The "fun-shooters" return. But why would anyone want that?

[NinjaDeathSlap]

Agreed, although Duke Nukem annoys me. Just the whole "Hail to the King" attitude that the fans praise, even though if he actually existed in real life, he would be the biggest twat on the face of the earth and no-one would give him the time of day.

Maybe that's part of the appeal. You can like a character that you would absolutely hate in real life. I really like Green Arrow as a character but, if he were real, I would consider the guy to be the lowest of the low (costumed vigilantism aside).

Good point, but I'm still puzzled as to how a character like that ends up being hero worshiped by the good ol' days computer geeks. I mean, isn't the Duke exactly the sort of guy who would have flushed their heads down the toilet in High School, I that scenario I would have thought burning hatred to be more logical.

 

[Iron Lightning]

So after a few pages of discussion -

1# Why do people get all defensive, to the point of insulting each other, and sending me hatemail, telling me how stupid I am for liking a shooter where you don't kill aliens. Really? Come on guys... If you like games I find horrible, feel free to do so. My own tastes deviate from the norm in many fields, and I didn't mean to insult anybody. I was merely trying to understand something and insulting me, or games I like or quote won't further any possible case you're trying to make.

Oh my, I'm terribly sorry about that. If you're getting any genuine hatemail you should probably report it to a moderator. While I disagree with you, I respect your the quality of your argument.

2# More importantly - to stay in the comparison of alcohol someone gave a few pages ago - I can understand sharing a bottle of whine with my boyfriend on the couch, but I can't understand why I would sit alone and drown myself in beer. Sure, there might be people that have fun just slogging away, but stating again and again that they have, will not exactly help me understand why. In the same notion, people keep repeating it, but why would I settle for a lesser experience? Again, I can understand why one would watch Machete instead of Citizin Kane, because it's a different kind of experience. What I can't understand however, is why anyone would want to turn his brain off, and watch a twenty year old Steven Seagal movie.

Truly, Steven Seagal movies are hilariously terrible but they're certainly not analogous to, say, Duke Nukem 3D. It's a common misconception that just because something doesn't take itself seriously it must also be mindless. What I liked most about Duke Nukem 3D was the relative complexity of the level design and puzzles. That's not to say that the puzzles were on the same level of, say, Braid but they did have their moments. I remember one bit in Duke Nukem 3D where one level ends with you stealing a submarine, by the start of the next level you find that the aliens have booby-trapped the sub and you need to use logic to crack a three-button code before you drown. That's certainly not mindless.

Also consider Duke Nukem 3D's exploration element. There are usually about a half-dozen secret areas in each of Duke Nukem 3D's many levels. One good example is an area hidden behind a movie screen that you have to reveal by using the instruments in a projector room and blowing up the screen with a grenade launcher that was also hidden earler in the level. Nonlinear exploration is certainly not mindless.

Now consider, for example, Modern Warfare 2's story campaign. It's one of the most linear campaigns I've ever played. Now I don't mean linear as a sequential order of predetermined events but as the term applies to level design. I remember a few missions in Modern Warfare 2 where I literally never turned around. Now that is objectively poor level design. That is a bit mindless I'm sorry to say.

I don't mean to say that Modern Warfare 2 was that bad of a game, there were parts of it that really shined. I particularly enjoyed playing the spec ops mode with a friend. That mode required some actual strategy and coordination (on the hardest difficulty, anyway.) Especially so when dealing with juggernauts.

3# Maybe the examples I've given were a little unfortunate, since hating cod/halo respectively apparently makes you as cool as quoting Yahtzee. Let's for what I'm actually referring to, take the example of Unreal II: Awakening. A fun little shooter from 2003. Quite linear, yes, and you do play a Space marine, but you also play a character as opposed to playing as Jean Claude van damme. The story telling was well ahead of it's time, you cared for the characters, and there were plenty of aliens to shoot, different aliens even. The fun of shooting stuff in weird scenery, with huge guns, it's all there - but why would I want to take the emotional impact away, why would I ever want less?

Having never played Unreal II: Awakening I'll have to take your word on that. I can certainly admit that the stories of most older FPSs were completely vestigial and all amounted to "those dudes are evil, fuck 'em up" (although I suppose that simplification could apply to pretty much any given FPS.) Duke Nukem definitely a character, not a particularly good one, in fact he's just a mishmash of every 80s action hero with a name ripped off from a Captain Planet villain. Even so, there's still something about him that I find endearing, maybe Duke has somehow put on so much stereotype that he passed negative infinity, looped around, and became a genuine character. At the end of the day Duke Nukem is still a face with a name, and that's much better than all those non-characters we see in FPSs nowadays.

