Why aren't FPS-Games like this nowadays?

[whiteraven1000]

Comparing Old School FPS-Games with Modern FPS-Games ...


1.) The Start of the Game

Old School:
"When you start you already have a weapon and get attacked within the first minute of playing."

Modern:
"First you walk around a bit, collecting some stuff, talking to people, then you see some weird things happening, you get your weapon and your first enemies."


2.) Level Design:

Old School:
"For me the maps sometimes felt a bit like mazes. Picture this: You come a cross a door and it tells you, you need a red key to open it. So you start looking for it .... for a long time .... until you fnd it in a place you did not except it .... In a toilet you didn't know you could dive into.

Modern:
"You enter the "map", you exactly got told where to go. There are no keys to unlock doors. You kinda feel like being on a Theme Park's Dark Ride.


3.) Weapons

Old School:
"Carring like 8 or more weapons at the SAME time."

Modern:
"You only carry 2 weapons at the same time."
"This is more realistic, but who needs that?"


4.) Storytelling

Old School:
"You read the story either before the game AND/OR between the levels written sometimes on what you may call a "Loading-Screen". (although it isn't one)

Modern:
"You hear the story while you play. For example while talking to NPC"

Note: For this one I have to give the point to Modern FPS-Games.

....

Did I miss some points?

Also feel free leave your opinions.


Thanks for reading,


Ralf

[Emmanuelexe]

There was so much awesome fps in the past, in the 90's especially, i can't understand what happened in the 2000, after doom3, there was really nothing more (even if doom3 was slow, at least, you can carry more than 2 weapons at the same time), and then, only modern military shooter.......
Maybe because lambda people prefer simple fps who are easy to play, like CS, COD...just because it's always the same thing, they don't need to use their brain, just for some tactics in mp but no more'
I prefer when there is a real Solo and Mp, not only MP, but the single player can be an awesome experience, it's what fps were supposed to be !

[I'm a Cop, you Idiot]

Games used to have a few devs so they could do whatever they wanted. Nowadays they have to appeal to a lot of people so mechanics are usually lost.

[Phoenix]

When FPS games were early in development the devs had to work with the technology available. They had to squeaze every bit of processing power possible just to render the game. Most CPU's back when Wolfenstein and Doom were first programmed did not have a floating point processor. They could only do integer math. It wasn't until the Pentium came along that floating point was common in CPU's. Quake finally made the jump to floating point math, but prior to that... ugh. I've seen what they had to do in Doom's source code to make it work. Not pretty. Then you have limitations on color - everyone takes 3D hardware for granted, but back then you had 256 colors to work with at the most - system and video memory, and disk space was at a premium. You had to get all the graphics, sound, program code, and map data onto a couple of floppy disks that held 1.44 megabytes. Yeah, that's right... 1.44 megabytes. A 100 megabyte hard drive was pretty standard.

So... given the limitations, focus on gameplay was crucial. You couldn't put hours of dialogue in a game and a ton of NPC friendlies to tell you what to do. Sure, you could do that in text form in an adventure game, but in an action game? A little history. Ultima Underworld was one of the first games that featured a first-person view. John Carmack saw it and said, "I can do that better". It started out as Catacomb 3D, but what we really remember is Wolfenstein 3D. Id specifically cut out the adventure game interaction and inventory system and focused on pure action. Doom perfected it. Duke 3D and Shadow Warrior followed on this formula, adding a small inventory system, humor, and one-liners. The story didn't really matter, and could be told in the instruction manual. The objectives were always simple: Stay alive, kill stuff, find the exit. It worked quite well.

As hardware improved, devs could start adding more content, so story and NPC's started making their way into games. Graphics and sounds improved, but level design? Part of the creativity went out the window when games became overly linear and scripted, and the other part left when, due to the more realistic-looking environments, fun and creative design took a backseat to trying to keep environments believable. As for my own experience with "realistic" games... I had dabbled with Counter-Strike when it was still just a Half-Life mod. I decided, after getting to about Beta 6, that it was actually rather boring. I spent most of the time spectating after someone with half of my ping killed me before I could get a shot off (I was on dialup modem at the time... ping was super-critical then), waiting for two campers to run the clock down because neither one would budge from their hidey-hole. I decided to go back to playing Quake 2, despite having horrible lag, because it was just more fun to blow stuff up with rocket launchers.

