first person shooters are extremely fun, but the industry rarely makes the ones i like anymore
There’s something about that anticipation as your dropship passes over open ocean and the fighting on the beach comes into view. “Touchdown,” your pilot shouts, “hit it, marines!” and you come barreling out of the ship, gun at the ready, firing at the first enemy grunt you see, tossing the grenade, switching to your assault rifle and battering the enemy elite’s shields, the grenade going off just as his shields pop, finishing him off.
I am, of course, describing the opening moments of The Silent Cartographer, a level in Halo: Combat Evolved.
I wrote about this experience way, way, way back in the day. In fact, I got my start talking about first person shooters — in this case, Borderlands 2 back in 2012 for Kotaku. I love shooters to pieces, and I play every shooter I can, but over the past few years, something has changed.
Somehow, my favorite style of FPS has fallen by the wayside, that glorious linear Halo-style “fight your way through a series of interesting encounters as you encounter awesome set pieces,” and no attempt at a Quake clone or massive open world game can really satisfy the same craving.
So, in July of 2024, I put my feelings out into the world, like so:
You can read the thread here. It goes into a lot more detail, but the gist is this: we get a lot of different kinds of first person shooter, but the kind I adore the most is sadly missing in action. Let’s explore why that is.
Some people responded with “there are plenty of boomer shooters out there,” but let’s be clear, shooters come in a wild variety of configurations, and just because they share the same ingredients doesn’t mean they’re the same genre.
Imagine asking for a pizza, and someone says “sorry, we don’t have any pizza, but we do have spaghetti. They’re the same basic ingredients, right? Wheat, tomato sauce, garlic, all that jazz. Different configuration, sure, but…”
Nah, fuck that, the configuration is the point. I want a flatbread with toppings, not a bunch of noodles in a sauce, you know?
So, this year, I’ve been playing some shooters I’ve already finished because there just ain’t that much new shit out there chasing what I’m after. Bulletstorm, Soldier of Fortune, Halo 1 & 2 (and I’ll begin Halo 3 very soon), Gunman Chronicles… I’ve been chasing that high of the 1998–2016-ish era of first person shooter, just because I miss this specific style of game.
Today, we’re gonna talk about why I love the shooters I do, what makes them work, and why people don’t really make ’em like they used to.
what is a first person shooter?
I saw someone call The Last of Us a first person shooter. While The Last of Us is many things, a first person shooter it is not. It’s a third person shooter — that is, the camera is acting like a third party watching the player move.
A first person shooter is a “POV” shot, that is “point of view.”
A “point of view” shot is one where the camera is treated as if it’s a character’s perspective — this is what a specific person is seeing.
A “third person” shot is your traditional movie shot — a camera is outside of a person and is treated as if it is not a character in the narrative.
(there’s a whole thing about various film directors and theorists arguing that ‘the camera is a character’ and they’re right, but that’s separate from what third person vs POV means).
Here are some examples of “first person” games:
And these are “third person” games:
Is the camera representing the player character’s eyes? If so, first person. If it’s a camera observing the character, that makes it third person.
(what is second person? it’s when we’re looking from a first person perspective at another person doing something, like watching a security camera but the gameplay is of a character running on the security camera feed. there’s a call of duty: modern warfare 2 (reboot series, not the excellent original) level where the player is watching a security feed in first person and playing as the character watching the screen, which would still be first person. okay, that’s a weird exception. let’s move on)
This may sound very basic if you know the terms already, but there’s a reason we’re going through this in such a methodical way — my articles are meant to be something anyone with at least a basic high school reading level can understand, but to avoid condescension, I assume you’re an expert in some other field, like, say, neurosurgery. So I’m giving you the ground level stuff so that the entire article is comprehensive, because I don’t know who, exactly, is reading this article.
Reading stuff that assumes a lot of knowledge on my part when I’m trying to learn and don’t know everything about a subject always annoys me, so I try to make no assumptions about what you know, so that all the materials are here.
