The FPS Genre and You

[Kon]

I saw some comment thread on a gaming website about the state of the FPS genre and its movement towards crap. Some guy proceeded to list his history with the genre, and they were all BF and CoD games. I'm curious, what are the most memorable FPS games for you? Do you think the genre can escape the US military circle-jerk it finds itself in? Are there any upcoming games that you think show promise? Here are the ones that I've beaten and/or spent many hours on, in order of play, and why I think they were worth the time:

Giants: Citizen Kabuto - Unique world, humor, third-person sections with melee character.
Delta Force 2 - Quite realistic for the time. Order squadmates, use stealth, open approach to most levels.
Halo - Fun arcade action.
Counter-Strike - Twitch head-shot mania still going strong 10 years later.
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory - First large-scale objective-based game I played.
Rainbox Six 3 - Still the best tactical shooter. Far more realistic than DF, though more linear. VOIP and the pre-game tactics map made multiplayer a dream come true.
Halo 2 - Campaign was shit. Multi with friends was quite fun. For what it's worth, best game in the series.
Tribes 2 - Got into this one late, but the amazing, huge custom maps really made the game shine.
Battlefield 2 - I very much enjoyed the chain of command dynamic. When everyone follows orders and plays as a team, it's an amazing experience.
Gears of War - Okay, this isn't FPS, but I got a lot of hours out of this game. The cover system and Xbox control scheme were innovative at the time. Fun small-team deathmatch with no respawn.
Half-Life 2 - Shooting baddies on rails, but it has the best atmosphere ever. I am Gordon Freeman. Replaying now to get through Episodes.

Basically swore off the genre for several years. Still consider myself not a fan. Played BioShock right after HL2 and couldn't bring myself to finish. I've only played a few since 2008:

Battlefield 3 - Huge disappointment. Nerfed the team-building aspects, reduced class types, some maps were disappointingly linear.
Red Orchestra 2 - Not as hardcore as the first game, which was too much for me. I enjoy the slow game. Crawling is a must, and every shot counts. Gets stale after a few rounds at time, though.
Metro 2033 - Installed, will start after HL2 Episodes. I played through the prologue and it looks promising. Has HL's cinematic feel.

[Anubis]

There are only two FPS games that I've played and could say were truly great. I invested months in both, both SP and MP, and thoroughly enjoyed them. Still get tempted to replay them every so often too, though I do that rarely:

Call of Duty 1 - Just a really well done game. Really powerful levels that made you feel the impact of history full on - something few games had managed with me before. The Stalingrad level remains one of my favourite in gaming. So powerful and evocative. Multiplayer was great too, though the United Offensive expansion ruined it a little. Also, "snipers imba".

Star Trek Voyager Elite Force - Solid FPS with a good SP campaign, and really good multiplayer to go with it. I sunk so much time into this not only as a Voyager fan, but a gamer too. The Pinball server is still to this day the most fun I've had in any MP game ever, and I played it solidly for months.

Unfortunately, as you say, these days the genre is just mindless "US Marine" clones with little soul, and since the mechanics of the genre haven't evolved at all since trhe original Quake was released it makes the franchise a little less than fun. I highly doubt it will ever evolve, because the audience is overwhelmingly made up of teenagers who have no real desire for anything else - some even buy consoles just for the latest MW/Halo, etc. As long as that audience exists the genre will remain in the trashcan, and that audience isn't going anywhere.

Can't say I care though in honesty. I am still very bitter towards the FPS genre for what it did to the adventure games genre.

[M.Steiner]

FPS is a tricky genre for knowing what to list really and what one defines as such. Since a title like Deus Ex for example is technically a first-person shooter too when you get down to it, partly.

Obvious choices for me would be:

Half-Life Series
These are still 2 of the highest rated games ever and for good reason imo. Sure they're kinda on rails and have scripted events like so many others but they're so masterfully done that you never feel like they are when you're actually playing them. You get pulled into the story and like you say Kahn, you are Gordon Freeman. Still the ultimate FPS for me and one of my favourite game franchises too. Think we'll get lucky this year and hear some news on HL3? lol

Bioshock
I never played System Shock 2 so I have no idea how similar it may or may not be to that, all I know is I loved every minute of Bioshock. Great story and setting, twists, really fun combat, collectibles which shed light on the backstory etc.

