MoonsaultSlayer
Member
The game where you play as the first bullet shot and the adventures of its short life from its POV while challeging the question: do guns kill people?What about first person fps?
The game where you play as the first bullet shot and the adventures of its short life from its POV while challeging the question: do guns kill people?What about first person fps?
Give me peripheral vision, dodges, and other typical third person maneuverability and I'd be ok with more FP perspective games. Until then, I'll play the occasional title or two.
Yeah, no.
...that's the point, though. Like, the point of the thread. It's about taking a microscopic look at the advantage of first-person and going "okay, we can transplant these ideas into the shooter."
I want to come up with ways to expand our thinking about the shooter.
It would have to be different in a lot of ways, but most of the basic elements of the game would still work.
The point is, a first person Souls game would pretty much be King's Field 5.
Shadowrun – I haven’t played this, but everyone I know who has says it’s pretty amazing. Yeah. I get it. It’s not a turn-based RPG. Well, Ultima Underworld wasn’t a top-down RPG, SWAT 4 wasn’t an adventure game, and Fallout: New Vegas wasn’t an isometric RPG, and they were all awesome. And y’know what? To the best of my knowledge, Shadowrun wasn’t just a great game, it was so good that the pros used it. Too bad about the Games for Windows LIVE thing—it could have had a great life on PC.
Dead Space 1 is a game that should have been in first person. Isaac was a non-character, so it would have worked really well. Though I suppose being able to see Isaac as he was getting killed in various gruesome ways was part of the charm. Fighting games like Marvel vs Capcom are much harder to do in first person, and I'd rather not see someone try. Same with action games like Devil May Cry.
Let's look at Mirror's Edge. A freerunning/parkour game in 1st person. What does that title being first person really bring? The most immediate answer is the perspective provides a kind of grounded quality and exhilaration you can't get from a detached 3rd person view. That's great, but what else? Could Mirror's Edge not be a more complex, more fluid, more versatile platformer in third person? I already know the counterargument to that is "Well the exhilaration of 1st person platforming is what makes Mirror's Edge special and that's enough." It might very well be enough, but I think there's only so far you can push Mirror's Edge before the limitation of the perspective holds it back. It gets even trickier when you talk about VR with the motion sickness people would experience if the turning, rolling, and flipping gets any more extreme.
Give me a VR headset compatible remaster of Mario 64. I'd be so f'n down!
I get that. My position is that it shouldn't be a general "Oh that would be great in first person" because if you have to bend something to the point that it breaks, I think you're doing a disservice to the original idea. Just because something can be put into 1st person doesn't necessarily mean it should.
DocSeuss, you just made my fucking day.
Shadowrun is absolutely one of the greatest team-based shooters ever made. It can hang with the best of them and has some radical ideas that are implemented dangerously well Yes, Shadowrun's teleport might just be the best first-person movement mechanic of all time.
*salutes*
I hate shooters. I think shooters are the most unfun and overrated genre out there. However, I also think they totally have a place in this industry and fans who love them. I am not arrogant enough to think my tastes are above yours, even if we completely disagree.
I just don't find it interesting to spew hate against a genre I never cared for. I would rather spend my time discussing games/genres I do love with those who love them with me
So, even though I dislike shooters on a personal level, I still hate dismissing the genre because if that.
At that point it's just System Shock 3 (which I guess would be better). Really you could describe the entirety of Dead Space 1 by calling it "System Shock 2 meets Resident Evil 4."
Being first person allows the game to do a lot of cheats to get the feel it has and makes things a lot easier for the developers; which is really clear when you go in third person and see how the animations are there. It also sidesteps camera issues and makes the sensation of speed much easier to convey while still being possible to control; that's important beyond a visual gimmick when momentum is a central mechanic of the game. Since Mirror's Edge is one of the deepest 3D platformers outside of Mario (which doesn't have reality getting in the way) I find the idea it would be better in third person purely theoretical. I do think ME can work in third person with some tweaks (and I hope someone tries), but I don't think it would really bring much to the game mechanically.
