What -do- people want from an FPS?

[:1]So a certain long-awaited FPS finally busted the Devil's boiler and saw release to mixed reception. Of the complaints levelled against it some decried the two-weapon system and regenerating health, some raged at the graphics, some claimed it was too easy and too linear and some, despite the BBFC 18 certificate on the UK box (It got an ESRB M in the US, right), even disapproved of all the sexual content.

Then the "fans" hit back, claiming that anyone who disliked the game for any reason expected CoD with aliens or something* or was too young to appreciate said game's series, blah blah blah. Cue never-ending Facebook war.

* = Mind you, there have been a few who dared say "CoD's better"...

In any case, all the bickering I've seen over the weeks since the game's release has got me thinking of the aforementioned question: What do people really want in an FPS? |||I guess an MMO, looking at Black Ops and it's exp/promotion/demotion system.|||Wrong question. In a Duke Nukem game, people expect Duke Nukem. Health packs, multiple crazy weapons and that kind of deal is what makes Duke Duke. They just copied stuff from what made other games popular without thinking how much it would make their own game trash.|||I agree with Zayren that it's the wrong question. I don't know that what people want is from "FPS" as a genre. What people wan't from Call of Duty isn't the same as from TFW or CS. Rather, different games within the genre try to achieve different aspects of what people want within the genre.|||BF3 if they don't **** up.|||Duke was like 12 years of different game styles all crammed into one thing and hey, it showed. I think the next game, if it is fully developed by Gearbox, will be much better.

As for FPS:

Single player FPS - Something like Deus Ex, or even Vampire: Bloodlines (More an RPG, but yeah) . Far Cry is up there too.

Multiplayer FPS - UT 2k4 was my high point. I liked faster games where movement & twitch were the most important bits. I really dislike the CoD era XP / perk stuff. Actually, I dislike a lot of things about current mp shooters, but the XP thing bugs me the most.|||STALKER would be my FPS style of choice, even though it's bordering on being an RPG. Crysis and Crysis Warhead were also very good (not Crysis 2, though). For multiplayer, definitely the Battlefield series and Left 4 Dead (2).

And yeah, Duke Nukem Forever was mediocre. It's still a fun game though. Duke's one-liners are always good.|||I'm two-thirds of the way through DN:F now, and to be honest the graphics do not bother me. Some of it I think looks fantastic. Granted some of the textures used for like posters, and monitors and crap were not super hires. But I think they did that for nostalgia purposes.



The thing that bothers me the most is that DN:F is so much like BulletStorm it isn't even funny. And I'm not talking about the replenishing shield, or the other semantics. The whole game just feels like one big scripted movie. I'm a big fan of the old Duke 3D, the old Doom games, and Heretic, and Hexen. The one thing I love about those games is the ability to wander around were ever in a level killing stuff, and then eventually making it through the level.



That is one thing I miss in a FPS. The ability to walk around where ever I can, killing whatever I can. Unreal was the last game I played that allowed me to do this. Every FPS since then just makes me feel like I'm being pushed through a story. You go so far, and something blows up behind you blocking your way back out. Or you hit a checkpoint, and the level changes. Or a whole portion of a level you just ran through blows up, which again cuts you off from going back to that part if you wanted to. And while the game is doing this it is doing similar things to allow you to advance foward. Granted you can wander around the immediate area you are in, and kill the things occuping the same area however you wanted. But it's not the same.



So what I miss the most is my free range killing ability.|||I like the CoD games, one playthrough kind of like watching a movie, and then a few missions for the occasional replay value (the specialops things). There's only so much you can expect from a singleplayer game. The multiplayer just has too much random stuff to be taken seriously, but I guess it could be fun if they had had dedicated servers.

And there's HL2 ofcourse, still the best FPS I've played. It has the simplicity of movement and weapons that you need for good gameplay, and fantastic level design to keep players interested through the story. Compared to that CoD feels too limited, too realistic. In CoD the movement is too slow, jumping is too limited and 2 weapons are too few, also the weaponswaps take too long. I won't even start about the "press space to hop over this obstacle", ****ing console ports catering to ****ty controllers. (that's just when you compare CoD to HL2 though, by themselves CoD games are pretty good)

For multiplayer, CS 1.5-1.6 are basically perfect, CS:S has too much randomness which dilutes skill (which is what you want a game like that to be about). CS1.5 was a little better in that regard then 1.6 imo. They could do with a graphics update but the gameplay is as good as it gets.

TF2 is nice for some casual multiplayer, and possible to play at high level as well I think (not sure how much all the added weapons have affected that part).

So imo, take CS1.5, HL2 gameplay and add better graphics, physics(not in CS) and more levels (also not really needed in CS, dust4life, amirite?).

I guess it's different for everyone though, for example I hate fallout3 and bioshock, the gameplay is just extremely boring to me. But I know a lot of people like those games.|||FPS game should have lots of tools at the players disposal.

Each tool should have character and flexibility.

All the tools mechanics should intuitively compliment the gameworld's natural laws.

No tool's advantages should marginalize the viability of the other tools.

The fun is in tackling obstacles in a fast-paced rhythm that rewards imaginative resource management. Resources being the tools, other players and the nuances of the environment and it's rules.

An example of an interesting tool that promotes such play would be a lightning gun where the emission's behaviour is to seek grounding itself after discharge. The lightning arcs downward towards the ground, or even sideways or upwards towards certain materials in the game's world.

Players can get very creative with it. Using it over cover like a mortar behaviour. Around corners where possible. Whatever. It's fun to play with.

You can compliment that with a player class that sets turrets. The turrets can made of a material that attracts the lightning gun's emission.

It doesn't take much imagination to think of cool things that would make an fps really wild to play. It took me a few minutes to think of that crap. lol