Plus, I’m showing my work — that is, I’m walking you through every single point I make, so you can determine for yourself whether or not the idea is worth considering; you have all the information, you can see how I got to where I do. If there are errors in my reasoning, then I’d be glad to know of them, because they’ll help me get better at understanding things too.
But there’s a third reason I don’t really get to do all that often, and I’m doing it here:
I’m an expert on shooters. I have consulted on shooters you have heard of — I’ve worked on just about every major franchise that isn’t Call of Duty, in fact — at one point or another. I’m aware my work has been shared around at various shooter studios, because people seem to think it’s good enough to share. I’ve had people at these studios tell me that yes, I’m right about things — whether it’s my thoughts on The Silent Cartographer from Halo linked above (Jaime Griesemer, Halo’s sandbox guy, the guy who named The Warthog, tweeted at me about that article and we had a fun chat) or Mohammad Alavi reaching out to me after I wrote about All Ghillied Up, one of his most famous levels.
I fuckin love this genre, and I know a lot about it, including some stuff that feels… shall we say, counterintuitive, but every time someone does it, they make a good shooter, and when they don’t, they tend to make a bad one. And I really, really, really want this point to sink in.
Before you get to the gun, you must consider the perspective.
If your game is first person, you need to design for it — because first person games move differently than third person games.
Before you think about the guns, you have to think about the movement.
Your guns? Well, they’ll impact the movement.
In a first person shooter, the gun is in your hands. In a third person shooter, the gun is in the character’s hands. Makes sense? But think about a shotgun — what does it do? If you have a shotgun, you’re spreading your pellets around the screen, rather than trying to line up a headshot. To ensure the most pellets land on the enemy, you want to be close. Some designers do this with falloff, which is something you see a lot in Destiny — the pellet damage diminishes over distance — and others do this purely with spread.
Take Doom, the 1993 shooter that kinda started the whole shebang (we’ll talk about Wolfenstein 3D later) — its pistol does damage between 5–15 per bullet. The shotgun’s actually the same — it also does about 5–15 shots per pellet, but as I recall, it can fire up to ten pellets at once. If all ten of your pellets hit a target, it will do more damage than a pistol, but at range, fewer pellets are likely to hit, bringing it more in line with a pistol.
That means a pistol’s great for shooting a demon at range, and a shotgun will work in a pinch, but the shotgun works best when you’re up close.
“Up close” means you’ve got to move. You’re not just standing in a shooting gallery aiming at targets, you’re physically positioning yourself in the environment.
Take a sniper rifle in a game like, say, Halo. That’s high damage in a single shot at long range, but it also requires you to aim, and in Halo, every time you take a shot, you get descoped — that is, you’re forced out of aiming the gun down the scope and put back into firing the gun from the hip.
So, in order to get the best damage out of a sniper rifle (which also has a low-ish rate of fire so you definitely don’t want to miss or you’ll have to wait to chamber another round (have it go from magazine into the firing chamber so you can pull the trigger) and fire again), you want to position yourself where you can get a shot on either an unsuspecting enemy (which means you need to think about whether the enemy knows you’re around and position yourself accordingly), or do your best to avoid enemy fire while you line up your shots.
First Person Shooters are games about movement.
Now, I’m going to talk about Third Person Shooters for a second, because I think this might illustrate the problem more vividly:
I was talking with a game designer about Gears of War some time ago; we were talking about how most of the third person shooters that followed Gears seemed to be a lot more basic and less interesting. My theory at the time was incomplete, but I suspected “types of enemies” was part of the reason why a lot of third person shooters didn’t work as well as Gears — Gears had a bunch of science fiction type enemies who could occupy different combat roles, varying the challenges the players faced.
The designer pointed something else out, though: Gears was explicitly designed like Mario.
Yeah.
Mario.
You know, a series of sidescrolling platformers.
In a sidescrolling platformer, the camera scrolls left to right as the player makes the player character — in this case, the eponymous Mario — run and jump. Mario can move on two axes — up and down and left to right — but he cannot move forward and backward relative to the camera; he travels on a 2d plane.
