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

Yeah this is definitely a big part of the appeal of the older games to me as well. I guess it is why I am not much into "gee whiz" graphics and why I find the modern "trying to look like real life" graphics so boring. It's almost like the higher the graphics definition and overall quality the more it seems like I am watching a movie instead of playing a game. And the lower the detail, more abstract I guess, the more my mind fills in the blanks. And the latter pulls me into the game more.

 

Thats like a niche type game. One my favourite games is actually "splatter shooter", crimsonland, alien shooter zombie shooter, and there was a new game called "Splatter blood red edition". These are niche games for that genre, and maybe if steam somehow expands on the steam curation -- I mean more to carter more to these specific sub-grenres (and not just a recommendation page -- but more of a "front page" that only appeal to these weird ass cool niches that only appeal to you and youll start to see more of these games popping up).

The type of FPS I like is not these modern military shooters its the old school games, if theres like your own "little stores" and theres a market to sell these weirdo type of games (that only appeal to these sub-genres of games). I dont know why they stopped at the curator idea, because it seems to be dominated by the youtubers who have a specific tastes, thats not really giving people what they want. And then it becomes what games do these "e-celberity" think is cool, rather then what games do I think is cool as a "this specific genre type of gamer".I dont need to see what what totalbiscuit thinks is a cool roguelike when he hates the genre.

 

It seems to me that making stuff "look right" often means taking control from the player. Compare the combat systems in Assassin's Creed vs. Ninja Gaiden for examples. In Assassin's Creed the controls and mechanics are really simple but there's a huge range of animations for different cases so it always looks like it has flow. They can do that because the computer gets to decide on the details. On the other hand, in Ninja Gaiden the animation is almost just snapping from post to pose, and different animations and visual responses specific to exact player input. The computer doesn't decide any details, it's all known in advance and the "gaps" covered by huge effects.

Both approaches can work really well, but I wonder if there's competing design influences early on between "make it look good" and "give the player more control".

 

The way I see it, only certain kinds of realism are actually called for in games. Few people would have a problem with having a lush, detailed scenery in a game, or an M-16 that looks more realistic. But the problem is that at the same time, this detail in the scenery kind of necessitates detail in the characters, in the story, in the dialogue, in short, in all of the parts of the game that each player needs to be able to experience individually. And the moment you don't like something and it sticks in your craw the experience is damaged. Each bit of detail in a game story (which includes dialogue), IMO, should just be a hint, an outline, to direct the story that the player is writing in their own head.

 

@Ony, thanks for breathing life back into this thread — very interesting stuff.

One thing that some games have done well is enabling people to play it at different levels. I'm thinking in particular of the various LEGO action games, which (granted) have become a little formulaic, but it's a really good formula, and it basically works like this: the basic objective of each level is to get to the other side, and you can blaze through the game just doing that. But if you take the time to explore, and search, and solve some puzzles, then there is a lot more in each level to discover and do. And there are rewards (credits you can use to buy new abilities/costumes/whatever) for doing so.

I think that's a great way to balance the needs of those who just want to get to the end of the game, and those who want to explore and discover.

 

For the record, I wasn't talking about "hidden object" games. I was talking about things like secret panels, hidden alcoves, items, etc. in FPSs. I think I've played maybe two "hidden object" games in my life. Not really my thing. It feels like you saw that I am a woman and immediately went for the "oh, those are womenly game things you're talking about". Please don't do that.

In the 90s, hidden things and puzzle elements were part of level design. Now, they're not, and if there is something "hidden", I'm not given the chance to find it myself, as it's usually pointed out so it's not missed. No challenge.

 

I don't know if that's necessarily true. Plenty of games have genuinely hidden stuff for people to find. There's just a clear separation between stuff you need to find and stuff that's optional. The former is almost always made glaringly obvious, but when games have the latter that's not always the case and there's usually a few items which are hidden pretty well.

Check out Grow Home if you haven't already. It's a non-violent exploration game about a robot and a plant, most of which revolves around finding stuff.

 

I'll check out Grow Home, thanks for the head-up.

Level design these days is very linear compared to the past, and when there's a hidden area it's almost impossible to miss. In the old days, you might have to go through a level a bunch of times to try to find hidden passageways, etc. Now it's mostly made glaringly obvious, if the game even has them at all.

