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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.
Why are so many first person shooters poor, repetitive, linear, and formulaic? This question came up during a conversation with a friend, and he and I came up with some ideas that we noted were present in what we considered great first person games. From that and succeeding conversations, I came up the ten maxims that every FPS should follow.
1. Get into the action early
Draw the player into the world by force; use that initial confrontation to set the tone. This first impression must be followed up by developing the tone.
Example: Call of Duty. The speech of the commissars at the beginning of the Russian campaign, mixed with the planes, explosions, and machine gun nests is dangerous, intense, and doesn't go on forever.
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 effectively 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.
2. Create a world that invites, encourages, and rewards smart thinking
Combining fallback points, fortified positions, and stretches of exposed ground intelligently allows the player to choose when to make a run for safety or to take a stand.
Example: Far Cry. The mixed terrain and objects gave the world a "real" feeling, allowing stealth or brute force to move Jack through the game.
Always running in circles or darting around the same corner to pick off one enemy at a time is boring, and forcing the player to figure out the "trick" is an exercise in frustration (not challenge) if done poorly or too often.
Example: Painkiller. Despite featuring a wide array of locales and enemies (and lots of them) every level managed to be the same combination of jumping in circles as enemies appeared from every side.
3. The game world is the real world
There should almost never be just one way from one place to another; the player should never feel constrained in their options.
Example: Halo 2. The open city environments allows Master Chief different ways to complete his objectives, adding replay value to the game by rewarding the player for doing nothing more than exploring their environment.
Highly linear game play quickly becomes repetitive and predictable; using false paths to provide the illusion of free choice only serves to make players angry.
Example: Quake 4. Every objective that Kane is given is straightforward and straight forward. The rationale behind each one is obvious: in order to delve deeper into Stroggos, the various companies need enemies cleared out. Throwing the player into a tank offers little variety; each mission is either an arena or a tunnel through the various installments.
4. No one lives forever
While playing, there must be a sense of urgency and empowerment; there must be a meaningful reward for timeliness and effectiveness (even if not immediately so).
Example: Call of Duty 2. Sitting still is not an option, and trying to fight the war alone is a suicide mission. Furthermore, the player's participation is not optional; there are no invincible allies that can clear the room while you hang back.
Failing this, the immortality or immediate mortality of allies or enemies that hinges upon whether the player is present makes the player useless as a hero; they are relegated to the role of mute witness.
Example: F.E.A.R. The Point Man has the amazing ability to be one room over or one second too late when anyone that can help him is in danger.
5. Make the character's abilities and options suit the world they inhabit
A player's armaments, protection, and surroundings need to make sense in terms of their location, power, and weaknesses. Done right, the player ha
1. Split your limited content onto multiple pages to increase ad impressions
2. Say stupid and inflammatory things you know people will disagree with, like: "The story isn't more important than the game" (Don't bother having a plot) or "The player must always know the objective" (Don't even think of making something that has elements of adventure gaming)
3. Include useless flamebait at the end of the article like proclaiming MMOGs as bad, or announcing that one game company is superior to others.
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.
The article was on 2 pages. Were we reading the same article? I don't consider that amount of content to be too little for 2 freaking pages.
Inflammatory? Nowhere in the article did the authors insinuate that games should not bother to have a plot, their assertion was that a good plot would still make for a boring game if the gameplay elements are not there - and I reckon the vast majority of gamers will agree with that.
And where in the world did the article claim that MMOGs were bad? Not to mention one of the authors lists "Guild Wars" amongst his favorite games - hardly an anti-MMORPG fanatic.
Too many FPS games get so caught up in their own little world that they forget about making the experience fun. I recently beat Doom III (three years late, I know) and one word best describes it: boring. Sure, the weapons and environments (Mars, hell) are damn awesome, but the actual gameplay is monotonous and contrived. I actually turned on God Mode just so I could beat the game faster...
Now look at Team Fortress Classic. No other online FPS is as fun and entertaining, for me anyway. And the game is almost 7 years old! TFC has no story, virtually no learning curve, no preset environment, and the graphics aren't that great. It just has balanced classes and some awesome maps (Dustbowl is one greatest FPS maps ever crafted). Red Team and Blue Team just kill each other amid a sea of gibs for no reason...and I love every second of it!
Games need to step back and realize that it's not all about production values and storytelling and graphics (though these things are important). It's about fun and entertainment, too.
I can agree with the writer at places, but one person's set of ideas for what an FPS should be will be completely different to that of others.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
The article doesn't really say anything interesting. The authors merely express their wishes as players. As an inspiration for game designers, this is more to the point: http://www.theinspiracy.com/Current%20Rules%20Mast er%20List.htm
And here's my favorite game design rule:
In every game there should be a five second goal, a 30 second goal, a 10 minute goal and a 5 hour goal (actual times may vary of course):
5 seconds - see what's behind next corner, shoot an enemy.