To make a sidescroller engaging, a developer must present a series of obstacles to the player — Mario, for instance, is most notable for needing to jump to avoid them. There can be all sorts of things to jump over, whether it’s an enemy who you want to land on, a platform that starts to deteriorate while you’re standing on it, so you can’t just stand there and wait for the ideal moment to jump, and things of that nature.
But Gears of War is, well, a third person shooter, meaning it’s operating in 3D space, so you’ve got three axes to move on, not two. And it doesn’t have jumping. Because it’s a shooter, you’re also thinking about where targets to shoot in the environment are. You might have to move around behind an enemy to attack its weak point, or shoot at a guy who just appeared on a distant ridge and is pelting you from above.
Gears of War was the beginning — though not the first cover-based shooter, it was the one everyone copied — of the “waist high cover” genre of shooter, which meant a lot of people designed shooters like this:
Walk into a combat arena, shoot at the enemies, hide behind cover so your health can regenerate, and occasionally move around cover to flank your enemies to shoot them.
…and… that’s it. That’s all there is to a lot of these games. This is very different than something like the high-flying Max Payne series (notably the first two games; Max Payne 3 was made by a different team and they tried to bring in cover shooting, which harmed the combat design greatly), where cover was more of a way to briefly avoid gunfire before running around the level shooting people.
So for Gears, and other cover-based shooting, the idea of flanking remained supreme.
It’s just… Epic considered Gears to be a horizontal platformer. If Mario was about moving ~up and down~ over obstacles, Gears was about moving around them; if you look at a Gears level from above, you start to realize just how much of the game’s design treats cover as a means of platforming. Rather than falling to your death if you leave the platform, you die in a hail of gunfire.
So, as Epic developed Gears 2 and 3, they worked to increase the sophistication of the level design, weapons, and enemy variety, as well as the encounter design.
Think of it like this:
Level design is the actual physical structure of the combat space.
Weapons are the tools you use to engage the threats you’re facing.
Enemy variety are the types of threats you’re facing.
Encounter design is the variety of enemies and level objectives you have to face.
So one encounter in Gears might see you riding mine cars, shooting at enemies like Silver Dollar City’s Flooded Mine attraction:
Another might have you fighting your way to a sports arena, only to find your back against the wall as you wait for your robot companion to cut through a door, facing off waves of enemies.
Gears of War 3 is an excellent game because its encounter and enemy variety is so massive that no fight plays out the same; it’s not simply “walk into a room, shoot some guys, walk into the next room.”
Now, Gears, while excellent (but limited to being available on backwards compatibility on the Xbox Series X — but it is worth the price of admission, in my opinion), is a third person shooter, not a first person shooter, but… there’s a lesson buried here that’s true of shooters as well:
Gears was designed with explicit intent, and a lot of people who copied it stripped out all the stuff that made it good — the way the level design was always about encouraging the player to move, and how enemies were built around forcing you to move rather than just stay in cover (like the enemies with ink grenades or mines that could burrow under cover).
Movement is the reason Gears was the best third person shooter series of its generation, and the reason why most people just couldn’t keep up: they weren’t thinking about cover as a means of motion.
While I’m not a big fan of Naughty Dog for reasons discussed in other essays, I do think the sequence in Uncharted 2 where you’re hanging onto a sign, having to move around the sign to shoot enemies, using the platform you’re climbing on as cover, was a pretty remarkable encounter; it’s too bad the enemy and weapon variety in Uncharted 2 just isn’t that interesting, or the game might’ve been able to do a lot more with its combat sandbox.
In a first person shooter, cover doesn’t work so well because of how the camera and player proprioception functions.
(proprioception is the sense of your body and its motion in physical space, and in a game, you don’t have as much as you do for a human body, so “take cover next to an object with a basic sixteen button controller for your inputs” ends up feeling kinda bad compared to a third person shooter, where you can watch the character take cover; you have a better sense of your environment. there are some shooters with cover systems, but they don’t work that well and players rarely find them interesting. we could get into a whole thing about leaning out of cover and how lean buttons used to be Q and E in a lot of games, but shooters eschewed that because of controllers, but that’s outside the scope of this piece)
In a shooter, you’re generally at your best when you’re moving around. If Gears is about thinking about platforms, a first person shooter is about thinking about all axes at all times — are you jumping, are you running, are you close or far from the enemy, and so forth.
