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Calling all 90's kids! What made 90's FPS's so good?

Discussion in 'Game Design' started by Not_Sure, May 23, 2015.

  1. JoeStrout

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    I honestly can't tell if you're trolling, or sincerely missing the point. If you bump into an old friend and say "hey, what have you done recently," do you really mean to say that there is no important difference between these two replies:
    1. I jumped out of an airplane over the Amazon!
    2. I read a book about a guy who jumped out of an airplane over the Amazon!
    If you claim these are almost the exact same thing, then I see no point in further conversation, as our world views are so far apart that there is no hope of connecting.

    If, on the other hand, you acknowledge that these aren't at all the same thing, then you ought to be able to also see the difference between controlling an avatar through a unique series of events, and watching a bunch of characters which you do not control play out a script.

    This is the fundamental difference between games and other forms of narrative: you have some control over what happens, by the choices you make with your controller or other input mechanism. You're not passively watching events unfold; you are an active participant in them. Obviously this isn't true for the sections of modern games where you have no input mechanism... which is the whole point of this part of the thread.
     
  2. Eric5h5

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    Of course they are. Also there's a world of difference between active and passive. Movies are passive...the same thing happens no matter what you do. In fact you can be dead after pressing "play" and it won't make a difference. If you do nothing in Doom, then nothing happens (or you just get killed). But then, all of this is entirely obvious and shouldn't have to be explained.

    --Eric
     
  3. RockoDyne

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    Go play The Stanley Parable. If you don't have the money, play the original mod. It will explain quite clearly how little of it is "your story."

    The game designer is God. While you play in his sandbox, there is nothing you do that can actually be called your own. All you do is chose some permutation of possibilities laid out for you by the designer, regardless of whether they make a point about saying anything on it or not.

    Well, chances are the second case would actually be more about the guy, rather than being an account of the experiences of jumping out of a plane. Ironically though, that's exactly like what it would be like in a game. Games aren't real life. Games are just as much a recounting of what it's like to do something as a book is. What's it like for your shoulder to start hurting from firing a gun? If you've only played shooters, you don't know. You might not have even thought of that being an issue.
    No, you are given an option. What you input is just to execute upon those options. Players are toddler kings, blissfully unaware of how little power and authority they actually have.
     
  4. GarBenjamin

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    There is no doubt the game designer creates the world, populates it as they see fit and establishes all of the laws governing it. That is where the similarities to a book or movie end.

    I can watch the same movie or read the same book many times and yet it will never change. Because there is no active participant in the movie or book. Sure you can say I am participating by watching it but it certainly is not the same thing as participating in a game.

    Take the game Blood (or basically any game) that I have been playing this week. So far there are many stories ranging from "I remember when I first stepped inside the cemetery and saw the zombies rise out out of the ground and run toward me. I hit the first one with my pitchfork and it fell backwards landing on the ground. I turned my attention to the second and just as I was about to strike I noticed the first zombie rose back up", "the other day I discovered there is another bundle of TNT hidden up on a ledge in the first big room" and "tonight for the first time I blew myself up with TNT". All of these were based on my choices... my actions.

    I did not need to engage the zombies at all. I could have just chose to run to the door of the building and discovered it was locked. Then I could have went into the cemetery, killed the cultist and gained the key to enter the building. I could have never checked that ledge just as I had not done several times before. And I definitely could have been more careful and not have blown myself up with the TNT for the first time.

    I get what you are saying about the designer being God. I agree with that and like I said earlier in the thread the designer creates the world and then sets us loose in it. While they ultimately define everything and kind of know the limits of what we can do they have no way of knowing what we actually will do and when we will do it. Unless they try to script out and control everything basically micromanaging us. Heck many times you will read interviews with game developers who say players started doing things they never even considered when they built the game. That is very different from a book or a movie and it is all due to the interactive nature and our ability to choose what we want to do (within the boundaries of the game of course) and when we want to do it.
     
  5. RockoDyne

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    So you still watch the VHS version of Star Wars, or only watch the theatrical release of Blade Runner, or only read the version of The Hobbit were Gollum willingly hands Bilbo the ring? To be fair, changing up stories used to be a bigger thing back when there were storytellers who traveled around. Look up any myth and there are going to be ten different versions of it. Hell, there are four different versions that made it into the bible. You don't even want to count how many variants of Arthurian legends are there, and then there's the welsh and irish counterparts.

