Ironically, a role-playing game inspired me to write this entry.  I won’t tackle it until Dragon Age is an afterthought, but the reviews suggest the soon-to-be-legendary Mass Effect 2 is akin to “Borderlands, this is how you do a role-playing shooter.”  However, I had an allergic reaction to one review snippet:

Gears of War fans should feel right at home with the cover mechanics and controls. Thankfully, there is still a huge emphasis on tactics and RPG stats – Modern Warfare 3 this is most definitely not.

Four years since Gears of War popularized cover mechanics, and as good as Uncharted 2 worked the flavor, I’m already sick of hiding behind walls.

It’s been a decade since Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena were the creative heights of twitch shooting.  Since then, developers have gone out of their way to prevent pinball wizards from permeating the new pay-to-play shooter culture of X-Box Live and beyond.

I’ve come to tolerate it.  Twitch shooters didn’t die because they were an inferior format; the business of gaming changed.  My problem?  We’re still hailing and deriding “Doom clones” that embodied nothing Doom and its successors were about.

Even the most jaded gamer would be an idiot to presume Doom was perfection.  The inaccurate chaingun is the most reliable long-range hitscan weapon, armaments are clearly balanced for single-player (i.e. player-versus-demon), circle-strafing is too effective, and your mobility is best described as “rocket-powered roller skates”.  Doom wasn’t roses.  But contrary to perception, the manic pace and pioneering weapons weren’t the panacea.  Level design was everything.

Featured: Doom gameplay.

How does Bayonetta succeed when its genre spent the last two decades holding on for dear life?  By approaching the meager diversity of its combatants from a number of angles.  Circle-strafing rendered Cyberdemons a legion of hulking puss, but even today, their one-hit-kill rockets are terrifying in close quarters.  Talented level designers became so good at exploiting these nuances that Doom level design became its own metagame, Dungeon Masters fighting the player’s expectation of what’s next

Melee monsters in closed quarters versus weapons with very little blowback?  What a novel concept.

But as popular as John Romero’s military level design proved, we weren’t yet convinced every building needed to look like a warehouse or armory, thus granting amateurs significant freedom to do what they wanted.  In 1998, Half-Life rewrote that rule.  Convincing everyone the first-person shooter was capable of the structured, compelling storylines reserved for role-playing, the march to shooter realism began.  No, the storylines remained absurd.  I’m talking the necessity for players to feel as though they’re walking around real structures and real buildings, discovering real weapons at realistic moments.

The other stomach punch was 1996’s QuakeWorld, the incredible achievement in wringing passable online Quake out of dialup.  Three years later, Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament were released within a month of each other, an unheralded stage in the fight against software piracy where their developers threw their weight completely behind multiplayer.

These games were the torchbearers in a multiplayer movement that snowballed into a greater demand for strategic gametypes, standalones (Starsiege: Tribes, Descent: Freespace) and modifications (Quake’s Team Fortress) leading the charge.  The most notable of these, 2000’s Counter-Strike, became the pre-cursor for the simul-shooters that would ensue.

Most notably, Microsoft recruited the company behind 1994’s Marathon to propel console shooters toward mainstream popularity.  2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved achieved its bacon by tapping an audience unfamiliar with the Quake approach.  If these games had a reference, it was Goldeneye or Perfect Dark, products prided more on party game appeal than hair-splitting accuracy.

The result was a product where one-man armies were discouraged, a title where single-player was a ginormous pile of shit.  And when Halo 2 became X-Box Live’s killer app, nobody cared.

With the exception of 2004’s Painkiller, we spent this evolution forgetting what Doom was about.  2001’s Serious Sam drew every comparison to the title as people forgot open-field combat was Doom’s most unsatisfying component.  2009’s Dreamkiller proved you could both an awesome premise (psychiatrist who gets the job done by entering the brains of her patients and filling their phobias with lead) and get called out not for being a poor title, but for being stuck in 1993.

“Some of the enemy and level designs display plenty of life and creativity and hint at the great shooter Dreamkiller might have been. Unfortunately, wonky game mechanics make this throwback twitch shooter more of an ancient relic than a welcome blast from the past.”

Circle circle circle, square room, square room…

Unless there’s a shift in the culture and economics of game development, this sort of plea will be irrelevant.  In 1998, developers considered it a good thing that players could mess with their product.  In 2009, it’s now a bad thing for open-content systems to compete with “downloadable content”.  Single-player?  Where’s the excitement in that?  And if you’re going to build a first-person shooter and come out even, you’re building it for a controller.  In other words, my advice isn’t coming to fruition any time soon.  So if you want to ride the Halo train, whatever.  I’d just prefer you stop misrepresenting what made the shooters of my childhood click.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 30th, 2010 at 7:03 pm and is filed under Console Gaming, Doom, Dreamkiller, Gameplay, Halo 3, Online Play, PC, Painkiller, Quake, Unreal Tournament. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.