I definitely agree that it's always preferable to have a good story with good characters, but I haven't seen that in quite a time. It's true that the upcoming Duke Nukem Forever will probably not be a great game and yet the fact that it has an actual character, decent puzzles, and nonlinear level design makes it a step up from the mindless, nearly characterless, two-steps-away-from-a-rail-shooter FPSs we have today.

 

[Netrigan]

Realism in shooters is a barrier to creativity. Frankly almost every story in a game sucks anyway so I'd rather they just stop trying and elevate shooting mechanics back to where Quake 3 left them; a beautiful ballet of explosions and precision shooting.

Quake 3 was horrible.
Everyone just used the rail-gun, the single player "campaign" was just unreal tournament all over again and it was beyond retarded.
No subsequent game in the series has been able to recreate the wonder and atmosphere of the very first Quake.
Then they brought in the strogg and the series went downhill so fast.
IV Was horrible, had barely any plot and was just trying to cash in on Doom 3's success, a little too late.
-Tabs<3-

Aaaah, the original Quake which proved you don't even need a strong premise (much less a story) to have a hit game. That game was perhaps the biggest mess I've ever seen in a AAA game. It had atmosphere, but to this day I can't figure out exactly what the hell we were supposed to be doing. It just threw a bunch of military, fantasy, and demonic cliches at us and let the tech and core gameplay carry the day.

And it was the original brown shooter.

I can respect Quake on its technical merits, but, egads, that is hands down the worst story/premise I have ever seen in first person shooter. Why are you shooting stuff? Ummm, because it was shooting at me?

 

[Psycho Cat Industries]

Because all I have been seeing since 2004 are new halos and recreations of what Tom Clancy does in a weekend.

 

[GiantRaven]

Good point, but I'm still puzzled as to how a character like that ends up being hero worshiped by the good ol' days computer geeks. I mean, isn't the Duke exactly the sort of guy who would have flushed their heads down the toilet in High School, I that scenario I would have thought burning hatred to be more logical.

I could make a comment about how they see themselves as playing the character as a form of self-empowerment, imaging that they could actually be such a type of person. But that would be pretty insulting and I'm no psychologist.

 

[Daedalus1942]

Realism in shooters is a barrier to creativity. Frankly almost every story in a game sucks anyway so I'd rather they just stop trying and elevate shooting mechanics back to where Quake 3 left them; a beautiful ballet of explosions and precision shooting.

Quake 3 was horrible.
Everyone just used the rail-gun, the single player "campaign" was just unreal tournament all over again and it was beyond retarded.
No subsequent game in the series has been able to recreate the wonder and atmosphere of the very first Quake.
Then they brought in the strogg and the series went downhill so fast.
IV Was horrible, had barely any plot and was just trying to cash in on Doom 3's success, a little too late.
-Tabs<3-

Aaaah, the original Quake which proved you don't even need a strong premise (much less a story) to have a hit game. That game was perhaps the biggest mess I've ever seen in a AAA game. It had atmosphere, but to this day I can't figure out exactly what the hell we were supposed to be doing. It just threw a bunch of military, fantasy, and demonic cliches at us and let the tech and core gameplay carry the day.

And it was the original brown shooter.

I can respect Quake on its technical merits, but, egads, that is hands down the worst story/premise I have ever seen in first person shooter. Why are you shooting stuff? Ummm, because it was shooting at me?

Actually, throughout the game you are given a little backstory, and at the very end there's like an 8 page explanaton of why Shub-Niggurath and her minions tried to take over Earth.
It had more plot than Doom.
The gameplay is for me still to this day enjoyable and the atmosphere was surprisingly creepy, even though I only played it like 3-4 years ago.
-Tabs<3-

 

[Bolleman]

One thing I have to say you're doing wrong, is comparing games that are over 10 years old, to some of the best games in the genre. Comparing Duke Nukem to Modern Warfare 2 is just silly, no offense.

"The kind of game we had in times where going into a room, having all doors close, and defeat x waves of enemies was considered clever level design". Well, you're missing the importance of one word in that sentence. The "Was". I agree, that's not something I really wanna go back to. Say, Doom, for instance, that has launched on XBLA, the level design in that game is absolutely terrible. Disagree and you haven't tried it. But it was fun at the time, and that's the thing. If Doom were to arrive now as a serious title, people would no doubt mock it. I would guess reviews like "The gameplay is quite good, if a little annoying, the rest is complete rubbish.".