    Edited to show how this is a crappy story. There are two points that actually connect (with but and therefore), while the rest of it is a series of random events that could have taken place in any order. Story is not an event. Story is when events connect.
     
  6. GarBenjamin

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    LOL! I think part of why people may think you are trolling is because you write and write and write but never seem to get to the point. It seems basically like you just write to disagree with whatever anyone else writes.

    I know it is all a matter of opinion. For example, your earlier story is no more compelling than what I described. If I minimalize it the same as I did mine it becomes... "I was facing some enemies so I took cover and ended up being blown up by a rocket when I stood up."

    I think it is safe to say we have different views on the subject and that is all I need to know. It has been an interesting discussion overall.
     
  7. evan140

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    I just want to defend Doom, since it's easy to look back and talk about how simple it was. I disagree.

    Doom was one of those games that was at the right place and the right time and it changed the industry. They were originally going to make Doom a story-driven shooter. ID was originally planning on doing a game that was way ahead of its time. Amazingly, they decided to scrap that model and the fast-paced shooter was industry changing.

    What made the difference with Doom was John Carmack made that engine so efficient it was fast. I was quite young when it came out, but it was unlike anything before it. Other FPS games coming out at the time were clunky Wolfenstein clones. (Again, fast shooter). John Carmack was a big reason why those games were so unique. The fast-paced gameplay.

    Now for the artist in me:
    Doom doesn't ever get credit for story, and it did kind of have one. Sort of a "What's-this-game-about-again?" option on the main menu. A major point why Doom was so different was the atmosphere. You should look back at Doom like it was an independent art film with little dialog. The quality of the art style was simply amazing. You may not have known why you were there, but you genuinely felt like you really were there. It was a action-film nightmare come true. The immersion for Doom was uncanny, and I think we should remember that.

    I do admit I am a fanboy. Doom deeply inspired me to become a visual artist. I even made my own tribute to the game by developing the cover art onto a copper plate and hung it on my wall. (This doesn't show the plate well, because I think I made the video to show an artist how I sealed the plate so it didn't patina. lol.


    PS: If anybody can get me an autograph from the original Doom artists, I would grateful for a lifetime. Seriously. PM me if you can make this happen!
     
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  8. angrypenguin

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    I don't know about that. "Halo health" is a real tension killer for me. In old games the health meter added an extra dimension to the choices you were making, especially when mixed with par times and/or side bonuses.

    For starters, each level actually had a finite amount of health. There's what you come in with, and there's whatever health packs are around, and... that's it. It's a resource that you have to spend wisely. The lower your health and/or the more health packs you use the higher the tension, because you're consuming a limited resource and bringing yourself closer to losing the game. When you're hit you're always making a choice about going back for the health now or saving it for later. It also doesn't encourage any particular style of play in and of itself, allowing level designers to do cool things with the placement of health packs - guard them so it's a risk/reward choice or a resource(ammo) for resource(health) choice, place them to make one path more desirable than another, make the player choose between getting the health and something else, put it on a trigger, etc. etc.

    With Halo health it's not a resource, it's just a thing that makes you pace yourself. If your shield is running low you just back off for a bit and wait for it to come back, so it specifically encourages cautious styles of play where you make sure you can always retreat or hide to recharge. Plus it gives level designers one less handy and versatile tool to influence the player. So, it slows down the game, reduces risk and takes choice away from the player. And aside from accessibility, I don't feel that it really adds anything.

    One of my favorite gaming moments to this day is a section in Half Life where I was on 1hp (and had already quicksaved). There was no health in sight and a nearly pitch black train tunnel ahead. I don't remember the details, but I do remember feeling stoked that I passed that section and got to the next health station without dying (or loading). It felt good because of the increased tension. It's a challenge and experience I couldn't possibly have had if the HEV suit just recharged itself as I ran down the tunnel.
     
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  9. Kiwasi

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    Fair enough.

    One thing you bring up indirectly here is the design differences. Halo health makes the game design revolve around the encounter. Doom health makes game design revolve around the level. The unit of game design is different.
     
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  10. Brainswitch

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    Agreed. A lot of my favourite gameplay moments in FPS have been due to limited resources, and self-regenerating health removes the edge of that.
    As does quick save and quick load. I wish more games had limits on them (as say the original Aliens vs Predator), because it took me too long to learn how not to over-use the saves even though I knew they subtracted from my enjoyment of many games.
     
