tailored to the environments (of course they are; as I'm arguing, in a real way they *are* the environments!). Check out Yasonuri Mitsuda's early soundtracks for an example of music so good that the unknown composer is catapulted into fame. The music of Halo is varied in style, pace and motive, and shouldn't work, but it does because it's just so good and because it's so thoughtfully matched with the game. The soundtrack of Einhander is one of the most varied, yet coherent electronic/techno compilations I've ever heard, and that game is a shooter! The film scores for the original Batman? The Empire Strikes Back? West Side Story? Field of Dreams? JAWS?!? These are a few of my favorite things... Watch Castaway sometime and note how the movie uses THE COMPLETE ABSENCE of scoring for a vast and continuous portion of its running time: he's stranded on a deserted island after all. All this music contributes immeasurably to the works in question, and I doubt even the most musically indifferent among you can honestly claim their music does not affect your appreciation of these works.
Shooters feel the benefit of, or wrath of their soundtracks as much as every other type of game and every other audio-visual art form. I estimate that any given individual's regard for a game can be altered by at least one full "degree" by the quality of its music alone. Shooters must be especially vulnerable to this, as they are often built narrowly to begin with and don't have much else to save them if they screw up one of the few gamer-hooks they actually attempt. Music is a human-hook. All gamers are humans. Whether there is a game, or movie, or play involved, or only the music itself, music is important.