Speaking of puzzle elements and hidden things as part of the level design, I was thinking of Tomb Raider earlier. The first one was absolutely amazing. So much fun exploring, finding the way through the tombs, watching out for traps and hidden panels, etc. It was player vs. environment for the most part. And then as the years have gone by, Tomb Raider has become player vs. enemy. Gone is the feeling of exploration and using your brain to find cool things, and it's been replaced with combat against human enemies. Whoopdie doo. I can shoot people in every other game in existence. What happened to exploration and challenge? Gone. Granted, I have not played the latest Tomb Raider. Maybe they went back to the basics. Problem is, I don't care enough about the franchise to find out. They took away the uniqueness of Tomb Raider and made it like every other game. Combat against humans. Erk. Bring back the puzzles and challenge and intricate level design. Please!

 

Oh, secret passages and such! Yeah, I miss those too. Also, one of the recent Prince of Persia games didn't have trap rooms. It's as if they forgot what they were making...

That's actually something I'm working on. Fingers crossed you're not the only one who appreciates it!

Also The Talos Principle, though it's probably more of a literal puzzle solver than you're thinking. It's still amazingly good, though, at least as far as I've played.

And upcoming Submerged from another indie team local to me. Looks amazing, and it's all about exploring.

 

Well, I mentioned above that Tomb Raider has over the years become less and less of what it was to start with, and has relied more on combat than on exploration. I also mentioned that I have not played the last couple of versions. So I figured I'd go look up some stuff about it, and I found this review about the 2013 version, which basically says exactly the same thing I am saying and a few other people are saying. Things have changed, and not for the better.

"In the course of surviving [a] single ambush [event] beneath the spotlight glare, Lara guns down more people than she killed in the entirety of the 1996 game that launched the Tomb Raider series... No, really... Lara Croft's debut outing saw her enter armed conflict with a total of five humans." - from the review I linked above.

"...The original Tomb Raider saw players navigating complex labyrinths, navigating ancient traps and puzzles, and picking her way though a vast underground space in search of answers to an ancient mystery." - from the review.

"...[In] the new Tomb Raider...Crystal Dynamics quarantined anything resembling the cave-diving of yore into optional "tomb challenges," carefully sealing away the need for any skill besides those revolving around combat neatly out of sight. Don't be afraid, they reassured players. Those scary parts where you're not killing things can't hurt you anymore." - from the review.

So there's that. A side note about a particular game but one that I think shows what I feel has happened to most modern games.

 

Ick. I mean, I really enjoy action games, but even I think that's a terrible attitude. I want more games where violence isn't the only option.

As a side note, one of my current game concepts challenges you not to kill things. Violence is a possible solution, but it is also a discouraged one. Not sure yet if I can make the game work, but I hope so.

 

That's what SWAT did. You had to apprehend people even if they were armed with AK-47s. You had to yell at them to come quietly, pray they do, if they shoot THEN you can return fire, but still your intent is to surpress them into putting their hands up because you need to apprehend so many to complete the mission.

 

Final thought about Tomb Raider, since it's not really an FPS but its evolution does very much represent the change over time from uniquely different gameplay to boringly similar gameplay...

This video from E3 2015 shows the new Tomb Raider game coming out:

What I see is exceptionally beautiful graphics and animation (absolutely gorgeous!), with a few controller movements here and there. From what I can tell, you can do exciting things like push the stick to walk forward through the snow, push a button when it tells you to, and then push buttons again when told to. Also, it's possible that you can move left and right but I can't be sure from the video.

I think I understand now. We're all here talking about how good games from the 90s were, but modern games have decided those 90s gameplay styles aren't good enough. No... instead, they've gone back to 1983, studied Dragon's Lair, and decided that it was the pinnacle of gameplay. Nice looking cinematics with extremely limited interaction and exploration. Pretty much every big game these days. What fun.

I'd love to see more involved gameplay that trusts the player to figure things out. I think the problem is that modern games have to look so good graphically, and have to have awesome sound effects and music, and full motion captured animations, etc. that cost an incredible amount of money and time to create.

