Part 1
So, let’s chat shall we?
There has been much speculation over id Software’s latest entry into the Doom franchise: What was taking so long? Was it ever coming out? Is it going to be any good? How will Doom perform in the age of streamlined, realistic first person shooters? You see, the era fast-paced, arena style shooters might have already passed, and when I say passed, I really mean dead, buried, and with no hope of resurrection. First person shooters have taken a dramatic turn from their original roots and whether or not this is a good thing is really a subjective matter. Or is it?
Many people say the criteria for what makes a good first person shooter is purely subjective—I’m not one of those people. Yes, it’s true, I am slightly biased towards the old style of shooters; however, I do believe these old shooters had their merits—specifically their ability to reward players for their skill acquisition. And when I say skill acquisition, I don’t mean some arbitrary leveling system found in modern day games such as Call of Duty: I mean skill acquisition in the sense that players actually acquire player skills as a result of both improving their ability and utilizing game knowledge. So, to clarify how exactly we arrived in our present day era of shooters, let’s look at an abridged history the first person shooter according to me, a grumpy old man who has grown tired of collecting hats and listening people rave about Halo and Call of Duty.
In the beginning,
You see, back in the day, first person shooters were rather simple. We had Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem, and Quake, and, for the most part, they shared very similar qualities. There wasn’t much to it: the player simply needed navigate a labyrinth of tight corridors in order to get to point A to point B. Along the way, the player would need to find key cards, kill baddies, collect powerups, and acquire new guns. Eventually, the player fights the end game boss; the credits roll, and if you were bold enough, you ventured into online gaming.
These games were fast and extremely unforgiving: weapons and ammunition were often in short supply, enemies were tough and could maim you with a single shot, and there was no self-heal or red damage system wherein if you stayed hidden your life would simply regenerate. If you were hurt and on the verge of death, your only option was to find a health pack somewhere in the level. Then, 1998 came and Valve released Half-Life and everything changed.
Half-Life changed the formula of the first person shooter while at the same time maintaining some of the tried and true mechanics of previous games. Instead of simply wandering around from point A to point B to finish the level, the entire game felt like a complete thematic experience, an experience similar to being the star of a sci-fi movie. Half-Life violently shoved the first person shooter genre into the realm of coherent storytelling and the gaming world gobbled it up without hesitation. Now, this isn’t to discredit other first person experiences like those found in games such as System Shock, but it’s impossible to deny the massive effect Half-Life had on the mainstream gaming industry.
“Half-Life changed the formula of the first person shooter.”
After Half-Life, there weren’t many games that didn’t have some sort of thematic experience attached to their single player campaigns. Sure, we still had games like Painkiller and Serious Sam, but these games weren’t widely received and had a rather niche following. It is my assertion that games involving shooting things now needed to wow the audience with more than big guns and pretty graphics: first person shooters now needed to get the player invested to what was unfolding on screen in a way they never were before.
This isn’t to say that people didn’t want to just shoot things anymore—because they did. In 1999, Arena multiplayer games were fully established with the release of both Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena (Doom and Quake both had multiplayer before this year, but 1999 is when arena style shooters truly reached mainstream popularity). These games brought different game modes to the mainstream including capture the flag, deathmatch, clan arena, and duel. Again, I feel the need to state that, yes, Arena multiplayer games were a thing before 1999, but 1999 is when Arena multiplayer truly became a thing. Alas, there was another game that was also widely played at the time, a game called Team Fortress Classic.
Team Fortress Classic was part of the Quake Fortress lineage, a mod that was developed for the original Quake. Quake Team Fortress introduced the idea of team-based warfare where players can choose one of nine classes with the goal of invading the enemy base, stealing the flag, and returning back to your base with the flag in hand. Valve took to the idea and decided to create Team Fortress Classic, a multiplayer mod, like QTF, which came ready to play with your purchase of Half-Life.
Now, I mention Team Fortress Classic for a couple of reasons: First, because I f*cking loved it; and second, because one of the most widely played first person shooters today, Team Fortress 2, descended from this lineage, but I don’t believe people know this anymore.
Note: In fact, while we’re on the subject of mods, it’s arguable that Half-Life’s biggest contribution to gaming wasn’t it’s ability to mix action and story, but rather the strength of its modding community which Valve helped foster.
So why did I love Team Fortress Classic? Because the game was fast, difficult, and extremely rewarding. The skill cap was brutal and you could play the game for years, as I did, and still learn something new every day of the week. There were different movement methods: air strafing, wall strafing, bunny hopping, rocket jumping, gliding and the weapons were difficult to master.
