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inXile Entertainment
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- May 3, 2011
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Over the last week or two I've been burning through my old catalogue of shooters I've toyed around with or enjoyed the hell out of in years past - but never got too far in. Specifically that includes Unreal, and Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II.
We like to think a lot that modern shooters are complete and utter decline in pretty much every way - and a lot of the time, I agree. But going back and playing these games in earnest - not just for nostalgia satisfaction, but to genuinely enjoy them start to finish, "for the first time again", I'm finding that there's as much not to like at times than there is to enjoy.
Warning: this is kind of a proto-blog rant. I don't even know if I'm asking any questions, but I guess maybe someone either wants to read this or give their own take on things.
Developers "back in the day" very quickly understood that hitscan weapons being used against stationary targets were fucking boring, and the shooting itself is just so much more enjoyable due to their attempts to avoid just that. Going all the way back to Doom, basically the king of shooters, even id Software realized that shooters live primarily in the temporal space - that is, it's not just "aim at target, press fire key" that makes them fun, it's the short-term goal of setting up and executing the shots, and the long-term goal of resource management that are where the fun part lies.
Here's an example. In Unreal, firing a razorblade at a fast-moving enemy is not just about reflexes, but control, coordination and timing. You need to judge not just where to fire, but when, by figuring out on the fly, through experience, knowledge and your own skill, how long a projectile will take to reach its target, and where the target will have moved by the time the projectile reaches it. It's no coincidence that the only hitscan weapons in these older games tend to be either weak (basic pistols), limited on ammo or situational (sniper rilfes), or special power-ups, while the most powerful have significant time delays in the form of projectile movement and charge-up (such as Unreal's multi-shot rocket launcher).
Without the time pressures enforced by these systems, there's very little to like about shooters - and that's why games like Call of Duty et al are so bland and boring from a mechanics perspective. These temporally-contingent systems have been replaced with other ones. When we say that modern shooters lack "challenge" we're not saying that you will never die; what we're really saying is that in these games, the only challenge comes from health management over extremely short-term encounters, at worst spanning just a few seconds. There's nearly nothing else filling the gap mechanically.
What we have instead are mini-games. They're called things like "press the throw grenade button when an icon appears on your HUD", "press the knife button when an enemy pops out in front of you" and so on. These challenges are unfulfilling in comparison to the more interesting mechanics of older shooters because they are simple reflex tests and nothing more. Furthermore, the rest of the shooter gameplay is, indeed, a reflex test as well - press the fire button when an enemy pops up from behind cover. Auto-aim and snap-to controls (on consoles) further reduce the required coordination such that it's hard to even call targeting a significant part of modern shooter gameplay.
I feel like the raw mechanics and systems of shooters used to be much better, and I think we can all agree with that. But at the same time, there are places where a lot of these older shooters very obviously suffer - and that's mostly in level design and pacing.
If modern shooters have one strength, it's variety. These games are expertly paced such that you're going to be seeing a new vista, a new interesting encounter, a new weapon, a new enemy type, and so on every few minutes. You rarely have to go too long without something happening. In the worst modern shooters, that's overly-scripted cutscene nonsense, but in the better ones, like Half-Life 2, the game always has something new and interesting to show you.
That's not to say older shooters did not have good pacing or variety, but I think that it was a much more hit-or-miss kind of thing. The relative inexperience, lack of project oversight, strong creative direction and so on that was common in smaller studios of the time undoubtedly led a lack of QC, consistency and good pacing.
This is clearly evidenced in my recent shooter experiences - Unreal, though a great game, has tons of horrible levels which make so many fundamental mistakes that would never get past even the most popamole, committee-driven studio. One level in Unreal in particular that I learned to loathe is called The Sunspire. This level is a veritable maze of identical-looking corridors with no clear way forward, no good points of reference, and a complete lack of enemy and visual variety (save for one or two rooms) that make even basic navigation a chore, much less figuring out where you've been and where you need to go. Pretty sure it has respawning enemies too, so you can't even go by the trail of bodies you have left behind.
There are several more such levels in Unreal, many of them full of switch puzzles. At the best of times, these can be pretty intricate but also logical order-of-operations sorts of scenarios. Most of the time, though, they're simply set in a large, sprawling level which lacks clear landmarks for navigation, and which does not make clear what the cause and effect of your actions is (like a random lever opening a door on the other side of the map). I feel only the person who created these level could ever play this the first time and think "yep, that was pretty fun."