The standards has improved, and just doing the aforementioned defeat X number of enemies doesn't really get you that far anymore. Fun-shooters isn't a genre for the shooters 20 years ago, it's subgenre that focus on killing people in a fun way, not killing people in a way that makes sense(that's what I gather, at least), and if the fun-shooters return, they can't be stuck in the same style of yesteryear, with the terrible level design, and just killing people as the only gameplay, and I'm sure they know it. I also don't think that's what people want. Modern Warfare is fun, it's great, but shooting terrorists from behind cover is getting old, and overdone, and THAT's the problem. I'm getting sick of the realistic shooter, that's why I want this fun-shooters thing to really land and make an impact. I don't want to play a game like Duke Nukem 3d again(Hell, I haven't even managed to complete that, it's so dull).

I want chaotic violence.

 

[danintexas]

Give me a Starsiege Tribes with todays tech and I probably won't ever play another FPS.

Till then I will continue to load up the original because today's FPS are zzzzzzzzzzz compared to it.

 

[Netrigan]

Realism in shooters is a barrier to creativity. Frankly almost every story in a game sucks anyway so I'd rather they just stop trying and elevate shooting mechanics back to where Quake 3 left them; a beautiful ballet of explosions and precision shooting.

Quake 3 was horrible.
Everyone just used the rail-gun, the single player "campaign" was just unreal tournament all over again and it was beyond retarded.
No subsequent game in the series has been able to recreate the wonder and atmosphere of the very first Quake.
Then they brought in the strogg and the series went downhill so fast.
IV Was horrible, had barely any plot and was just trying to cash in on Doom 3's success, a little too late.
-Tabs<3-

Aaaah, the original Quake which proved you don't even need a strong premise (much less a story) to have a hit game. That game was perhaps the biggest mess I've ever seen in a AAA game. It had atmosphere, but to this day I can't figure out exactly what the hell we were supposed to be doing. It just threw a bunch of military, fantasy, and demonic cliches at us and let the tech and core gameplay carry the day.

And it was the original brown shooter.

I can respect Quake on its technical merits, but, egads, that is hands down the worst story/premise I have ever seen in first person shooter. Why are you shooting stuff? Ummm, because it was shooting at me?

Actually, throughout the game you are given a little backstory, and at the very end there's like an 8 page explanaton of why Shub-Niggurath and her minions tried to take over Earth.
It had more plot than Doom.
The gameplay is for me still to this day enjoyable and the atmosphere was surprisingly creepy, even though I only played it like 3-4 years ago.
-Tabs<3-

And it has nothing to do with id scrapping the John Romero hand-to-hand-combat/RPG game and shoving those game designs into the futuristic Doom style game that American McGee and Tim Willits were developing.

Seriously, I don't care if someone wrote a 1,500 page novel explaining every last bit of the game, the game's plot as presented in the game is just a bunch of id's favorite game cliches thrown together... then someone coming along afterwards and figuring out some slip of a plot that kind of sort of explains it. There's zero logical progression through that game.

Good gameplay, good atmosphere, and very good tech for its day... but if you check out the "STORY" entry on its Wikipedia page, the article writers pretty much gave up describing the "plot" after the second paragraph and spent several more paragraphs explaining why it really doesn't make any sense.

The player takes the role of an un-named protagonist sent into a portal in order to stop an enemy code-named "Quake". Previously, the government had been experimenting with teleportation technology, and upon development of a working prototype called a "Slipgate", this enemy has compromised the human connection with their own teleportation system, using it to insert death squads into the "human" dimension, supposedly in order to test the martial capabilities of humanity.

The sole surviving protagonist in Operation Counterstrike is the player, who must advance, starting each of the four episodes from a human held but overrun military base, before fighting through into other dimensions, traversing these via slipgate or their otherworld equivalent. Once passing through each slipgate, the player's main objective is to survive and locate the exit which will take him to the next level, not unlike that of id Software's previous hit, Doom.

So one level, you're fighting soldiers carrying conventional weapons, the next you're fighting grenade launching trolls and demon dogs. Later on you have zombies throwing their own limbs at you. Still later it's Lovecraftian nightmares. Usually you're fighting through castles devoid of any modern technology, but sometimes you're fighting through cave systems or nondescript military bases. The game simply has no real identity.

 

[TK421]

Because I'm tired of games that take themselves so fucking seriously.

This is why. No matter how "realistic" or serious they try to be, every game is still just a game. I love the way games like Duke Nukem where the whole game is a comedy act, yet badass at the same time. I also love the way there are secrets throughout every level that you have to just spend time with the game to find.