Crysis
Just the original one not Crysis 2. It's not open world but it feels like it due to the size of the maps it uses which also gives you different ways to approach objectives. Stealth is viable, far from linear and still looks great on PC.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
I have yet to physically play MW3 or either of the Black Ops games myself due to Activision and their retarded pricing but MW was fantastic both for its SP & MP. I've always been a fan of CoD multiplayer (console kiddies aside, and I still prefer the Battlefield games for multi) but as far as SP goes the series has been poor for that for a long time. CoD4 was a nice surprise in that department.

Metro 2033
Intense, awesome setting, limited ammo, ability to play with Russian voices & subs, PC benchmark.

Old Rainbow 6 games & SWAT 4
Gone are the days where we used to get awesome tactical shooters like these. Then again, there's still hope for "Takedown" and Rainbow 6: Patriots I guess. Fingers crossed.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl
I suppose this one is kinda similar to Deus Ex in that it does play in first person and it is a shooter except this is primarily a shooter but with bits of RPG mixed in, rather than the other way around.

I can't stand shooters like Halo, Gears, Bulletstorm or anything like that personally and I've never been a Doom, Quake, CS, Tribes or UT player. Besides UT2K4 which I played quite a bit of back in the day. The Battlefield series is probably the only one which I've continually gone back to playing multiplayer with for many years and then CoD.


Upcoming FPS? Bioshock Infinite and Metro: Last Light mainly I'd say. The former being one of my most anticipated titles for this year. I will be keeping an eye on Survarium too.
There's Crysis 3 as well which I will be buying at release but after Crysis 2 I'm not so sure on that one. Will reserve judgement until I've played it.


Anny makes good points in his last paragraph too. Whilst I do enjoy a bit of CoD MP every now and then it annoys the hell out of me to see games like that and Halo remain on top of the charts everytime they release. Raking in the dough. Plus Activision charging £10 more for their releases than any other publisher has pissed me off for some time now. I can't blame them either. As long as the millions of people continue to willingly throw that extra money at them to play CoD they'll carry on with those prices. It's not like their games are any better or worth any more than any other new PC release out there either lol, but they continue to get away with it cos people let them.
I know it's not really a shooter as such but this plays into the above; but one of the reasons I was giving Dishonored so much attention and mentions last year was partly due to this too. They dared to be different and release something a bit risky and special. Not some dumbed down piece of shit for the masses. It still wasn't one of Britain’s best selling games of 2012 unsurprisingly (but ofc Halo 4 and Blops 2 were in the top 5 as expected...) but I was so <censored> happy to see that get the praise it deserved from both critics & players who did play it. I wanted to do my bit by encouraging others to not only experience it for themselves but to support a game like that, and its developers. We need more like it. One would hope that the glowing reception Dishonored received will be a wake up call to some developers out there, if even just a small one

[Ozone]

Never truly been an FPS fan myself, though over the past 1.5 - 2 years I've been putting in time on Battlefield 2+3, mostly as a long distance hangout with mates.

Saying that, in the late 90's I was a Resident Evil fanatic, loved it. Then, back around 2000, I was a slave to Deus Ex, so much so I was joining clans in their early days and ran a website and kill board dedicated to it. The last FPS I was impressed with was Bioshock, again, an all around original concept outside the too familiar cookie cutter FPS mold.*


* Reminds me, I posted a 'comparison' of FPS map design a while back... http://www.shatteredstar.org/forums/vie ... f=2&t=7224

[Isileth]

I'm definitely an fps fan although there are huge series that have totally passed me by on the way.

Unreal Tournament - Thinking back this must have been my first fps, absolutely loved it. No idea how I came to own it but poured so many hours into it across many years.

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory - Quite possibly my favourite game of all time. Everything about it was just brilliant. Progressive objective gameplay, the class system, the xp system, the pacing, the construction/destruction mechanics. I just loved it.

Tribes 2 - I never actually owned Tribes, but my god I played the hell out of the 1 map the demo provided (plus the odd mod map that was for some reason playable).

