What games would you recommend? I'm open to trying anything out. I have every console and a good PC.
FEAR.
Honestly? It's kind of challenging to recommend shooters, because, by their very nature, they're challenging to play right. It's a bit like chess in this regard: anyone can learn it, because the rules are super simple. The onus is on the player to play the game with intelligence.
Look at Halo, for instance. Anyone can play Halo, but it requires a lot on the part of the audience to appreciate the experience Halo can give. Sure, you can take any gun and point it at someone and shoot it until it dies. Yes, you can find The Most Powerful Gun and use it to kill quickly. But... you shut yourself off to a lot.
I love The Library, because, to me, it's a sandbox. I can get explosions to send ammo my way. I strategize, using carrier forms to take out others. There is so much
there. So much to
do beyond simply pointing and clicking.
Far Cry 2 is another example of this. People restrict themselves to driving around in cars, and as a result, they don't have much fun with the game. Once you start using boats (which are faster anyways), start respecting Far Cry 2's world like a real space, and stop focusing on trying to play it like a
game, the experience really sings.
The STALKER, Thief, and System Shock games are wonderful as well. Honestly, any immersive sim (first-person/rpg hybrids) should do this well, by virtue of being decided to facilitate emergent gameplay/storytelling, thus creating more chances for diverse gameplay. But, honestly, any shooter with great AI can do it, like Crysis (watch Nanosuitninja's videos on Crysis).
It's strange, but the power of the interactivity of first-person shooter play is also its greatest weakness. Because it
can be reduced to just pointing and clicking, the freedom to do SO MUCH MORE with that is ever-present.
No, but when entire swathes of the genre look indistinguishable from each other, that is definitely visually dull. There's only so many different ways a developer can render a WW2 tank or a blown-up building in the first-person view. The genre as constructed does not allowed for eye-popping environmental designs or character designs. It's just a bland attempt to render the coolest, most photorealistic military or corridor imaginable.
That is a non-argument, though. I could easily point out how mascot platformers all look the same, or how JRPGs are indistinguishable from each other, or how fighting games all look alike.
That's not an inherent fault of the medium, and that's
assuming it were actually true, which is absolutely isn't. Or have you not paid any attention to the visual diversity present in Halo 4/Dishonored/Blops 2/The Darkness 2/Far Cry 3/Syndicate.
These boring military shooters everyone complains about are few and far between (generally, only one is released in a given year), and even then, they can look very distinct, as evidenced by Black Ops 2.
That is the fundamental problem with the first-person perspective: We don't want it to be us.
That is not
the fundamental problem, that is
your fundamental problem. And it's a problem I totally understand and respect. Just don't act like your personal hangup is the medium's problem.
Do you prefer choose-your-own-adventure books , or do you read books to enjoy the story the author is trying to tell? Do you watch movies because you want to be in them, or are you trying to watch the movie the director shot?
I have always wanted to have a holodeck. I have always wanted to go on an adventure, to explore the unexplored, to see the unseen. Before I got sick, I loved going out and adventuring. I liked skiing, I liked rock climbing, I liked skeet shooting. I liked a lot of things. Adventuring is in my blood, and so first-person games have always appealed to me.
But now, they're the only way I can do anything.
Hell, some days, I just don't want to be me anymore, trapped in a body that barely works, with what seems like no way out, working under the threat of impending homelessness, putting up with a place of employment that's actively harming my health, hoping my dad finds a job so I can start receiving medical treatment again, wondering what happens next in May...
My life is kind of
shit.
We need a main character that we have an emotional connection with, not one we need to pretend to be. That just leads to laziness and an excuse to not fully flesh out the game world.
I fundamentally disagree. I think you're limiting yourself too much. I enjoy stories. Love 'em. Hell, I'm a writer, albeit one currently unemployed.
But to argue that this new, unique medium
can't allow players to be in another world
This is just your opinion. The facts are that game narratives spawn some of the wildest fandoms known to humanity, and they inspire all kinds of fan-created content, expression, and general fan behavior.
Justin Bieber also spawned one of the wildest known fandoms to humanity. Fans are irrelevant when it comes to quality. Argument ad populum is irrelevant, particularly when you consider that people tend to be biased towards things they spend time in. Warcraft fandom doesn't exist because Warcraft is great, it exists (in part) because Blizzard deliberately designs their games to be addictive, worming their way into peoples' heads, where people become emotionally attached to their products.
It is not
just my opinion, it is my
educated,
informed opinion.