This era of first person shooters gave birth to legitimate gaming leagues such as the Cyberathlete Professional League, or, CPL for short. This era also housed known players such as Fatal1ty who became one of the first individuals to show that one could become financially stable by playing video games at a competitive level.
Just to be clear: a skill cap, or, skill ceiling, is the total quantifiable amount of skills or game knowledge necessary for a player to exhibit a mastery of the game and perform at the highest levels of play. The higher the skill cap, the more you will need to know in order to achieve success at the elite level.
It was an exciting time and what was most interesting was the modding community. There were custom maps and custom games constantly coming out in a way that I’ve have yet seen replicated in modern FPS platforms. One of these custom games, or mods, was Counter-Strike.
Before we start talking about Counter-Strike, it’s important to note here the definition, or, rather, my definition what an arena style shooter is in order to differentiate it from the realistic shooter. Simply put, an arena style shooter is a game that utilizes fantastical weapons instead of weapons used in the real world. The damage these weapons inflict are not realistic either, i.e, a direct hit with a rocket launcher in real life will undoubtedly kill a person but in an arena style shooter it may take as many as 4-5 rockets to achieve the kill.
Now many of you fine people are going to hate me for saying this, but I’m going to say it anyways: Counter-Strike was the beginning of the end for arena-style first person shooters. Now, I’m not saying Counter-Strike was a bad game; as a matter of fact, I think it’s a fine game and a game still worth playing to this day, but it’s my assertion that Counter-Strike single-handedly murdered the fast paced, arena style shooters in cold fucking blood. It broke my heart to see my beloved Team Fortress Classic fall into obscurity as Counter-Strike rose in popularity, and for a time, even I jumped onto the bandwagon, that is, until they patched bunny hopping and I could no longer fly through the maps headshotting people with the mp5.
It wasn’t alone in this tragedy, there were other games that played a part as well: Day of Defeat, Natural Selection, Frontline Force—all games with realistic weapons, but Counter-Strike was the most popular, so it gets the brunt of my hate. Counter-Strike changed the format in a way that made playing a first person shooter still a skillful endeavor, but also more accessible at the same time. The game still required first person shooting know how, but also slowed the pace of the game a great deal. Counter-Strike made movement based shooters a thing of the past, and replaced it with slow tactical warfare. You see, I think games such as Quake and the like, were beginning to get a bit intimidating for the casual player: there was no easy fun to be had.
The skill gap (the difference in skill between a new player and an experienced player) had grown so much between those who have been playing for years and those who just started, that it simply wasn’t fun. In other words, it’s hard for the new player to stay invested in a game where the skill gap puts them at a tremendous disadvantage. It’s even more disconcerting for a new player when they come face to face with the idea that the only way to close this gap was to invest a serious amount of time into learning the game. It also didn’t help that the elite experienced players were also complete assholes, but that’s another story.
“Counter-Strike murdered arena shooters in cold blood.”
When a game is slowed down, it makes it easier for players to understand what is happening on the screen. Counter-Strike was great at achieving this. There really wasn’t much to understand as a new player: you just had to kill the other team without dying or achieve the objective and for the most part, you could take your time. There was no rush to get in there and make something happen as doing so without team coordination was a sure fire way to get killed. For the new player, all there was to Counter-Strike was slow deliberate movements into enemy territory where they hopefully could nab a kill or two before their inevitable demise. It also helped that the weapons were easy to understand because they were real weapons from the real world.
Counter-Strike also eliminated the ability to respawn after a death. Now, I’m not a scholar on the subject, but I don’t believe any other first person multiplayer shooter handled respawns quite like Counter-Strike. This put a real emphasis on the importance of staying alive and created a viable way of playing the game: camping. You see, previously, staying in one spot was a bad idea as you would certainly become victim to a drive-by rocket, but now, staying in one place was a viable strategy.
Oh, and Counter-Strike also introduced headshots and the motherfucking AWP. Now I can’t say this with absolute certainty, but I don’t believe there was any other first person shooter before Counter-Strike that handled headshots in the same manner. Sure, there were 1 shot kills in TFC and Unreal Tournament, but such kills were reserved for the sniper rifle and in certain situations: a headshot with the sniper rifle in UT would be an instant kill but a headshot with the sniper rifle in TFC against a Heavy Weapons Guy wouldn’t always be. Counter-Strike made headshots a thing for nearly all of its guns. The AWP was a one shot killing machine that could take a player out from any range. The only downside was its slow rate of fire and expensive price tag.