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  11. Not_Sure

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    And there it is, I think I figured out why (or at least why for me) I prefer 90's shooters.

    Modern shooters are slowed WAY the hell down and dragged out to no end. And at the end of the day I'm putting in 100 hours to get 20 hours of actual game.

    1) Players are MUCH slower in modern FPS games. Period. Look at how fast you move in Doom, Quake, Duke, Blood, Shadow Warrior, Tribes, and about every game from that decade. Compare that to today. BIG difference.

    2) Unskipable cut scene after unskipable cut scene.

    3) The level content that is there is dragged out by simply throwing endless waves at the player, rather than allowing them to move along to the next area. After the fifth wave, I'm ready to quit.

    4) Lots of void sections to act as a "palette cleanse" that are the opposite of waves but manage to do the same thing, pad content. Now they make giant set pieces and make you walk through/around them, but all the while it's just scenery with nothing to it.

    5) Tutorials. Oh my god, the tutorials. I don't really give a crap if a player has never played a game, they can figure it out with experimentation.

    6) Halo health for EXACTLY what penguin said.

    I'm sure there's more if I thought about it more, but really that's what it boils down to: slowing the game down at every turn.
     
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  12. GarBenjamin

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    The game speed is very differenct. When I first played a modern style FPS back in 2008 at my cousin's house I asked him "why in heck does my character move so slow? It's like molasses in January. Feels incredibly unresponsive. I tried a couple more FPS he had and they were all basically the same way. I think it is part of "the suit" thing that was very big at least in the last decade. Big clunky slow moving suit. A huge contrast to the incredibly smooth, highly responsive fast movement of the 90s FPS.

    Having finite health definitely adds tension to the game.

    Really the 90s style shooters and the modern styles are simply different. Some people like the modern style and bash the older games. Others like the older style and bash the newer games.

    The crazy part that I don't understand is people seem to think the modern games really are "better" (instead of simply being different which is what they really are) and that some of us dislike the modern games because they are simply not older games. LOL

    Anyway maybe we will see some different game styles come out like the Doom 4 that Eric mentioned. Certainly we've seen a revival of platformers and even shmups to a degree. All of which tells me the few of us speaking favorably about older games are not the only ones who liked that stuff.
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2015
  13. RockoDyne

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    This mostly comes down to classic shooters being about movement, while modern shooters are about precision and pacing/timing (which is largely necessary when your input method is a controller). As much as movement is slower, combat is usually an instantaneous affair. Combat is largely hitscan weapons (which produce more reliable results in online multiplayer), that typically drop enemies in a single shot and produce similar results on the player.
    There actually has to be waves just to give the combat any substance, and even then I'm willing to bet that combat can actually lasts the same amount of time.

    This is a genre that rarely goes for longer than twenty hours, and six is probably the mode average. Compared to some older shooters that can be finished in a sitting, that's long, but it's nothing against the time spent in multiplayer. They tend to keep campaigns to average action game length.

    Another factor brought out by the limitations of controllers is that you can't get very creative with level design. Enemies need to appear close to the player's view, otherwise the player won't be able to notice the enemy, or can't react both fast enough and precise enough to kill the enemy before they die. Even just the flow of the level has to follow this design notion. Ideal paths are shallow curves that the player can constantly keep track of which way is forward, and right angles and greater are to be avoided without some greater view of the level's flow.
     
  14. angrypenguin

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    For reference here, what games are you referring to with the latter? "Precision" is hardly the first thing that comes to mind with "modern shooters" and gamepads. The fact that they generally feature a strong auto-aim, too...
     
  15. Not_Sure

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    Yeah, I'm sort of confused too. Gamepads have more movement control than K&M, not less, so why would movement be limited for pads?
     
  16. Eric5h5

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    Well, yes and no. A gamepad has finer directional control compared to WSAD, but view movement is clunkier compared to a mouse, which limits the ability to make rapid orientation changes.

    --Eric
     
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  17. angrypenguin

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    Yeah, when it comes to aiming a gamepad forces much more compromise between speed and precision than a mouse does. Because it is time independent, with a (good) mouse all you need to do is move it to the right spot (because the mouse alters the aim point directly). Gamepad input is not time independent, so you can either move faster which is necessarily less precise, or move more precisely which is necessarily slower (because the stick does not alter the aim point directly, it alters its rate of change).
     
  18. Not_Sure

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    Ah, I'm thinking in terms of movement versus look. I'd consider that "look".
     