You know what these games have in common? They are not in the artistically lazy first-person perspective. They provoke the imaginations, however crazy they may be, of fans through world-building, relatable characters, and a powerful (this is debatable) structured story, not by throwing a gun into your hand, dumping you off on some planet or military battlefield, and saying you can be John Lance Corporal in the Eastern Front.
Not really. Even if you were right, you seem to ignore the existence, of, say, the
Marathon Story Page or the prevalence of Halo fanfiction. FPSes inspire fanfiction, so, if your logic were correct, they too have 'soul', and thus the suggestion that they don't is faulty.
But, alas, your argument is wrong. People are fans of things they participate in. People like things for diverse reasons. People will always,
and I do mean always, create vast bodies of fanworks based on things they enjoy. Narrative quality means nothing.
Having a lead character doesn't mean that will happen. As a teen, I participated in a great many fan-fiction-based roleplays. I didn't even
care about the source material, nor did my friends, and we completely ignored the canon much of the time, using the bits and pieces of the worlds that we enjoyed. Quite often, we all agreed that the fictions we based our roleplay on was actually pretty bad, but they made for nice worlds to play in.
As explained above, the first-person perspective is weaker than 2-D sprites in being able to portray video games as an art form.
It's the equivalent of choose-your-own-adventure books, pick-your-own-ending movies, build-your-own-bear. You are trying to strap a diorama on your head, claiming it is "immersion", and passing it off as the highest paragon of videogame-as-art; I'm sorry, but in my opinion, central to art is having it relate to humanity, and games in the first-person perspective consistently and constantly fail to do this dating back all the way to Wolfenstein 3D.
No. It isn't. It's equivalent to the holodeck. It's equivalent to--or rather, it's the first step towards--putting people in new worlds.
I don't like it because:
1 - Motion Sickness - even PORTAL is hard to me =/
2 - I prefer games that I have to fight than games that I have do shoot. Example: Gof of War > Uncharted - altought I really thinks Uncharted is one of best games of his style and GoW one of the worst (really love DMC, Bayonetta and Ninja gaiden).
3 - I love games that I can DODGE.
4 - I love games that I have to jump precisely.
All that said, I really enjoy Metroid Prime series because it's less shoot, more exploration/jumping experiencie. Love Goldeneye (n64) because I love the exploration. And almost love mirrors edge because makes me vomit =/
1. Understandable, since Portal is one of the worst games for motion sickness out there.
2. You like melee. Cool.
3. Yes. Lots of FPSes allow this. Some actually have double-tap-to-dodge buttons. Good, high-level shooter play is all about dodging enemy fire. If you like dodging, FPSes are kind of the king of that.
4.
Then why not love FPSes?
Mech Warrior, Battlefield, Halo, Metroid Prime, Call of Duty, Elder Scrolls, Minecraft...
It seems kind of difficult to make the argument that people in general don't like the first person perspective, considering that many of gaming's most popular and critically acclaimed franchises are first person.
I personally love first person games. Can't get enough of them! The Oculus Rift is going to be fucking great.
I don't think I was making that argument. I was just interested in discussing the people who don't like FPSes and trying to understand their point of view.
First person perspective in general is fine. First person shooters make you focus on a very specific point in space. It's about having a lot of practice at doing that and I guess I'm just not interested in the time investment it would take to get enough skill to be competitive.
Is there a non-shooter first person game with satisfying (like monster hunter/demon's souls) combat? TES games for example are really unsatisfying.
Dishonored has incredibly, incredibly satisfying melee combat, as does Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. I'd be willing to argue that no one does melee combat in any form better than Arkane, period.
There's nothing wrong in the perspective, just in the majority of first person games. There are examples of great first person games (Metroid Prime, Mirror's Edge, Amnesia etc.), but for every Metroid Prime there are about 15 generic FPSs.
I disagree with this, not just because I don't like Amnesia, but because the FPSes most people call "generic" only total about fifteen games, and even then, it's hard to call games like Black Ops "generic" when there is nothing else like Black Ops on the planet. Not a
fan of the game, but I don't know of any psychological-action vietnam war shooters, either.
FPSes, in general, aren't nearly as common as people claim, and, as I stated above, this year, we saw an incredibly diverse set of shooters, which happens every year. Never played a shooter like Syndicate before, Nothing else like Halo exists, The Darkness II was pretty fun, etc.
That said?
Sturgeon's Law.
FPSes aren't some exception where they, and only they, are crap. The same is true for just about any game genre you can imagine.