It’s a big part of why I like them — a great shooter, like Doom 2016 or Titanfall 2, or even a shooter with great combat despite its other weaknesses, like Destiny, is all about the movement. The enemies, weapons, level design, and encounter design encourage you to move.
If you’re standing still in a first person shooter, something is very wrong with its design.
generation zero: the first shooters
Arguably, the first ‘real’ first person shooter was Wolfenstein 3D, a game that works a lot like Gears — you’re moving forward and backward, left and right. You can turn around. But there’s no real height involved. No stairs, no ladders, no guys on balconies trying to shoot at you.
For a while, this is all shooters were. Games like Blake Stone (which used the Wolfenstein 3D engine) followed suit. You wandered around mazes that vaguely represented real spaces, but were still pretty abstract, shooting enemies by putting them in the middle of the screen and clicking the fire button . This was the best technology could give us at the time.
And you needed to press the “ctrl” key to attack your enemy.
Then came Doom.
generation one: doomclones
I’m not here to write an article on the importance of Doom, but there’s a reason that first person shooters all got called Doomclones. A distinctly different style of game from Wolfenstein 3D (if you play a Wolfenstein clone, you can immediately tell it’s not being Doom), Doom is considered by many to be the first ‘real’ first person shooter.
Legend has it, John Carmack saw Looking Glass previewing Ultima Underworld, itself a first person game, though not a shooter, and decided he could program a better renderer than they did. If you want to read more about Doom, there’s books like Masters of Doom and John Romero’s Doom Guy for you to read (bookshop.org is a great place to buy from local booksellers instead of Amazon or some other big corp).
Years ago — before anyone had even heard of the “PlayStation 4,” I think around the time Gears 3 released, someone told me that there were “too many” first person shooters. As a fan of the genre, I felt that wasn’t true, so I built a spreadsheet listing AAA releases every year from like 2005–2011, and found that shooters… weren’t actually that common. They were successful when they released, but the number of releases wasn’t actually that high.
In fact, shooter releases had peaked (at the time; my info is, obviously, fifteen years old or so by now, but given the slowdown of AAA releases and the point of this article, I suspect it’s even worse now) with games that did what they could to be, well, Like Doom. Until about 1998, shooters were released in ridiculous numbers, and, as with anything, Sturgeon’s Law applies. 95% of everything was crap.
Doom added height, even though you still weren’t aiming up and down. It had more interesting scripted sequences — like walking into a room where the lights would go out
If Wolfenstein 3D was a maze, Doom was a haunted house — it would spring things on you, surprise you, work harder to situate you in a space, but its level design was still very abstract.
For my money, the most interesting evolution of the Doomclone was Marathon, Bungie’s Mac-exclusive (free on Steam now!) series that emphasized things like mouselook (looking around with your mouse) — because, yes, Doom started out with arrow keys for aiming — and a kind of quasi-jumping mechanic. I played Marathon through Aleph One on an old PC when I was living out of an unheated trailer around 2006 or so using an old Dell from the Boeing Surplus store in Wichita, and it was spectacular. It was also very well written, something you couldn’t say for Doom.
Marathon is a big part of the reason I’m where I’m at today.
But these games were still very abstract and mouselook (or, for controllers, twin stick) wasn’t part of the formula. That came next.
generation 3: quake
Then shooters went fully 3D. At some point, Quake players, most notably Dennis Fong, started using WASD, rather than older, clunkier (CTRL TO SHOOT?) control schemes.
The genre about movement finally had a control scheme — and an environmental freedom — that let players pull off some really cool tricks. You could finally do some extremely high skill, fun maneuvers, and you were doing it in real-time 3D environments.