Us old-school players tend to keep playing the old games for these reasons. Given the choice of playing a modern shooter like CoD and playing Quake 2 or (old) Doom, I'll play Quake 2 or Doom, especially if we're talking multiplayer. You haven't seen insane multiplayer until you've seen a Quakeworld game with skilled players. It sucks that modern games can't go back to the "action only" formula of days before, but that's business. At least they got it right with Doom '16 putting the combat first for the single player. I... won't comment on the multi. I don't play it. I played the public beta and did not like the multi, so I didn't bother with it after release.

[丂ｱ乇丂丂ひ_丂乃]

2006 marked the start of mainstream level target audience. Notice how in 2004 in Doom 3 you had stuff like fully interactive monitor screens with realtime cursor and stuff. It at the time being game in graphical quality unlike anythign else. And now we have games like Far Cry 2, Far Cry 3, Doom 4, Wolfenstein New Order.. all static and simple, nothing amazing and nothing fast nor frantic either. Fully designed for the consoles and lowest common denominitor.

When big names moved away from PC design focus to console design, that's when the difference came to be. FPS doesn't work on consoles the same way it does on PC and this is why things now are how they are. Consoles neither never will pack the processing power what PC has.

Also, it's easier to make and market some scripted cutscene fests than have hours of gameplay testing a level and not to even mention balancing a map for actual resources like Health and Armor pickups. Throwing in infinite-ammoboxes is just so much easier for the devs to do than do pickup based gun systems.

[Jian Hou Zi]

First-Person Shooters on console systems, that's what happened.

Probably the #1 advantage PC gaming has over consoles is the keyboard & mouse combination. There are dozens of bindable keys on a keyboard while the most recent handheld controllers have barely over a dozen. Games like Hexen had a large item inventory, which you could scroll through or you could bind a hot key for each item. Apogee/3D Realms let you reassign two keys to almost any function and even double-bind a single key -- without having to directly edit the configuration file. (The first time I played a Windows-based shooter, I was annoyed that I couldn't bind left and right Shift/Ctrl/Alt keys separately.)

Have you ever you tried playing a classic PC FPS ported to a 32-bit console? In the 1990s I played Duke Nukem 3D on my cousin's PlayStation 1, and it was quite frustrating because I didn't have enough buttons for fast-paced gameplay.

Console controllers eventually got analog sticks which improved movement and aiming, but an old computer mouse with a rubber ball instead of a laser can still maneuver faster than a stick. Even a trackball in the hands of a skilled player is still better!

Original games were later made for consoles, but developers were still treating them like PC games with several weapons and sometimes inventory items which still had to be scrolled through.

In 2001 along came the Xbox, with original non-PC games like Halo by which the developers figured out ways to simplify the interface:

• Scrolling through 10 different weapons takes too long, so
  
  • Limit the player to TWO so that he can just alternate the two with a single button
    
  • or limit the player to FOUR weapons and use the D-pad as weapon hot keys.
    
• Inventory management is too cumbersome for a console controller, so
  
  • Keep the inventory very small
    
  • Or have a large inventory but only allow the user to equip one or a few items between levels
    
  • Or eliminate the inventory feature entirely.
    

I don't know how much PC ownership fluctuated during the 2000-oughts, but suddenly there were a lot of people who didn't own PCs who were play FPS games on consoles. I honestly never imagined that FPS games could be so successful on keyboardless interfaces.

Halo, and many games like it, was a console game first, and then eventually was ported to the PC a couple of years later. As the processing capabilities of consoles and common PCs began to converge, developers eventually realized they could develop their new games for consoles and PC simultaneously, or at least closely following each other. The econimic approach to designing and programming became, "Make it work with the limitations of console input devices first, accommodate a keyboard and mouse second." For this reason, many console and PC games are near identical to their counterparts, the most noticeable differences being that console games display "Press [brightly colored button]" while PC games display "Press [gray, square key]" (unless your game lets you use your USB console controller).

