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

[Turn-X Alphonse]

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.

Nearly all right

[megalomaniacs4u]

Not bad, I agree with the list but they missed some pet peeves:

• Thou shall not steal my carefully collected, especially the one decent gun I like and use.
  Examples: Red Faction, Quake 4, and too many others
• Thou shall not have pointless out of character stealth levels in an out & out action game.
  Examples: RTCW, MoH:AA
• Thou shall not use dumb jumping puzzles to slow the player down
  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 Best FPS was made 10 years ago. Case Closed

[oni]

You want to know what the best FPS ever was? Quake 3 with either the Threewave CTFS mod or CPMA mod.

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=4392915597 663174837 [google.com]

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.

Pet hates

[payndz]

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.

my top tips in no particular order

[Anonymous Coward]

#1 fancy effects are no substitute for fun level design

F.E.A.R. wow loads of shiney, then lots of running through empty rooms till you hit the next 'tripwire'. Oh and complete jap film ripoff.

#2 invincible, infinate ammo teammates are boring

HL2 - Ep1. lets try and move her into position so she does most of the firing

#3 running around in the dark with a torch is only fun for about 30 seconds

Doom 3 - HL2 Ep1

#4 Episodic content with no 'wow' moments or different gameplay is a ripoff

compare HL2 Ep1 with HL2. In HL2 you had great bits like piloting the boat and car, controlling the crane and antlions, that bridge walk, that whole area with the mad priest (hellxxxx somehting i cant remember), able to mess about with security turrets etc. where ep1 has annoying bit with gravity gun, annoying bit in the dark, then just running around and shooting. with a crap 'lets try and extend the game time' right near the end

#5 ammo

ive got to used to FPS, i conserve all the ammo i can, often restarting a level just to use more ammo. or i go all the way through not using grenades/rockets etc thinking 'i wont use them, ill really need them in a minute', only to find i finish the game without using them. perhaps an intelligent ammo placement system? or just have infinate ammo, would suit me.

#6 try and cut down on 'LOADING'

Deus Ex 2 - arggghh. GTA:SA seems load sections dynamically, shouldnt really be a problem for anything else.

#7 Please learn from Deus Ex

multiple ways of solving problems, multiple choices in the ways to gain entry, see new things every time you play the game. Still playing Deus Ex every 6 months or so.

Re:HL2

[grumbel]

Maybe its just me, but I found the first 10-20mins of HalfLife2 to be *by far* the best part of the entire game. It was good especially because you didn't have a gun and because you really hadn't all that much to do. You where after all in a city ruled by Combine, so you had to follow their orders and couldn't just wildly run around as you please. The beginning of HalfLife2 was great because it felt realistic, because it made sense, something I can't really say about the rest of the game. At the point where you get the gun the game fell pretty much apart for me and turned into yet another random run-and-gun game, maybe prettier then other, but not really any more interesting. There where a few other good cutscenes later on, but the core gameplay lacked any of the realism and feeling that was established in those first minutes. I would absolutely love a 'first person shooter' where you just run around like in those 10-20mins for all of the game, add a bit more interaction into the mix and you could end up with an awesome first-person-adventure kind of game, DeusEx already kind of did that and I would love to see a few more games in that direction, maybe with even less guns.

no

[tartley]

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?

Re:The Best FPS was made 10 years ago. Case Closed

[brkello]

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.

Re:no

[Dr. Eggman]

How about a FPS with no fecking guns in it, just once?

I read this statement and almost immediatly thought "How lame would that be?" But after a second thought, I realized that is exactly what Portal [wikipedia.org] will be: an FPS without guns. I am still very excited about Portal, but I didn't even place it in the same category as an FPS, more of an FPP (First Person Puzzler.) I think you're on to something. Innovation is a wonderful thing, and at its core, it is essentially about genre bending. HL1 was great because it brought intresting twists the the FPS genre.

Personally, I think the FPS genre is getting pretty huge and may be ready to split off into some real subgenres. The article describes something of an Action FPS, oriented around giving the player an experience concentrated in the action, but not mindless action. This is opposed to a sort of Adventure FPS, like HL2, which can get away with sacrificing some of the action in ways that promote the player's adventure through the storyline. Then there's Doom 3 and Quake 4... they're out there as FPS games, but not quite the same as modern FPS games; they reminded me more of the old Shoot-em-ups style arcade games, not necessarily as mindless but still lacking that strange quantifier that makes an gamer 'mindful' of the environment he's in. Of course we'll always want, and need, those genre bending games like Portal, or HL1, or Farcry.

Re:The Best FPS was made 10 years ago. Case Closed

[Mprx]

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.

And *still* nobody mentions this:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I hate that

[SanityInAnarchy]

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)...

my list

[Floritard]

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