I’m not sure I’d really call that stuff “innovation” in FPSs - it’s just like “woo lets add MORE of this same stuff and make it upgradeable!” Spells are just another set of weapons and rarely had any fundamental gameplay changes; dual wielding is just having more weapons. Vehicles were a nice innovative addition that changed the way games worked. Character upgrades had been around since… hm, System Shock? But they already existed in RPGs. Anyway, you only listed a handful of games and think just how many of the buggers have been released (often quietly and mediocrely). The ones you listed were of course the excellent ones that blended all their features together in a great and playable way. I think the Thief series was probably the most innovative, gameplay wise, as it totally removed the emphasis from weaponry and changed it all into timing and location. All of the others have the same basic formula - point, shoot, kill. That’s what I’m getting at.
Why does it matter? Every shmup has the same basic formula: shoot, dodge. Platformer? Jump, kill, collect. Rpg? level up, sit through boring movies. Fighters? kill opponent. Sport? simulate sport. Racing? race a vehicle… on and on and on…
Every single genre can be reduced to a bare set of essentials (we do use the word “genre” for a reason). All that matters is if the games are engaging, quality and fun to play. And in that regard, the first person genre delivers in spades.
Here is an excerpt from Electronic Boutique’s annual report. They actually sell PC & console games that others publish so these figures are more reliable since they inculde all games made by all publishers that EB thinks will sell. From page 3 of http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/13/130125/2005AR2.pdf
Industry Background
According to NPD Group, Inc., a market research firm, the electronic game industry was an approximately
$11.5 billion market in the United States in 2005. Of this $11.5 billion market, approximately $10.5 billion was
attributable to video game products, excluding sales of used video game products, and approximately $1.0 billion
was attributable to PC entertainment software.
But the above ‘video game products’ probably includes the console hardware…
Ok, so replace Deus Ex with System Shock - it’s still later than Doom (and IIRC made by most of the same people anyway).
As tortoise said, you’re always going to be able to reduce a game to it’s core concept and claim the rest is fluff, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not progressed any since Doom. And i’ve deliberately avoided games which have progressed outside of the standard FPS style - Gears Of War and Crackdown could be considered to be highly innovative FPS games since they rewrite some of the basic rules (particularly the control mechanism and how you traverse your environment). But I suspect you’d say that they’re “not FPS games any more because they’re too different”, which is silly.
Likewise, the sheer volume of crap games doesn’t mean that the genre hasn’t progressed. We’ve had shovel-loads of terrible, bland platformers, but that doesn’t mean that the platforming genre hasn’t progressed any between the original Mario and Mario Galaxy.
I’m tired of people claiming that theres no innovation in games any more, or that PC gaming is dying and holding up a few specific examples as if they’re indicative of the whole industry. People have been saying this for years and it’s just not true. Games are more varied and better than ever, damnit.
I don’t think anyone is willing to spend money on making games targeting older hardware; the dilemma is that nobody is willing to buy old-looking-games, but most of the computers are old hardware. It’s a lose-lose situation
[innovation] There is continuing innovation in FPS, but at the same time there seems to be a maddening amnesia that stops newer games building on it.
Witness Halo - the two-weapon limit and always available grenades and melee were -IMO- brilliant and refreshing additions to the genre. 3 years later in Half-Life 2 and I’m back to frantically scrollwheeling around in an improbably-large bag of ordinance for the appropriate weapon. Grenades (which, incidentally, are cleverly shaped to make it impossible to predict how they will bounce) and melee never get used in combat because you have to stop and think to select them. What’s the matter Gordon? Too squeamish to lift your size 11 and stamp on that headcrab that’s oh-so-slowly swivelling around at your feet? Duke Nukem was doing it 8 years ago.
It’s happening again with cover systems - Rogue Trooper, Gears of War and RS:V have shown them to be a good thing, but COD4 still has you doing the shooting-from-cover shuffle, jinking left and right to try and find the angle that lets bullets past the invisible collision hull of whatever you’re hiding behind.
[back to crysis] They can always hope to licence the engine. How did that work out for them last time? Were there any games using the Far cry engine?
@princec: play Portal immediately. It’ll only take you a few hours and it’s magnificent.
