Crysis and UT3 selling unusually low numbers

[Uraniun235]

When was the last time a game's physics engine allowed breaking a chair with melee attacks and impaling generic supersoldier with the chair's broken wooden legs ? Why is it not possible to break things, make a cross and crucify enemies and set them on fire ? Why is that the cool body armor on bad guys is a pretty texture instead of hardened plates that stop bullets ? Why do enemies in FPS games never run out of ammo ? Are their AI so bad they nead infinite ammo cheat ?

these are obviously trivial problems to solve, programmers are just lazy


Let's go through these suggestions.

"breaking a chair and impaling someone with the leg" sounds like gimmicky bullshit to me anyway, since I'd rather just shoot the fucker. Half-Life 2 almost got there with the gravity gun anyway, with being able to pick up saw blades and fire them at enemies and cut them in half. Throw a paint can at someone and they get splattered with paint.

"Why is it not possible to break things, make a cross and crucify enemies and set them on fire ?"
How does that even contribute to gameplay? I'm pretty sure most people playing a FPS don't want to stop for awhile and build shit (though there is a game called Garry's Mod for that sort of thing), they want to be out killing shit. Is this a generic "why can't I do absolutely anything I want to in a game world" complaint (which is an enormous undertaking from a programming standpoint) or are you seriously bummed out that you can't somehow build a cross, beat a guy into submission (but not death), crucify him to that cross, and then set the cross on fire?

"Why is that the cool body armor on bad guys is a pretty texture instead of hardened plates that stop bullets ?"
That wouldn't be fun, that would just be a frustrating exercise in "shoot the weak spot!" I hear boss battles already have "weak spot" elements so technically this is not an "innovative" gameplay element.

"Why do enemies in FPS games never run out of ammo ? Are their AI so bad they nead infinite ammo cheat ?"
Part of that depends on the kind of game you want to make. If you make them too effective, it's not like the player's going to be able to clear out a whole level full of them, is it? I suppose if the game has a different focus (like evading detection) then having a "oh shit they saw me I guess I'd better get ready to die" set of enemies is prudent... but then, not every game's going to strive for realism.

Also, yeah, I don't know if you've heard, but "AI" is pretty hard to program. Did that occur to you?

[MJ12 Commando]

With Crysis' failure, i've pretty much lost hope in the ability of action FPS developers to deliver any of these things. The only thing they ever offer now is a "zomg X magical power/time control/super suit" gimmick to give the game a slight differance in personality over all of the other Dooms.

I don't mind terribly much actually. Then again, shooting things rarely gets old, and due to my upgrade cycle by the time I can play the games as they're meant to be played they're in the bargain bin for 15 bucks, which is a very good deal for 6 hours of things exploding (3 action movies' worth!).

The real reason to get FPSes now is probably just for the mods, which get pretty crazy. SMod and the other miscellaneous mods for Half Life 2 have at least doubled its lifespan for me.

Also: Portal. It isn't even a FPS, more like a first person puzzle game, but it's really neat, innovative, and it has the cutesiest killer AI ever.

The main big thing that I really think FPSes should have implemented long ago but never do is body awareness. For fuck's sake, System Shock 2 did it in 1994, goddamn it how hard is it to give the player a model and have that model interact with the environment just like any other model? :p

Also, action-RTSes. I loved Urban Assault and Uprising and Battlezone to bits, why can't we get one or two of those types of games? The last FPS that gave us controllable units I remember was R6 Vegas, and really, elite CTs are nice but sometimes you just want to order a couple of tanks to help you blow shit up while you call an airstrike on some poor sap via laser designator.

Honestly, the only shooter worth getting excited over for me is Operation Flashpoint 2. And when you think about it, it's absolutely hilarious that a game released back in 2001 did things that current action games are still struggling to do.

If you don't absolutely abhor the idea of a console FPS, Breakdown has some really really neat ideas that it tries to implement (and does fairly well). I've played bits of it and seen some more of it in Let's Play type threads, and it's, from what I see, really cool.

What it, however, really needed was regenerating health instead of eating crap to regain health, to give the player more incentive to charge through gunfire like a bezerker on crack, punching the crap out of enemies, instead of shooting guns, because the first person melee combat was the coolest bit of the game.

It's also IIRC made the 360 backwards compatible list, so if you can find it cheap... give it a shot.

Anyways, I'm rambling, but I'm thinking, more and more, that the FPS formula itself isn't very open to innovation, and the best way to make it better is to combine it with bits and pieces of other game types. FPS-Puzzles like Portal, FPS-RTSes like Urban Assault, Battlezone, and the like, and even the occasional FPS-Fighting Game or FPS-RPG... they all tend to be really neat.

Unfortunately lots of people tend to love big booms and pretty explosions (and I'm going to admit that I do love the thrill of blowing shit up in Crysis when I can convince my friend to let me use his PC to play it) and these games are overlooked. I'd seriously have loved a 360 sequel to Breakdown, or an Urban Assault 2.

