I'm glad the article mentioned movement. Games today make so many decisions when it comes to movement where the goal is to make it feel 'realistic', with sprinting, ducking and the like, but they end up feeling like they don't have any depth. An average player will have fairly similar movement to a fairly good one, with incremental differences on small things, and a player with amazing movement won't hugely stand out. In Quake 3? A player with amazing movement could do way more to control the map. Quake 3 really mastered that depth, especially with how much there was to learn between the two physics rule-sets (with CPM allowing for a bit more than VQ3). And the reason I say that is because the classic arena shooters (Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc) had their movement systems as a key part of the game. It's why Defrag became such a (relatively) big thing. And it's why Overwatch just doesn't feel as fun as it could, to me at least. For a game to look like that, but to leave out bunny hopping? Disappointing.
I felt the same way when grenades were removed from TF2. In TFC they were hard to learn, but very rewarding to players who did. Conc-jumping was severely OP and fun. I guess they remove advanced gameplay mechanics to make the games more appealing to noobs and lower-skilled players.
I think one of the reasons for CS' enduring popularity is even noobs can get lucky or trick a better player and kill them. In Q3? Nope.
I have a friend who played Q3 for 6 years in a hardcore manner. I have played fps games for like 10 years but when we fought the result was 50 to -1 in his favor. (I managed to kill him once but I landed in lava 2 times) 4 years later we played again (he was not playing Q3 for 4 years) the result was 50 to 2 in h is favor. The skill cap in Q3 is just so damn high but it is also a rewarding experience.
> I think one of the reasons for CS' enduring popularity is even noobs can get lucky or trick a better player and kill them.
It's probably better for the better player as well. No matter how good you are, a stray bullet or two could take you out. There was no relaxing, and the game promoted caution enough that if you felt unchallenged, there were risks to take.
>No matter how good you are, a stray bullet or two could take you out.
And this is why I never really liked this game: it takes the control out of the hands of the player and gives it to a random number generator. If I'm good at the game, I should be the one who is in control, not RNG.
I think this is one of those situations where most people don't really know why they like what they like, or at least have a hard time comparing between two things. People like winning, but people like challenge. In a game where the more skilled or already winning player continues to win, that's enjoyable for them short term until it gets boring, but importantly it's often not enjoyable for the other players. In a game where some randomness is introduced (and/or other mechanisms to reduce the advantage of an already winning player) which prevents a single person from completely controlling the board/map, that person may feel it's less fun than situations where that is allowed, but I think that level of less fun (but still fun!) may last much longer, since challenge remains. In fact, to remain consistently at the top actually requires more skill, IMO.
Personally, I never liked Quake deathmatch (all the way back to the original). To me it seemed to reward prior map knowledge too much, and allowed someone with a known path that optimized item respawns to deny pickups to other users. Anything that makes the game easier for the person in the lead in a multiplayer game is a net negative IMO, as much fun as it feels to be that person.
It took me a while to really _get_ the difference in mentality between different types of gamers and this difference would go a long way to explain what one person finds enjoyable vs another - of course everyone wants to win but if you didn't have to put in any real effort to win then it's not going to be as rewarding.
In a nutshell there are two types of gamers:
1) casual and
2) serious
FWIW (which may not be all that much), certain games cater more to casual players by having a shallow learning curve and a low skill ceiling while others are more favourable towards serious players by providing a steep learning curve and a surprising amount of depth.
I'd compare games that have a steep curve and skill depth to real sports, like tennis or golf. If you've never played tennis and you go up against an enthusiast player who's played a few hundred hours of tennis, guess who's not going to be having much fun? How long will it take you to catch up if you both continue to practice the same amount from this point onwards? You'll probably always feel that the other guy has a certain edge over you even once you catch up to where he originally was.
If you're serious about wanting to get better then you'll keep practising until you reach a point where you become competitive against players of a given level and things get a whole lot more rewarding and fun then. This is actually the main reason why I loved playing Quake and Starcraft so much (there are many other games, but these are the two I was most involved with), It's also the reason why they were (and still are) great competitive platforms.
I agree with what you are saying, but it's somewhat different to what I was explaining. Beyond learning curve and skill there are the mechanics of the game itself. These can affect not only the learning curve and the skill, but also provide positive and negative feedback loops, which can completely ruin the experience for many not because of a disparity of skill, but because of poor forethought of the designers.
