Gaming Triumphs and Failures, Part 2

How about we tackle the iconic genre most people think of when they hear about videogames, first person shooters. I've played countless FPS games, from Wolfenstein 3D, Quake 1 through 3, Doom 1 through 3, Battlefield 1942, Halo, etc. I can truly tell you, FPS games are going downhill. They aren't changing at all. First off, WHY ARE THEY ALL EITHER WW2 OR MODERN ERA? The Call of Duty series pisses me off. Do something original. Not every shooter needs to be placed in modern day situations. Not every shooter needs to be a world war shooter. Where did the aliens go? The fantasy creatures? The alternate worlds? Those are reserved for survival horror and RPGs I guess. After I played Battlefield 1942 everything just started to look the same.


Halo was fun when I played inhouse matches with a group of friends. Halo at least innovated a little bit with regenerating shields to keep the action going instead of finding health kits to restore an HP number (my thoughts on regenerating health in FPS games will be explored in a future post). Halo grew old sort of quickly, and became a camper's game...like almost every FPS on the planet. Games like Doom and Quake were fast paced, and didn't do headshot one hit kills like modern games. You just didn't get gibbed very often like in modern shooters. In newer shooters, you can just camp in a corner and pick people off before they can figure out what happened. I know, Quake had some camping, and I know you can counter campers. Before I hear the cries of “OMFG UR NOOB LOLZ” I'm not bad at new shooters. I'm not great, but I do know ways to counter snipers and campers, I just think it makes for a very lame style of play. I understand realistic shooters have their place, but I long for the more arcade style of Quake and Doom where you can take a rocket and live to fight back and lob your own hardware at your foe. Long intense fire fights were normal, with people jumping over missiles and dodging behind pillars while shotguns reloaded. Now its frequently about jumping people or landing a sniper shot, with intense longer firefights being rare occasions. Some would argue its just a different style of play, which is true, and I just like the old better. That doesn't take away that new FPS games just are NOT innovating ANYTHING, they are just reskinning and adding some new features that have little impact to whats going on. An untrained eye could hardly tell the difference between Call of Duty 4, Modern Warfare 2, and Bad Company 2. I don't like it, I know I will get flamed for it. But I believe the FPS genre is dying due to complete lack of innovation.

A noted few have pushed the enveloped. I enjoyed Gears of War, which added a rather nice cover mechanic for stop and pop shooting. Mass Effect 1 and 2 were rather good, while both having flaws (too much pointless space to explore in ME1, with generic sidequests, ME2 had the horrid mineral searching) by pushing in RPG elements with a good story while maintaining fun shooter action.
I'm not trying to say any individual Call of Duty game, or other recent shooters, is bad. I haven't played them enough to make that judgment. It just annoys me to no end how everyone thinks each one of them is a miraculous work, when in fact they seem more like expansions most of the time. No other genre has been so stale for so long, while still being so highly praised. It also doesn't help that the Call of Duty community is just as bad as any others that I have mentioned :)

Triumphs: Arcade style FPS games, daring to innovate in a proven genre, Doom and Quake multiplayer

Failures: Rereleasing the same game 10 times with new graphics and two new features and calling it a sequel, Campers, Mass Effect's empty space and Mass Effect 2's mineral searching