[Sarevok]

When was the last time a game's physics engine allowed breaking a chair with melee attacks and impaling generic supersoldier with the chair's broken wooden legs ? Why is it not possible to break things, make a cross and crucify enemies and set them on fire ? Why is that the cool body armor on bad guys is a pretty texture instead of hardened plates that stop bullets ? Why do enemies in FPS games never run out of ammo ? Are their AI so bad they nead infinite ammo cheat ?

these are obviously trivial problems to solve, programmers are just lazy


Let's go through these suggestions.

"breaking a chair and impaling someone with the leg" sounds like gimmicky bullshit to me anyway, since I'd rather just shoot the fucker. Half-Life 2 almost got there with the gravity gun anyway, with being able to pick up saw blades and fire them at enemies and cut them in half. Throw a paint can at someone and they get splattered with paint.

"Why is it not possible to break things, make a cross and crucify enemies and set them on fire ?"
How does that even contribute to gameplay? I'm pretty sure most people playing a FPS don't want to stop for awhile and build shit (though there is a game called Garry's Mod for that sort of thing), they want to be out killing shit. Is this a generic "why can't I do absolutely anything I want to in a game world" complaint (which is an enormous undertaking from a programming standpoint) or are you seriously bummed out that you can't somehow build a cross, beat a guy into submission (but not death), crucify him to that cross, and then set the cross on fire?

"Why is that the cool body armor on bad guys is a pretty texture instead of hardened plates that stop bullets ?"
That wouldn't be fun, that would just be a frustrating exercise in "shoot the weak spot!" I hear boss battles already have "weak spot" elements so technically this is not an "innovative" gameplay element.

"Why do enemies in FPS games never run out of ammo ? Are their AI so bad they nead infinite ammo cheat ?"
Part of that depends on the kind of game you want to make. If you make them too effective, it's not like the player's going to be able to clear out a whole level full of them, is it? I suppose if the game has a different focus (like evading detection) then having a "oh shit they saw me I guess I'd better get ready to die" set of enemies is prudent... but then, not every game's going to strive for realism.

Also, yeah, I don't know if you've heard, but "AI" is pretty hard to program. Did that occur to you?

You are thinking of FPS games like RPGs where everything has a hitpoint and every move is a spell or feat or something. Me I would like to see FPS games move on from this to trying to simulate the real world as best as possible.

One repeated saying in game developer world is "illusion". That's right they are trying to produce illusion of smart enemies and realistic physics . If you play a game for ten hours then buy another then this type of game is fine for you. But I replay good games and the illusion comes apart when enemies have infinite ammo or take bullets to the cheek without flinching.

The games today focus on one aspect of reality which they turn into their gimmick. For example Psi-Ops was the first game to utilize PPUs. And the realistic physics was the only thing the game did well. It featured horribly unbalanced weapons, powers stacked up against corridor crawling and dumb as rocks enemies. The developer simply made flashy ads about their physics to sell this ten hours of interactive bad cinema masquerading as a game.

I am not saying FPS games that are basicaly shoot 3D model with x hitpoint with a gun that does y damage points are all bad. But if a FPS game calls itself revolutionary it has to move beyond Doom. Simulating real objects is the way to go. It would not be perfect but the closer to reality a game's world and enemies are the better it would be.

[Darwin]

"Why is that the cool body armor on bad guys is a pretty texture instead of hardened plates that stop bullets ?"

I've seen this since Half-Life (the original). the Barneys helmets and the Grunts torso both had shiny armor that would bounce bullets, causing them to do absolutely no damage (Though plinking a Barney in the helmet would make him aggro you..)

"Why do enemies in FPS games never run out of ammo ? Are their AI so bad they nead infinite ammo cheat ?"

Some games have done this. These games are almost always panned for having moronic AI that runs around like idiots or just stands there to get shot when they run out of ammo.

[Vendetta]

You forgot the skill system that became totally irrelevant when they gave you 5000 skill points near the end. What character development decisions?

Character development decisions were only relevant to psionics anyway. Because two thirds of the weapons were shit, you only took the Standard weapons skill, you couldn't avoid maintenance, research was a no brainer (and I think you were railroaded into at least one point anyway)....

Also, let's not forget that half of the time the best combat tactic was "run backwards firing" because it kept Spiders and Rumblers out of attack range.

The longer you look at it, the more cracks you see in the "Bioshock was System Shock dumbed down" argument, because what it really was was System Shock with all the shit that never worked anyway washed off, and only a few of it's own new flaws, and those are only flaws because they make it all too easy. (seriously, make ammo and money half as common and make Vita-Chambers off until the player interacts with them and Bioshock would be pretty much golden)

[MJ12 Commando]

Character development decisions were only relevant to psionics anyway. Because two thirds of the weapons were shit, you only took the Standard weapons skill, you couldn't avoid maintenance, research was a no brainer (and I think you were railroaded into at least one point anyway)....

You didn't NEED research but it helped. There was a point where you needed to research something to get past a level. However, there was a LabAssistant implant on the same floor the research was required to do. It was perfectly possible to never put a single point in Research ever. Of course, if you did that you lost out on a lot of awesome neatness.

