I get this, too. (Occasionally with over-the-shoulder shots in RPGs, too, if the motion is too fast.) Mostly due to the lack of feeling of movement to go with the visual. Games that have the scenery bob up and down with your steps are the worst (especially since, duh, people’s vision doesn’t do that - the brain compensates), so it’s more like looking at footage from a handhead camera.
Oddly enough, I only get this sensation in flight or driving sims.
In an FPS, while I don’t necessarily get a great sense of where I stand in relation to everything else there are usually enough cues regarding where I’m getting shot at from and such, and looking around is a straightforward manoeuver. I look there, that’s where I’m facing and where I’m going.
Not so in a flight sim (or a mech sim, or a driving combat sim), where the only choices I have are either A) eyes locked forward, in which case I loose track of any opponent whom I’m not right in the 6 of or B) tracking cam, which keeps my point of view locked on this or that enemy, but then I have no clue whatsoever where I’m going.
In an actual airplane, I think I would know just because it would be easy to either figure out which way the ground is, how many G’s I’m pulling or how fast I’m going instinctively (or, you know, just “which way am I looking relative to my body”), or if that’s not the case it should be easy and not disorienting to quickly switch between “lookin’ at that guy”, “looking at the horizon” and “looking at my instruments” in a split second. Very difficult to do in a flight sim, to me at least.
I still love them mind you. I just suck at them.
You give some good reasons as to why people (esp casual gamers) wouldn’t be into them. But I dunno about the lack of innovation thing. Unless you’re blazing new genres, you think that the innovation in FPS is coming out at a slower rate than in any other genre?
And how are we using genre? RPGs have certainly had innovation, but the genre is pretty broad. Is updating the turn-based combat system to a hack 'n slash or similar the same genre? What about FPS RPGs, then? Maybe FPS can only be compared to sub-genres, unless you want to look at the larger action genre and compare innovations that way.
Wolf3d became Doom, then tons of clones came, Half Life brought decent innovation, and now we’re here. Does Portal get to claim the FPS genre? What about a TD game played from an FPS view (Sanctum, which I’m playing now. Innovative, but could be better, honestly).
RTS - Dune, Warcraft 2, Command and Conquer, Starcraft, WoW –> MMORPG
The genre became more polished as it grew, and the scope of upgrades once WoW hit became vast, but isn’t that just “new guns and maps”?
I don’t have the gaming knowledge to run through all the genres/sub-genres, and maybe you do and can provide some counter examples. I just never really thought innovation was slower to come to FPS than most other things.
You could satisfy your (and my!) curiosity by having him/her play Half-Life 2, which uses essentially the same engine.
Have you heard about TrackIR? It’s a headtracking camera popular for some flight and driving sims.
I personally don’t like action-RPGs, other than Zelda or Zelda clones, and that’s only because I don’t really consider them RPGs, but action-puzzle games. I need that element of pulling out of the battle to think of strategy. I need my character to be better than I am. All I can ever manage in an Action RPG is to attack, and wind up dead except on the lowest difficulty settings. I want turn based battles.
I also hate any platformers that require precise timing. I love the genre itself, though. I also do not hate the concept of the Sims, but find it incredibly difficult to focus on multiple people at a time. I had to put it on 1/8 speed mode to play.
I am a story gamer. I play games for the story. I frickin’ love adventure games.
**jayarrell **: I’ve heard about it and I’ve been meaning to give it a whirl, but I simply don’t play enough flight sims to justify a 150$ investment in my current state of flatbroke-ness. I don’t even have a proper HOTAS for that matter.
3D FPS. Even Halo and Half-Life, both of which I tried to like. A lot of it is probably the “looking through blinders and having no sense of touch” effect. It’s unpleasant.
I love Portal, but it’s a FPP (first person puzzler).
Oddly enough, I also like Doom and Marathon, which are sort of 2.5D.
I was really thinking about the “modern” FPS, where all the various Call of Duty/Black Ops/Wolf 3d/Killzone stuff are all pretty much the same game. I really wish I could find that screenshot that had the screenshots of Killzone, Call of Duty, and something else all in one image and I swear they looked creepily similar.
I generally wouldn’t consider a Mass Effect game an FPS. Though Mass Effect does suffer from some of the same issues (Blinders effect, tough controls), but they are somewhat mitigated by the lack of some of the others.
Portal is pretty much the exception that serves to highlight the rule. And I’m sure there are other non-typical FPS games, but they represent a nearly microscropic drop in the bucket of FPS game sales.
The RTS genre is pretty stale too, but how many new RTS games have there been in the past two years? There’s StarCraft 2, and uh…honestly I, at least, can’t name any others. Compare this to the FPS space.
Innovation is generally much slower to come to the “top genre”, particularly nowadays that releasing AAA games costs so dang much money. Companies become terrified of deviating from the formula because they need to sell millions of copies just to break even. This isn’t unique to FPS games as a whole, but FPS games are “on top” right now and as a result are in that unique “Hold to the status quo!” position that comes from being there. Certainly, other genres have had periods of stagnation when they were on top, but it’s actually even WORSE with the FPS genre, because they are so multi-player focused, it becomes harder to say “Well, game X was fun, but I really liked the story and characters better in game Y”.
