5punk

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."




Author: Zonk
Category: fps
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Source: Slashdot: Games
Description: News for nerds, stuff that matters

As a fan of the FPS I'd say this list is bollocks, although I didn't read it all. There's no recipe for the perfect FPS, if there was then Quake 4 might have been a good game rather than just okay.

I'm not sure if they're stating the HL2 example as a good or a bad thing

Either way I think It's a very good thing, all FPS games start you off with the small weapons and build up to the big ones, that's natural for a sense of progression, starting with a hueg rocket launcher would quickly get boring,

So I guess it's a natural extension to hold off on giving you a weapon at all, worked very well in HL2, making you scared of the guards etc, then Ep 1 it worked with the grav gun.

I think it's a bit dodgy to say this wouldn't work in other games, although it depends if you want an immersive experience or simply to plough through corridors of baddies.

What we have here is a prime example of Genre Theory Gone Bad™. Genres are great for quickly describing a game ("oh, its a fairly generic FPS"), but when its things like this, its shit. It would only work if every FPS was aiming for exactly the same type of game, which they are not. Half Life 2 is very different to Unreal Tournament, which is very different to F.E.A.R, which is very different to Beef2, but they are all classed as FPS's. Clearly, you cant make meaningful statements about "what FPS's should all have" when FPS can cover so many wildly different things. Its not much better than trying to make a list of "what every game ever should have". What they have ended up with here is a list of things that are either specific, but not always right (their first maxim has an example, Half Life 2, where what they are saying not to do is done and works, and they say "it worked here, but wouldnt work elsewhere. So, not every FPS then ), or right, but not specific to FPS's (I would argue that unavoidable deaths you cant learn from, like their Doom 3 demon example, should be avoided in all games, not just FPS's). Bloody rubbish article.

/Genre rant.

Well at least it's generated some discussion.