“Shoot ‘Em Up” is a post category focusing on First Person Shooters. FPS’s have a strong crowd, but are they becoming a little bit repetitive? Are FPS’s just about fragging dude after dude, or should they be given less killing and more thoughts on innovation? These posts will discuss that.”
First Person Shooters have always been a HUGE stress reliever to me. Just logging onto “Halo” or something and walking around, blasting grunt after grunt gives me just the slightest amount grim satisfaction. However, I also notice something about this genre. There is so much repetitiveness in the single player gameplay. You walk around, grab a gun, shoot gun, kill things, find bigger gun, shoot bigger gun, kill things, lather, rinse, repeat. If you take a look at the FPS market today, you’ll all notice these boring, boring aspects. Little innovation.
There are a few gems out there however, gems that have taken the first step into making these games…less lame. What is this first step? It’s the story, bitches. Yes, as a hopeful future game designer, I’ve realized that one of the most important things to a mainstream gamer is to have a storyline interesting to keep the player involved.
One of the first to take this step has been the “Half-Life” series by Valve. Ever since the first “Half-Life,” the series has gripped me with an epic storyline that rivals some of the movies in Hollywood. The fact that this series has been able to have this wonderful story and present it beautifully in a first-person shooter just goes to show that it is definitely possible.
However, what is the drawback to games such as Half-Life, Bioshock, and Halo, FPS’s that actually have a story? Well, it gets in the way of the killing, of course! Many FPS players play the game for the killing. This isn’t a bad thing. Hell, games like Wolfenstein and Doom, the granddaddies of the FPS, were built just for this. However, I’ve noticed in Half-Life 2 there are long sequences where the shooting is interrupted by conversation, mood-setting, and character development. To me, this is fantastic. However, to the mainstream FPS player, the story is not the most important thing, while having dozens of bloody corpses lying around a government complex is. If more games went the story route that HL2 went, FPS’s would lose an audience, but it draws another crowd into the genre, a crowd that enjoys seeing a story being developed from a first-person view. So much potential is there right in front of our faces.
Like I’ve said above, this is about the single player gameplay. Multiplayer gameplay in single player games and online FPS’s are fine, I guess. Mindless killing can only be awesomer if you realize your breaking a real person’s spirit instead of just a polygon. I happen to be an avid player of Team Fortress 2, so I’d be a hypocrite if I slandered the idea of mindless online FPS’s. Pyros for the WIN.
Anyway, we’ll see how the genre will evolve. I see some HUGE potential for them, especially with the fairly recent releases of Bioshock and Portal. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