 

[jowo96]

These games are trying to revive the spirit of the old games which was one whose main goal was to be fun, the crappy, unimaginative level design was a mix of inexperience (because who had experience back then?) and limitations of the systems available, now that this is not the case anymore I can see no reason that these games should, by merit of being "fun" games, be rubish.

Whether these games are any good will have to be seen but I for one welcome the change in tone.

 

[GiantRaven]

I still haven't seen any reasons why games like Call of Duty cannot be considered fun whist games like Duke Nukem are explicitly labelled as fun.

Without these explanations, any argument falls completely flat. Surely the most important factor is gameplay and, well, you a dude going around shooting shit in both. Why can't they both be fun?

I just don't get why such a stark line has to be drawn between the two ideals.

 

[Zannah]

readability snipI haven't played duke, just a few serious sam installments. Mentioning those puzzles is a somewhat valid point, I wouldn't have expected that in this kind of franchise (You could say I'm puzzled ba dum tish).
However most arguments so far said that the story get's in the way of the fun, by breaking the flow. To me, from what little experience I have about games from the time, what could possibly be more flow braking, then backtracking the entire level in search for that one secret rocket launcher?
And that very 'flow' is what I'd argue in the two modern warfare games favor. You are correct, both games are almost completely linear, but then, they succeed at motivating you to keep moving. And I'd personally prefer a game, where the flow is strong enough to make me not notice the linearity, because I want to go on quickly, over a game that has so little incentive to go on, that I'd want to search all the small corners, and possibly backtrack a few rooms.

The duke as a character - well that might be a question of taste - I hear there's people who don't like Dante or Sephiroth, so whatever tickles your fancy I guess.

You (and everyone else who didn't play Unreal II) should fix that though - it's an fps about a Space Marine, that genuinely made me shed tears, and that's quite the feat :3

 

[MrGalactus]

There is a middle ground ya know, s'called Brink.

 

[Logic 0]

Because I'm tired of drowning in the colour brown and the feeling I'm playing a pallet swap of the same game over and over again.

 

[Char-Nobyl]

So between bulletstorm, Duke nukem, and the upcoming serious sam sequel, throughout lots of threads, people on here have been celebrating the return of the so called 'fun-shooters'. A somewhat misleading term, that refers to the kind of fps we had before there was half-life, before there was Modern Warfare, before there was halo. The kind of fps we had before such games started to have stories beyond "demons / aliens / nazis over there, kill they ass". The kind of game we had in times where going into a room, having all doors close, and defeat x waves of enemies was considered clever level design, especially when it happened five thousand times per level, with nothing else.
In short: The kind of fps we had, before fps became any good.

That's hardly a fair standard to set. In Doom, you had an X-axis for aiming and no Y. There were a lot of restrictions placed on game design of all sorts, voice acting outside of sound effects was virtually out of the question, and everything was rendered in what they called 3D, but what we would call "cardboard cutouts."

You seem to think that the upcoming games are just going to be polished versions of Wolfenstein...they're not. The inspiration that's being drawn for these games is in concept and spirit: you're a one-man army mowing down the countless mere mortals that dared stand in your way, and laughing the whole time. It's over-the-top because it wants to be. In Doom you were an unstoppable juggernaut of destruction, but in Duke Nukem Forever, you're an unstoppable juggernaut of destruction that realizes how fully awesome being that is.

Now, on the off chance of sounding sexist, maybe you need to be a guy to like that kind of games, but seriously - abandoning the story in favor of un-funny one-liners doesn't work. Bad Company 2 proved that much. And neither badassery, nor comedic effect requires you to abandon years of game-design progress.
So, I ask you dear escapist, why would anyone want such games to make a return?

Disclaimer: This is by no means a judgement on the upcoming games, I don't know those. It's just that all the "good old games" mentioned in the various discussions about these games, are from my perspective horribly boring, repetetive grindfests soaked in testosterone and immaturity, and that I'm trying to grasp why anyone would want a game coming out in 2011 to be like a game that wasn't any good in 1995.

Just as a side note: if you want to avoid sounding like you have a massive gender bias, don't use words like 'testosterone' as a negative attribute.

Anyhoo, I think the problem isn't that you're a girl. The problem is that you're you. Millions of gamers enjoyed the original Doom, Wolfenstein, and Duke. There are probably plenty of people who didn't play them, but will find that they enjoy the spiritual successors coming out. The people that won't enjoy them are people like you, because you've formed your judgment about their most basic concepts and you've chosen to hate it.

You seem to argue that the upcoming games are somehow going to hobble themselves because their predecessors had gameplay limitations (a hilarious concept at best, and a boneheaded one at worst), yet you switch gears and lament how it's the stories and gameplay that are going to be neutered. From the look of it, you want long since gone limitations to embody why you hated Duke and company, and that's not a relevant argument.