For example, in games where there are relatively few spawn points, spawn points are enemy accessible, and you can respawn multiple times per round, you might have a negative feedback loop on death through the camping of enemy spawn points. If this isn't mitigated in some way, such as through removing one of the prerequisites or making it fairly dangerous to attempt, it can turn into a situation where once this tactic is successfully employed, skill becomes much less important, and you may not be able to escape.
In the original Quake/Quakeworld, there were routes around some maps where you could run the route, and things would spawn almost immediately prior to your arrival. For a person who knew this and traveled that route, not only would it allow them to effectively travel a large portion of the map to look for opponents while keeping themselves in good health with good ammo, and denying their opponents resources. This is a positive feedback loop on a successful player, and also reduces the effectiveness of skill.
In the end, games that have easily implemented tactics (that is, they don't require a lot of skill) that nullify the impact of opponent skill and don't have tactical answers to those situations are not good vehicles for competition. A good competitive game is one where skill (speed, accuracy, knowledge, prediction, etc) is often the deciding factor, and tactics employed can be countered by a skilled opponent that is prepared for them.
I think I agree with your point in general, but it doesn't sound like you played much Quakeworld or Quake 3. Spawn times on all items are on a fixed timer, and a large part of the game dynamic is, when you're behind, knowing when the opponent picked them up and knowing when to contest them. And obviously being skilled enough to do so. Variants of Quake 3 (and Quakeworld for that matter) are still played competitively, and the skill ceiling is extremely high.
Your suggestion is that these games would allow a weaker player to win because of lucky spawn or item pickups early in the game, but this never happens.
In all games (Tennis, chess, whatever) one player very often has to play from behind -- whether you agree this is a good thing or not I'm not sure, but it is one way to design a game, and the way many many competitive games well before video games work. If you play better you gain an advantage, otherwise what is the point of playing better until the last moments?
> it doesn't sound like you played much Quakeworld or Quake 3
You're right. There were multiple factors that made it less fun than the alternatives I had at the time.
> Spawn times on all items are on a fixed timer, and a large part of the game dynamic is, when you're behind, knowing when the opponent picked them up and knowing when to contest them.
> Your suggestion is that these games would allow a weaker player to win because of lucky spawn or item pickups early in the game
That's not sufficient for the scenario I described. It's not just that you get specific items early, it's that some maps supported specific routes you could traverse that allowed monopolization of those item drops. Now, my point isn't that this is necessarily bad, but that without effective tactics to combat this (which may exist, I was by no means a pro), then it's possible it may boost the ability of a player over someone who might be considered somewhat more skilled at that game. Based on how good my recollection of the situation (from almost a decade and a half ago) was and how well I was able to ascertain methods to counter it (possibly very poor), it may not be a good example.
> In all games (Tennis, chess, whatever) one player very often has to play from behind -- whether you agree this is a good thing or not I'm not sure ...
I think it is a good thing (thus my original point, a few comments up-thread). I also think a game that's meant to be competitive and skill based that it should be possible for a more skilled player to outplay a less skilled player, given enough time. Any situation which allows the lead player to maintain a lead regardless of skill (or even just ignoring everything but great skill differences) is a poor game of skill, and not really fit for competitive play.
And let us consider the infamous Mario Kart blue shell, a weapon that specifically targets the player in first place. Still, for all the complaining about it making races random, the better players still seem to win most of the time.
In some iterations you can avoid the blue shell. IIRC the 3ds one shows you what items the others are holding and if you see a blue shell pop up, just move behind the guy in second place. Even if the blue shell is fired, it makes a distinct noise and if you aren't too far ahead, you can duck behind the second place guy and let him take the hit.
An RNG is not a bad thing, if the rest of the game is designed to compensate for it. In FPS, such random mechanics tends to make solo gameplay less dependent on skill, but rewards team effort, insofar as coordination can minimize such random chance affecting the outcome.
I can't speak for CS, not having experience there. But in Red Orchestra, where weapons are even more instakill, and there's even more randomness (with things such as artillery strikes, that have unpredictable patterns on terrain - you can be in a trench, and if you're unlucky, a shell can land inside and kill you), good team commander and squad leaders are absolutely necessary to win, and a team with better leadership will run circles around the one that doesn't, even if the latter has better players, for this exact reason.
All of them, really (that are video games). It's a single series.
