Going back to broad strokes genres, this week’s topic concerns the FPS (First Person Shooter), a staple of the overall gaming scene.
A First Person Shooter is the type of game where you play from a first person perspective (big shocker) and focuses around shooting (bigger shocker there), whether that’s other players or NPC enemies. It’s nice for a genre to be so plainly self-descriptive! FPS games also involve the navigation of a 3D environment, and often times incorporate standard concepts that are ubiquitous at this point like ammo management and loadouts of different weapons. This genre was heavily shaped by Doom (the original, released in early 90s), to the point where before the name FPS fully took hold, one term often used was “Doom clones”. Nowadays there are many subgenres and styles paired with the FPS - class-based shooters, “boomer shooters”, milsim and/or tactical shooters, twitch shooters, and others.
Here are some questions and subtopics that I encourage people to discuss:
- What are some of your favorite subgenres or styles of FPS, and your favorite games from them?
- Do you enjoy secondary concepts often associated with FPS games like ammo management and loadout adjustment?
- What genres do you like to see crossed over with an FPS?
- Do you prefer multiplayer or singleplayer FPS games? For multiplayer, Co-op or PvP?
- What are some of your favorite weapons from FPS titles? What’s been memorable?
Also feel free to bring up anything you like related to the topic! If you have suggestions for future discussion topics, leave them in the suggestion thread.
Additional Resources
- List of first-person shooters from Wikipedia
- First-Person Shooter tag on Steam
I always struggled with FPS games as they made me a bit nauseous and I would get lost easily. Typically I preferred 3rd person such as Gears of War, Uncharted, Witcher, etc. although I do have gob tons of hours in Destiny 2 and Skyrim so obviously managed to make it work.
What do you think it is about it that makes you nauseous? I notice that I get sick when I’m playing first person games with a low field of view and opening it up really helps, as does a higher refresh rate monitor. Have you tried either of those?
What defined Ego shooters for me wasn’t doom but unreal tournament. Played a lot of it when I was younger. I liked to just mentally check out and play this game on high speed which put me in flow-mode. There wasn’t too much strategy to it. Just know the map, run around and kill stuff with fast reflexes. I was really good at it. Beat all my friends on LAN-parties.
There was ammo but no reloading and that was absolutely fine. Made for some amazing mmmonster-Kills to not have to reload.
My favorite weapon was the flak-Canon with it’s shotgun-style primary attack that suited my jump-around-and-be-on-the-move-constantly Playstyle. The secondary attack was like a grenade and very handy for AOE or when people were following you.
Nowadays I don’t really want to play egoshooters anymore after having worked 8 hours+ on the computer. Stresses me out. Especially multiplayer where I would have to train to be able to keep up.
I’m going to go on a nostalgic trip below.
IMHO, Powerslave/Exhumed was one of the best first person shooters on the 5th generation consoles and the Powerslave engine (Slavedriver) enabled the Saturn to run an amazing port of both Duke Nukem 3d and Quake.
I remember being ecstatic that a game I could only play on a friends PC when I visited back in the day (Duke3d) was not only playable on my Saturn, it was a fantastic port too. DeathTank Zwei was a lovely hidden bonus game included on the D3D port.
Likewise, Quake was an impossible port, bought to a console that traditionally struggled with substandard 3d games vs the psx.
I remember seeing a psx owning buddy play a superb port of Doom on his psx, only for me to be burned by the absolute 💩port that Rage software put out on the Saturn. Even the 32x cartridge version of Doom was batter.
Console shooters have come on in leaps and bounds each generation but Exhumed on the Saturn was a real highlight for me in my younger years.
What I wish would come back is really good COOP PVE. I ran a hugely popular ut2004 Invasion server that we wrote a custom mutator for (Sudvasion). I had a T1 line to my house that just ran the servers. We had a solid dedicated group of people from all over the world playing that 24/7. Was the pinnacle of gaming for me. 18 years later I still chat with some of the community via steam disc etc.
I’m loving the FPS renaissance we’ve been seeing lately. The Boomer Shooter… boom, low poly gameplay-centric entries like BattleBit Remastered, rhythm games like Metal Hellsinger, and the latest incarnations of DooM and games seeking to mimic it are all welcome additions to the current gaming landscape. Also love experimentation happening by even established and larger developers - Gearbox’s efforts with the Tiny Tina RPGish games come to mind; though I wish they’d do a better job of addressing bugs in those games. I’d love to see more FPS-RPGs come around.
Hell - I’d love to see a ton of crossovers. It’s been a while since we had a truly great FPS platformer. RIP Mirror’s Edge.
Warhammer Boltgun was a day one purchase for me and now we’re in the age of handhelds like the Steam deck, I can get my fix anywhere.
I’m on a flight to Spain next week and a good part of that flight will be spent purging heretics.
I will purge them for the Imperium!
Titanfall 2 scratched that itch for me. I love that type of movement in games.