The consolifcation of PC games is truely frustrating to PC gamers. I played Halo or Halo 2 for the first time in the late 2000-oughts at a Halo party. I had to turn the aim sensitivity all the way up (I believe it was labeled "insane") and I still couldn't aim fast enough. Every time a friend talks me into playing a game on his console, I have to correct the Y-axis (see my later comments about axis inversion).

Let's not forget the (equipable) turd that was Duke Nukem Forever. PC players were so pissed off about the 2-weapon limit that a patch was eventually released that increased the limit to a whopping four. Because of the weapon limitation, the gun placement was very specific with the expectation that the player would pick up whichever new weapon appeared and discard an old one. I ended up just carrying the two best-functioning guns and only ever picked up the crappy rocket launcher when it was required to progress (and the game always provided one in such cases) then dumping it for my prefered weapon as soon as possible.

Because of the simplification of FPS games for consoles, there have been many that could have allowed players on different consoles to play with each other, but developers chose not too, citing the advantages PC players would have over console players.

About 5 years ago my brother-in-law, an experienced console gamer, was playing the latest Halo game, which I had never played before. He was having trouble getting past a level, so I joined him. Once I corrected the Y-axis and readjusted my mindest to the 2-weapon-B.S., I helped him pass that level and then we went on to finish the game together.

I way outperformed my brother-in-law. I say this not to brag or to hoist the "PC Master Race" flag, but to emphasize this point: The vast majority of my 3D gaming experience has been on the PC, with very little expience with console games. Whenever I sit down to play a console game that could benefit significantly from a few extra buttons, I feel like I'm being restrained. Meanwhile, console gamers are doing the best they can with their limited input devices, but still not realizing their full potential.

More old school vs modern comparisons:

Y-Axis Inversion

Old School:
Pushing the mouse forward tilted your view forward, and pulling the mouse backward tilted your view backward. If you wanted the opposite, you had to invert the Y-axis.

Modern:
Pushing the stick forward tilts your view backward, and pulling the stick backward tilts your view forward. If you want the opposite, you have to invert the Y-axis.

This is something I really don't understand. If you're moving a cursor around a 2-dimensional screen, sure it makes sense for mouse-forward to move the cursor up and mouse-backward to move the cursor down, but for manipulating a 3-dimentional perspective, whether you're standing on the ground or sitting in a simulated aircraft, it just makes sense for the input to behave like, well, real life: If I want to look down, I tip my head forward. If I want to look up, I tip my head backward. When did this concept become so difficult that an inverted Y-axis became the standard?

Environment Enclosure and Secret Areas

Old School:
Games often had multiple routes which required climing on things, crawling through tunnels, or destroying part of the environment to be discovered. This lent itself well to secret areas that could only be found by hitting a crack in a wall, shooting a distant switch, or pushing the "use" key on the right decoration.

Modern:
Games rarely have multiple routes and are too often on guided paths. They are also lacking truely hidden secret areas. My experience with modern "secret areas" have usually been "figure out how to open this obvious door," or "go slightly out of your way to look around a corner to find an item lying in plain sight," or the game might go out on a limb with "move this box to find something hidden behind it." There have been exceptions to this, but that's what they are, exceptions, and the norm is very lazy.

Terrain:

Old School:
It was quite easy to build a level as systems were simpler, and a well-built level rarely had issues like players getting stuck in random places.

Modern:
Level design is quite complex with very meticulously crafted visuals. With its many-surfaced terrains and objects, it's too easy to accidently create random sticking places. Too often in modern games I've been walking/running/crawling but because of a nearly imperceptable difference in height between two adjoining surfaces my forward progress was halted and I had to jump to progress past a rise that wouldn't stop an infant in the real world.

Realism:

Old School:

• Players could carry all the weapons and lots of ammo.
  
• Players could run fast and without tiring.
  
• Players could jump their full body height.
  
