First Person Shooters

So, lets talk about first person shooters.

Everyone knows what a fps is, nowadays you find fps games bloody everywhere. The idea is to play from a first person perspective and shoot at things.

What about games that are through a first person perspective but aren't shooters. Do they exist? In the past, you could find first person puzzle games or first person adventure games. Now if you want to be a first person adventure game you need to be a freaking shooter. The idea of "adventure without shooting" seems to be inconceivable, at least in first person. But everyone loves fps games, I love fps games, so it's fine. Maybe first person shooters should be just called first person games. What do you think? Can you think of any fist person game that isn't a shooter?

Google agrees. Fist person = shooter.

There is a lot of different kinds of fps games, but nowadays it seems that every fps can be sorted in two groups of games. Fps games that are tactical shooters, and the rest. 'The rest' is the group where you can find Team fortress 2 or Bioshock for example. Theres just too much tactical shooters out there. Even developers are realizing that they need to try to do something different. The genre has to evolve right? But if you look at the sales, if you look at the numbers, it looks like tactical shooters are the pinnacle of the genre.

First person shooters became popular with wolfenstein 3D and doom.Then we got quake, half-life, etc, huge innovating games. Everyone know that story. Now for example epic is trying make us believe that Bulletstorm is the next step in first person games. Does Bulletstorm looks like innovation? It looks awesome, thats true. But the game has nothing we've never seen before. The last innovation in the genre has been Portal, maybe Mirror's edge.

But hey, maybe you're thinking that good games doesn't need to be innovative! And innovative games can be bad! Just look at Mirror's edge. So tactical shooters can be the best shooting experience, why go forward? Well, I believe that innovation doesn't mean too much. I love shooters but I don't play tactical shooters. I will explain you why.

counter-strike made tactical shooters popular

You see, when playing shooters you can look for different kind of experiences. Single player adventure-like fpses with puzzles, or multiplayer shooters. In both cases good gameplay is important. What does tactical shooters have in those fields compared to other games?

Single player experiences in tactical shooters are more filers than anything. Call of duty campaigns aren't bad, but a 100% single player focused game will always do the job better. Look at valve games for example. Realism is good but once it gets old it's kind of boring.

Now, multiplayer tactical shooters, it can't get much better than that right? You don't need innovation for good gameplay, thats true. The problem is realism. Tactical shooters are slow, very slow, and from a game mechanics point of view almost all the weapons plays the same ways. So, what kind of multiplayer shooters do I play?

The kind of shit that I play

Quake, Unreal tournaments, Quake 3, Painkiller, Warsow, all those 'competitive' multiplayer shooters are the way to go. They have good fun weapon design, good level design and fast paced gameplay. Someone could argue that those game are 'too hard'. They are actually easy to pick up, you should give it a go. In a generation where gamers are divided between casual and hardcore gamers, can Quake be too hard for a hardcore gamer? COD players are considered hardcore gamers so I'm sure everyone can play those badass 'competitive' shooters.

There is one problem though. This kind of fps experience is impossible on consoles. So what can I say to console gamers who want to play multiplayer shooters? Well, go buy a PC and play some good fpses!!

Well, actually nobody cares about all that shit, maybe it's just me. But seriously, if you haven't, go try quakelive and if you can, get Half-life 2, best single player shooter, hands down.

So, what do you guys think about the fps genre?