so one thing i got into recently was the more realistic sim-style shooters. my friend rly likes red orchestra 2, roleplaying a squad gunner. he linked me this game SQUAD which looks kind of neat:
i like the kind of tactile bodyfeel of this thing.
This channel is pretty underwhelming but this video essay is alright and encompasses quite a bit. Play the first game and its first expansion, Extraction Point, and you can safely ignore the rest.
For me F.E.A.R. is as close to essential first-person shooters have gotten since id’s 90s run, aside from HALO nailing how to make them engaging, distinct and effortlessly playable on consoles, and I say this as someone who has made their peace with being a shooter player. How do you build the design beyond Quake? Dynamic lighting, abstract level design but emulating recognisable locations this time to really sell the ambience of a nightmare, combat that hinges on mobility and adapting to a reactive, expressive force and yes, a further grounded player avatar. It also helps if both your action and horror influences explore outside of Western staples, and if the horror is also foundational to the pacing and tone of the game rather than just being an aesthetic.
If only it had become the template for military-themed shooters rather than Call of Duty. Where are the modding tools so I can make a Frozen Synapse theme?
There are about a dozen people out of 200 who’ve been around since 1997, so it’s very possible. I think Craig Hubbard is the main connection; ‘level design’ in Blood and then Monolith’s Creative Director until the dark days of Gotham City Imposters (the short of it is: merging with Snowblind and Surreal Software as “WB Games Seattle” destroyed them for about 5 years until they reasserted the Monolith identity and settled on making a Batman/Assassin’s/systemic narrative game).
I’m still curious about pre Nu Wolfenstein, the one with the dimension-phasing. It’s the only entry in the series (not counting the reallll old non-FPS game) that I’ve missed.
Also Singularity which seems like the spiritual successor to Time Shift in the “Games aping Half-Life 2” subgenre.
Didn’t help that there was a critical networking bug they knew about before launch; they couldn’t get a month delay from WB to fix it, and it took another month for the patch to ship. Poison for a live game.
Gotham City Imposters Is/was my ideal loadout based shooter. Very few things felt superfluous. Nearly every thing felt like it had a purpose to fill with out to much crossover. Not to mention all the movement options, grapple hooks, gliders, rollerskates, double jumps. There were a lot of playstyles to lab out and most felt valid for pubbing.