The headshot mechanic gave rise to the expression “spray and pray,” which for those of you who don’t know, involves moving your crosshair wildly across the screen in the general direction of your enemy, hoping that one of the bullets manages to find its way to his head. You see, in the other games, this wouldn’t work: wherever your crosshair was aimed is where the bullet or projectile was going to go. Counter-Strike, in attempt to simulate real life bullet physics, scrapped this idea. When a player is in motion, bullets had a tendency to go flying everywhere, giving way to the skill of memorizing bullet patterns but also adding a serious amount of randomness to a fire fight.
Now, listen, freaks; I understand spray and pray is sometimes more involved than someone just wildly waving their mouse; sometimes it’s an educated guess. But even the most seasoned Counter-Strike players can’t account for every single bullet that leaves the nozzle of their gun.
It was an odd experience: being a veteran of the first person shooter genre, having played hundreds of competitive matches, and getting one-shotted by a day 1 player from across the map with a pistol. It was jarring. It made me doubt everything I knew about first person shooters and made me feel like less of a human being. For most players, though, it seemed that these gameplay dynamics made them feel fucking awesome; so they kept playing and Counter-Strike rose to be one of the most played first person shooters in the history of first person shooters.
Note: most of what I’m describing here pertains specifically to pub play, not necessarily competitive play.
Now I’m not saying 1 shot kills were added to Counter-Strike for accessibility, but I do believe that as a result of the success of Counter-Strike, people attempted to emulate this dynamic of players being able to nab kills without very much experience. If a player can be successful within minutes of playing, they have a much greater chance of being hooked into the game. In a sense, this closes the skill gap between new and veteran players and levels out the playing field. The downside to this is that the skill cap is also diminished as a result, but we’ll get to that later.
Then something else happened that wasn’t directly related to first person shooters: Saving Private Ryan. This may seem like a stretch, but I’m going to go with it. Saving Private Ryan, released in 1998, really popularized the WWII aesthetic. There would others to come in its wake like Enemy at the Gates, but none succeeded in the way Saving Private Ryan did: Saving Private Ryan was the definitive WWII movie. It captured all the grit, sound, and gore of what actual warfare was like, while giving us believable characters to take us through the chaos.
Now I’m not sure when Day of Defeat started production, maybe it was before the release of Saving Private Ryan, but I would bet a million dollars that the success of Saving Private Ryan played into the success of Day of Defeat, released in 2000, Medal of honor, released in 2001, and also, to a lesser extent, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, released in 2001. These games put WWII first person shooters in the mainstream in a very big way. It seemed every gamer with a computer wanted a chance to storm the beaches of Normandy in much the same way Tom Hanks did in the movie.
A couple years later and the first Call of Duty is released in 2003. By this time, Medal of Honor had already released three games and Day of Defeat had become a full retail game and not just a modification for Half-Life.
So it goes that Counter-Strike paved the way for every realistic shooter to follow. Ultimately this line of evolution brings us to 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Before we talk about Modern Warfare, we should probably talk about what was going on with our arena shooters.
Quake 3 Arena never got a sequel; Unreal Tournament 2003/2004 were unpopular; TF2 was released five years too late; and Doom 3 didn’t have a proper multiplayer. It’s safe to say that arena style games shot themselves in the fucking foot. Believe me, I do think that the advent of the realistic shooter severely crippled the appeal of these games, but the developers themselves didn’t do much in the way of keeping the games alive. And of course, there was another huge problem: Halo.
Halo came out in 2001 for the first Xbox and it was an immediate success. Why? Because it was a console first person shooter that had a cohesive single player campaign and an arena-style multiplayer that was actually playable and fun at the same time. How did it achieve this? Well, Halo, and later Halo 2, achieved success in a few ways:
Created a new universe with new characters and interesting story.
Cool, interesting weapons for the players to master (machine gun standard weapon for accessibility).
Slowed down the pace of the action to make it accessible.
Used sci-fi inspired guns present in previous arena shooters to great effect.
Introduced vehicles that were fun and easy to use (Halo 2).
Offered variety in its multiplayer sessions.
Offered both online play and online matchmaking (Halo 2)
That’s right, at its core, Halo has more in common with arena shooters than it does with the realistic shooters. You see, Halo really offered nothing new in the grand scheme of things, but was able to take the best of multiple games and put them into an easily digested format—even one of its most definitive features, vehicle warfare, was done first in games like Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes 2.
A year later and we had the first iteration of the Battlefield series: Battlefield 1942, another realistic shooter with a WW2 aesthetic that was based around the same vehicle combat that was found in Tribes 2 but in a grander form. Battlefield will later become a major player in the realm of first person shooters but not until 2011’s Battlefield 3, so for argument’s sake, we’ll curb our discussion of Battlefield until a bit later.
