Let’s Bring Back the Classic FPS Formula
The 90s were great. Zubaz were worn unironically, the “Dream Team” dominated the 92’ Olympics, and the First Person Shooter took its first steps into what would eventually become a billion dollar genre. The first FPS games were by no means crafted in the 90s; see Maze War, Spasim, or Battlezone. It was, however, a time when the formula we know today was refined, defined, and solidified. Skip forward to the present day - the modern FPS is a far cry from what the classic formula outlined in the days of Full House and Furbys. The player-perspective may have stayed the same, but the shootman games that command more market share of any other genre in the gaming industry have evolved into a different beast. The classic FPS formula was special, and in some ways, is beginning to make itself relevant again. So, this is my own version of a love letter to the classics, a list of what I believe made them special and why I think these concepts are long overdue for a comeback.
Bring Back the Health Kit and Dump Iron Sights
Things are easy in 2014. We’re babied, really. In modern FPS games, regenerating health is commonplace. Games like Call of Duty and Halo pioneered this concept, and boy, did it stick around. Of course, different games do different versions of the regenerating health scheme. For example, Resistance: Fall of Man uses a segmented health regeneration system, which lowers a player’s health before regenerating it up to 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100%, depending on the amount of damage taken.For the most part, though, this is a concept that has been repeatedly capitalized on within the genre. Add in cover based combat, and you can breeze right through the latest shooter with an inflated sense of immortality. Does that make you a jerk? Probably.
In the classic FPS formula, games like Wolfenstein 3D, Goldeneye, and Duke Nukem had health packs placed sporadically around levels. In addition to adding a degree of difficulty to the game, this system added a level of strategy to a pretty straightforward genre. For instance, if you were about to storm through a particularly troublesome portion of a game, saving those med pack locations to memory would give you a leg up. Rather than baby you through a difficult boss by allowing you to regenerate your own health like some sort of ostentatious demigod, the classics encouraged you to get through the fight on your own accord.
Iron Sights is another feature of modern-day FPS games that fundamentally changed the classic formula. Until the release of Call of Duty, if you had enough skill to aim at an enemy, then you could successfully deal damage. Call of Duty introduced artificial inaccuracy to your player-character when not using iron sights. As a result, the game encourages you to lock on to an enemy instead of actually aiming. What made the classics special was the sense of satisfaction you got from knowing you got that headshot, or you hit that weak spot, all on your own. You didn’t need automatic tracking. You did that. Go you!
Do you remember getting to what was essentially “the end” of a level in Doom, only to realize that you missed a mandatory switch halfway through the level? That was the worst, but it’s something that modern-day FPS games have all but done away with. Classic FPS’ encouraged you to explore the area you were in by including collectible items and secret areas that added a different dimension to any given level. In 2014, maps are linear, and you need only to look up at the floating arrow in the sky to figure which way to go. Did you miss something 15 minutes back? Sorry, bud, but you are going to get punished if you decide to not push forward. You are literally killed if you want to explore.
One other aspect of level design that is sorely overused in modern shooters is a dependence on cut scenes and set pieces. In the “old school” camp, shoot ‘em ups put a heavy focus on learning about the world around you by eavesdropping on NPCs and paying attention to the minute details scattered throughout any given level. That unbroken gameplay fully immersed the player in the experience; it exercised your imagination, rather than intermittently interrupting the action to show you a polished CG movie of what your character could be doing.
Campaign vs. Multiplayer Focus
It was not long after Goldeneye successfully introduced local multiplayer that people realized FPS games were a ton of fun to play with friends. My childhood friends and I still joke about camping in the basement of Temple with a Golden Gun and finding a glitch that allowed Trevelyan to survive an endless barrage of rockets aimed at his butt. The difference today is that many of the shoot ‘em up games we are playing are entirely focused around a solid multiplayer experience, without giving much thought to the quality of the single-player campaign. Half Life, Duke Nukem 3D, System Shock: these are all games that featured excellent single-player experiences and expanded upon their predecessors by including more robust and thoughtful experiences. Rather than simply going from point A to point B and killing everything that moved on your way there, these games gave you a story to play through and made it interesting through the actions you had to complete to move on to the next level.
In 2014, we’ve got entire AAA games that are simply a multiplayer experience with the thin veil of a story. There’s nothing wrong with this, mind you. In fact, there is a seriously competitive FPS scene that has taken root due in large part to streaming services like Twitch. Furthermore, there is something to be said about the replay value that a full-fledged multiplayer experience adds to a modern FPS, but that same replayability coalesced into the classic FPS formula through smart level design and secret collectibles that changed the way any given game was played.
I’m not trying to sound like an old-timer here. This is not my way of trashing games like Call of Duty and Halo, who are at the heart of this fundamental shift in formula. Those games have in some way done exactly what the classics did years ago by building on an existing design and creating the blueprint for what comes next. Instead, this is a celebration of the classics; this is a plea to re-implement these fundamentals into future games. In a way, they are already being revisited in newer releases like Wolfenstein: The New Order and, hopefully, the recently announced next iteration in the Doom series. And for good reason, these classic FPS elements made the genre deeper than what it has become today. They made the genre challenging. Most importantly though, these qualities made the genre fun.