30 seconds - get to next floor/building, find key, make something explode, see nice scenery.
10 minutes - get new weapon, encounter new enemy, finish a level.
5 hours - finish the game.
As long as the goals and rewards are enticing enough, it's all fine.
So as far as HL2 goes, was getting the crowbar that late in "half hearted" or not? Because I sure as hell felt the panic of someone chased when running through the apartments completely unarmed while CP stormed the place, and after they've been shooting at you while you frantically looked for an exit from the train yard, it's rather satisfying to club a CP thug to get your first pistol to gun down his buddy. Not too half-hearted if you ask me.
The gunships always felt kind of contrived though, and taking them down was nothing like the immense satisfaction you got from blasting the chopper that had been harrassing you through a good chunk of HL1. Or maybe I'm just jaded.
FPS's in general though are getting really quite old. In virtually all of them, you zip around on perfectly flat surfaces at cheetah speeds shooting with perfect accuracy due to your glass-smooth and unfaltering run, with your main interface to the world being your always-visible gun. Games like Gears of War may not be advancing cliched concepts much, but are at least shaking up the stale control mechanics somewhat. Normally I rail against "console-ification" of games, but I can only welcome these developments.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
You want to know what the best FPS ever was? Quake 3 with either the Threewave CTFS mod or CPMA mod.
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The reason is simple, the action is fast and well-balanced. I'll talk a bit about both points:
1. Action - playing quake in either of these two mods is like being in a fucking kung fu movie. That's the way it feels. You get in people's faces. You dodge, you rocket jump, you move fast.
When I play Halo or Half Life or (god help us) CS, I feel like the goal of the game is to hide and creep. If you turn a corner and find yourself with a bad guy, you hold down the trigger and spray and pray.
The feeling in quake is just so much better, in part due to the running speed, and in part due to the ability to rocket jump off of walls. I played UT for a while and it was better, but I still felt like I was stuck in molasses.
2. Balance - in quake 3, the weapons are better balanced than any other game I've ever seen. A rocket hit does exactly as much damage as a railgun, which does exactly as much damage as a shotgun (up close) or a nade. What that means is, the guy with the railgun doesn't necessarily own - not if you out smart him. Get in close and your shotgun is more powerful. This also means that switching weapons is a useful tactic.
What I see in other games is that some weapons are clearly better than others. That simply isn't true in quake (unless you are a complete newb). It also means that nobody can camp you in quake (unless you are a complete newb). Case in point. Everyone remembers the map q3ctf4. Play that map (in threewave mode) and let someone get on the railgun platform and start camping. I guarantee you I can kill him. All I have to do is dodge his one round, then jump on the bounce pad. I'll be up on the railgun platform before he can reload and I'll have a shotgun, so now I'll have the advantage.
Take a look at this video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=439291559
Note the speed of the game. It's just crazy. They aren't making games like that anymore. Modern FPSs are slow and boring. Even Quake 4 sucked.
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.
It was released in 1999, so it's not quite 10 years, but it's still depressing to think that gameplay hasn't advanced at all since then. I can think of two reasons why: the rise of consoles and the rise of LCD monitors. Console controllers aren't precise enough for Q3 speed gameplay, and LCD monitors are capped at 60Hz (even those that sync to 75Hz resample down to 60Hz) and most have perceptible lag. People who say 60Hz is enough obviously never played a fast FPS at high level. I used to play Q3 on a CRT at 180Hz, with the detail turned down to almost minimum. I never got to pro standards, but I'd kick ass on public servers. Another possibility is that pro-level Q3 is the highest possible achievement for human gaming, and the human brain is simply too slow for anything faster or more complicated.
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?
It seems to me to be pretty much
the same as always.
To each their own. To me Q3 lacked any sort of depth. It was just all twitch. You could kill or be killed in a matter of seconds as every weapon did too much damage. CS is more exciting in the sense you actually care if you die and try to be more cautious. Strategy mattered more as throwing yourself at the enemy would be stupid.
In any case, this was more about single player than multi-player...and Q3s single player was terrible.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
The thing that people forget is that HL2's art direction was amazing. I can't think of another title in recent memory that had a higher level of visual cohesiveness on a reasonable polybudget. For example, darkness consistently equals safety throughout the game, whereas any point you're exposed to sunlight is a location shrouded in danger. This is consistent both internally and externally. No-one, to my knowledge, has followed this color styling, yet it is an effective technique at making the player feel like an unwelcome outcast.