Shooters started speeding the fuck up as a result, and that meant it was real, real easy to get into the zen flow state that I find so satisfying when playing a shooter. You’re just a being of pure movement, putting projectiles where they need to go, taking out enemies
But these generations of shooters were still very arcadey, still not doing the one thing I really, really love video games for: putting you in a space that feels real and alive.
Up to this point, id was dominating the shooter space; it was time for someone else to take the reins.
And who better to take the role than Duke Nukem?
generation 4: the golden age
I was talking with someone who was there when Duke Nukem 3D hit the scene. “You have no idea what it was like to play a shooter where you could actually recognize the places you were in. Like, it was a total shift in how people saw shooters.”
Except… Duke Nukem wasn’t… exactly doing the mouselook thing. Not quite yet. It was in a weird place between Doom’s auto vertical aiming and recognizable 3D spaces. It still had 2D billboard enemies despite the 3D environments.
But, hey, it released around the same time as Quake, so it makes sense that it’d still be pulling from some of the older influences, rather than the newest stuff. Its primary contribution was that we finally had a big shooter that emphasized verisimilitude over just mazes or haunted houses.
Most boomer shooters borrow from Quake and Duke Nukem 3D, sometimes hybridizing the two, whether that’s Cultic (which is very Duke Nukem 3D by way of Resident Evil) or Wrath: Aeon of Ruin (which is much more Quake).
While Duke Nukem 3D marked the generational shift, the real transformation happened on May 22, 1998.
And then the next big transformation happened November 19, 1998.
And then the third big one happened on November 10, 1999.
Let’s start with Unreal, which released first.
You awake in a prison ship, things going horribly wrong. You fight your way off it and walk out into… into… well, no one had ever really seen anything like it. You were there. You were on an alien planet. Sure, Turok had tried the year prior, but that was on the Nintendo 64, and the controls were… well, rubbish, to put it mildly.
Here comes Unreal, doing cool shit like “you think you see someone in the flashing lights ahead of you,” or “a mysterious alien runs away.” The ship rocks as fires break out. You were there.
You were there, it was 3D, and it was fast.
But, of course, Unreal wasn’t the only game to completely reshape shooters. That honor goes to a little game by Valve.
I’m not sure which game is better, but I do know Half-Life cemented some of the basic ideas that would show up in a lot of shooters after, and I know it was the first game to ship with WASD (W for forward, A for strafing to the left, S for moving backward, D for strafing right) and mouselook, the modern control scheme we use to this day.
Doom may have cemented the pistol/shotgun/automatic rifle/rocket launcher dichotomy of most first person shooters, but Half-Life did things like “the mid-game twist that changes the kind of enemies you’re fighting,” which would show up with Halo and the Flood in 2001.
So, here’s November 1998, and you’re booting up Half-Life, a game with a nondescript cover that had a Lamba symbol; little do you know you’ll be playing one of the finest video games ever crafted.
You begin, not by immediately shooting some creatures as in most games, nor with a fairly quick action scene like Unreal’s escape from Vortex Riker’s, but by… riding on a tram car, watching the massive base drift past before showing up to work for the day. You make your way to a science experiment, get heckled by scientists for being late for work, blow up a guy’s casserole in the microwave (it’s optional, but funny), and eventually push a cart full of exotic material into an energy beam, summoning hordes of aliens into our world.
You must fight your way to the surface, looking for help, only to realize that the government sent Marines to kill you and they have no interest in saving your ass.
Half-Life attempted to be seamless — rather than loading screens, the game would briefly hang up, say “loading,” and then you’d be right where you were, able to run into the room ahead of you as if nothing had happened.
You might happen upon a dying scientist, who tells you that just up ahead, something really bad has been killing people. You might walk into a room only to be ambushed by assassins, or finding the entire place has been booby trapped. Maybe you’d launch a satellite to help some scientists try to make everyone safe.
Instead of the usual “walk into a place with some vague context, shoot some guys, and leave,” Half-Life was doing everything it could to make you feel like you were there and things were happening around you. It took the verisimilitude and did its best to put you in the action, make you a part of the story.
