Never mind.
It’s sad when people stop caring.
Today’s Market need a sound beating, or a lobotomy (hey, it helped Jack Nicolson to drop the stupid behind and move onto mad genius), so they may realize that sound and graphics (what have you found bad about the controls in SS?) are not what’s important in a game or to the evolution of this medium rather a contributing side factor.
Anyone who obsess over eye candy rather than design deserve to be fed through the console tube.
Are they going to feed me Crackdown, Dead Rising, or EDF 2017 through this console tube? Because you can sign me up.
Man, I wish I could get more meaningful storyline and plot design from this here Microsoft Word. I swear, it’s like totally dumbed down for consoles.
Painkiller.
Screw storyline. It’s not that there is anything inherently wrong with a storyline in a shooter (even though most are unbeliveably corny). It’s that for someone like me who prefer really non-linear shooters, a storyline is usually the Kiss of Death: Damned if the developers aren’t going to funnel you into a particular location at a particular time so they can play their storyline-in-game-cutscene/event/effect before your eyes. Gameplay becomes a remedy to ooh and aah you with audiovisual treats.
Games like the original Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon (and the first Delta Force games for that matter) at least had the courtesy to keep the corny storyline (and I say this as a raving fanboy of those games) to themselves between missions. The first shooter I remember as something special was Zombie Studios Spec Ops, which didn’t even have a real story, just a slideshow of background info between every 2-3 missions or so. But it had an awful lot of tactical shooter gameplay features. Too bad Spec Ops 2 was so poorly made or the franchise could have been a classic.
A good litmus test for me is the old 2002 shooter Shadow Force: Razor Unit. Made on a tiny budget, this linear one-man shooter was neither fabulously good, nor hugely popular. On the other hand, it covered most of the basics. So measuring the latest AAA shooters against this cheapo oldie, the question is: “Besides being bigger and prettier, does this new game bring something new to the table?”. Surprisingly often the answer is “no”. Like Call of Duty 4.
At least FarCry 2 seem to bring something new to the table. Personally, I’m waiting for the two shooters from Blackfoot Studios, which hopefully will set new standards for realism and non-linearity.
Respectfully
krise madsen
SS2 is still great and controls reasonably well. SS1? I find it unplayable. The interface is horrible, and I can’t even mouselook properly. I’ve never even played the game because of that (I only tried it about a year ago, for the first time). SS2, I’ve played 3 times, which is incredibly rare for me. With the texture patch that updates the graphics, it still looks great today, IMO.
As for stories in FPS, I’ll take Bioshock and CoD4. I thought HL2’s story was absolute tripe.
I thought HL2’s story was excellent for the method that they chose to tell the story through. By having a silent protagonist and first person gameplay with no cutscenes, they limit themselves to a certain kind of story-telling. And even though it didn’t work as well as other methods (like the ones in SS2, Bioshock, CoD4) for the purpose of story-telling, it worked well given it’s limitations. I thought it was pretty brilliant that they didn’t try to explain what had happened since we last saw Gordon. Instead, we’re put into this new future and just have to observe how the world has changed.
However, I do agree that they failed in HL2: Ep1 in terms of gameplay in the first half, and in HL2: Ep 2 in terms of cheesy storytelling. In Ep2, they try to give the players a lot of answers, and have Alex inappropriately flirting and fawning over Gordon (Oh Gordon, you can press the On Switch when I ask you to… you’re soooooooooo smart!) when things start getting really cheesy. In HL2, they let the world’s setting do most of the talking, which is the best way to utilize their story-telling limitations, I think.
I’m with you Tom. You comment on Uncharted story really struck home, actually. It’s not an amazing story but damn if the voice acting and characters don’t do a hell of a lot with what they have.
Assimilate for Christs sake.
I don’t know what “most of the basics” means, but if you think that the only thing CoD4 does is to be “bigger and prettier” then you have a significant problem with over-generalization. Like a movie reviewer who complains about the plot of every single movie because it is all just boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back. Yes, in CoD4 you assault a ship with bad guys in it, assault a town with bad guys in it, defend a town with bad guys in it, sneak around and snipe a bad guy, and shoot bad guys from a chopper. If that’s all you get out of the game, you are doing it wrong.
Baldur’s Gate 2 is the most innovative FPS evar. It has a great story, good voice acting, and it isn’t first person and doesn’t involve shooting people. What more do you want?
Over-generalization. Point taken. Look, it’s not like I have anything against CoD4. It’s arguably the most well-made first person shooter ever (and like apparently anyone else, I found the gunship mission totally awesome). But I’m not sure if that constitutes “State of the Art”. “Great Game” for sure, but that’s not necessarily the same.
A game like the original Rainbow Six was, in my opinion, a state of the art shooter, not simply because I thought it was great, but because it offered an entirely new way of playing a first person shooter: Run-and-gun was no longer a safe way of playing and in single player mode you actually had to come up with a careful plan before you started playing.
You could say the same of Delta Force 1 that offered not only huge maps, but also the ability to shoot at each other over great distances.
Crysis would, IMO, be a borderline case. On one hand, it’s very much a revamped FarCry. On the other hand, it does push the envelope of graphics detail (or so I’m told, I’m horrible at telling the difference between average and top-of-the-line graphics), and you could argue that the nanosuit features provide the player with an unprecedented freedom of choice in how to play the game.
But I suppose it also comes down to how we define state of the art: Would Crysis Warhead (which I haven’t played) which apparently does everything Crysis does a little better be more state of the art than Crysis?
Respectfully
krise madsen
Outlaws infused narrative cutscenes to tie together the levels, if a bit awkwardly. It also changed a lot of things about the gunplay model (like requiring the player to reload). From a technical standpoint, it was one of the early games to utilize true 3D level design. For those reasons, I consider it a groundbreaking title, and perhaps even “state of the art” for the era. It was supplanted by Jedi Knight, which also featured a heavy narrative focus, coupled with innovative level design.
Then Half-Life came along…
- Alan
Just what does FPS stands for in your dictionary?
Nah, getting three paragraphs into an argument over something that was never intended to be an argument is a clear sign you’re in The Wrong Place. Not to mention the futility of complaining about being needlessly hostile, condescending, and argumentative on Qt3, with the guy who started the forum. That’s like, what? Going to the Forbidden Palace and complaining that people shouldn’t eat so much soy?
In this case, I think we can probably go with Fools Perplexed by Sarcasm.
Thank you for your assimilation.
So what’s happening in this thread, now?
I’m really interested in what happens with dynamic storylines over the next several years. Nobody has really had the resources or the ‘political will’ to really invest in them, but it seems with Far Cry 2 that there’s some pretty interesting steps being taken towards one.
The Half-Life/Call of Duty model has a storyline like the links in a chain, each link leading to the next, but the links were fairly narrow, with only minor variations in what you could do while you advanced to the next link. With a ‘more open’ game like Crysis, the overall story experience was still very linear, very chain-like, though each link in the chain was fairly wide. I think the next step is still having the end-point determined, but the whole middle story area not really a chain at all. More like a possibility space with any number of possible ways through it. Is that what Far Cry 2 is trying to achieve?