Dark Horizons: Lore - The reason im in SSX. Its incredible to think how much this game has been a center piece of my life, ive been involved with the community around it for 10 years now. Again for me it just got the pacing perfectly, really fun game focusing on small scale teamwork.

Call of Duty - Sure they get flak but at the end of the day they are fun and that's what I play games for. Only played up to CoD4 because I cant run anything newer on this computer but the 3 I have played have been well worth the money spent on them. Both SP and MP still get regular play throughs.

Team Fortress 2 - I came to this one quite late compared to many people, very odd considering its F2P. If ever a game could be summed up with the word fun its this one.

As for what passed me by CS or any of its many clones, despise the pacing. The Halo series, any of the tactical shooters, definitely any of the horror fps combos because im a big fat coward and sadly the battlefield series. Even BF2 doesn't run well on my comp, its always seemed like a game I would love however.

[M.Steiner]

Neocron could come under the FPS banner too really, since you could alternate between both first and third person and it was basically a shooter at heart.

Saying that, in the late 90's I was a Resident Evil fanatic, loved it.

Used to love the Resident Evil series too back in the day but it has gone the same was as Splinter Cell & Silent Hill unfortunately.
Ofc those were a mixture of third-person and over the shoulder rather than FPS but as shooters go they used to be awesome. The original & RE4 in particular. <- Whilst we're on the subject, let me direct you to Zwei. Tis one of the games on my 2013 games list but you may not be aware of it. A new survival horror game in the works from Shinji Mikami, the creator of Resi Evil (he was behind RE4 too). That alone should have you hyped

[SL33PY]

The original Return to Castle Wolfenstein : nuff said
Doom: a true classic
Duke Nukem 3D: epic at the time
Soldiers Of Fortune: shooting limbs off is awesome
Unreal: The original that blew away quake and consorts of it socks when it came out
Half Life Series: Story + shooting = win
Deus Ex: The original one, cyberpunk FPS with RPG elements and as a first with multiple endings
Counter Strike: fun fast multiplayer shooting
Neocron: MMORPGFPS hybrid... awesome, and not because I worked there
Crysis: setting new standard in graphics (good story at start, halfway trough the game it started to fail)

Might add more later

Oh I kinda missed the thread purpose... I think.. but imo these games were all FPS milestones

BTW kahn try dishonered it's a good game

[Anubis]

Oh, if we can count NC2 then add that to my list too. I always saw it as more an MMO, since I never played at as an FPS (always went third person), so wouldn't really consider it one myself. If it counts though, definately deserves a place.

[SSX-Andy]

Wolfenstein 3D: First feel of the genre although it lacked multiplayer and most other things that FPS games have today. Still was fun to try to get a 100% rating on the levels and compared to the other games of those days it added something new.

Doom: A step up from Wolfenstein. Introduced new elements to the genre, even though multiplayer still lacked. It was there, but not really useable.

Doom II: Same as original Doom except that LAN was added. First FPS that I played multiplayer.

Unreal Tournament: This game changed the genre for me. Still consider it one of the best when it comes to multiplayer. Tons of fun and a game I kept coming back to years after it was released. Even after the release of new UT and Doom games that just couldn't live up to it.

Half-Life: Mostly played it single player. Fun and innovative. Took a big step towards the FPS games of today (the fun ones that is).

Doom III: Never felt for this. Too fast and too little new added.

Team Fortress II: Probably the most fun I've had in an FPS. Played it for some time, but sine it became F2P and more about collecting hats than actually playing I've stopped and haven't looked back. To bad since it was a very good game.

Call of Duty I, II, II, IV, MV, MV II, MV III, Black Ops, Black Ops II and so on: Meh. More of the same. Can be fun in single player. Not really tried multiplayer. Unfortunately they make a lot of money and pretty much ruined a genre since the UT days.

BF3: Fun, good graphics, but why why EA and Origin?

I used to play quite a bit of FPS up until the modern games came out. Might be that I'm more picky now, might be that the genre is stuck in the same tracks and just add graphics and explosions while removing the hard/fun elements to cater to a larger mass.