• Players could twist through the air against the laws of physics, e.g. jump (or fall) out one window and swiftly push back into a neighboring window on the same wall.

Modern:

• Players can only carry a few weapons, typically 2, usually 4 at most, and have to reload, often.
  
• Players can run only in short bursts, only forward and never sideways or backwards, and players usually can't shoot while running. No more running into your own rocket!
  
• Players usually can barely jump higher than elephants.
  
• Game engines begrudgingly allow players to slowly alter their inertia while airborne.

One of the deplorable aspects of modern gaming is the realism. Apparently too much escape from fantasy, like running without stopping to wheeze, makes a game too unbalanced, even if it is a single-player game.

I must admit that reloading a weapon can sometimes be satisfactory, but how cool or annoying it is depends on how the game handles it. Quick is best.

Health Management:

Old School:
Players typically had a number representing health, and health power-ups were strategically placed across the level. Sometimes health could be increased beyond the maximum, and special health pick-ups would often be hidden in secret places, or otherwise placed to reward the player. Players could also pick up armor which halved the damage recieved.

Modern:
Players have regenerating health. If they can just avoid taking damage for a few seconds, their health bars will fill back up automatically. There seems to be few modern games that use armor/shields, but then they're totally unnecessary with regenerating health.

Presumably balancing health power-ups in a modern game is too difficult, so regenerating health is used instead. There are a few cases where this works well, like in Portal where you don't even have a health meter, but in most cases it's just lazy design.

Rocket Launchers:

Old School:
Rocket launchers made big explosions and a single hit was only survivable if you had 200 health plus 100 armor, plus a portable health power-up to help you survive the next hit. Their main disadvantages were that they were too dangerous for close combat and fast-moving opponents might dodge fast-moving rockets at a distance.

Modern:
Things that go boom don't have much bang. The blast radius is small, so that it's not as dangerous in close combat, but then hitting near a target is much less effective than it used to be. The rocket also moves slowly so that slow-moving targets can easily dodge it at a distance.

[Phoenix]

The irony about rocket launchers is that modern games are not even close to realistic about how they work. An AT-4 or an RPG-7 flies hella fast. The explosion from an RPG has a very large lethality radius - same with hand grenades - and it's a VERY bad idea to stand anywhere near the person firing the rocket. Stand behind someone firing an RPG-7 and you'll get your face burned off, as well as severe internal injuries, assuming you live through it. Fire it from inside a room and you're likely to need a funeral yourself. An AT-4 you can fire safely from inside a room since it has a salt-water charge to blow out the back of the launcher, but it's still a bad idea to be near the operator. Sure, the older games weren't super realistic about rocket physics, but in Shadow Warrior it's VERY easy to die from explosions.

The one that always gets me is bullets underwater. Just about every game treats water like air when it comes to bullets, whereas real bullets don't go too far under water. In the real world you're pretty safe from gunfire if you dive underwater, but a grenade or any other explosive is going to seriously ruin your day since explosions are far more severe under water owing to the fact that water does not compress and carries the shockwave a lot farther than the air does. The shrapnel is rendered useless, but the force from the explosion is going to reach out a lot further.

Personally I don't like overly realistic games, or games that attempt to be overly realistic when they don't need to be. To me, the level of realism required should be just enough to allow you to understand the world you're in - gravity, running into things, solid vs not solid objects, some physics to define movement, etc, but after that the gameplay needs to be the focus. I would say the exception to this is if you're making a simulator of some kind. That's about it though.

[laff]

Modern games are trying to compete with movies and they try to appeal to the lowest common denominator, making the game easy to get into by new players who have never played a game in their life before, it's about sales. I feel like the gamers have been pushed out of the gaming industry by a bunch of accountants and businessmen who only care about their bottom line.

