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By Nelson Schneider - 07/31/11 at 12:55 PM CT
It is no secret that I dislike the first-person shooter genre. It’s not just because modern FPSes are invariably pointless multi-player frag-a-thons, and it’s not just because most of them are ‘rated M for juvenile’ with paper-thin plots and settings featuring some combination of Space Marines, World War II, and/or Zombies (all things I hate in my entertainment media, be it games, movies, books, or anything else). There are a handful of FPSes that defy these genre conventions, and actually make themselves into games that I would be interested in playing… if it weren’t for the fact that the genre is mired in poor gameplay conventions that I find intolerable. So here’s a short list of gameplay mechanics that FPS developers need to put into their games in order to make me dislike them less.
5. Regenerating Health
Wow, this one has been done already! I always hated the so-called ‘classics’ of the FPS genre – things like “DOOM” and “Quake” – because it was so easy for enemies to come out of nowhere and wing the player with a lucky shot. Getting out of the way quickly and returning fire was pretty pointless because the player was too injured to survive any more surprises. Save/Load became the order of the day. It was pretty lame and completely broke the flow of the game. Regenerating health allows enemies to get a few surprise/lucky shots without interrupting the action.
4. Pointer-Based Aiming
I have always been a fan of light gun games. Unfortunately, most of those that tried to be anything more in-depth than a ‘shooting gallery’ ended up as annoying on-rails things that required the player to actually shoot incoming enemy projectiles instead of dodging them. Thanks to the Wiimote and PS Move controllers, FPSes on consoles have the opportunity to adopt the greatest aiming controls ever devised by merging light gun shooting with traditional FPS movement. Pointers completely destroy analog sticks in terms of speed and accuracy, and they are a Hell of a lot more fun to use than a mouse. Wielding a pointer feels like I’m actually shooting a (light) gun, whereas moving a mouse feels like I’m actually working on an Excel spreadsheet. Add-on the fact that analog joystick movement is far smoother than keyboard movement and the perfect controller setup for this type of game reveals itself. Nobody needs that many extra keys for macros anyway!
3. Fully Customizable Weapons
When playing a game where the main character is just a Hand with a Gun, wouldn’t it be great if players could fully customize their guns in order to become more fully invested in the character? I’m thinking of a system along the same lines as the “Armored Core” series, except for pistols and rifles instead of giant humanoid robots.
2. Randomized Maps in Multi-Player
The worst thing about multi-player in FPSes is the obsessed players who memorize the maps. Not only do these people have more practical experience than most other players, their familiarity with the lay of the land gives them an enormous, unfair advantage. Instead of offering a handful of multi-player maps with a game, developers should use random terrain generation via mathematical seeds. I remember an old PC game called “Dungeon Hack” that supposedly could create millions of different dungeons just by starting with different random numbers. If this kind of map generation was implemented correctly in FPSes, it would also be entirely possible for insane tourney whores to agree on a seed number and continue to use the same map over and over and over while playing with themselves.
1. A Button to Turn 180 Degrees
This one’s a no-brainer and the number one cause of frustration when I play FPSes. I am invariably shot in the back, either by enemies that spawn behind me or by sneaky screen-lookers in multi-player. Having a single button to whip-around makes infinitely more sense than the slow, tank-turret-style turning that is prevalent in FPSes. If a crap third-person shooter like “Resident Evil 5” can have a ‘turn-around now’ button, surely its first-person brethren can share the love… even the original “Tomb Raider” had a button for this!
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