I would say that the most recent incarnation is the most tactical - ironically, largely because it disposes with some of the first game's realism, and makes squad leaders into moving spawn points for the rest of the squad. This means that squad leaders need to balance staying alive (to provide better spawns) versus the need to keep advancing (to provide spawns closer to important objectives); and squad members, on the other hand, need to protect their leader even at great personal risk to themselves.
It also makes flanking and other maneuvers that much more worthwhile, because the payoff for having your entire squad spawn on you near a gap in the enemy's defense line (or, better yet, behind it) is immense, and can make for a very rapid takeover of the objective, or deny the enemy reinforcements and allow the gap to grow faster than the other team can plug it.
So the team that provides the best collective cover for their squad leaders' advance is more likely to win compared to the team that just goes for kills, even if the latter is noticeably better at the run-and-gun mechanics.
This. Overwatch is fun, but Weapons Factory Arena was much more so, esp with half of the classes (including the sniper, engineer, and some of the attack classes) given off-hand grapple, which could be used to "grapple jump" and massively increase the movement speed and agility of a skilled player. Here's a video showing some fairly high-level play: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3UW7eCYqGpQ
IMO it's a massively more fun game than Overwatch, but it no longer has an active player community. The best shot I have at playing with others is QuakeCon, but there used to be a few servers with 32 player limits, and I can tell you that anything beyond about 8x8 was just stupid fun. I've played hundreds or thousands of hours of this and it was amazing. I've never found another game which did it for me quite like WFA did. As the cherry on top, it runs great on a Pentium 3 500 with a Voodoo 3 MP on 56K at 1024x768 on a CRT. It also runs fine with 60fps constant on the original Motorola Droid.
Better graphics and loot boxes don't make a game fun IMO. Great mechanics and an awesome tight-knit community do.
I abstain from rocket jumping in TF2 because I feel it's such an outrageously unrealistic thing that it shouldn't be there in the first place.
I also don't use anything but the default equipment, because I feel everything else gives an unfair advantage to players who hace played a lot and thereby gained items. I mean, what is this? Play to win?!
Some of these decisions (slower speeds and cover mechanics in particular) are driven by the need to make the games playable on consoles with handheld controllers.
The article addresses this - Doom is 'first person Robotron' and it was designed without 'mouselook' absolute positioning control in mind. I don't think it's an all-encompassing explanation (tastes and fashions drive change too) but the fact that designers have to accommodate two fundamentally different control schemes in the same game has had a very big impact on the way FPS games are designed.
I think it's broader than just "designed for easy control on a console". There were other factors at play.
I think what actually set this type of design in motion can be traced back to that point in time when Half-Life came out and all of a sudden everybody seemed to criticize Quake (and indeed id Software in general) because their shooters lacked a story (actually, my recollection is a little fuzzy - games like Thief and System Shock were certainly exploring the 'story' space as well, I'm just not sure off the top of my head in what order the games arrived on the scene).
The realistic movement (head-bobbing, slowness, inertia, etc) seems like it's meant to convey a vague sense of what the physical impact of running would be, in the same way that camera shake is used to accentuate punches in a fighting game or a movie with fighting scenes. It's something that conveys momentum and mass.
It's an element to convey story and immersion. I feel like there's probably an axis here, where you have pure arcade games like Geometry Wars on one end and ultra-cinematic shooters like Battlefield 4 on the other. I'm really guessing here but I imagine Battlefield 4 (or let's say even the original Call of Duty, though I've only heard/read about it and never actually sat down to play it) wants you to actually feel the things that the soldier in the story is feeling. In some sense, it wants to be an interactive movie experience. As opposed to Geometry Wars and Doom, where the gameplay comes first and the story is nearly non-existent or very secondary.
I remember one of the biggest praises given to Call of Duty (EDIT: actually, reading further down, I think it was Soldier of Fortune that I was thinking of!) that it felt like you were in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. I can't help but think that must have been a huge contributor to the tone of console shooters that came afterwards.
actually, my recollection is a little fuzzy - games like Thief and System Shock
I think it might be, Ultima Underworld, Dark Forces, Marathon, many others were story-driven well before Half Life. So I don't think it's story that did it. The console aspect is something several designers have written about, including Romero, I just couldn't google my way back to the references.
I remember one of the biggest praises given to Call of Duty (EDIT: actually, reading further down, I think it was Soldier of Fortune that I was thinking of!)
CoD got MASSIVE praise for it's first 2 games though. They were genuinely atmospheric WW2 shooting games (and, IMO, a whole lot better than the dreck that followed).