Essentially what we have as "levels" these days are really giant expensive set pieces. Stages as if for filming. With the scripted effects and special animations for each part, it's almost not possible to allow for too much player interaction or exploration without breaking the scenery or losing some of the impact. So the big games being made these days are basically movies. 3D movies that you can sort of have a part in by pressing buttons when told to. It's like you're an actor on a stage: move here, do this, touch this, etc. instead of what you should be, which is immersed in a world.

 

I like that. Look forward to seeing where you take it.

 

I thought that they'd decided that an action movie is the pinnacle of gameplay, and that happens to be as close as they can get whilst still calling it a game.

Me too. I want players to choose to not kill, as opposed to thinking I'm just trying to be edgy.

 

Ha ha! That is almost exactly how I see modern games. I definitely see the emphasis is on presentation and their "movie experience" above all else. I don't know how anyone could not see that. When I first watched that trailer I thought great more of the movie crap. And you are right it does remind me of the old laser disc games in a way. I also think of the movie style games from the 90s. The difference is that back then they were seen as junk and not really games. I guess if the graphics and sound are good enough most people can't tell how lame these things really are. It looks boring... absolutely completely boring to me.

If they want to focus on absolute graphics / video quality / camera shots etc above all else then I don't understand why they just don't make movies. I mean just take the final step and throw out the interaction completely and then they don't need to worry about directing a player around like an actor or the silly player messing up the scene. Just make a movie.

 

Going back to Halo, I've been thinking a bunch about classic Halo.

If anyone has played it, you may recall the second mission of the first Halo game. You crash land on the ring with the pilot and other marines expired leaving you as the only survivor. As the Covenant dropships circle overhead to land, you know this can't be good. Their potshots fired by the underslung plasma cannon do significant damage and are decently accurate.

Then the doors open up on both sides of the dropship and out pours several grunts, jackals, and one or two elites, formidable foes.

All you have is your pistol, a few grenades and spare ammo, and an AR, virtually useless for anything but suppression beyond a short distance.

After making it past this first part of the level, two covenant vehicles known as Banshees appear and veer toward you as you march almost symbolically up a hill, who then proceed to make passes firing quicky plasma projectiles which bring your shields to a quarter almost every time. There are not many places to hide.

Later Halo games boosted the shield recovery speed and made the player gradually more powerful. There was no longer any plausible narrative to covenant combat interactions, it was more simply just traversing a canyon and happening upon a group of seemingly bored, and unaware, covenant troops.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that feeling of powerlessness, and it created a real sense of fear to the player because they weren't certain they'd get to go on to the next mission/level section. Later Halo's introduced Dropships willy nilly, and it never made the player feel powerless. Marines were actually helpful, didn't meet their ends to covenant weaponry as much (if ever, I'm looking at you: halo 5).

When Jason Jones said back in those days in the ViDocs about Humanity being up against a wall, fighting for their lives, he meant it and the games showed it.

I've been thinking about these mechanics and its something I'd like to emulate.

I really enjoy Halo 5 forge (the free windows PC game), because the enhacned mobility is actually sort of fun. It gives you a great sense of control, but without feeling too powerful (mostly). The boosters were a feature I'd always wanted, and sprint is nice but not necessary. Halo works best when you can't cross a map in a few bounds. Groundpound and the booster assisted melee attack are just dumb because it reminds me too much of super heroes, which are exactly what Halo is not about (being all powerful).

Honestly the game would be perfect without sprint, that "Smart link" hover feature, or ground pound. Boosters are a great thing though for simple things like dodging grenades or gaining the upper hand in a CQ firefight.

 

There's a cool and very fun effect created by giving the player less power, and fewer options.

 

It was all new and both the games and the hardware were developing at a very rapid pace. There was a series of new innovations in every new game, and computer speeds, especially video hardware in the later 90's, were advancing well above Moore's law predictions at the time.