[Mister Torgue Flexington]

Originally posted by Phoenix:

The irony about rocket launchers is that modern games are not even close to realistic about how they work. An AT-4 or an RPG-7 flies hella fast. The explosion from an RPG has a very large lethality radius - same with hand grenades - and it's a VERY bad idea to stand anywhere near the person firing the rocket. Stand behind someone firing an RPG-7 and you'll get your face burned off, as well as severe internal injuries, assuming you live through it. Fire it from inside a room and you're likely to need a funeral yourself. An AT-4 you can fire safely from inside a room since it has a salt-water charge to blow out the back of the launcher, but it's still a bad idea to be near the operator. Sure, the older games weren't super realistic about rocket physics, but in Shadow Warrior it's VERY easy to die from explosions.

The one that always gets me is bullets underwater. Just about every game treats water like air when it comes to bullets, whereas real bullets don't go too far under water. In the real world you're pretty safe from gunfire if you dive underwater, but a grenade or any other explosive is going to seriously ruin your day since explosions are far more severe under water owing to the fact that water does not compress and carries the shockwave a lot farther than the air does. The shrapnel is rendered useless, but the force from the explosion is going to reach out a lot further.

Personally I don't like overly realistic games, or games that attempt to be overly realistic when they don't need to be. To me, the level of realism required should be just enough to allow you to understand the world you're in - gravity, running into things, solid vs not solid objects, some physics to define movement, etc, but after that the gameplay needs to be the focus. I would say the exception to this is if you're making a simulator of some kind. That's about it though.

but yet, the rockets in this game (unless you're firing the Nuke) has a very small explosion, while the grenade launcher not only packs a mean wallop with a much bigger explosion, but the radius is quite big as well.

[Jian Hou Zi]

Interestingly, Shadow Warrior is the only game I know of that deadens the inertia of projectiles under water (grenades).

[Phoenix]

Originally posted by Mister Torgue Flexington:

but yet, the rockets in this game (unless you're firing the Nuke) has a very small explosion, while the grenade launcher not only packs a mean wallop with a much bigger explosion, but the radius is quite big as well.

True, and I can provide an explanation... sort of. If you direct-hit an tougher enemy with a rocket, such as a red or silver pantsed ninja, it will almost always 1-shot gib him, while a direct grenade hit does not. If you hit the ground near him he'll take damage, but not nearly as much. A "realistic" but complete BS explanation would be that the projectile has a shaped charge, designed for penetrating armor, and would do more damage to anything it hit directly, whereas the grenades are designed to be more "area of effect".

The actual (game design) answer is that the grenades are meant to be spammed around a corner or through a door and wipe out a room while sneaky Lo Wang ducks for cover, whereas rockets are supposed to be more precision, line-of-sight, and used more sparingly. That's why grenade ammo is a lot more common than missile ammo.

When I spoke of dying from explosions in my previous post, it's more of a general thing, not a tribute to Shadow Warrior having realistic explosive physics. Barrels, incoming grenades, and incoming rockets - those tend to kill Wang extremely fast. You can get shot over and over with Uzis, torn by Rippers, hit by throwing stars, etc, and not take a severe amount of damage, but a silver pants ninja lobs a single grenade at you and you're hitting the quickload button.

As for realism... I've seen what an RPG-7 does to a car and it's not very impressive looking. It will punch a rocket-diameter entry hole on the side of the body and leave a 1-foot (if that big) diameter exit hole on the other side of the body. That's because the shaped charge blows hot metal in a jet directly forward, and they're designed to hit hard armor - not a soft car body - so the blast just ends up on the other side of the car. No, you don't want to be in the path of it, but unless it hits something hard (like the engine) it's not going to look all that interesting. Hit an armored vehicle and you'll see a very small impact hole, but the inside of the vehicle becomes a hell of hot jagged shrapnel and vaporized metal bouncing all around the inside. Anyone inside is going to be dead, which is the general idea. If you hit the engine area instead of the passenger compartment it will disable the engine and stop the vehicle.

Now as to why dropping a rocket or shooting it at the ground will ruin the operator's day... well, the ground is inflexible, and all that hot gas and metal has to go somewhere. Since it can't go down very well it expands out everywhere... not to mention the rocket has no flight time so the explosive charge detonates all the fuel in the rocket motor, plus the initial launch charge gets blasted apart with it. Same thing if you shoot a concrete wall point blank. The shaped charge may blow through the wall, but you're going to eat all the propellant blast and any debris kicked back by it.

