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[Mizhara]

What if Quake had been made today?

This is a rather depressing movie because of how sadly true it is, while it also gave me quite a few laughs.
Personally, I blame consoles since they have never been able to keep up with that kind of fast skillbased gameplay, but is there more to it? Is it because of the amount of 'casual' gamers that have taken over the market and demands Call of Modern Halofield Warfare XXIV remakes until the end of time, since they're not really into challenges/skillbased gameplay? Why is it that the FPS game genre have practically fucking died for those of us with dreams of the old glory days?

Share your thoughts on this, Backstage.

[Louella Dougans]

lots of genres seem to have declined.

e.g. previously, there was X-Wing, Freespace, Wing Commander, for space-type fighter-pilot game things. Now there's... ?


Possibly, it is to do with obsession for internet-based multiplayer.

Doom and Quake, and other games worked great over LANs, but less so via modem and such. That whole latency thing.

Same with the spaceflight games, things move fast enough that a missed network thingie means you;re shooting at things that aren't there anymore.

but a slower -pace means stuff is far more easily smoothed by the game code to account for network issues.

So the games are made to be suitable for internet multiplayer, and make money off the subscriptions to the internet service.

Maybe. That's my thought anyway. vOv

[Mizhara]

That's actually a -very- good point. Didn't even think about that.

And GODSYES Volition, make Freespace 3! You just released SR3 which was sandbox porn, now go back and make Freespace 3!
It'd be the ONLY game in the genre on the whole damn market, which should easily net you a massive number of sales!

[lallara zhuul]

Quake, Doom.

Both FPSs, but both very inclined towards survival horror.

Deadspace one and two, both very good bang for the buck.
Resident Evil series, Silent Hill series... there is good survival horror out there, that gives you that same FPS feeling that the old games did.

Then there is the more RPG oriented System Shocks and their current flag bearer the Bioshock series.
Nothing to complain about there.

Deus Exes and their current iteration.
Plenty of creaming of ze pants on these forums.

Remember the first games of the Elder Scrolls series?
They were one step up from the Eye of the Beholder and Dungeon Master.

Now there are people missing sleep over Skyrim.

For me the FPS evolution has been quite clear.
From Doom & Quake to the Unreal series.
Fast paced multiplayer combat in tight quarters.
COD series is exactly that, with exp.

For a more 'warlike' scenario, you have to go with Battlefield 3.

Back in the day you could not make a 'realistic FPS', because the tools sucked.
Hence the FPSs were a mixture of genres.

A single soldier fighting the legions of Hell in Mars FFS.

With that premise the Gears of War series and the Lost Planet series are the 'real' children of Doom & Quake.

Perhaps its just the case that once the tools got more complex, the innovation has suffered.
Perhaps it is the big money that moved in on gaming that caused it.
Perhaps the fact that Elite has sold a total of 600 000 copies to date while Modern Warfare 3 sold 6.5million copies on its first day has something to do with it.

Hard games do not sell.
There is no money in making games that challenge you.

It is a change in society and culture that could explain it.

I think its a big question, larger than time related, and one that I would like to see to be sorted in my lifetime.

By a zombie apocalypse.

[Senn Typhos]

I've yet to hear a legitimate reason for the outcry against the modern warfare (that's a genre, not a title of a series) FPS games of today. I mean, not even one.

So if anyone would like to put it into bullet points, that'd be great.

[Desiderya]

Skill based games are unpopular, since they're usually dominated by a small group of players who do possess that skill. That's why grind and so on is big in MMOs since it's the big leveller between all players.

'Levelling' and perks ruin these FPSes for me. Also CoDesques are basically not the classic FPS (with rocket jumping, insane weapons and tons of speed) but more of a slower tactical shooter which desperately wants to get played like a classic FPS. It's just using bunny jumping instead of rocket jumps.

Consoles might be blamed, obsession with graphics over gameplay might be blamed, or just the changes in the target audiences, as with all 'hardcore' games of the past. We were nerds.

[Seriphyn]

Gaming is a bigger market than the movies, now. It's no longer a niche; you have everyone and anyone playing video games now (Casual gamer trifecta; Need for Speed, FIFA and CoD).

If you're taking 1 million dollars of someone else's money to make a top quality game, it cannot be hard and counter-intuitive like games were back in the 90s. Developers are now huge corporations, not a team of five guys who can afford to cater to a niche market. If gamedevs fuck up now, they'll lose their publisher as they won't sell to the huge mainstream market. Games have to be easy to get into, otherwise no one will play it (no one relative to how many people play games these days)

Gaming went mainstream, that's what happened.