So it could be both (MoH was also praised a LOT).
Soldier of Fortune was praised mostly for it's "gritty" story and the "realistic" bullet damage (shooting different areas of a character had different visual wound results and reactions).
Dark Forces is one I haven't thought of in awhile - such a great story-based FPS.
I probably didn't make it as clear as I meant to - I wasn't so much referring to "when story-based first-person games started being made" as much as I was meaning to refer to "that point in time when people started criticizing games like Quake for not having a story".
Well, the point is Doom's levels and controls are designed for the constraints of a 1992-ish pc. It's not too surprising it worked on consoles as well. Quake on consoles was, predictably, poop.
I couldn't disagree with that more - I am so glad they kept bunnyhopping out of overwatch and instead focused on adding depth and skill to the actual game itself.
There's enough high skill floor things to master in Overwatch that there doesn't need to be a gimmicky movement system to separate the good from the bad. The games intended and obvious mechanics leave plenty to be mastered.
What bhopping would add to Overwatch is a huge increase in pacing and aim and prediction needed. I don't think it would really take away from the rest of the game, as it's not like bhopping and shooting at the same time has to be viable. The huge number of movement abilities wouldn't lose anything because of it. The skill ceiling would go up, but the skill floor wouldn't.
I' will concede that the number of movement abilities, and how they're trying to balance the game, bhopping might feel gimmicky in the case of Overwatch. I don't believe it's gimmicky in general. It certainly didn't feel that way for Quake. Or in a more recent case, Reflex.
Bunny hopping adds a skill floor to the game competitively because everyone who can't do it simply gets blown out. You cannot compete without being able to master this skill. That's a skill floor.
That's very interesting. In competitive SSBM (smash bros melee), movement is one of the integral parts of the game that give it its depth. Top player's movements can differ greatly from each other.
What is good about bunny hopping? It raises the skill ceiling, but it doesn't do so in an interesting or challenging way. It's basically just a "rub your head and pat your belly" test, what TVTropes calls "fake difficulty." It doesn't test your tactics or your aim or your situational awareness; it just tests your ability to stay focused while hammering the spacebar continuously.
Because it completely opens up map geometry. New paths open up, and it makes landing shots on you harder. It lets you put yourself in an advantageous situation. Aim and situational awareness aren't the only aspects that matter in a 1v1 game. Because of that, I'd say it raises the skill ceiling in a very meaningful way. It can be hard to master, and it's not critical to understanding the map, but if you want to have real success, you need to be able to take advantage of the new paths that open up to you with bhopping.
It raises the amount of aim and situational awareness needed. And I'd say it does so in a fun way.
I love the fast movement and large enemy hordes in open-but-not-too-open-spaces mechanics of the new Doom.
I absolutely hate the platformer aspect. Seriously, guys, just because you have taught Doomguy to jump, doesn't mean that I want to have a series of random platforms that have to be jumped on in precise sequence to get anywhere.
At first I thought it's just a gimmick that they were showcasing in one map, and it'd even out... instead, I found that I'm spending more and more time doing this, and it's getting harder and harder, with the addition of moving platforms etc. The first Hell map was the last straw.
If I wanted to play Super Mario, I'd buy that, not something called "Doom".
Oh man, I feel so the opposite (of course, to each his own.) To me the platforming is fantastic, especially in mid-fight. It adds to the thrill because you can do a lot of jumping from platform to platform to evade shots, double-jumping and staying above a lot of the fray. Plus they have those jump-lift force fields you can use to launch through the air.
Those were some of my favorite parts of Quake 3 too. The maps where you could spring off a jump lift from one end of the map to the other, shooting at people as you soared through the air...
I don't object to platformers per se, it's just that it's really not what I expect from Doom.
Also, I actually liked the (much more limited / less frustrating) platforming mechanics during fights, that just gives you more freedom of movement. Freedom of movement is good and Doom'ish.
It's the part outside of them, where you have to hop around in silence just to get somewhere, or get to a juicy item, that's objectionable - because that part is less about freedom, and more about railroading ("No, you HAVE to jump onto that moving train to proceed... and sorry, the last checkpoint is before that fight that you just have - hope you like replaying it if you fail the jump.").
But the multiplayer, on the other hand, is the polar opposite. It has a "more of the same" kind of feeling and is easily forgettable. It tries a few things, but not effectively enough.
What's scary, is that something that was basically an afterthought, became the poster boy for the game before it even released. Couple that without sending prerelease copies to reviewers made everyone extremely nervous.