It was incredible. I still remember a friend, Callum, telling me excitedly how he’d blown up a wall with some explosives (I think he was referring to the part where you radio in an airstrike, which blows open a wall, but he told me this about 25 years ago, so my memory is a little hazy), and having that blow my mind because the idea that a game could do that was just… I mean, I’d never heard of such a thing.
I personally played Half-Life much later — for the first time — in 2007. I played Half-Life 2 for the first time a week later, and I don’t think it holds up in comparison, despite looking better.
That November 10, 1999 date? That’s for a very different kind of game, though most people wouldn’t recognize it as being significantly different for quite some time.
That’s right, we’re talking about Medal of Honor.
Steven Spielberg, the guy who directed things like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Saving Private Ryan, worked with Dreamworks interactive to make a game that could both educate and entertain by situating players in World War II, letting them experience it as if they were there.
It was taking real world places and trying to let you relive real experiences, while still being fun. Some of the Medal of Honor developers would go off on their own as the series stagnated, creating a series you may have heard of: Call of Duty.
Call of Duty, which released in 2003, was a breath of fresh air from the now-stagnant Medal of Honor series. It was more focused, more cinematic, more energetic. It’s been a long time since I played them both, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time explaining the differences, but basically, the creative people who had been trapped in the World War II mines wanted to make something new. They started with a World War II game, to prove they had what it took, but as I recall, they really wanted to make a game called “Modern Warfare,” followed by “Future Warfare.”
Instead, Activision demanded they make Call of Duty 2, so they did.
Then Activision demanded that another team would be allowed to make a World War II shooter both before and after “Modern Warfare,” which would now be called “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.”
Activision, as I understand it, had zero faith that people wanted to buy shooters that weren’t set in World War II, probably motivated in part by the fact that a few people had tried modern military shooters and they hadn’t gone over well.
So we got the dreadful Call of Duty 3 and Call of Duty: World at War bookending Modern Warfare, a game that clearly based a lot of what it was doing on Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, which itself was a modern military film that had learned a great deal of Saving Private Ryan.
And buddy,
let me tell ya,
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a fuckin riot. That game sold crazy amounts, everyone wanted to play it, the online multiplayer kept people playing for ages (I didn’t talk much about competitive multiplayer in this piece, because I’m talking about the games that aren’t around anymore, and that’s linear first person shooters), and Activision realized they had a hit on their hands.
So they decided to force West and Zampella, the founders of Infinity Ward, to make Modern Warfare 2, which led to a massive legal battle and, finally, West and Zampella were able to spin off and start their own studio, making a video game known as Titanfall.
Titanfall was a multiplayer-only game; it wouldn’t be until Titanfall 2 that we got the future warfare campaign that the founders had been planning, in some form, since the early 2000s. Sixteen years late is better than nothing, I guess.
There was also a different Future Warfare under development, by a different studio, but it got canceled. Infinity Ward gradually declined, without a lot of its original leadership, Treyarch took over with the laughably-edgy Black Ops series, a bunch of Naughty Dog leads took over and rebooted Modern Warfare (which got increasingly pro-Bush-era-politics as Bobby Kotick, president of Activision, kept hiring Bush admin people).
This is where the big split occurs.
On one hand, you’ve got Halo: Combat Evolved, Doom 3, Crysis, and the like. On the other, you have Battlefield, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, and Homefront.
Games following in the Half-Life tradition were still largely about moving around, fighting weird enemies with cool weapons, while games like Call of Duty were mostly stuck doing the “realistic guns in realistic environments that plays like an action movie” thing.
But, uh, then we got Far Cry 2.
And it ruined everything.
the decline of the linear FPS
There’s something to be said about the world after Grand Theft Auto III. Everyone — even Nintendo, with Wind Waker — started looking for ways to build open world games. It was as if the entire industry went “now that we have the technology, we can put you in an entire world, not just a cool movie.”