What you will NOT see from a shoulder-fired rocket... or any high explosive really... is a big Hollywood-style fireball with parts flying everywhere and the entire vehicle coming apart. That's hollywood using pyrotechnics to blow up a plastic or wooden model. Real high explosives generate a lot of smoke and kick up a lot of dust and debris, but the flash is so quick because it burns so fast you don't see a lot of fire at all. The exception is a fuel-air bomb, like the MOAB, because it's burning fuel vapor as opposed to just high ex. What's interesting is if you slow down footage from a high ex blast. That's where it starts to get Hollywood looking, but real world military explosives tend to not be as visually exciting in the "fire and flash" department. The sound... THAT will scare you to soiling yourself if you're not used to it. You simply cannot translate the sound and visceral physical sensation of shock from something powerful going boom nearby onto a movie screen, so they make up for it with visuals instead.

Another area Hollywood tends to get things visually wrong is muzzle flashed on guns. A lot of 80's action flicks have people shooting M-16's or AK-47's and there's this humongous 5-sided fireball on the end of the gun. You won't ever see that on the firing line from a real rifle, especially if there's a standard A2 flash hider on it. The "big flash" guns are propane-operated gun mockups designed to have a lot of flash and the sound effects got dubbed in later - and they can fire several magazine's worth of "shots" without reloading. Remember that from the 80's? What does create a large flash is a short barrel with a lot of slow-burning powder. I've seen a .50BMG pistol (it was a custom made weapon) fired on video and it had a VERY big muzzle flash - about 3' long and about as wide. The same round from an M2HB or an M82A1 will have hardly any flash because the barrel is a lot longer and more of the powder is burned. Short guns with bullets normally fired from a long gun = big flash. Long gun with ammo designed for it = small flash. Previous + flash hider = very little flash, even at night.

Anyway... what were we talking about again?

[haha nerds...]

As people have said above: Halo, console shooters and multiplatform happened. Up through the 90's FPS games were steadily getting more complex and advanced, that all died when it had to be limited to console memory, two clumsy thumbsticks and a handfull of buttons.

There were console FPS games before, but Zero Tolerance or Perfect Dark weren't allowed to define how shooters should be designed and play in general.

[Adrax]

Big Corporations take over and than it goes to lowest common denominator, to make the most profit. The same happened with Hollywood movies.It is era of political correctness and trash culture. Also there were less PC users back than and they were mostly from different background, now every average Joe has PC.

In 90' it was "gamers for gamers", now it is "programmers hastened by profit hungry managers for low IQ brain dead people".

That's why there is so much fanboysism and defending unplayable, unoptimised buggy mess and DLC politics. The IQ of average PC gamer has dropped a lot. Corporations clings to the lowest of masses and only care about money.

There is even darker side in it. Horrible licensing politics, DRM destroying even hardware and no responsibility for it, buying good studios and rights to titles just to disband them so nobody else would make money etc. People losing jobs and whole their career, their life work and reputation goes to dust because of psychopathic managers. And no. I am not exaggerating.

[Emmanuelexe]

You are right, Adrax.
It was games for gamers, now it's games for casual/people who dont care really about videogames but who want spend (lose) some times at playing some "things".
And yes, a lot of IP are ruined because licensing politics and stuff too, they want buy a videogame name just for his popularity and make something off topic to the original games who want very good basically, with bad stuff.
Companies start to be more agressive with each other too, that's ugly.....
We could say a lot of exemples'

[Adrax]

Yes. That is also a thing. A lot of gamers today (if not the most) don't even like to play video games. They just play because they have nothing else to do. They just play what others play, even in single player. No matter if they like it or not. Just click buttons. They play what has been advertised for them by big corporations or paid reviews.

They don't even know better because they cannot or don't want to go past the graphics of older games. Basically, they not only do not like to play, but also have no taste whatsoever. Taste is acquired through experimentatin and experience. And they play same crap over and over and over again...

[Phoenix]

Very well said, Adrax.