We' ve had a few discussions about shooters lately, Crysis contra everything else. And if Prey is a good shooter.
There are things that are personal preference and then there things that is just plain bad.

I' m a pretty versatile guy, liking mostly any kind of shooter, as long as it isnt buggy or otherwise frustrating.

I like bells and whistles in a shooter, since you get up close and personal a lot its nice to see the details.

I like being in control of my character throughout the expirience ala Half-Life.


My favorite shooters ever are thus far:

Half-Life
Half-Life 2
Doom 3
Crysis
Rainbow Six series.

I like the ' Realistic' historic story based shooters.

CoD series and the early Medal of Honour sorry Honor series.

What makes them good, for me it is the fact that they were based on real events, not set in a galaxy far far away or in a parallel universe or set years into the future.

However I would have to say that I preferred them on PC rather than console.

Just accept that Prey and Quake IV are shit.

there' s two parts to that. What makes a good single player shooter, and what make a good multiplayer one, as the two are not necessarily the same.

For SP - a good reference in space and time - while I do really like WWII shooters with their historical accuracy, I' ll happily play a modern or sci-fi one if the frame of reference is good. For similar reason' s I like to have a plot to follow. I prefer to be up against a reasonable humans or humanoid opponents (with good AI) rather than a cheap millions of easy opponents or a super-tough one which can be only killed one way (i.e. no boss battles). Cut scenes should move the story along but should not get in the way of the action. I also prefer to the play the game how I want to, not have to hit invisible checkpoints to trigger the next wave. Vehicles as well as on foot.

For MP - a level playing-field no cheap cheats for hardcore players over occasional players - battles should be based on skill on the day not who has played the most. Balanced maps for short/long play. Cheaters/Standbyers are stomped on. No superjumping, no super-weapons, no weapon spawns.

Even though it contradicts most of what I' ve said above CoD4 is still my favourite shooter for its overall experience. Also honourable mentions to the BiA games and Halo1 (up to end of Assault on the Control Room)

Just accept that Prey and Quake IV are shit.

The essence of the thread is, what makes them shit? Are they ugly? boring? buggy?

Quake 4 was truly wasted potentiel, Quake 2 was really awesome.

ORIGINAL: Vx Chemical

Quake 4 was truly wasted potential, Quake 2 was really awesome.

Quake 2 still remains one of the most compelling games i' ve ever played. I was obsessed with it for what must of been a couple of years. Everything about it was flawless (for the time). The music, the physics, the sound the graphics... it was an amazing experience in 97/98.

But then Half Life was released almost 12 months later and turned the FPS genre upside down. After that, straight up shooters in the same vein as Quake 2 simply weren' t enough. Doom 3 was different in that it revelled in nostalgia and was a technical benchmark. It helped that it also had great art direction and that everything about is had been perfectly crafted - from the character models to the players hands and PDA. Quake 4 on the otherhand was a technical mess, featured some seriously awful character, weapon and level designs and simply didn' t feel like a sequel to Quake 2.

The mistake id made was handing development over to Raven Software. Not that they' re a terrible development studio, they' ve had a handful of decent titles like HeXen, Soldier of Fortune and the Jedi Knight games. But those games still weren' t of the same calibre that id' s inhouse developed titles were.

id Software made the same mistake with Quake Wars. It could have been their follow up to Quake III Arena and a direct competitor to UT3 and CoD4. Instead, it' s sat rotting courtesy of poor game design and a lack of technical proficiency compared to it' s peers.

I have this thing about hands in first person shooters. I figure that if i' m going to spend the entire game looking at a gun and some hands, they better be modeled properly. The hands in Quake 2 are still superior to the vast majority of those in other games, even far more recent ones. The hands in Doom 3 are possibly the best, maybe with the exception of those in BioShock.

Prey was a long time coming and turned up with archaic game design, lame art direction and a seriously poor b-movie storyline. It was released nearly 2 years after Half Life 2 and while it has some nice texture work (or had in 2006), the game as a whole is laughable compared to it' s peers..

When you look at the competition in the genre now, a game has to be something special to even make a dent. Medal of Honor: Airborne would have been great, once upon a time, ...but compared to the likes of CoD4 and Crysis, it' s little more than a hiccup.