  19. Not_Sure

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    This is all true, but the whole game pad versus K&M thing isn't a simple matter of one being better than the other (not that you're saying that, I'm just used to that being how it's presented). But if one was simply "better" than the other, then aim-bots would be the "best" way to play any game.

    I do think that game pads are more challenging to use than a K&M, but I hate, hate, hate hunching over a desk. Hate it. So very much. Like, it's the worst. I've got a beautiful big screen TV, a gorgeous gamer girlfriend, and we veg out in our bed when we play. I can't do that with K&M.

    That and I think that there is a lot of fun factor in mastering using a controller, where as a mouse is easy to master in a week.

    Then for online content, K&M's responsiveness turns the game into "who can't twitch the fastest?" Which starts to seem shallow to me.
     
  20. angrypenguin

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    What's the logic behind that? The aiming assistance present in most gamepad shooters seems like it belongs in the same ballpark as aimbots, to me. Both take some measure of control away from the player and get the comptuter to do it instead. The difference with auto-aim is that everyone gets it.

    Regardless of personal preference, I see mouse aiming as the most technically pure approach for (specifically) aiming at things in an FPS. That doesn't make it superior - it doesn't work on a couch, in many instances the difference doesn't matter, and sometimes being technically pure doesn't give the experience a game is aiming for in the first place. Having said that...

    Who can twitch the fastest is only a part of a well designed shooter. It's the part that matters when things are down to fractions of a second, but there are other higher level strategies/tactics that can rule the day at the minutes and seconds level. (See tactics regarding health resources above, for one example.) When you're evenly matched at those things then it's time for a battle of twitchiness.

    Plus, I can say with absolute certainty that practice makes a difference with all forms of input well after a week has passed. My personal preference is strongly for a mouse because, to me, playing with a gamepad feels frustrating and gimped - it slows me down, and usually the game interferes with my aiming by trying to "help".
     
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  21. Not_Sure

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    Okay, that is absolutely true and I hadn't considered that.
     
  22. Kiwasi

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    I thought the early 90s shooters were just keyboard, not keyboard and mouse? I might be wrong on this. But either way this is a PC vs console issue. Not an old versus new one.
     
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  23. Brainswitch

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    The earliest ones might've just been keyboard, but keyboard + mouse (look/aim) was an option at least (although not default setting) quite early (or rather in the middle of the 90's). Then again, it depends on what you mean with early and what platforms you played (Marathon 1 had mouse aiming, and that was 93-94) while Doom did not (you could use the mouse for movement though) but that was earlier. I think it had a lot to do with how '3D' the physics and world was, didn't make much sense for mouse aiming in Wolfenstein 3D :)
     
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  24. angrypenguin

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    With regards to old vs. new, Goldeneye 64 was doing its own version of the joystick auto-aim thing in 1997. I could be wrong, but I think Quake 2 might have been the first game with default mouse aiming, slightly later in the same year. I think the original Quake, in 1996, is where people started using mouse aim which, from memory, was non-default (and possibly didn't have vertical look?).

    So yeah, it's definitely not an old-vs-new thing. Everyone started experimenting with whatever controller options were available on their relevant platforms as soon as the hardware was capable of making full 3D shooters, at around the same time.

    It makes perfect sense. Keyboard aiming is the same as gamepad aiming, but with even less control. I remember playing Doom (one of the recent re-releases, I think) with mouse + keyobard and it works fine. There's only 1 axis that matters, but that doesn't make it less useful.
     
  25. Deleted User

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    Am I weird/ the odd one if I'm a "nineties baby" or w/e that means and I LOVE cutscenes, a story, realism (to degree), and I find [almost] anything made before the year 2000 a disgustingly boring horrible mess?

    To this day I do not understand the fascination with retro games like Super Mario Bros or Metroid.

    A key note about me though is my family (and thus I) never owned a console until I was a tween. We had a computer with zero internet access and I still have fond feelings for 90's PC gaming because every time my family went to the base BX we got these free game demo's on a cd called "HotRel disks" which stood for "Hot Releases". These discs contained several different demo games and my brother and I spent wayyy too much time playing them.


    I am still rather fond of Shadow Warrior and Jedi Knight DF2 (which I bought a few years ago on Steam, it works with my windows 7 PC cause' Steam made the company which provided it make it compatible).

    I never did get to finish the full game of Shadow Warrior. But the demo was a blast!