Now, as a counterpoint - Jedi Knight, which I also played recently, has fucking awesome level design most of the time, but I feel for its era it was kind of a rare exception. It straddles the line between everything perfectly - each level looks and playsdifferently, each has some sort of unique puzzle-type gimmick, each has some variation in the encounter designs and terrain, and so on. You can tell playing the game that a ton of time and effort went into ensuring they did all they could within their shooter framework. That's also why I was so disappointed with its expansion pack, which went right back to the worst trends of shooters at the time - long repetitive corridors, copy-pasted rooms, lack of landmarks to navigate using, obscure key hunting, and so on.
I also think that older shooters sometimes weren't so smart with pacing new enemies or weapon types out. In Unreal, you find pretty much every gun in the game by the halfway point through, and there are pretty much no new enemies to see beyond then as well. They even reuse the same mini-boss a half-dozen times over, and with each fight lasting a solid 3-5 minutes, it's never more fun the second, third, fourth or fifth time. Again, there are definite exceptions, like Half-Life, where you get new weapons and enemies to play with even in the endgame - but in my experience with shooters this isn't so common.
Playing through some of these older titles also makes me realize that shooters back in the day weren't as huge or lengthy as we like to remember. Sure, Call of Duty is a 5-6 hour campaign, but so are these older games if you don't stop and smell the roses or try to find every single secret. While they definitely have more exploration to them, a lot of the time that exploration takes the form of "wandering aimlessly through copy-pasted levels pressing levers and buttons." When I say "fuck it, I just want to finish the level", I'm often left in the situation realizing it's not clear at all where I'm supposed to go to do that. In other words, when you have really complicated and well-executed level design, this can be awesome - but when that falls apart and the player just wants to move on, sometimes a strong critical path can be a good thing.
What I want to see in future shooters are one which take those old-school mechanics (projectile weapons, deadly and mobile enemies, resource management) and combine them with some of the extra quality control, testing and consistency that more organized, modern teams are able to field. Sure, we have Serious Sam, but most of the self-styled old-school shooters out there tend to have a lot more in common with modern games than they like to admit - namely, far more restrictive level design and lack of creativity in mechanics, enemy types and so on. I just don't get why it's so hard for devs to actually make games that played like shooters from the 90s, instead of cheap nostalgia cash-grabs.
tl;dr
We like to think a lot that modern shooters are complete and utter decline in pretty much every way - and a lot of the time, I agree. But going back and playing these games in earnest - not just for nostalgia satisfaction, but to genuinely enjoy them start to finish, "for the first time again", I'm finding that there's as much not to like at times than there is to enjoy.
Warning: this is kind of a proto-blog rant. I don't even know if I'm asking any questions, but I guess maybe someone either wants to read this or give their own take on things.
Developers "back in the day" very quickly understood that hitscan weapons being used against stationary targets were fucking boring, and the shooting itself is just so much more enjoyable due to their attempts to avoid just that. Going all the way back to Doom, basically the king of shooters, even id Software realized that shooters live primarily in the temporal space - that is, it's not just "aim at target, press fire key" that makes them fun, it's the short-term goal of setting up and executing the shots, and the long-term goal of resource management that are where the fun part lies.
Here's an example. In Unreal, firing a razorblade at a fast-moving enemy is not just about reflexes, but control, coordination and timing. You need to judge not just where to fire, but when, by figuring out on the fly, through experience, knowledge and your own skill, how long a projectile will take to reach its target, and where the target will have moved by the time the projectile reaches it. It's no coincidence that the only hitscan weapons in these older games tend to be either weak (basic pistols), limited on ammo or situational (sniper rilfes), or special power-ups, while the most powerful have significant time delays in the form of projectile movement and charge-up (such as Unreal's multi-shot rocket launcher).
Without the time pressures enforced by these systems, there's very little to like about shooters - and that's why games like Call of Duty et al are so bland and boring from a mechanics perspective. These temporally-contingent systems have been replaced with other ones. When we say that modern shooters lack "challenge" we're not saying that you will never die; what we're really saying is that in these games, the only challenge comes from health management over extremely short-term encounters, at worst spanning just a few seconds. There's nearly nothing else filling the gap mechanically.
What we have instead are mini-games. They're called things like "press the throw grenade button when an icon appears on your HUD", "press the knife button when an enemy pops out in front of you" and so on. These challenges are unfulfilling in comparison to the more interesting mechanics of older shooters because they are simple reflex tests and nothing more. Furthermore, the rest of the shooter gameplay is, indeed, a reflex test as well - press the fire button when an enemy pops up from behind cover. Auto-aim and snap-to controls (on consoles) further reduce the required coordination such that it's hard to even call targeting a significant part of modern shooter gameplay.