We went from entirely CPU processed 2D sprites displayed in a 3D environment on 386 and early 486 processors, to full 3D polygon rendering on dual Voodoo2 cards in SLI mode on 133MHz processors in just around 5 years. (for the younger crowd, Nvidia uses the acronym SLI when referring to linking multiple graphics cards because they eventually bought their rival 3DFX which invented the concept with the Voodoo2, even though the Nvidia version is entirely different technology and the acronym actually refers to different words - but in the 90's no consumers actually knew or cared what computer acronyms stood for)

Not only that, but the Internet wasn't big back then. We all would have our favorite BBS we'd connect to, and it would spread word of mouth where to get the shareware version of whatever new game had just hit. You'd work out whatever Hayes initialization commands your modem needed to turn off hardware flow control and compression, because for some stupid reason every modem would need a different cryptic initialization string to do the same exact thing, and get your first taste of remote multiplayer in games like Doom. If you couldn't figure out your initialization string, you couldn't play unless you actually drove over to your friend's house and hopefully you both had bought the $250 in today's dollars network cards you would need to lan it up.

Eventually things moved to the Internet when Quake came out, but finding servers was still largely a word of mouth process, as they hadn't yet invented an in game server browser.

So in my opinion it was just the pace of advancement that was so exciting. There was always the next new shiny thing to come out, and then the next thing that fixed all the insane issues you worked through just to get the last thing to work.

Today everything is just a slight iteration on the previous game, and when a new video card comes out your previous generation card still has a few years left. In the 90's when a new card came out, that was the signal that it was time to throw out the card you bought last year. Because if you don't, the next game that comes out will take advantage of the new card, and if you use last year's you're going to have to reduce your screen size down to half of your monitor size just to get a descent frame rate. Last year's hardware was pure garbage, not even fit to try to sell to a buddy. Good times!

I even remember playing Dark Forces 1 on an I-Glasses VR headset that was basically the same formula that Oculus touted decades later as revolutionary. Oculus rift is actually not that much different than what I was playing with over 20 years ago.

 

Personally, the thing that I liked best about old shooters is that you had to both master shooting and movement. Modern first person characters move so slowly compared to old-school heros which means that your movement is not all that important. You might make an opponent miss one or two shots out of five if you strafe well, but in an old school deathmatch, fights were as much about how you dance than how you shoot. I think it was more necessary in the old style single player modes: enemies actually came towards you so there was no cover. In modern games you can always duck into a corner and hide while even "smart" ai just looks around from their restricted area. That wasn't the case before, if you ran through a level in DOOM, by the end you'd have every enemy in the whole level homing in on you.

I also don't understand where the concept of verticality went. Most modern shooting takes place on a more-or-less flat plane. Even when you have levels that are multi-tiered, the teirs themselves tend to be fairly seperate with only a few points between them. This wasn't true with Quake, there were plenty of levels where you weave up and down. You had so many movement options in that game (which was actually an accident. Quake released before the developers realized that you could rocket jump and wall jump.) You actually had to learn those skills to be any good. I can think of only one level of a single modern game where I actually grenade jump in combat (Damnation in Halo) and modern games don't even have a wall jump. Why can the Master Chief not kick off a wall? I would love to see a shooter with a wall jump. Even Quake's was double accidental - it was actually a rocket jump just off of a wall.

 

Quake was also more customizable than most modern shooters. You could enter in complex key binding sequences from its console, and the game could be modded endlessly. On the rocket jump example, my brother shocked me in multiplayer with his always perfect rocket jumps. When I asked him how he always nailed it perfectly, he showed me how he just used the console to bind a single key to do the below sequence, for an always perfect rocket jump with a single key press.

1) jump
2) switch to rocket launcher
3) aim down
4) fire rocket
5) switch back to previous weapon
6) center your aim forward (aim back up)

 

I think for me, part of it was the reward of just playing. I remember carrying CRT monitors and ridiculously heavy desktops to friends houses where we would network several machines together and then having to go through menus and setup games manually using IP addresses, etc. When everyone finally showed up in the same LAN game, half the fun had been had already. Nowadays I send a group text to 15 friends at once and 2 minutes later I get a notification that three of them just turned their XBoxes on.

I also don't remember my friends and I ever being really competitive when we played shooters. It was more about hanging out because we were all friends in the same room drinking the same root beer. Nowadays when I play with friends, we almost always are a team that is up against a team of strangers who are half a world away, which changes the game entirely. It's now us versus them instead of us versus us.

* Edit. I don't know why I used numbers and then suddenly opted to spell out 'three', but I'm leaving it.