You can see how minimalist this tree really is. They only gave it just enough branches to cover the illusion, but not so many that it holds up to actual inspection. Another shot of said tree, from a more common angle. By not wasting any polys, they really can afford to put more on-screen. Heck, look at leaves. Artificially close, they are a big smear. But from the distance you normally see them, they can stick thousands of these things on screen, and they look beautiful.
Love the look of brick? Notice how in this shot they've burned the bump maps and damage maps and everything into the same texture? The increases the repetition in texture, but if you vary your geometry sufficiently the player will never notice. All they'll notice is a lot more is going on on-screen than they're used to. This technique looks terrible for big-open walls, but Half Life studiosly avoids big open walls within proximity of the player.
They even used a distinct pallete of blacks, muted browns, and light blues. This was far before anyone else was using anything but super-saturated primary colors.
Ignoring any technical accomplishments, this is an achievement of strong visual composition and consistent, solid art direction.
The ______ Agenda
Q3 is only pure twitch if you don't know the maps. The strategy is all about predicting the enemy's movements while balancing the need to control as much of the map as possible with remaining unpredictable yourself. When you've played for long enough the "twitch" becomes purely automatic - you see them, you rail them, with no conscious thought in between. For this reason the rocket launcher is the most interesting weapon, as it depends so much on your predictive ability.
You should _always_ be able to skip cutscenes, particularly if they're longer than about 10 seconds (Here's looking at you, KOTOR2).
Q1 was the best of the Quake series, followed by Q3/Q4 and Q2 .. Q4 i thought was just the same as Q3 but with improved graphics .. really seemed that way.
...
I've been bitching up a storm on the Unreal engine forums, about how EVERY game made with Unreal feels like crap compared to Quake
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
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.
My favorite games are the Half-Lives and the Halos. One is made by Bungie, who is owned by Microsoft, and will only play on their console (or Windows Vista) -- although there was a sort of halfhearted port of the original Halo. The other is made by Valve, which was founded by a bunch of guys who left Microsoft to make games.
Halo has decent tech, except you have to buy an xbox to experience it.
Half-Life has absolutely awful tech. Half-Life 2 still has loading screens, and they're awful -- no progress bar, but still a LONG wait. And Valve can be quite unhelpful to the community, and they've used DirectX 9 -- and I think Doom 3 proved that OpenGL could've been just as good a choice, if they weren't [ex-]Microsoft sellouts.
Looking at what's out there, it looks like Doom 3 is one of the better engines out there now -- that or the new Unreal. But Half-Life 2 uses its tech better. Doom 3 probably has more polys, and has more advanced shadows, but Half-Life 2 has the HDR, and just flat-out looks better. Even in Quake 4, people mostly look like they're plastic -- but Alyx looks as good as ever.
I really wanted to like Doom 3, and I do, but it's nowhere near as good a game as Half-Life 2, native Linux port or not, OpenGL or not, Carmack's Reverse or not. And I want to hate Halo and the Xbox, and I hate to support Microsoft so directly, but at the same time, Microsoft can afford to commission an orchestra to record the music for a game trailer.
Resistance: Fall of Man is actually looking pretty cool, too. And I know fl0w is nice. But I hate Sony soo much...
And all of that pisses me off. The companies I want to hate the most are actually doing really damned well at focusing on what really matters in games, while the companies I want to like just don't make anything fun to play. Only exception is Nintendo and some indie people (Introversion, Wolfire)...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
While it has some good points there were a few that really felt to be antithetical to the way I prefer to enjoy a good FPS.
First off was the idea that you need to always be under pressure. I acknowledge that some people think this makes a game fun. I remember playing a number of multiplayer mods for Quake where you'd get insta-gibbed if you stood still for too long. Yet I don't like this sort of frantic, don't pay attention to what you're doing and don't plan or think, just move around a lot concept. I like to be able to take a slow, methodical approach to the game. If I think there might be enemies nearby then I'm more likely to hold down the walk key... slink around slowly to keep my noise down and my aim steady and spend my time checking out every corner. I'm just about the only person I know who walked most of the time when I played Sonic the Hedgehog for fear of missing something or running into an enemy accidentally.