I feel like the raw mechanics and systems of shooters used to be much better, and I think we can all agree with that. But at the same time, there are places where a lot of these older shooters very obviously suffer - and that's mostly in level design and pacing.
If modern shooters have one strength, it's variety. These games are expertly paced such that you're going to be seeing a new vista, a new interesting encounter, a new weapon, a new enemy type, and so on every few minutes. You rarely have to go too long without something happening. In the worst modern shooters, that's overly-scripted cutscene nonsense, but in the better ones, like Half-Life 2, the game always has something new and interesting to show you.
That's not to say older shooters did not have good pacing or variety, but I think that it was a much more hit-or-miss kind of thing. The relative inexperience, lack of project oversight, strong creative direction and so on that was common in smaller studios of the time undoubtedly led a lack of QC, consistency and good pacing.
This is clearly evidenced in my recent shooter experiences - Unreal, though a great game, has tons of horrible levels which make so many fundamental mistakes that would never get past even the most popamole, committee-driven studio. One level in Unreal in particular that I learned to loathe is called The Sunspire. This level is a veritable maze of identical-looking corridors with no clear way forward, no good points of reference, and a complete lack of enemy and visual variety (save for one or two rooms) that make even basic navigation a chore, much less figuring out where you've been and where you need to go. Pretty sure it has respawning enemies too, so you can't even go by the trail of bodies you have left behind.
There are several more such levels in Unreal, many of them full of switch puzzles. At the best of times, these can be pretty intricate but also logical order-of-operations sorts of scenarios. Most of the time, though, they're simply set in a large, sprawling level which lacks clear landmarks for navigation, and which does not make clear what the cause and effect of your actions is (like a random lever opening a door on the other side of the map). I feel only the person who created these level could ever play this the first time and think "yep, that was pretty fun."
Now, as a counterpoint - Jedi Knight, which I also played recently, has fucking awesome level design most of the time, but I feel for its era it was kind of a rare exception. It straddles the line between everything perfectly - each level looks and playsdifferently, each has some sort of unique puzzle-type gimmick, each has some variation in the encounter designs and terrain, and so on. You can tell playing the game that a ton of time and effort went into ensuring they did all they could within their shooter framework. That's also why I was so disappointed with its expansion pack, which went right back to the worst trends of shooters at the time - long repetitive corridors, copy-pasted rooms, lack of landmarks to navigate using, obscure key hunting, and so on.
I also think that older shooters sometimes weren't so smart with pacing new enemies or weapon types out. In Unreal, you find pretty much every gun in the game by the halfway point through, and there are pretty much no new enemies to see beyond then as well. They even reuse the same mini-boss a half-dozen times over, and with each fight lasting a solid 3-5 minutes, it's never more fun the second, third, fourth or fifth time. Again, there are definite exceptions, like Half-Life, where you get new weapons and enemies to play with even in the endgame - but in my experience with shooters this isn't so common.
Playing through some of these older titles also makes me realize that shooters back in the day weren't as huge or lengthy as we like to remember. Sure, Call of Duty is a 5-6 hour campaign, but so are these older games if you don't stop and smell the roses or try to find every single secret. While they definitely have more exploration to them, a lot of the time that exploration takes the form of "wandering aimlessly through copy-pasted levels pressing levers and buttons." When I say "fuck it, I just want to finish the level", I'm often left in the situation realizing it's not clear at all where I'm supposed to go to do that. In other words, when you have really complicated and well-executed level design, this can be awesome - but when that falls apart and the player just wants to move on, sometimes a strong critical path can be a good thing.
What I want to see in future shooters are one which take those old-school mechanics (projectile weapons, deadly and mobile enemies, resource management) and combine them with some of the extra quality control, testing and consistency that more organized, modern teams are able to field. Sure, we have Serious Sam, but most of the self-styled old-school shooters out there tend to have a lot more in common with modern games than they like to admit - namely, far more restrictive level design and lack of creativity in mechanics, enemy types and so on. I just don't get why it's so hard for devs to actually make games that played like shooters from the 90s, instead of cheap nostalgia cash-grabs.
tl;dr
for Jedi Knight being one of the greatest FPSs ever with continually amazing level design).
).