 

My favorite shooters came at the end of the 90s like Rainbow Six and in the early 2000s we got Ghost recon, and a few years later SWAT 3 and 4. What made this games so much better than most shooters today are they are not dumbed down.

We also had Half life 1 that took the concept from Quake 1 and 2 and made a great story driven shooter out of it, still without dumbing down or taking away control from the player

 

My favorite thing about those same games was the atmosphere, more than anything. The original Ghost Recon games had character models that looked like ordinary soldiers with 1980's american military gear. They didn't have tough guy beards or huge biceps. They were round around the waist with LBE's carrying ordinary soldier gear. You didn't play dress up at all. You just used what you were given, just like real soldiers.

The theme music was very militaristic, the dialogue no-nonsense, simplified military jargon, and the color palette was dim, like a swamp in morning fog.

It felt authentic. It made you believe you were the tough guy SF dude crawling through a swamp to assassinate a drug lord.The theme seemed to center around how tough the mission was. The challenge. Now, the theme in the same games seem to be about how cool the characters are.

Now, all the GR games are about flashy tech. Hollywood S***. Some people like that, but not the same fans of the originals. Instead of radio silence except for mission essential info, we have muscle bro's pontificating about the morality of killing and fighting. Trust me, these kinds of conversations are not realistic, nor are they interesting.

90's military shooters set a mood and left the rest to the player. Of course, I was much younger then, with a bigger imagination. And I thought military stuff was really cool. But there's probably plenty of teenagers who are just like I was then.

 

My favourite part of the fps games in the 90s, was how many of the games were focusing on providing a certain aspect of an fps enough content.

For example, Serious Sam games were fun to me because the gameplay was mostly just shoot enemies as they come to you. They had a focus and they nailed it. Though this is probably biased because I pay little attention to narrative, and I care more about the gameplay itself instead.

Also the big weapon inventories, that S*** is great.

I also like how Quake had a community of rocket jumping and speed maps, giving birth to the art of rocket jumping, my favourite product of explosions. It's also not surprising that a lot of people loved rocket jumping so much that other games implemented explosions with the intent of people wanting to rocket jump. Eventually creating environments within the game's to allow more rocket jumping (reduced damage to self like in TF2).

 

Oh, how you missed one Halo's many subtitles. The AR is almost always my sidearm in Legendary and multiplayer. It's by a wide margin the most powerful close quarters weapon in any of the Halos including the energy sword/gravity hammer. Press melee, the immediately toss a grenade, then immediately press melee again. It's called the double-melee glitch and it'll allow you to chain melees together without having to wait for the animation to reset as long as you have grenades. It'll kill blue and red elites in campaign and a fully shielded spartan in multiplayer. You just have to hop away from the grenade that you poop out, which is pretty easy. It works with any weapons, but the AR is fastest. Unlike other button combos, you don't even need an enemy in your recital so you can practice it any time.

 

There are too many differences now. Early FPS or games in general were short.
Replay-ability came through dying and repeating the same levels. Today, devs do their utmost that sections don't have to be replayed again which is a shame because only when you replay sections over and over again you start to appreciate the whole composition.
It's like listening to a great song, ONCE! Who does that, right? Would you listen to anyone who heard it once and now talks for weeks about it how great it is? It's like, dude, you have listened to it for 3 minutes and then never again. No brain on this world could pick up everything in such a short amount of time.
With games you need even longer to pick everything up. But as this behavior is now a design principle I stopped wondering why I can't find anything worthwhile if I replay games like Bioshock:Infinite or even DOOM (2016).

Also FPS got too easy with the input methods we have. When I first played Doom I could not circle strafe. It was not possible because you had to hold alt+arrow key to strafe so how do you turn now without an additional button?
Switching from KB only to KB/mouse and then gamepad with aim assist, it's like a joke now.
Imagine playing Resident Evil 1 with directional movement instead of tank controls? The game would be a joke.
(I'm not saying we should go back, hehe)

One new genre that evolved on the early 90s FPS formula are Soulsborne games. FPS games made great levels but got stuck in their easy aim-shooty-shooty loop so players got bored. We need something new. So what to do? Make the combat loop harder.