    When we got our second PC and I DLed the Halo PC Demo I was hooked. From that point on I wanted to make games!

    A few years later we got an Xbox and Halo 2 not soon after + XBL. I had so much fun then.

    Playing through Jedi Knight DF2 wasn't much fun this time around though. Much frustration, though the complexity and design of the levels was pretty spectacular. I really felt like I was aboard some massive spaceship.

    Punching the fuel in the fuel reservoirs in JKDF2 gave me a good laugh though. The fuel reacted to *any* kind of damage so punches would set off a chain reaction of fuel explosions, and that was asking for trouble!

    Games have changed greatly over the years. I do wish we had a more delicate balance between graphical fidelity and level extensiveness though. I really did like exploring those levels in JKDF2 and Shadow Warrior!

    Honestly I'd rather explore a level than stare at a gorgeously rendered vine ensconced brick wall.

    There has to be some in between.


    I love cutscenes because its good story telling, even if its bad story. Halo's "Halo kills the flood's food to starve them to death but they've been used before yet here is the flood go have fun" never made a lick of sense to me either but I did enjoy the cutscenes.

    It really made me feel like a spartan warrior in the midst of an epic fight for survival aboard a massive spacecraft, alone, lost, and outnumbered and outgunned. Playing some two bit level without any outside perspective or secondary character perspective never made me feel "special".
     
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  26. Eric5h5

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    Yep! It's sufficiently weird, in fact, that I have to suspect you have some kind of brain disease. Probably a huge inoperable tumor. Or wait—it's more likely an alien organism, slowly eating its way out. You'll probably die soon...sorry about that!

    They're fun. If I wanted to sit around watching cutscenes, I'd just watch a movie.

    --Eric
     
  27. GarBenjamin

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    I find it very interesting that you opened with "I LOVE cutscenes, a story, realism (to degree), and I find [almost] anything made before the year 2000 a disgustingly boring horrible mess".

    And then as you continued into the details of your post you mentioned "Games have changed greatly over the years. I do wish we had a more delicate balance between graphical fidelity and level extensiveness though. Honestly I'd rather explore a level than stare at a gorgeously rendered vine ensconced brick wall. There has to be some in between."

    I'm not criticizing what you wrote. Just mentioning that you basically hit on the real issue here!

    The reason many people still play the older games is simply because, as you stated, games have changed so much over the years the only way to get those other experiences is generally by playing the older games.

    As you noted, the emphasis has become more and more on presentation. Just making everything look & sound as awesome as it can. That is the focus first and foremost. Then the games seem to be thrown together around that focus trying to make sure the player has a chance to see and hear everything at its best. To achieve that goal some compromises are made elsewhere such as limiting exploration and interaction (outside of simply blowing things up or the motion interaction provided by canned physics systems).

    And that is why people still like to play games like Super Metroid and even the original Metroid on NES. The presentation is good enough to allow experiencing the game world and the focus is on the actual game play.

    It all comes down to what you want from your games. Heck some people find it immensely satisfying playing games with ASCII characters. Others want everything to look like a movie. Generally speaking it is still true that the more focus put into presentation the less focus is put elsewhere and vice-versa.

    So it would be awesome (as you said "there has to be some room in between") to have games focusing on both. Cutting back on the presentation focus so they can focus more on the actual gameplay. Let's face it, the presentation of modern games has a ton of room to be dropped back. Yet instead what we see is a continual focus on that area.
     
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  28. Deleted User

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    Very true modern graphics/aethetics could be dropped to a large degree, still look good, and still be fun! Its an odd paradox. I watched something (it may have been on Polygon or Extra Credits) about graphical improvements. I believe the statistic was twenty years ago a two fold increase in polygon count resulted in much increased graphical recognition. In other words, every time the poly count increased the characters and environments became much more true to life.

    Fast forward to today and an increase in literally thousands of polygons or many powers of two and the difference is barely noticeable. It hits on the law of diminishing returns. Also with each new iteration of a game over the years; the graphical requirements increase and older games do not stand the test of time really at all.

    Its an odd thing this games business. AAA studios can produce AAA games but it costs $XX millions of dollars to produce. Next year they must invest $XX millions + a few extra millions just to stay relevant. In most other businesses the irrelevance and obsolesence of older games might offset the price of producing new products. Because the older games paled in comparison the newer ones might get bought more. As I've always said (maybe not here on the Unity3d.com forums) making software is essentially creating something out of nothing. These days we have Unity3d and other game engines to provide a basis to build from, but you still have to build the actual game. Software development is eased by using third party engines, frameworks, w/e because then you don't have to use time reinventing the wheel and doing things which are boring/tedious/distract from your actual project.