Hey, it’s a game – I wouldn’t do Go. I’ve read the book by Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, and another’s name I can’t remember, but it’s a hard game for me to master.
Dude, why are you commenting on innovation if you’re not even aware of what’s going on in the market?
In two years, we’ve seen innovation from Starcraft 2, Dawn of War 2, the Total War series, the DotA subgenre explode (new genre?), and AoE Online. You could even count Halo Wars trying to do for RTS what Halo did for FPS. That’s just off the top of my head.
The innovation in FPS is huge too. Just yesterday we had Brink, which brought a lot of new ideas to team-based gameplay. Homefront a few months back pushed multiplayer progression to new places with its in-match upgrading and “battle commander.” Bad Company 2’s environments brought a whole new experience. You’re just wrong about everything.
I don’t really consider Total War games RTSs in the traditional sense, so they don’t really register in my mind in that regard. YMMV, but uh… not much innovation there either. That formula’s been refined through half a dozen iterations now. DotA I would’ve even have considered in the RTS space. Halo Wars and Dawn of War 2 are now officially more than 2 years old. DoW2 has had an expansion in the past 2 years, but generally expansions aren’t exactly rife with change.
But…innovation from StarCraft 2? I guess in the sense that they decided they couldn’t balance the multiplayer with all the single player units so decided to cut their losses, but I think otherwise you’d be hard pressed to come up with anything that counts as innovation there. Which is fine, mind you - it’s what they set out to do, and indeed, what Blizzard does best. We just shouldn’t call it something it’s not.
So yeah. Off the top of your head you can list a lot of games that are more than two years old. Maybe only barely, but it doesn’t go very far to prove that the RTS genre isn’t relatively stagnant.
Yeah, I’m just wrong. It’s not that all the changes you mention are tantamount to rearranging the furniture. Or hell, maybe they’ve finally give up trying to beat Black Ops, but I don’t think that’s likely. Or perhaps one man’s “innovation” is another man’s “Yeah, big deal, guys.”
I’ll wait and see on Brink, I guess, it’s rather new to see if it even…well, sells.
/digression off.
I purchased it the day of. I despise the UI, which was clearly made to integrate well with consoles, but the game itself isn’t too bad. I’m not entirely sure how game-changing the parkour is, but it is fun to run around a map with a decent amount of freedom.
Still, I would say TF2 is more value for money.
This is dumb. Of course genres are stagnant if you decide to exclude all of the new ideas because of technicalities or just decide they don’t count.
Of course Starcraft 2 had innovations. It’s insane to say otherwise. At the very least you have the replay system/spec UI that provides never-before-seen insights in the play of your favourite pro gamer by allowing you to follow their camera see mouse actions. The new Battle.net and its map marketplace. The insane power of its mapmaker. Someone remade a WoW raid until it got yanked by Blizzard. You have a huge change in the usual game dynamic from the Protoss’s warp-in mechanic, which eliminates the decades-old defender’s advantage. Or the ability to control space with force fields, I haven’t seen that before either. That’s not even getting into the dozens of minor choices they’ve managed to insert into a match, when in previous games, you only had one option.
What do you want from games? The entire genre to be redefined every six months? I mean, seriously. A new genre just emerged from the RTS realm, but you don’t think there is innovation going on.
Is “lack of innovation” really something that keeps people away from a particular genre? I doubt it.
It doesn’t keep people from trying a genre, but if they get the impression that game X is just like game Y, they’re going to be less inclined to pick it up, that’s all. People do get bored, and only serious enthusiasts appreciate the subtle differences between a lot of products.
Some good FPS game innovations to me have been the introduction of physics and destructible environments, both of which are illustrated well in games like Battlefield Bad Company 2. Back in the day of the Wolf3d all the rooms were square and if there was a candlestick sitting on a wooden table, no weapon or ability in your arsenal could move that candlestick one inch. Things like that help a lot with the immersion.
Also games like ARMA2 and Grand Theft Auto IV have very large environments so you really feel like a small fish in a big pond.
Any game in which I’m competing against actual people, not just against the computer. I hate PvP in pretty much all ways. (I don’t mind co-op multiplayer, though - but it’s hard to find. Little Big Planet and…um…Little Big Planet 2?)
Sports games.
Fighting games.
Games where you play a criminal working to further a criminal agenda (Godfather, GTA).
Military Porn. Not FPS games in their entirety, as I’ve always liked the Unreal games and goodness knows TF2 is a lot of fun. No, I am completely tired and have no interest in the vast genre of games that are set in World War II, Vietnam, Iraq, or wherever else will let them play to the military fantasies of 18-30 year old American males without actually having to design an original game. It just happens that the vast majority of these are FPSes.
Maybe that was a little harsh, but the degree towards which Call of Duty and its various subgeneres have taken over the gaming industry kind of gets me going.
Lots of games have co-op multiplayer as an option, though often alongside PvP. I’ve played tons of hours of co-op Diablo II, for instance, and Portal 2 has a co-op mode. And even games that are largely driven by PvP, such as most RTSs or FPSs, will have team modes and AI opponents to play against.
And say what you like about MMOs, but they certainly have enough opportunities for co-op gameplay.