Though all fears were absolved when that first level loaded up, and holy shit!
I got it based on glowing reviews, started it up....and wasn't too impressed initially.
But I kept playing, and started getting used to the movement and the shooting and started dancing through the enemies and dodging fireball after fireball while charging headfirst into a room, picking off enemies easily even though I'm using a controller (I know it has some auto-aim assistance but it's one of the best I've seen) and it felt different from every other fps I've played lately. Last game in a long time to make me feel that way was Splatoon.
The monster AI is better than in most games too. They chase you, leap onto ledges, climb up ledges and hang from walls, run around to get behind you (sometimes), constantly moving to dodge you and get a better shot at you, not hiding behind cover and then appearing briefly for you to shoot where you've been training your gun for 30 seconds like most games. Not the best I've seen, but better than most fps games.
Then there's the secrets. It's hilarious how Doom will show you the secret, either through a window or behind a vent, or a hidden level section will show up on the map, and then it pretty much dares you to figure out how to get there. You go where it looks like you can get there and there's nothing there. It can take a long time to figure out how to get to some of these secrets. That's pretty fun also.
The need to shoot people enough that they can be glory killed, and then needing to rush in to get that melee kill because it drops the health you desperately need, or hit them with a chainsaw to drop ammo you need is great too.
It's super smooth, and the levels are giant, and puzzly, it's pretty, and just a lot of fun. What Doom should be.
Word for word, your review is exactly how I felt (Though I was also excited from the beginning because I'm a sucker for Doomguy and wished Doom 3 was anything remotely like Doom 4)
I think the beauty of the single-player of new Doom doesn't translate well in videos. A lot of the features I thought were not that interesting or downright dumb (e.g. melee executions) actually tie the gameplay in such a way that it just clicks. It doesn't just lack cover, it forces the player to be anti-cover. There's a lot of weapon variation, and the customization (via a RPG-ish leveling up aspect) allows you to play the game the way you want. The level layout (including map system, secrets, challenges, etc) make you really want to go back and play more, explore more, do more.
For me, it's a similar feeling to the original Doom, albeit in a very different (one could say "more mature") packaging. It's not trying to be a modern FPS as we know it, it's almost like a parallel universe version of a modern FPS. It's really masterly done, any way you put it, but you only realize it as you play through it. When watching a video, it's too easy to get distracted by the superficial qualities of it and miss the meta-game.
Another thing is how pretty the game is. It's hard to get that out of a video, but when you're actually playing the game you realize just how beautiful it is. Part of the reason is they use a lot of colors. It's not just another dark color palette shooter.
Good point. In a world of 30-fps-locked games, a game that is engineered to run with your framerate just feels right, even if you're "only" playing at 60Hz.
No, the game uses frame delta times rather than a set tick rate per second.
(In general it's how most games already work; it's just that it's normally convenient to set it at a fixed rate to make some things like physics more deterministic, and it gives a nice target performance/budget).
Not if the cinematics are synced to a global timer instead of the frame rate. Then when the frame rate is too low the game skips some frames to keep up.
whatever_dude summed it up pretty well. It's not without its faults(terrible checkpoint system), but the single player is nearly a perfect game. Perfect pacing, smooth and engaging gameplay, the executions don't interrupt the shooting, the weapons feel amazing, tons of customizations and upgrades, the secrets are so well done they make you want to find them, and top it off with a KILLER soundtrack. It's all about action, no nonsense story, or cutscenes. Back to raw gaming. It's just overall the best FPS game I've played in at least a decade. It's THAT good.
This coming out in 2010 the new Doom 2016 runs like an itemized list of his explanations of what made the original great.
Being agile instead of being a tank. Doging over cover. Low barrier of entry to modding (which the new one didn't totally do but the snapmap system is at least an attempt at that.) Fighting priority of large bosses while kiting around smaller enemies.
He doesn't dislike it, but highlights the game elements that didn't quite make it in the new one. Plus, he showcases parts of Doom that really couldn't have happened at any time other than the early-90s.
I disagree on the point of no other games having the same level of user generated content. Specifically, Starcraft and then Warcraft III modding birthed multiple centi-million dollar industries (Tower Defense, MOBAs). Minecraft didn't exist at the time this article was written but obviously it has similar depth of user modding.
If you're using SI prefixes, yes. If you're using the latin sense of "centi" meaning "hundred", as in centipede, then it means "hundred million". Dollars are not (yet) an SI unit.