Suddenly, “linear” became an insult. This meme typifies the discourse at the time:
And while that was true to some extent — shooters were now about moving you from encounter to encounter, rather than locking you in a maze where you had to get various keys to get to the exit — it reflected third person shooters more than first person shooters — the image on the right could be a dead ringer for the opening of Vanquish, for instance, or some of the levels in The Last of Us.
Shooters like Halo had a bit more going on, and the encounters were always engaging and fun. I’ve been playing Halo recently — just finished 1 and 2, and am now nearly done with 3 — and it feels like a breath of fresh air in comparison.
Shooters were getting linear because people kept trying to up the ante for cinematics, in part by trying to compete with Call of Duty without understanding what made Call of Duty work. When I wrote about All Ghillied Up (linked above), I made the argument that you’re not supposed to stealth your way through it.
I’ve played linear shooters that will kill you for “trying to stab a guy when the game says to, but you were doing so from a crouched position, so you failed. start over,” because that’s how bad they were as linear experiences. They had “stealth level,” and by god, you were supposed to do it stealthily, or the game would tell you “figure it out. Start over until you guess at how I want you to play this.”
It sucked.
Shooters were the most graphically intense games out there, and that meant they were the most expensive games out there. In third person, the camera’s far away enough that you don’t have to spend so much time making all the assets dense and realistic; the player is focused on the character. First person demands the most expense if verisimilitude is your goal, and everyone wanted to be ‘cinematic,’ so costs skyrocketed.
Campaigns themseslves stayed fairly short — it got to a point where the average video game took about 4 hours to complete in the single-player, and you’d be lucky if it was actually any good. People were fed up. They wanted more bang for their buck.
And that’s where open world games came in.
Similarly expensive to make, open world games weren’t about linear corridor experiences, they were about going to various locations and shooting a bunch of dudes and leaving. Far Cry 2 was arguably the first major AAA attempt at an open world shooter, and it had cool ideas like fire propagation and enemies who would try to protect their friends if you got in the way.
It wasn’t perfect — characters talked too fast, allegedly to save storage space on the disc, the story was nothing to care about, allied NPCs could only be encountered in non-combat zones, enemies respawned too fast at checkpoints, meaning you’d have to fight the same fight over and over again if you used the roads (solution: use boats. boats don’t have as many checkpoints).
The game got some rehabilitation after it came out because of a podcast by the name of Idle Thumbs, and from there, a lot of people have reevaluated it as a modern classic but… ehnh, the later Far Cry games did all the same stuff but with more varied stuff to do, more engaging stories, and, yes, better gameplay and enemy AI.
But it did get a lot of people thinking the right way to make a shooter was to make a big open world bonanza, which is how we ended up with things like Metro Exodus.
There’s a talk given by Chris Barrett (who sucks as a human being, fwiw) and Joe Staten about building Destiny where they mention one of the big bummers was that they’d spend all this time building a level, for players to only play it once on the campaign. They didn’t want that expense to go to waste, so they designed Destiny, which has several small open worlds, rather than one big one, for players to spend lots of time in.
As the market made open world games possible and players started demanding games be longer, bombing short games — like the absolutely excellent Kane & Lynch 2 — with negative reviews (because who wants to pay $60 for a 4-hour game?), devs started moving toward more open world shooters. Even series like Metro shifted toward an open world format.
The campaign-centric Battlefield: Bad Company games (Bad Company 2 multiplayer is also the series multiplayer peak) fell by the wayside as Battlefield proper moved back to a multiplayer focus.
Linear campaign shooters, where you get to be a person in a place doing cool, adventurous shit… kinda fell by the wayside. If you’re lucky, you might get a game like Deathloop, that has some multiplayer, but more often than not you’re either getting an open world shooter like Far Cry 6, a multiplayer-only shooter like Valorant, or a shooter that removes jumping like Doom The Dark Ages.
Sure, you kinda get some shooting in Indiana Jones or Avowed, but the shooting in Indiana Jones is so bad that if you told me leadership completely forgot who Indiana Jones was and decided he had to be bad at using guns because he’s an archaeologist, I’d believe you. Avowed is trying to be DnD in its own world, so the guns are slow-firing muzzleloaders that have to be held back so melee characters can still feel useful.