Related to this is the idea that you always need multiple ways to get somewhere. While I greatly applaud not having a single forced path and giving the player a degree of freedom I find that when misapplied it can be even more crippling. Give me two or three paths to a destination and I'm likely to go a little bit down one path, checking it out, then stop, turn around, and go back to check out the other path. After I'm done with any fights I'll probably wander back around and be certain I checked out everything along both paths. Not only to avoid having missed any powerups or weapons or such, but because I'll feel a bit cheated if I don't. While I like multiple playthroughs of a game (though I'll gladly play a linear game many, many times, just the same as I'll gladly watch a movie or read a book a good dozen or so times) I want to experience everything I possibly can the first time through. If not, I feel like I'm missing out on something. I want to see all the possible content and not miss a thing. The difference comes when you go beyond just two or three possible paths and begin to make it really open: e.g. Grand Theft Auto or other "sandbox" style games. At that point there isn't really a path except the one you make and I don't worry that I missed something by taking the left path over the right. Sure I'll worry a bit that maybe there was a better way. Maybe I could have snuck around in some other manner, but I'm generally ok in believing that I saw what there was and made my own choices.
Finally, the idea that you need to be thrown right into the action buts against my generally laid-back, methodical method of play. I want to slow down in the beginning. Learn about the world and the characters. Get a chance to test out my weapons a bit. Figure out the lay of the land and get a feel for my new persona. Throwing the player right into the thick of things makes me anxious and ill-prepared. It's an unpleasant feeling that makes me cringe and curl up inside. Then again, I'm the sort who always, always reads the entire manual from cover-to-cover before I even load up a game. Not reading the manual is unthinkable. How else do you know how to play it? How do you know what's going on? There's no room for "just learn as you go and fiddle around with things". Maybe, to a degree, in an adventure game where the rule is to explore (although you should still be taught the basic commands and how the parser/control scheme works and have the stage set for you if it isn't done entirely in-game), but that's a special case.
Ultimately this is only "how to make a better FPS for a specific type of fan". Some of the design ideas are solid, but these are far from the maxims they intend to be.
1 - Eliminate mindless key searching. This includes door switches, members-only jackets, and any other mcguffin the lack of which prevents progress through some point in the game. If you can't find a more interesting way of prolonging the time spent in a level than backtracking to acquire some silly object, your level design probably sucks. Half-Life always did this well. The game felt bigger as you never saw the same place for too long. Backtracking is so gameplay fatiguing it almost stands as an argument for linearity. Halo's maps probably wouldn't have felt so monotonous and symmetrical if you didn't have to plod back through them in reverse fighting the same dumb enemies, which wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't the Flood you were fighting (I found the other enemies in Halo pretty fun to fight), which brings me to point 2...
2 - If you AI is going to be dumb, at least don't make it numb as well. Build some reaction into your enemy's damage taken. If I pump a shotgun shell into any part of the enemy's body at close range, and they don't register a reaction, they should be completely indestructible. They are giving me the indication that they feel none of my damage and really I should be turning and running. Watch a zombie movie. While they feel no pain they will at least shudder when pummeled with a significant bit of force. If they can take a lot of damage, their advance should at least be hinderable. Remember Goldeneye? It was a little over the top, but you could create a veritable dance competition with a group of enemies wiggling about in response to your gunshots. The delay, while not killing your enemy, could at least buy you some time to form a new strategy. OTOH, Halo's Flood are no fun to attack. They feel more like switches that take x amount of button presses to turn off. The enemies in Doom3 felt similar, and I stopped playing after the first level. Bullets are supposed to hurt, and pain should always be visible. I've always wanted rag-doll to be a part of the killing experience as well as the death sequence. Knock your enemies on their ass even if they aren't dead. A grenade should knock you down too. Getting up should be part of the experience. What's more immersive than reacting to the forces in one's environment? None of the characters should feel like concrete pillars, which leads me to point 3.
3 - This was mentioned above and I agree, I'd like to see some more realistic camera movement in games. I only played a little Killzone for the ps2 (ps2 controller is terrible for fps IMHO), but I do recall the fantastic camera work. Reloading/running, it really felt like the camera was in somebody's helmet. This kind of stuff is more of the moving away from a static upright statuesque posture in an fps. It is more immersive. Gears of War, which I haven't actually played (and isn't really an fps), looks to do this pretty well.
As for ammo use as someone mentioned above, I think it's handled pretty well in games. If it's a decent game it seems the rule of thumb is to use it when you get it. If you're handed a rocket launcher, you're probably about to encounter something that demands having rockets shot at it. I find I've always got enough ammo to get the job done and actually like running low on it every now and then. Keeps up the tension. When the ammo balance is screwed up, the game is usually pretty crap in other areas as well anyway.
I think TFA is too philosophical. Those are silly over-reaching concepts that really should be applied to gameplay design in general, and lacking too much in any of them is going to hurt the fun of any game anyway. My list is short, but more directed at fps games in particular. And can we stop comparing multiplayer games in this discussion. They are a completely different beast. Apples and oranges. You usually don't require AI in multiplayer, there's plenty of user intelligence (or lack thereof!) already, although more interesting bots (with completely different design considerations from single player games) would be something