Just throwing it out there that I love the shit out of your writing on shooters Doc, and I really hope your upcoming piece is about the game I think it's about...
My two favorite action game subgenres are the FPS and Kamiyalikes, and I often think about how to merge the two into one glorious hybrid masterpiece. I'd guess the reason a good one hasn't been done yet is that they focus on completely different design paradigms that seem greatly at odds. In a gold standard FPS (for me, Doom 2 and Halo: CE) the player character has an extremely simple ability set, essentially limited to moving, shooting, and melee. In addition, that ability set is heavily influenced and metered by the level design, because your primary ability is shooting and you need a replenishing supply of weapons and ammo to do that. Also, interesting fights can exist in shooters primarily because of level design. A player's path through a good shooter battle is more about observing the space around them and using that space to find good angles of attack, retreat to that cover area you saw earlier, funnel enemies into a group where you can take them all out with a grenade, using active proprioception to remember what threats still exist outside of the FOV, etc... I'd say the guns themselves are way less important than space control, they're just tools used to get the job done.
In contrast, in the archetypical character action game (DMC, Bayonetta) level design is basically irrelevant and is just used as the stage where fights take place. Battle arenas are usually BETTER when they're featureless and flat, too much extra geometry just gets in the way and rarely has any tactical value. Your abilities aren't typically limited by a level designer, you have all your currently purchased moves all the time and special attacks are limited by a meter managed by combat events, not a level designer's pickup placement. And those abilities are complex as hell compared to an FPS. In Bayonetta, your most powerful attacks happen at the end of a long combo string, and once the player is familiar with some of those strings they can start deliberately using them in smart ways. Ex: Bayonetta is fighting a group of two melee scrub angels and one of those trumpet assholes in the background. Bayo is comboing the shit out of the melee dudes with a wide sweeping arc attack, stunlocking them so they can't return the favor (offense is the best defense), then mid combo the trumpet dude fires his projectile, requiring Bayonetta to Dodge into Witch Time, use dodge offset to continue the combo then hit the projectile back at trumpet dude, and finishing him off with a Wicked Weave (powerful ranged attack at the end of a combo). The key thing in that scenario is that the player is primarily managing enemies using Bayonetta's myriad abilities, which are metered by time (combo and animation length) rather than space/level design.
So how would a designer reconcile these different modes of expression? A conclusion I came to was that simply taking mechanics directly from Kamiyalikes would be kind of a dead end. In my head, a good first person (shooter) character action game would use a complex ability set, governed in some way by level design, primarily as a means of controlling space in interesting ways. I believe it can be done with guns or other flavors of shooty weapons, they would be some weird guns that fire in rhythmic combos or something though, something to approximate the feel of a good XYXXXY style mash flow of a character action game. These guns, instead of just being different flavors of damage hoses, would affect enemies and the surrounding space in a variety of interesting ways that could be chained together with your other guns, plus the already expressive free movement afforded by the FPS, and baby you got a stew goin'. Imagine Bulletstorm with 5 other tools like the whip, imagine Bioshock Infinite where the vigors weren't all identical and boring, imagine Shadow Warrior 2014 where the guns are even half as fun to use as the sword is...
I don't like first-person shooters for a variety of reasons but one of my biggest complaints about them has to be the limited viewpoint and the fact I can never quite tell what my hitbox is. This makes stuff like dodging bullets or doing any kind of platforming an exercise in frustration. I also find that first-person games (with the exception of Mirror's Edge) tend to be limited as far as movement and number of actions go.
Also I like seeing my player avatar
"Immersion" is a weird thing for me, I've found plenty of old 8-bit NES games and text adventures far more immersive than modern-day games... having to use your imagination to fill in the blanks will always beat having a game mimic reality as far as my level of immersion goes.
OP I think you really need to spend more time thinking about what your saying.