Sometimes people pop up and try — Serious Sam never really went away, but Serious Sam is a series about big open fields where you’re constantly firing guns to manage the hordes of enemies chasing you down. Flying Wild Hog’s Shadow Warrior reboot got there, but Shadow Warrior 2 turned it into a series of randomized levels — the sense of ‘being there as things happen’ gets diminished as a result.
They just don’t make ’em like they used to.
And I get it. I get that cost is a big part of it. I get that gamers want games to be 15–20 hours long, and it’s much easier to make an open world game where you take a bunch of prefabricated assets, place them around, call it a base, and spawn a handful of guys in who will fight you when you approach.
But… I dunno, I miss the giant space ships blasting overhead, the “wait, what’s that?” as a giant monster crests a hill. I miss the pacing of it — the encounter-to-encounter-to-encounter pacing that is so fun, the sense that I’m on a journey, moving from one point to the next.
I miss games like Titanfall 2, Doom 2016, Halo 3 and Reach, heck, even the original Half-Life and Opposing Force. I even loved Bulletstorm, despite its removal of a jump button.
I miss the linear shooter because it was fun to be part of an exciting story, rather than just running around a big open world shooting stuff.
Sure, I loved STALKER 2, but STALKER is a series that’s always been about being in a world, just vibing with it. I didn’t so much love it when Halo Infinite tried to be an open world game, even though the core combat felt nice.
Open worlds have this bad habit of flattening out the overall experience. Boomer shooters have this bad habit of abstracting things out so you’re not talking to characters in the world, going on adventures about stuff — it’s more “find the key to open the door” level experience, and I just don’t quite get as much out of that.
I wanna be the guy in the story going on an adventure. I want to do it with pitch-perfect shooter combat and awesome set pieces. I think it’s a shame we don’t get much of that these days.
Years ago, a friend of mine was going to quit games. I told him the future was shooters, and instead of a walking sim, he should make a shooter next. Back then, walking sims weren’t selling all that well, and he was lamenting staying in the industry. “We talk about quake a lot,” I said, “so make quake.”
A few months later, he tweeted saying he was making a game for me.
He sent me the build. It was E1M1 of a very popular boomer shooter — one that helped get the whole thing started. Throughout Act 1's, I gave him some advice, but as he blew up, we lost touch. When the game shipped, he included me in the credits under special thanks.
Consider this piece me asking for some people to start making the 1998–2010 shooters now, okay? That’s my request.
I’m working on one now. If you want to participate, hit up my DMs on bluesky. We may end up with too many people — it’s just a demo for the time being, unless we get funding — so I might have to get a second one started, but wouldn’t that be cool?
Hey, I have to pay for GLASSES, a GLAUCOMA TEST, PHYSICAL THERAPY, AND A COUPLE BILLS next week. I really, really need like $1,200 in tips.
If you want to support the work I do, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, then hey, hit up my tip jar.
I figure this kind of writing helps inexperienced writers the most — which means people who might not have the finances to afford my work if I kept it behind a paywall. A paywall would help me, obviously — I could guarantee a certain minimum that would ensure my ability to continue writing these articles — but the people who need my help the most cannot afford it. So I gotta rattle the tip jar. I know it’s not pleasant, but like… think of me like a busker. I’d rather play a song on the street and get a few coins in a hat than just run a gofundme or something.
I, personally, can only do this with your support; if I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to get a second job, and as disabled as I am, that’s really not great. I have to spend between $160 and up to an entire Nintendo Switch’s worth of my income on medical care every two weeks. That’s an extremely difficult burden for me.
So it’s either do this or get a second job, and a second job would not be ideal given my current disability. So when you send me a tip, you’re not just helping a disabled writer like me, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access. Thank you.
paypal.me/stompsite (this is the best way to help me out right now)
@forgetamnesia on venmo (this is the second-best way to help me out right now)
ko-fi.com/stompsite
$docseuss on cashapp
