Does This Thing Go Any Faster?
Two years back, I huddled some friends for fun with the X-Box 360 port of Doom, a game I consider the cream of the medium. Their experience with shooters was mostly Halo, currently fighting a tight battle with Call of Duty for “face of the genre”. The words most consistent in coming out of their mouths: “This game is so fast.” Having first played the Doom series when I was eight, I could only think “No, this game is not fast. Halo is slow.”
Sunday’s entry was the story of a franchise (Team Fortress) earning accessibility by not only sacrificing gameplay, but the element of speed. As other genres satiate the best players by becoming faster, adding more notes, and throwing more bullets at the player, what the hell happened to the first-person shooter?
No wonder pro gaming can’t get off its ass in the United States. This country has a gun fetish. It loves war. Today, the most popular shooters simulate war. War requires teamwork. And guess what? Teamwork doesn’t sell tickets. Superheroes do. And the pace of games like Halo have become Kryptonite for world-class gamers.
I am a carry-over from an era where Doom said “cover is for pussies”. That evolved into Quake and Unreal Tournament, half-shooter, half-gymnastics simulation. Those evasive maneuvers have been replaced by “get behind the wall, you noob!”
If you want to blame any one game for this, the answer is beautifully ironic. It was Doom 3.
Yeah, Halo was the coming-out party for the console shooter, but ID Software is the undisputed father of the genre. Set in code, they declared the first-person shooter a genre where reloading weapons was for bitches, that dozens of beasts would simultaneously fail to cut you down. And then Doom 3, thanks to the Duct Tape Reduction Act of 2184, was pure darkness chugging at eight frames a second.
So much for “cover is for pussies”. Maybe I should go order Painkiller. I’ll be back later.
August 4th, 2009 at 9:41 am
Well, it was all good back when graphics were simple and abstract, but once you have realistic graphics and animations, you just can’t make a game on steroids anymore; it just wouldn’t feel right. I think UT was already rather ridiculous. The Quake series solved this issue really well with it’s trick jumps; the regular player motion wasn’t that crazy fast, you had to do those strafe-jumps to get real speed and since players aren’t in contact with the ground while jumping there’s no walk animation that would look weird at that speed. It’s still pretty crazy unless you’re used to it, though.
So, the trick to making such speeds work in a FPS would be to make the game more abstract, maybe to the point where the players are no longer humanoid characters. Of course, then it becomes tricky to get the players to relate to their in-game avatars.
So, in conclusion, maybe the FPS was destined (or cursed) to become a slower genre from the start.
On the topic of teamwork not selling tickets, there’s plenty of team sports that sell tickets so I don’t see why that couldn’t transfer over to team FPSs.
I think a bigger issue for FPS games is that they aren’t spectator friendly – if the camera follows a player’s first person view, you don’t have a good overview of the whole game, even if it’s just a 1 vs 1 (not to mention you can get sick watching it), however, if the camera is away, you still don’t have a good overview because of the FPS level design. This is a problem that RTS games, or basketball, do not have.
So, while being great competitive platforms, FPS games just might not be good spectator platforms due to the 3D nature of their level design, and you can’t really blame the developers for that.
August 4th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Painkiller is the fucking best
August 4th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
are you going to write something about 1.24 and the ruckus it’s causing at the wgdf and tech forum? lol.
August 4th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
Mebbe. <3
August 5th, 2009 at 7:36 am
Cover really is for pussies, why I hate halo, why I love Painkiller and a few other such tittles, even UT3 fucked it up by accepting to have better graphics but slower fights …In my oppinion UT 2004 and Quake 3 are the best games for fast paced slaughter.
August 5th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Super Noah’s Ark 3D for the SNES is probably the best FPS game to ever be released.
August 5th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Also what game I had high expectations for last year and failed badly was Turok …was expecting it to be fast + gory ….the only thing it turned out to be was bad graphics and slow arcade boss fights.
August 5th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
I love UT, I was playing that shit when I was 10. lol @ lack of duct tape.
So what I’m getting from your problem is that TF2 would be the PERFECT solution! Apparently, since there’s no teamwork to be had, it will be very exciting to watch. Because there is no balance, a single l33t player can rape everyone in the server because it’s just a DM game with these silly flags that nobody goes for. This sounds like very good entertainment indeed. Oh man I love hypocrisy.
August 5th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
I know nothing about the balance in Team Fortress 2, but I think you’re confusing “broken game dominated by two or three classes” with “balanced game ala Starcraft where great players are capable of jaw-dropping stunts”.
August 10th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Sooo basically you want the “Galaga” style of FPS, running down corridors blasting waves of enemies? It’s “arcade”ic but i understand that sentimentally.