I read other comments here, and would like to point something.
Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and other early FPS, got the name "FPS", because people saw them as a first person version of shooters, and shooters were those games where you control some vehicle from the top view and would dodge a hail of bullets and shoot back.
Currently, most poeple think the important thing about "first person shooter" and "third person shooter" is the camera, and completely forget why "first person shooter" had that name, the "first person" thing was just an adjective added to the base genre, "shooter".
Most modern games aren't shooters... I am not sure how I would name them, but the focus is not on shooting or avoiding get shot, the focus is something else.
The descriptions I am seeing of Doom 4 single-player and why people are loving it (I am waiting for Vulkan version to try it) are the descriptions of a game that nailed the "shooter" genre correctly, Doom 4 can proudly call itself a FPS, because it is a true FPS.
So some people might wonder, what I am calling here an FPS, why people feel it is so fun and whatnot?
1. Base mechanic, is shooting.
2. Movement is very important, both to aim, and dodge.
3. Stealth should be discouraged.
4. Cover should only be part of the game if you dodge in and out of it, it would be acceptable in a FPS with parkour mechanics for example.
5. No Halo-style health regen, this requires you hide, stop and wait, and when you do that you are not shooting.
6. Weapon variety is important, even one of the shooters known to be "minimalist", Ikaruga, has 4 weapons for 4 different uses (dark bullet, light bullet, dark laser, light laser), the point of shooting games is the shooting, even if the only variety comes from using powerups (1942 for example) it makes shooting in different ways possible and interesting.
7. If game has few weapons, it should nail it REALLY well, and the few weapons should solve any situation, games with "realistic" limit of weapons that result in you picking up a shotgun and a pistol and then having to shoot something 3km away is not a shooter. (maybe it is some other genre, war simulator or something, but it is not a shooter).
8. For the thinking part, the important is tactics, not strategy, the player should only be thinking of immediate decisions while shooting, and not stopping to think what path (in the map, narrative or upgrade) he will have to take several hours on from now (unless he is replaying the game for completionism, then it is fine, but usually he will preplan before starting the playthrough anyway).
> No Halo-style health regen, this requires you hide, stop and wait, and when you do that you are not shooting.
This is now a 10+ year old complain, but I am so glad to hear. I recently played through Alien: Isolation. It was good—had its flaws but I enjoyed it. One of the biggest reasons was the lack of health regeneration. It really made the game much more challenging.
The latest Metal Gear Solids use health regeneration. Still fun, but they reward sneaking around way less than the games before it because you can just go shoot everyone and hide for 20 seconds.
> the "first person" thing was just an adjective added to the base genre, "shooter".
To be fair, calling them first person shooters wasn't really a thing until a couple of years after the release of Doom. By the time it became the dominant term I think this type of game had already diverged far enough from your concept of a first-person SHMUP that I don't think that your theory on the origin of the term is accurate. Genre taxonomy can't easily be reduced to a simple analysis of the particular words used.
> To be fair, calling them first person shooters wasn't really a thing until a couple of years after the release of Doom.
In fact up until that point they were generally referred to as "doom style" games or similar (because while Doom certainly wasn't the first, not even the first out of iD, it was the first that really made it big and caught the general public's consciousness).
Here's a little background to the article that might be interesting to some of you, concerning the evolution of shooters.
I'm the Nathan McKenzie the blog author thanks at the end of the article. I worked at Raven Software, off and on, from the spring of 1997 through the summer of 2004. I think JP, who wrote the blog, worked at Human Head in Madison, WI for a time. So we were both kind of in the id / fps diaspora, to some degree. I think this conversation took place on JP's old anti-factory blog, way back in the day.
Anyway, enough real-life background. The more interesting, possibly, background, is that I carried a lot of the responsibility for the single-player game balance and feel of Raven's and Activision's 2000 FPS, Soldier of Fortune. I basically was responsible for tuning player weapon damage, player input responses, enemy response times, enemy damage, high level enemy logic, enemy style differentiation, overall game progression curves, user settable difficulty levels, etc. I worked with other super talented people, of course, but at the end of the day, I was the main person in Raven's office at 2 am tweaking variables and subtle enemy aiming algorithms and properties to try to make the game match what appealed to me aesthetically. I really didn't work on SoF2 at all, so in so far as the games feel quite different, I would say that at least partially comes down to SoF being much closer to my own tastes.