    I say that because if the old product isn't as new and shiny as your newest one perhaps it would sell more. You have increasing development costs however, which make it more and more difficult to turn a profit.

    Even if you use third party software to produce your AAA game, its still expensive and a long arduous haul to release.

    Going back to the original thought I was going with; at some point investing $XX millions in to a game has to become too much to sensibly make money. Another indie game dev said once, and again I forgot who and where, but he said he can make a game with $X thousands of money and get back a return 10x that much. It makes more sense to make a smaller cheaper game and get a larger return than to make a big expensive one and barely make a profit, if any at all.
     
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  29. RichardKain

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    FPS shooters in the 90s (and early 00s) are rembered fondly today because of their strong focuses on gameplay, level design, and exploration. A lot of FPS design in the post-Halo days focused on set-piece interactions, a valid aproach, but one which cut back considerably on motion, exploration, and level design.

    In early FPS games, the player is able to move very quickly, and mobility is significant to the gameplay. In Doom and Quake, many of the enemies shoot slow-moving projectiles as opposed to just bullets, and dodging such projectiles is possible for the player. Keeping distance from the enemy and moving to avoid attacks is more important than aiming and shooting. The large, sprawling level designs helped to reinforce this type of gameplay, as did the lack of "quick-cover." The lack of automatic healing also encouraged the player to explore and hunt for health and power-ups, as well as be more careful not to take damage.

    Halo-centric FPS design changed a lot about the FPS genre. Automatically regenerating health made most health-related pick-ups useless. This seriously cut down on the need to explore levels. Likewise, the idea that all weapons would be picked up from enemies also cut down on exploration. In earlier FPS games, you had to hunt through the levels themselves to find more powerful weapons, and enemies usually only dropped ammo. This also led to the stop-and-pop approach to the shooting mechanics. Accurate shots became far more important, and the best method for gameplay was to find cover, pop out for accurate shooting, and then duck back behind cover. This turned most gameplay into a more arena-style system, with significantly less movement. Level design became much more linear in order to accommodate this approach. Levels turned into simple linear corridors that connected different set-piece arenas.

    Both are valid approaches, but both are also quite different. Which one you prefer is just a matter of personal preference and style.
     
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  30. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    Very good analysis! And I also agree with your final thought. It comes down to personal preference. I can't speak for other retro gamers but when I talk about older games and what I like about them over modern games... or that I'd like modern games more like the older games... I just mean give me something different for heaven's sake. Keep the current gameplay style for many games certainly but occasionally just make a damn game that goes back to that fast gameplay with more focus on level design, exploration and so forth. Apply today's tech to it. Sure upgrade the graphics some but focus on the other stuff for a change. The important stuff.

    I know I am probably in the minority around here but honestly making a game HD movie-like graphics doesn't do anything to make the game any more fun than if it had lowres 32 color palette grqphics. I guess I just don't get why they never just focus on the "other" stuff for a change. Not a complete change for all modern games just one out of 3 or 5 or 10 games or whatever. We know players will not refuse such an approach because this is basically the approach Minecraft took and I think on PC it is the biggest selling game of all time. Sure the graphics are blocky. Certainly it is not something artists can use to show how good their skills are. However, in place of HD awesome presentation what the game offers is incredible interaction. The important stuff.
     
    Last edited: Jun 1, 2015
  31. Tomnnn

    Tomnnn

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    Silly Teila, that's just an issue with naming. The actionboner is actually located just below the appendix in both males and females. Please, observe this diagram.

    ab.png
     
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  32. Teila

    Teila

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    Uh..yeah...right. That is what they all say. :rolleyes:
     
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  33. AndrewGrayGames

    AndrewGrayGames

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    Darn Dwarf-Headcrabs...where's Gordon Freeman when we need him!?

    Oh wait, he's filming Half-Life 3
     
  34. Aiursrage2k

    Aiursrage2k

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    Oh yeah I just got a kickstarter email from the superhot team, and I guess thats the new FPS im looking forward to.
     
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  35. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    That looks cool. Finally something different! I was beginning to think most of the creativity was left back in the 80s and 90s! :)
     
  36. Tomnnn

    Tomnnn

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    All of the violence from the 80s and 90s made a comeback today. Hatred just released.
     