Times were definitely changing: first person shooters were acquiring mass appeal like they never have before. No longer were first person shooters about Nazis, demons, and wizards. No, first person shooters were now about story and multiplayer that was not only accessible but didn’t possess a very large skill cap.
So, the end times came in 2007, and it was a sad year indeed. You see, in 2007, two games came to be: Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. They say history tends to repeat itself, and I tell you I felt like I was watching it all happen again. Many people from my generation of gaming were looking for TF2 to bring arena era shooters back into the limelight: a true successor the the Fortress lineage that was going to take competitive first person shooters to the next level. Well, it didn’t happen. In fact, TF2 wasn’t really all that enjoyable in the beginning.
I’m not sure if anyone really remembers, but TF2 was not always free to play and it wasn’t always about collecting hats. No, TF2 was a class based first person shooter that was no longer so much about capturing flags but more about taking control of command points. It was a dramatic change in the gameplay and with so few maps available on launch it was hard for players to really sink their teeth into.
Remember, this is 2007, a year when arena style shooters have long since been dead and consoles were reigning supreme—especially with the release of Gears of War in 2006 and Halo 3 also coming out in 2007. Needless to say, TF2 had very little hope of becoming a widely played game.
The thing is, first person shooters were becoming consolidated right before our eyes into two games: Halo, and Modern Warfare, and for a while, that’s all there was. Now, it’s true, I hated Halo and Modern Warfare (and Counter-Strike for starting it all) for stealing the thunder out of the games I wanted to succeed, but at the same time I recognized what they brought to the table.
Halo was a fun game that possessed a relatively higher skill cap but managed to also be accessible to new players; Modern Warfare was the perfect blend of accessibility and fun packed into a very streamlined experience that everyone could enjoy. So, Halo and Modern Warfare were now the standard for the first-person shooters and the console was their home. With the advent of the PS3 and the Xbox 360, two consoles that brought HD graphics to the mainstream, arena shooters were now a complete thing of the past. TF2 never really got off the ground in any meaningful way and it’s competitive scene was a joke; Quake 3 arena was dead and the upcoming Quake live service barely managed to get on its feet; Unreal Tournament 3 was played by a total of 10 people (probably); and all the while Modern Warfare and Halo sold millions upon millions of copies in their subsequent releases.
No big deal I suppose, life goes on, but then something else happened.
While part of me can admittedly accept the fact that times were changing and that I myself would have to evolve, Modern Warfare and the like became a poison. You see, and I hate to say this, back in my day when there was a sequel, the changes were often dramatic and for the better. It’s just the natural order of things. Sequels were supposed to offer players something new—something tangible—for the players to enjoy. Tell me, what exactly did Modern Warfare 2, Black Ops, Modern Warfare 3, Black Ops 2, Ghosts, and Advanced Warfare offer the player? I tell you what they offered: they offered nothing more than a shittier sequel to the original Modern Warfare. Yeah, I said it; come at me CoD bros.
“2007 was a sad year indeed.”
With each subsequent release, Modern Warfare has become buggier, wrongfully accessible, and insanely repetitive. Not only has the multiplayer formula stayed the same, but the game engine itself is a modification of the original Quake 3 engine. Let that settle for a second. Advanced Warfare, the latest in the Call of Duty franchise, is running on an engine that has been around since 1999. Now, it has been modified of course, but to what extent exactly I’m not sure anyone knows except the developers themselves. What’s even more entertaining, is the graphical quality of the franchise itself. With each iteration, the developers have touted each subsequent release as being graphically superior to the previous, but it’s not. The graphic similarities between Advanced Warfare and the first Modern Warfare are so apparent that believing Advanced Warfare actually possessed a higher graphical fidelity would be borderline delusional.
Each subsequent release has also suffered from bugs and terrible networking issues. Each release of CoD has had an issue with it’s multiplayer connectivity, resulting in play that is frustrating and unfair, and the developers have done nothing to fix it. Why? Who knows, there could be a multitude of reasons why, but there are some people who believe that the developers have artificially created the networking problems on purpose in order to create a skill gap that is so diminished that it is nearly impossible for anyone to achieve great success through the merits of their own ability. I can’t attest to the validity of these claims, but I can tell you that it wouldn’t surprise me if there was some truth behind it. Either way, the networking problems need to be fixed and it’s embarrassing for a modern day game to perform poorer than games made nearly a decade ago.