However, I am impressed with Battlefield 3's multiplayer. We do need a decent singleplayer experience again, though.

[IzzyChan]

From what I see it went from "what we want to play" to "what the investor thinks will sell."

Luckily indie games still exist. :3

Lazy edit: Also I've noticed that gamers are also to blame on some of the results of game quality today.  Every game coming out every gamer picks apart the graphics to an almost insane level, a few people pick apart the gameplay mechanics, even fewer care about the writing.

With developers worrying about "does this shadow look realistic" they lose time to put in, yknow, a decent budget for writers.

[Desiderya]

Note, not every game makes this, obviously, but most do.

[Kaleigh Doyle]

I think, to some degree, graphics have been the culprit in the direction of FPS genre games. They have made tremendous advances in making polished looking games, but the price is hundreds of man hours to create such an environment, which means the game is going to be much shorter. Look at the difference between Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the original; while HR is an amazing product, the replay value is nowhere near as high as the original because the game has been reduced to a stealth shooter and the game is considerably shorter than its predecessor.

There's also a battle for realism versus the challenge. The old FPS games had AI who could hit you every time at any distance if they saw you. Now, the AI fires inaccurately, provide covering fire and attempt to flank you. The AI has gotten considerably better, but human ingenuity will always find a weakness in predictable behavior.

Games these days are less about being a game and more about storytelling, and that might be because of games like Final Fantasy VII and Half-Life, genre-changers that made you invested in the story more than just completing objectives because the game wanted me to.

[Seriphyn]

Anyone here played Halo Reach? Perfect example of a recent game (2010) that goes against many of the tropes and grievances displayed here. Am of course referring to the single-player campaign, and it might just be that Halo has to be classed in its own realm of FPS due to its distinct difference in executing its campaign gameplay.

[Silas Vitalia]

Popular culture has the tendency to take things and 'blunt' them, smoothing over the hard edges to create an easily digestible format.

The larger the cross-section you have to appeal to, and the larger the influence of 'marketing' divisions, etc, the more easily accessible the thing will be.

Just look at Hollywood and top 40 music as examples of anything 'risky' or not easily assimilated being shut out of the marketplace.

So we get beautiful, gorgeous first person shooters that are more cut-scenes on rails than anything else. 

[Lyn Farel]

What Seri and Kaleigh said. And I am saying this because I am myself in the graphic workflow in the industry, and I do not even want to imagine the resources needed to create massive, huge and open environnements. Either you get a FF XIII where everything, EVERYTHING is a 3D unique object, because EVERYTHING is modeled specifically for its place, and you end up with one of the most linear series, but also beautiful and NEVER repetitive. Emphasis put on the shinyness. Then you have some kind of hybrid like Deus Ex or bioware games where you are free but still with scripted parts and environnements. Or either you want something more enormous, more free with huge environnements like Elder Scrolls, GTA, etc, and you usually end up with something quite ugly, low standard or less resources demanding "per pixel" to create it. Lets face it, GTA, Red Dead Redemption, or especially the Elder Scrolls, are ugly and lot less polished compared to more linear games.

Back in the day you just basically had to crate your very low poly 3D models and add textures. Most environnements were quite barren due to technical limitations, mostly with walls and objects directly tied to gamedesign (very few things dedicated to the ambiant immersion) Now, you need concept artists, a lot of Artistic Direction skills and process, pre production, then all the creation process of 3D assets that needs : 3D models, complex animations, textures, shadering, specular, normal maps, and now even ambiant occlusion and tesseling, all this with complexe lightning and scenes full of 3D objects absolutely everywhere.

So yes, thats realism vs abstraction. It was very hard to go for full realism before, but now it is the case.

But what pisses me off these days are all the people complaining each time something is a little too linear. They are all happy to have awesome stories, universes and very well done environnements, but when the linearity comes up as a matter of fact, they all whine about it.

[Lydia Tishal]

I miss the original Tribes.

[Wanoah]

I expected a lot more progression with AI. While graphics have certainly improved massively, the people you shoot at have largely stayed the same. I'd hoped to see enemies that were challenging because they were smart, not because they had 5000 hit points. Nothing dumps me out of a game quicker than shooting an enemy in the face several times and him staying alive.

I assume that the problem is that AI is hard. Graphical fidelity may be expensive, but it's comparatively easy and has specialist hardware aimed at it in the case of PCs. I also assume that while you can maybe dedicate an entire processor to handle simulation if you release a PC-only game and set the minimum specs to be quite high, that simply won't fly with the consoles and their ancient hardware.