I usually bind each weapon to a specific key. Scrollwheeling around is for newbies.
I really can’t understand how one could play like this. If I need a specific weapon I want it as fast as possible and direct weapon binds are the only option for that. Also the learning curve is pretty flat. I use the same (associative) layout for all games… melee on x, peashooter on alt, shotgun-ish on f, rocket-ish on r, rail/beam-ish on q etc. Once I know what the weapon does I know the key it belongs to.
I used to do it like that in Q2, but gave up when games began to have 10+ weapons (or maybe when I stopped being a hardcore fps player…)
Infact, Q2 had an interesting scripting quirk, where-by you could bind 2 weapons to the same key (bind someKey “weapon 5;weapon 6”), which caused repeated presses to toggle between the 2 weapons. Very handy when you have finite keys, and multiple weapons with essencially the same function. I believe they fixed this particular ‘feature’ in Q3 onwards
I’m more attracted to slower paced FPSs now, that’s why I found Crysis appealing - much more so than Unreal 3.
set w1 “weapon 1;set ws vstr w2”
set w2 “weapon 2;set ws vstr w1”
set ws “vstr w1”
bind x “vstr ws”
Something like that iirc (usually one would add resets to other weapon switches in order to get deterministic behavior). Well, it has been a while, but I wrote some massive scripts back then.
After I finished Crysis I gave Stalker another try, which never attracted me too much (actually I started it multiple times and lost interest). But now after forcing myself through the first two or so hours, the addiction came kicking in. So if you haven’t tried it yet, give it a shot.
Well we were comparing a PC game with a 360 game (Halo 3 is only available for 360 as far as I know), so that means that it is one niche against another niche. 360 game sales might be bigger, don’t know, but it is not that much bigger.
Yup, that includes hardware. Games stood for $7.4 billion, so that would give PC games almost 14% of all game sales. Madden was the top selling game I think for that period for platforms: 360,Wii,PS3,PSP,NDS, XBX,PS2,GCN,GBA (9 platforms). Each platform would on average get (100-14)/9=9.6% (brutally simplified)
So the niche idea doesn’t really make sense to me (since PC then would be one of the bigger niches ;)).
I am quite sure that the high HW requirements in combo with the idea that the cool thing with crysis is that it looks great when all bells are turned makes it sell so badly. A new games should be possible to enjoy on a 3-4y old rig and make use of current and next year or so hardware. I get the feeling that I could possibly play it on my rig, but not at all enjoy it, so I will not play it. This might be wrong since it could be great to play even without gfx set to max, so maybe the hype about the gfx has made crysis a bad favor.
Also Halo is a franchise and Halo 3 is almost a “must have” on 360 whereas crysis is just a purdy lookin fps in a long line of fps’s for PC, so even though the numbers are quite different, I don’t think it is all that surprising.
This might be pointless to some, but for a few will get what I mean (I hope!)
The innovation of the car didn’t happen over night. Yes, there was the initial change of paradigm: the invention of the combustion engine. But after that, a lot of little addons made what the car what it is today. If you look at cars of today, the inner workings might be the same, but can a 1901 car really out perform a 2001 car? I think not…
This is true for any innovation, from cars to medicine to architecture to software programming (just look at Fortran). Same goes for FPS shooters, Doom was the change in paradigm, then alot of innovation happened quite quickly to make what FPS what they are today…
There has been alot of innovation in any genre you look at, mainly being driven by the market. If the market isn’t asking for anything new, it wont get it…
Exactly what I think. Crysis is a good to excellent game for the gameplay itself, but all the gfx hype provoked wrong expectations. A friend of mine said once “I heard it looks hardly better than far cry on minimum settings, so it’s not worth playing on my rig”… :o
[quote]I’m tired of people claiming that theres no innovation in games any more, or that PC gaming is dying and holding up a few specific examples as if they’re indicative of the whole industry. People have been saying this for years and it’s just not true. Games are more varied and better than ever, damnit.
[/quote]
Sure there have been some innovations to proven genres, but when was the last time a successful new genre surfaced?
Was it when MMORPGs came around?
Music games are probably the newest genre. They firmly became a solid genre in Japan in the mid nineties, and now in America they are becoming solid here too.