  37. Aiursrage2k

    Aiursrage2k

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    Yeah but it looks pretty boring, well except for his funny one liners
     
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  38. Tomnnn

    Tomnnn

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    The reviews are mostly positive haha, but... well... it's a twin stick shooter. Boring is inevitable. You know some walls over and say "woo, physics!", you kill some cops and some civilians... and that's it.

    In GTA 5 on the other hand, I placed a bunch of proximity explosives, shot a round to startle a crowd, and watched them race to their own doom. The winners got to be sniped by me personally, with 1st and 2nd place being hit by laser guided rockets. The police were displeased with my activity.

    First person slaughter > isometric slaughter.
     
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  39. Deleted User

    Deleted User

    Guest

    Nice font.
     
  40. Tomnnn

    Tomnnn

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    Thanks! I used some weird paint-clone on mac called 'paintbrush'. The interface is really awkward but it's faster than opening up GIMP. I made it read so people can see it faster since it's a pretty lame gag :p

    Some jokes are more successful when people spend less time thinking about them. That's a free lesson from me to the community. Some jokes work in the moment but die upon any critical observation.
     
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  41. Moaid_T4

    Moaid_T4

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    maybe because they were the olny one's
     
  42. Ony

    Ony

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    I just read through this entire thread, and what a great thread it is. This is the kind of discussion that gets me excited about games again. For a long time now I have openly stated to people I know that "I don't like video games anymore." I thought for a while that it's because I've been in the games industry for 20+ years and I've just got tired of it, but I think it's not so much that. It's more that I can't get excited about modern games. Most of them are the same. All the same mechanics, mostly military style shooters, no good puzzles to work out, no sense of exploration, etc. Boring.

    Games these days are all about holding the hand of the player to the point where nothing is a challenge. Nothing takes any thought. It's all "press this button to do this" and "press this button to do that" and if there's a hidden object I'm supposed to find, it's glowing and pulsing the second I enter the room. If it's not, then it soon will be as the game decides that 30 seconds is just too much time to let the player find it on their own.

    So what's a girl to do? Go back and play old games, of course! So last weekend I hooked up a bunch of my old systems: SNES, N64, PS1, etc. (plus installed some old PC games) and dove in head first with my wife and daughter for a full weekend of good games. And then... and then... we played for about 30 minutes, turned everything off, and went on with our day. Because you can't go back.

    Damn.

    As much as I loved cerebral, story-based FPSs like Half Life (my #1 favorite game ever until Bioshock), System Shock 2, and the like, I also totally loved jumping into an arena and killing everyone as quickly as I could. I was one of the top ranked TF(1) and Counter Strike players back in the day.

    I think of the 90s as the pinnacle of gaming. The best games, in my opinion, came out during that decade (plus Max Payne in 2001 which I still personally consider a 90s game). I'm trying desperately to find the love again. The love that got me into game development in the first place, way back in... the 90s.

    I told my wife the other day, "I'm no longer going to say out loud that I don't like video games." Instead, I'm going to seek out and find what I'm looking for, even though I don't know what it is exactly. I'm going to give games a chance. I stopped doing that a few years ago. I started getting so bored with the direction games were taking that I pretty much wrote them all off. I gave up. My wife said "you used to LOVE games" and that's sad, because for a long time now I haven't. So I'm on a new path to find that love again.
     
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  43. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    Well said @Ony. As much as I dislike much of modern games and like older games (and do spend time playing them every week) I run into the same kind of thing as you've described. There were many flaws in many games from the 80s and even 90s. Same as there are for games now. The flaws are different. In different areas. I have been thinking about this for quite a while. I think what I am looking for is some kind of bridge between the older style of games and modern games. Games with the basic feel of the older games... the challenge, the exploration, the "feel" and so forth without the crap design parts such as enemies cheap shotting you, requiring loads of memorization to make progress and so forth. Those are the kind of games I want to make. If you find some games that "click" with you please let us know. I'd like to check them out.
     
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  44. Aiursrage2k

    Aiursrage2k

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    Right and all you have to do is be keep your "ear to the ground" and be selective about what type of games you play. Im not sure what type of games you like but you just have to scour the web, watch giant bomb vids, check out gamejolt every now and then and try to find the cool ass games that appeal to you.
     
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  45. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    I wonder how much of it is a presentation issue.