I'd argue against people only ever taking the Standard weapons skill-both Heavy and Energy were extremely useful as backup skills, and Exotic was at least fun to play with if you had enough points.

You could finish the game without ever touching a non-bullet-flinging weapon, but a grenade launcher came in handy quite often, and so did the laser pistol. Of course, the awesomeness of the GL, laser pistol, and laser rapier were overshadowed by the amazing uselessness of the later weapons in both trees (although the fusion gun was IIRC pretty good in the end boss fight).

Standard Weapons was just the most overall useful because none of the weapons in the tree sucked or were hilariously specialized, which made it much more useful for the player as compared to Heavy (where there was one weapon that didn't suck) or Energy (which had a nearly useless pinnacle gun). But they had some very useful weapons in their arsenals-the laser rapier was a very good melee weapon, superior in all ways to the wrench (and with extra juicy bonus anti-robot damage), the laser pistol was a really nice peashooter when you learned where the recharge station was, and the grenade launcher was an impressive and versatile boomstick.

Character development wasn't as open as it looked, but I wouldn't say there weren't any choices to be made.

[Stark]

Heavy and Energy weapons might have been useful, but they soaked up skillpoints for little reason. The 'best' gun, the fusion megablaster or whatever, was complete bollocks. The laser was semi-useful, but even compared to the Sparq beam (since it fired a blue arrow and had no power settings) it sucked and everything lategame is resistant to it.

Seriously, in most situations the pistol + appropriate ammo was totally fine. The AR was just massive, massive overkill and arguably not worth the huge pile of skillpoints required.

Even Psionics wasn't that great, since 60% of the abilities were useless depending on what flavour of psionic you were. I seldom bothered with the higher tiers, as they soaked up huge piles of skillpoints for little benefit.

And hey, at the end they just give you enough points to buy five or six skills to maximum, so who cares? At least SS2 was fun at the time: Biosocks was silly from the day it was born.

It's ironic that people can say 'shooters + something else are often neat' when it's really quite sad that Doom-esque corridor strollers are even made.

[Uraniun235]

But I like Doom. Why can't we have "Doom + better graphics"?

[Stark]

Pretention? Games like Crysis, FEAR and HL2 might be linear corridor-strollers, but they have incredibly pretentious stories you're supposed to care about. Games like Serious Sam (not that I liked it or anything) which are just 'here you are, go shoot some cool guys in interesting levels' are virtually non-existent these days.

Ironically even Doom3 did that, by inserting a crazy story (which involved large sections of levels with nothing going on and none of the huge battles and fucked up geometry puzzles of doom).

It's sad that I'd rather play a slightly tarted-up HL1 than shit like FEAR. HL1 was hell linear, but the absurd level design at least kept the game changing and relatively fresh. Compare with FEAR.

[Uraniun235]

Pretention? Games like Crysis, FEAR and HL2 might be linear corridor-strollers, but they have incredibly pretentious stories you're supposed to care about. Games like Serious Sam (not that I liked it or anything) which are just 'here you are, go shoot some cool guys in interesting levels' are virtually non-existent these days.

I know and that makes me sad. :(

[Darwin]

It's sad that I'd rather play a slightly tarted-up HL1 than shit like FEAR. HL1 was hell linear, but the absurd level design at least kept the game changing and relatively fresh. Compare with FEAR.

But I liked FEAR, and the reason is simple. The whole game is set up to show how much of a badass you are. The weapons feel powerful, and by the end you feel like you can take on a whole legion of those replicant soldiers., who are just tough enough to give the illusion that they're supposed to be a competent force when not up against a complete asskicker like the Pointman. Sure, it's contrived and repetitive, but you know what? It's satisfying, and the shotgun is the Fist of God.

It doesn't have to be deep or creative or original if they get the gameplay down to where it just feels right and is *FUN*.

[Stark]

Right, you think it's fun to fight the same hideously easy fight over and over again through boring level design (the office level was particularly terrible). Sadly, I don't, or my standards would be as low as yours.

PROTIP: if someone says 'HL1 has more interesting level design than FEAR', saying 'I love FEAR because it makes me feel powahfulz and this satifies me' is not a response. Really, you have to ask yourself what it says about you that you're prepared to play an admittedly 'contrived and repetitive' game just to get a feeling of potency.

And it DOES have to be creative to not be BORING, which was my original point. Even Crysis is more interesting than FEAR (while linear, far superior level design and AI), which is probably the most boring big-budget FPS of the last year and a half. Unless you count TimeShitters, that is.

[Sarevok]

FEAR had a lot of potential and the first 3 levels show it. What killed the game was over emphasis on Half Life like elements. For example the devs removed other FEAR squad members powers. Then they made all friendlies invulnerable to damage so they don't die before the scripted moment. Just like Alyx in Half Life whom you can't shoot dead for being annoying. This was just the start. FEAR was greatly driven by the plot and that hurt the gameplay. This plot over game play mentality has killed the appeal of FPS for me.

Another thing that bugs me is the lack of cut scenes in modern games. The FPS view looks like shit compared to good movies from great games. Developers justify this by repeating the cliche "never take control away from the player". In practice this just results in railway rides like Half Life 2.