I actually don't remember the conversation in great detail that JP and I had that led to this blog post, but I do know that a lot of what I was saying at the time about Doom was related to my experience of trying to do my part to balance Soldier of Fortune and make it fun and fair, and the challenges I faced in doing that.
SoF is a fine game, but I think it occupies an interesting point, historically, for shooters. I LOVED Doom. I just loved it. I played so much of it. It was hugely influential on me. If it had been up to me, I would have just been making more Doom-esque games.
But once you're making a realistic, bullet weapon based game with human enemies in relatively recognizable environments, much of what Doom got right kind of HAS to go out the window in the name of realism. Player movement speed. Enemies very strongly differentiated by attacks, properties, and novel behaviors. Enemies very cleanly parsable with strongly different silhouettes to signify that they are of different kinds. Enemies with radically different amounts of health or interesting weaknesses or weak points. Weird, interesting, abstract traps and interactive gadgets that can be combined with enemies to create novel situations. Game pacing controlled by the rate of introduction and variation of these things. Fairly abstracted environments that interconnect in weird ways, custom built to make for interesting combat experiences. Ratios of player size to monster size to projectile size to environment size that maximize player ability to move gracefully. Player interaction styles that maximize the aesthetic appeal of moving through a hostile environment that looks nothing like how real people interact with being shot at (specifically, using cover). There's an entire grammar that Doom and similar shooters from that era rely on that kind of has to be tossed (or at the least VERY dampened down) once you want some realistic verisimilitude.
And it just gets worse when you're trying to tell a linear story in the middle of the game and so require hyper linear level flow to make sure all the plot points are hit, and so you have to largely toss exploration as an aesthetic pleasure. And it gets worse still when you have dumb AI buddies that have to stay alive and get in the player's way in the middle of combat, and end up causing players to lose because the AI decided to do dumb things and die.
We were in the middle of all these broader genre transitions while working on SoF, and I don't think we entirely understood the consequences of how the individual changes were adding up, nor did the broader industry. It was like we had a recipe for a perfectly good dish, and then said, "Yeah, we're going to totally make that exact recipe again! Except we're not going to use salt, chicken or flour, and we will be adding some grapes and some rhubarb. And no use of an oven!" You might be able to hill climb your way back to a new recipe that works, but there's no guarantee, and once you do, it will be something totally different.
The biggest thing that plagued me while trying to balance SoF, and what caused me to look so much more closely at Doom later, was the issue of fairness and legitimacy of challenge. In Doom, because of a variety of very carefully considered factors (many of which JP talks about), when players take damage, it's nearly always because they did something dumb that was avoidable. When you get hit in Doom, it is punishment. Because of this, it's very difficult to get yourself into an unrecoverable state in Doom. No matter how low on health you get, you can almost always finish a level as long as you are sufficiently savvy. And because of this style of design, Doom levels can really ratchet the difficult up while still presenting a fair challenge. And, in turn, the distance between casual play and really skillful play can be pretty immense.
I really love and admire that quality in a game. But it really does take a lot of very precisely balanced, often game-y choices to make that possible.
I think JP's mention of the player-as-damage-mop versus player-as-one-who-dodges gets right at the heart of this. Obviously most shooters with regenerating health in the last decade or so are fair in some important sense of the word. If you play reasonably, you will probably win. But they're often just... sloppy. The connection between player input and resulting world states is often looser, more chaotic, more often collapsing into a kind of spectacle. Obviously you can ship a game someone can play through with those design choices. But I do think games have lost something in the transition. Given the success of the Dark Souls series, I think there's some contingent of gamers out there how agree.
In the end, I think SoF was pretty fun. I was certainly proud of my work on it. It's hard not to look back on it as a kind of intermediatary step, digging its heels in as a traditional run-and-gun shooter as the future of modern military shooters came barreling down. I know there are plenty of people who like the direction that more modern shooters have gone, but for my part, I always lament that I never got to work on a shooter more closely aligned with the original Doom's design philosophy.
There's a series on YouTube called "Game Maker's Toolkit" which does an excellent analysis of why Doom worked so well: "What We Can Learn From Doom", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOObGjCA7Q
He hits on many of the same points, but it goes into more depth.
Bloodborne seems to meet all of these pretty well. Especially "speed over tanking", levels not needing to make sense if they're functional, weapon and enemy variety.
Cool to read it all laid out why we like certain games so much more than others.