    I was at a trade show this weekend with a match 3 game I'd made. The people who gave it a go picked up pretty quickly on what was unique about it and from there everything was positive. On the other hand, loads of people were dismissing it as "yo, some dude made Bejeweled, lol" and dismissing it in all of three seconds. (Note: that's not a complaint. I can absolutely see how they'd get to that conclusion from what they could see.)

    This was great for me as it strongly re-affirmed that when I go to sale shortly I absolutely need to put my points of difference right up front, before people even see a screenshot. Easy, can do.

    But it made me think: when I scroll through pages of Steam games and ignore most of them because to me they look the same, how many of them actually do have a cool twist I might really enjoy and just aren't getting it across to me before I move on to the next thing?
     
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  46. GarBenjamin

    GarBenjamin

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    I am sure there is a lot of truth to this. If a person could spend the time to try the thousands.... millions? lol.... of games out there I bet there are some very unique games that I would like. There is just too much to dig through these days. So... you're right. Devs need to do a better job of communicating the differences right up front. Too many Indies seem to be modeling their games after current AAA style games so if a game looks like just another variation on the standard FPS I don't even bother checking it out. Same for many game types. The market places need a better way to categorize games and Devs need to put some more thought into how they are listing them.
     
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  47. SkyTech6

    SkyTech6

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    2005's SWAT 4 - Favorite FPS.

    I'm not really into high action shooting games... Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Battlefield, Halo, etc kinda feel like a completely different genre than something like SWAT...

    SWAT is like a tactical game. I had to plan how to enter buildings and take down the bad guys... Now my best chance for that is playing one of those weird SWAT inspired top down games that are overly difficult with bad controls.

    SWAT 5 please.
     
  48. RockoDyne

    RockoDyne

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    Curiously enough, finding hidden objects became a genre unto itself, but no one talks about it since the target demo is women ages 35+. I would say the trade off is mechanical depth versus potential infuriating. It's a puzzle with little depth, so under the best conditions it provides a slight road bump, while the worst scenario is derailing the game for hours as you stumble around for the only solution to the problem. Modern sensibility is to make games friction free where it's not the game's primary forms of conflict. The S***ty games always had only one solution, with modern games pointing it out to make sure you don't miss it, but the better games have always recognized the fact that it was a puzzle and gave it proper thought.

    Learn from Huniepop. No one will really care what the underlying game is like when you put in tits. To be fair, the match 3 part of it is actually quite good.
     
  49. angrypenguin

    angrypenguin

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    It's more than just categorisation. My game, for instance, would be perfectly categorised as a match 3 along with all of the hundreds of others. As a developer, a part of my marketing thought needs to be assuming that that's how it's being seen and pitch it appropriately.

    My first pitch was basically "It's a match 3 but with this difference". Judging by the weekend's experience, I lose the majority of interest right around the word "match".

    What would happen if I flipped it around and pitched "This is my game's unique twist! It's built on top of the match 3 rules you know and love."? Then, by the time people see the word "match" their expectations are already changed, because they know it's in a (slightly) different context.

    I don't know what impact that's going to have, if any at all. But I'm going to find out. :)
     
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  50. Billy4184

    Billy4184

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    One thing I like about really old games was how much was left to the imagination (no doubt not by choice!). The bad graphics so understated the game reality that you had to bridge the gap with your imagination. And once you had the player willingly trying to create part of your game inside their head, not only did it mean that they were more suggestible but also they were able to create (or leave as abstract) each part in such a way as to most satisfy themselves.

    On the other hand, these days, so little is left to the imagination, so little is asked of the player imagination-wise, that they never invest anything into the game, do not connect with it strongly, and are not able to mould the game in their minds in such a way as to satisfy themselves individually. Every little detail that is put in the game, that doesn't fit their idea of reality or their idea of style or their idea of fun, jars against the experience and threatens to break it. You shovel 10Gb worth of art and animation into the game and the chances of the player eating up all of it without choking on something are slim.

    It's like the difference between poetry and a Tom Clancy novel (nothing against him, had to pick something). If you can get over only having a few lines of text in your hand, the experience can be so much deeper, so much more adaptable to your own reality, even so much more different every time you read it, whereas every time you read the novel you have to be annoyed all over again at some stupid thing someone said or some little thing that doesn't make sense or something you didn't need or want to know that bores you, and there is no way to rewrite it at all without it failing to connect with all the rest of the detail.

    I think that devs and players should both be less afraid of leaving things understated.
     
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