The same kind of applies to Halo 3. It hasn' t evolved with the times and it' s game design is archaic. If Bungie had licensed UE3.0 i feel that it would have been far more technically impressive, ...but it would have sacrificed that " look" . It' s not a great looking game, ...it' s passable as a console title, but it should have been the best looking game on the platform at it' s time of release and it wasn' t even close. Worse still, the lame ass Resistance: Fall of Man which i' ve dogged for being fugly in areas is still a better looking agme than Halo 3.

Not that it' s all about the looks. Halo 3 is gun, but where every other FPS has adopted using ironsights, sprint commands and the ability to cook grenades... Halo 3 just feels old before its time.

I don' t know what makes a shooter good, but i know what i like, and what i don' t like is trash like Quake 4 and Prey

The closer to real life a shooter is, the more I' m inclined to enjoy it. I prefer the 1/2 shot kill system, but most games aren' t properly designed to take advantage of it. The " hardcore" modes in games nowadays are far too unbalanced. I want to be totally on-par with my enemies in terms of stamina and life.

Realistically modeled weapons with accurate audio are a must, and the hands have to be at least passable. If it' s historical, setting accuracy isn' t a must, but it has to be at least coherent.

Shooters are great because of their arcadiness and also usually their fantastic music. Shooters like the Thunder Force series, Gradius V, R-Type 1, Radiant Silvergun, Gate of Thunder, Lords of Thunder and others are all great.

First Person Shooters, however, are not great. They are boring. They rarely have music and instead try to be " ambient" . There are also waaaay too god damn many of them.

The Bad ones.

I only like classic style shooters, NOT first-person shooters. The only First-person game I liked and actually finished was Namco' s Breakdown.

I' m all about the Gradiuses, the Salamanders, the Parodiuses, the Ikarugas, Cave' s rich collection of insane, reflex intensive arcade shooters, Omega Five, ANYTHING that falls under the horizontal or vertical scrolling shooter label.

I like shooters that have a good story to them.
i also think its cool if theres like a secret message in the story line.

what makes a good shooter:

- Guns that feel like their real life counterparts, they sound good. The bullets make realistic impacts and stuff like recoil and load times should be taken into account

- good level design, its too common for fps to get lost in its own level struture, Half Life 2 is a great example of what an open ended fps can be done without confusing the player or allowing them to get lost

- Multiplayer makes a shooter, typicaly a shooter is only played for multi, or that where the games basicly boils down too after a few months, fps with poor online will suffer and disappear, I think games like cod4 sold so well becuase the multi is awesome, word of mouth possibley made other people buy it.

- A good, stable game engine, nothing worse than playing on an engine which can barely render the whole screen without chugging, ditch the pixel shader 3.0 dyamic shadow if you have to.. make it playable...

- and finally you got to have something else, with so many fps on the market you gotta be different. cod4' s perk system is awesome, half life 2 gravity gun was fantastic and to lesser extent portal gun.

Also you got to get a buzz going about your game, nobody will buy it if nobody plays it.

I' m sold on the " 30 seconds of fun" theory that some dude who worked on Halo 1 came up with.
The little battles you have need to be fun. It takes a lot to get this right.

A decent physics engine is required. Pretty much all games have a decent one now days though. Objects need to act the way you think they were real. They need to be consistent and predictable. It isn' t fun playing a game based on luck.

The weapons need to be balanced. When you spawn in a game you should start with or be able to survive long enough to find to get a good enough weapon to have a decent chance at defeating your opponent even if he has the best weapon. The game will feel cheap otherwise. Hopelessness isn' t a fun feeling.

The levels need to be balanced. There can be areas to control that are better than others but they can' t be too good. There needs to be multiple paths, giving players choices. There need to be multiple strategies catering to different skills, not just one strategy that is clearly the best. The game gets boring if it is just the same thing over and over again.

The more options there are the more depth the game can have. This is the hardest thing to get right. Every feature added to the game needs to be balanced out with all of the other features. And if there aren' t enough things in the game it will get repetitive and boring.