Call of Duty has also managed to give accessibility a bad name. While games like Counter-Strike have managed to maintain their skill cap, CoD has seemingly done everything in their power to remove both the cap and the gap in skill. The skill cap was diminished by the simplification of the game: there is very little that the player needs to know in order to be successful. As far as I am concerned, there are really only two skills a player needs to learn in order to be successful at a modern CoD game: how to aim, and how to play the maps. That is all. There is really nothing else to learn in CoD. It’s true, there are a multitude of weapons of CoD, but essentially, most of the primary weapons operate in the same fashion: 3-4 bullets are enough to kill a person, so kills can be acquired quickly. You see, the developers of CoD have successfully managed to remove any skill associated with specific guns—something that has always been present in a game like Counter-Strike.
Remember how I said that even though I played Team Fortress Classic for years and I was still learning new things everyday? Well, that doesn’t exist in a game like CoD. You could arguably learn everything you need to know to be successful in CoD in about a day. From this point, all that there is left for you to do is improve on the two skills mentioned previously. Because of this, CoD becomes incredibly repetitive very quickly. But then how did CoD stay so popular for so long? Surely I must be missing something? Truth is, CoD has remained popular due to this accessibility, even if it is poorly designed.
In modern games, accessibility is everything. Accessibility explains the success of mobile games; accessibility explains why as a whole the average difficulty of a typical game has fallen dramatically; accessibility allows players to consume content quickly so that they can throw it away the following year when the developer releases the sequel.
So what the heck does this all mean? Through this long winded—slightly abrasive—history of the first person shooter, my hope was to show you fine people just how we got to where we are today. It was an evolution; it didn’t just happen; and it wasn’t always like this. Now we live in a world where Call of Duty is on it’s tenth or so sequel; Halo 5 is just around the corner; and Battlefield is still kicking. Why? Because of accessibility— because developers of arena shooters were haphazardly releasing content without catching the public’s eye—because we live in a world where Angry Birds and the like have come to define what it means to be a casual gamer—because computers, despite becoming more sophisticated, are still pricier and harder to manage than your typical next-gen gaming console—because the generation of gamers who played those arena shooters are now all old, married, career oriented fiends with no time for games; and everyone wants a quick fix of awesomeness before they have to go to sleep and start the day over once more.
But, something else is beginning to happen. People, you see, are beginning to realize that they’re sick and tired of Call of Duty and Halo: they want something more. They want to be rewarded for all their time invested into the game; they want to feel as if they’re doing more than just tending to their kill/death ratio; they miss the satisfaction of hard earned victory that can be attributed to nothing else other than their finely tuned skills. If games like Dark Souls can tell us anything, is that people love to be challenged, and it’s about time that this difficulty permeated into the first person shooter.
This idea is what makes a good first person shooter: when an investment of time attributes to the development of skill that can help differentiate yourself from a new player. And, furthermore, the new player can only achieve victory against a seasoned player by his own ability, not by some kind of mechanism put in by the developer to help level the playing field.
There are exceptions to this rule of course, in a general game design sense, and the first one that comes to mind isn’t a first person shooter at all. Street Fighter IV is a high skilled game with a mechanic built into the game called the Ultra. An Ultra is achieved by both absorbing damage through a focus attack and by taking damage through combat. The Ultra allows players a mechanism by which they can even the playing field through the use of the Ultra, but here’s the catch: the Ultra is not easy to land. Against a new player, the Ultra is almost a guaranteed way to score a great deal of damage, but against a seasoned player, you would have to guess and get lucky. This is a skill gap closing mechanism at its finest: it gives players a way to score damage against an opponent, even though they are losing, but the game doesn’t make it so easy as to guarantee the damage by simply activating the move.
This mechanism works much in the same way that headshots do in Counter-Strike. Headshots, when executed by a high-skilled player, are an extremely deadly game mechanic that can be devastating to the other team. Headshots also give inexperienced players a chance to secure a kill against any player, regardless of the skill gap between them.
So how are the old school shooters doing?
Well, Counter-Strike is still one of the most widely played shooters in the world. With an average concurrent player base of around five hundred thousand players, a thriving competitive scene, and Valve continually releasing new content—Counter-Strike is set to secure its position as the standard for competitive, realistic, first person shooters.
Team Fortress 2 has also grown in popularity, but unfortunately I do not believe it’s necessarily because of its gameplay. Valve made TF2 free to play in 2011 and with it introduced a farming system in which players can acquire different weapons, accessories, and items to make their experience more similar to other mainstream free to play games. The competitive scene in TF2 is still there—how active it is I cannot say as most matches, scrimmages seem to happen behind closed doors—but TF2 will probably never take off as a true competitive game in the way that Counter-Strike has.
And now, in 2015, eight years after the release of TF2, we get word of Doom. And guess what? Arena shooters are going to have another crack at the mainstream.
End Part 1