Short version: you already hated the inspiration for these new games. Lots of people didn't. These games are for them, not for people who've already passed negative judgment on them.

 

[Netrigan]

readability snipI haven't played duke, just a few serious sam installments. Mentioning those puzzles is a somewhat valid point, I wouldn't have expected that in this kind of franchise (You could say I'm puzzled ba dum tish).

Seriously, the puzzles are pretty much trial-and-error things. You're presented with three or four buttons. Say closed is "x" and open is "o". So you hit buttons until you stumble across the solution which is something like xox or ooxo.

 

[Dratis]

Yahtzee puts its really well in his review of 'Pain Killer'. Its just a fun excuse for mindless violence. Very few puzzles if any. A challenge of making sure you don't die to much. And so many guns that its hard to switch between them on anything less then a keyboard.

These sort of games can like any first person shooter only be improved with the newer tech. If you look at Fallout 3 and take the bloody mess perk. Just add that. Shooting everyone in sight, watching them all fall before you as you empty their clip in their direction. Body parts falling every which way and nothing but a one liner from the character or yelling something at the screen from you playing it.

Its just mindless fun and there isn't a deep story needed. The shooters we have nowadays can all be well and good though a lot of them are very samey. If you've ever played a Halo Firefight map with infinite health or at least high resistance, or a similar game/mode, you'll know just the kind of fun you can have with these games. Challenging dudes and interesting dudes to kill. Constant new places to relieve them of their life giving force in. So many different weapons for it that every now and then you forget that there is one gun you have tons of ammo for because you never use it and then just unleash it upon the world.

You get the same enjoyment out of these games as you would an action movie.

 

[thePyro_13]

Fun shooters don't require themselves to have no story. That's just an artefact of the times they were created in.

The fact that you call them fun shooters, suggests that uber-realism shooters aren't fun?

I play games for fun, I'd much rather be shooting at cyber Hitler than hiding from Russian/North Korean peons and pretending I'm in the real army.

It certain requires the plot to be a bit more 'silly'. But I find that much better than game which abandon good game-play and fun in order to fulfil the realism or fluff of the universe they're set in.

 

[Triforceformer]

Well I feel Duke Nukem Forever is actually finding a happy median in terms of "Old vs New". DNF takes the modern gameplay mechanics that it feels would work really well for its game, like the 2-gun system and regenerating health. BUT, DNF uses them in a way that still feels as over the top and old-school as it is would have been in 1998. That, and games like CoD aren't really all that fun to me. They're a slog though linear pathways with the only parts that stand out in your mind being the cinematic parts where you just watch. The actual grindy and, to be quite honest, emotionally draining combat/gameplay is very safely pushed from your memory by flashy setpieces and a some military guy yelling vague objectives.

I decided to pop MW2 back in to play the campaign, having not played in a while. My line of thinking being that I only think it's bad because that's what been pushed into my brain by people here and interviews with Randy Pitchford and such. 15 minutes later I popped the disc right back out due to just how fucking BORING it was. Multiplayer wise, let's just say that it's just as frustrating and grindy as I remember.

With Duke Nukem Forever the things that stick out most, at least from what we've seen, is just how nice the gameplay looks. Just you, your Ripper Chaingun or whatever, some alien bastards, and a bunch of one-liners. Sure there are fancy setpieces, but those are mostly there to make the game feel more massive and epic; as opposed to making the grindy gameplay slightly more bearable. So I guess what people are looking for in DNF is refreshing simplicity. That and the dropping of any connections to realism, while not the best for "Compelling" plots, does give the developers more room for fun ideas.

I don't want to make 10 paragraphs here, so I will just say this of Bulletstorm. The jokes may be lame, but launching a guy into the air in contained slow-mo and sending him skyward with a rocket flare is much too satisfying for me to really mind. Keep in mind that this comparison is mostly towards Call of Duty. Mostly because that's one the modern FPS franchises that I've to most experience with. But also because when you think "Gritty Modern FPS", what do you think of?

Overall, DNF and Bulletstorm will be a refreshing change of pace for FPSes, no matter what you say. They'll be games that drop any attempt to "Compel" you with alright visuals and grindy gameplay that's connected by flashy, unplayable, setpieces. They will instead kick back and see just how much fun they can squeeze into their game's deign, philosophy, and disc space. So with DNF clocking in at 15-17 hours, multiplayer excluded (Which is to have jetpacks), I'm sure there's plenty of fun to go around.