My earliest memories of difficult games are, I complete 10% of the level, die, repeat, I complete 15% of the level, die, repeat, and so on. It's one of the tightest gameplay loops I know of but hardly anyone has the patience for it anymore and 90s games like Doom, Duke3d, Quake, Unreal nailed it for me.

Dark Souls is a great example of players impatience. Players rather play with a guidebook, a friend who knows the game, cheat, watch videos. Really anything, just to avoid the fail-repeat pattern. It gained a cult following and most players who played it can't shut up about it, which is great but it's still very much a niche game. A niche game that garnered 13 million sales now. Anyone thinks DS had sold 13 million without the community? The community made it accessible for others to pick it up. It's a weird dynamic that is hard to figure out, why it works and very rare to occur.

Soulsborne aren't just hard games. They tend to every itch 90s gamers had. Exploration, danger, player agency/freedom and mechanics that favor reaction or foresight but not necessarily both.

They also took out every lesson from the FPS level design playbook mixed with Metroid. Hardly any dead-ends, loops, traps, interconnected levels, non-linear progression, lots of secrets.

I doubt that we see any evolution in FPS again. It's so much about theme, story, one or more mechanics now but those hardly matter if the levels are boring and the monster (placement) is too forgiving and the game is just a breeze.

 

You nailed it!

Ever since playing DS, I've desperately wanted a third person shooter of the same vein. Exactly the same design principles, just replace weapons with firearms.

 

Not third person and not really close to Dark Souls in any way (except that you die a lot), but have you tried Devil Daggers? It's a very pure destillation of the FPS core combat loop.

 

No I haven't. I watched some reviews about it and it looks a bit intense for me. I probably would have got into it a few years ago, but I don't have the energy for that sort of thing now.

The thing about Dark Souls is that you can always go at your own pace. It doesn't push you. Except a few boss fights, in fact, going slow and cautious is the best way. By the time I played DKS3, I think I went through the entire game on the first go only dying a few times. Not like I'm so quick or anything, I just know how the games work. Still, paying attention and avoiding all the dev's tricks makes for fun gameplay, IMO.

I guess what I really like is a game that is challenging enough to force you to make some adaptation, but once you figure it out you can consistently do good. Layer in enough complexity so that player can experiment and develop new ways to win, and you've got a 500+ hour game for me. But above all, it has to control nice. Feel nice. Like a natural extension of my being -- I should always be able to intuitively make the actions I want, and not feel stymied by the control scheme.

 

It is quite intense, that is true. I think a friend of mine said something similar. In the beginning we used to compete for highscores and that was a lot of fun, but I guess it was too tiring for him to keep trying. He doesn't have the patience for / interest in Dark Souls either.

In the Dark Souls games I always had some problems consistently pulling off parry, kick and leap. For parry I understand that it shouldn't be easy to pull off because it is so powerful, but the implementation of kick and leap I thought could be better.

Nice!

 

I agree about the kick and leap. It's a little tricky to pull off and not always entirely reliable. In later iterations of the game they made leap easier... but anyway, those are tools you don't really need in the game. Especially kick, kind of useless anyhow.

I was never great at parry -- not in PVP anyway, but what I love about DKS is that you can beat the game using the equipment and stats you start with. It's all entirely skill based, and the skilset is simply "watch your enemies pattern, and dodge at the right time. Don't get greedy with attacks." That's it. You master that and you've got it. I just love that. That's like, pure gaming without any bullshit.

 

Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament game styles, with rocket launcher jumps on multi level arenas / maps.

Very memorable multiplayer Unreal Tournament pressure chamber, where shield perk was located.

 

@Not_Sure
They were fast and frantic! Eg. Quake 3 Arena
And people got destroyed, really quickly. Sometimes in less than 0.8 secs.

 

I see that you leveled up in Necromancy. Raise thread was successful. I wonder if you put your points in longevity rather than power. If not, it will collapse rather quickly

 

Aye. I like this comment. Nice one.

What you say is very true. Points in longevity, is better than power,
because it has a longer, lasting impression on people.

Okay. As a joke, I think I'll make a comment, that will have points in longevity,
for this fps topic. Here it goes......

"We,.......have all,.......just been fragged,.........by Unity!"

 

-Half Life 1
-Doom
-Quake
-Deus Ex