Even though they’re probably the most popular current genre in video games, I don’t like First Person Shooters. I’ve never really enjoyed them…from “Doom” and “Quake” on through the more sophisticated evolution of the genre into games like “Half Life” and “Deus Ex,” I just can’t get into them. They usually control like crap even with a mouse and keyboard setup, and they tend to be straight-up unplayable on home consoles. I never feel like I can “see” what’s going on in FPS’s - I think that I have to see my character from some sort of third-person perspective before I feel like I can accurately sense what’s going on all around him.
And they make me sick - physically nauseous after even a few minutes of play. If I’m trying to play one on a computer monitor, just a few feet away from the image, it’s awful to the point where I have to go lie down and feel like I’m going to vomit any second. On a TV it’s not as bad, but even after about 10 minutes of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion at a friend’s the other day, I felt like I was going to hurl and had to turn it off.
Unfortunately, it seems like every single gaming franchise is turning into an FPS these days. The Metroid series was ruined when they forsook the game’s classic and fun engine and turned it into a Halo clone - to add insult to injury, they kept a third-person view for the morph ball, just to show you how they could have made a great engine or at the very least an optional third-person perspective (like “M.D.K.” or something like that), but simply chose not to. Hell, I’m surprised they didn’t just keep it first person for the morph ball scenes, spinning your field of vision around and round as you roll, in order to make me projectile vomit within seconds!
They just announced that the long-awaited third “Fallout” game will be an FPS. Yippee! Another game that had a great engine turned into a generic FPS, no doubt complete with your character holding their weapon up right in your field of vision and blocking out 65% of the screen real estate. Hooray - another game where you can’t tell what the hell is going on at any given moment!
What’s next - Final Fantasy goes FPS? How about Mario? I can’t wait to see those big white gloves blocking out 85% of my first-person view while a turtle attacks me from behind and I vomit blood from the perspective jerking up and down any time I hit the jump button.
I don’t like any game that requires good “twitch” reflexes, because I know I will suck at it, no matter how much I play. I finally figured out, after many years in childhood trying to play arcade-type games, that I don’t have those and never will.
I’m not a fan of gore in games, either, and I will turn it off if I can. If I feel anything as a result of seeing blood or gore in games or movies, it’s going to be disgust or nausea. I just really don’t understand the attraction there.
My favorite type of game is usually one in which you try to take over the world. The Civ games are good for this, as are the Europa Universalis games.
I always end up getting lost from a first-person perspective. I have very little sense of direction in real life, so I guess that’s not too surprising.
What really throws me for a loop, though, are games where you can change your view of what’s going on. They usually make this too easy to do accidentally, and I get really disoriented when it happens.
Hear hear! The King’s Quest series was completely ruined. I don’t remember the version, but when I had to fight skeletons, I knew it was the end of the series for me. I like Myst, old King’s Quest, and games like that. I also like Civ, though, especially III.
FPS = first person shooter. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion are both games that utilize first person perspective but they are not first person shooters. They are open-ended single-player RPGs which utilize the first person perspective.
Halo 1/2, those are first person shooters. As is Quake/Doom/Wolfenstein/Rainbow Six et cetera.
The Thief series is a “first person stealth game” most decidedly not a first person shooter.
Basically, if the game isn’t a shooter, just because it uses a first person perspective doesn’t mean it is an FPS.
When it comes to FPS, I never liked most of them. However when the Rainbow Six series came out, I really enjoyed all of them. Those games are much more about carefully planning and using tactics, because the actual combat is instantaneous. Unlike most FPS games, you aren’t a lone-wolf taking on hordes, you’re part of a relatively realistic small infantry squad dealing with hostage situations. Shooting is about being accurate and quick, and the weapons you use are realistic, as is the ammunition and there’s no “ammo packs” laying around unrealistically. And, sort of like in real life, most of the time a single bullet puts a squad-member down, and can sometimes kill them outright. There’s no “medical packs” or et cetera that can “restore” a team member on the fly.
Unfortunately the newest incarnation of the R6 series decided to abandon a lot of the old realistic, tactical-planning approach and opted for a more mindless shoot-em-up approach.
Being an avid baseball player up through High School I’ve always felt I had really good reflexes, even though I graduated HS about ten years before the 1980s explosion of video/arcade games, I picked them up and enjoyed them immensely when they were introduced. A few of the old NES games required extreme “twitch” reflexes and I enjoyed those a good bit. I had a game for the old Mattel Intellivision in which you had to shoot down-falling asteroids and that required almost obscene twitch reflexes.
However I do like the conquer the world games more than the arcade style games, even though I think both are fun.
Ok, I admit that I was a bit broad in my inclusion of those games, but they’re practically First Person Shooters to me, even if they have RPG elements. Any game with a first-person perspective where you see the guy’s hands hanging in front of your eyes and you rapidly mash a button to attack/shoot/throw spells/etc. is a First Person Shooter to me, no matter how much RPG window dressing you hang on it. Oblivion is an FPS as far as I’m concerned.
Well, you can certainly feel that way but it needlessly obscures well-established game genres. “Shooters” are games where you well, shoot at stuff. Not generally games where you cast spells, investigate clues, talk to people, develop a character’s levels/skills, complete open-ended quests and et cetera. That’s just not what the shooter genre is all about, and the different video game genres have, over time, become relatively well-defined.
I’ve been following video and computer games since 1980, and reading magazines devoted to them for almost as many years. When you read a review of a “First Person Shooter” most people know what you’re talking about, and they don’t really associate that term even remotely with RPGs, they’re a totally separate genre. Many old-school RPGs, like the old Bard’s Tale games were in the first person perspective. What perspective a game uses has no bearing on what genre it is in, in general. The biggest exception is the shooter genre which is usually divided into First Person/Third Person shooter sub genres.
I don’t think ever. King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity was an incredibly controversial game (receiving widely varying reviews, some labeled it average to above average and other reviewers panned it as being unimaginably bad) because it featured extensive 3D graphics, fighting/combat, and a general lack of feeling like a traditional “adventure” game. The reasons it was made the way it was probably relate to the fact that during that particular time the classic adventure game genre many of us knew and loved was more or less dying out. But still, I owned the game and am almost certain it was a third-person, not first person perspective.
I like FPSs. I’ve got those fast-twitch reflexes and it’s fantastic. Video game folk SEEM to be a lot like NFL franchises, where someone does something innovative and kills everyone with it, and then, the next year, an army of clones pop out.
That does sadden me. The strategy genre has been eviscerated by wanting to make them slicker, shiner, and faster. A game like Romance of the Three Kingdoms couldn’t make it anymore in America.
I’ve never liked the classic single-player FPS’s such as Doom, Quake and so forth. I agree, the controls are awkward, especially when you have enemies that can come from different directions. I did play Metroid Prime and one boss fight was comical, you had to continually hop up in the air, and turn to keep facing the boss. It is sort of neat if you’re playing some sort of game where you’re clearing rooms and halls though. There’s something satisfying about turning corners just the right way, skidding and using the “slicing the pie” method to engage targets.
The only FPS I ever really enjoyed was Unreal Tournament, as a multiplayer game but not as a single or 2-player game. When I was in high-school we played it, along with the teacher sometimes, in a $100,000+ new engineering lab. It was all it was really good for.
I’m in my twenties and I haven’t played much in several years. I worry sometimes that I might not be as fast as I used to be, when it comes to “twitch reflexes.”
I like FPS’s, I just wish they were easier. Maybe more strategy development rather than shoot shoot shoot shoot. My biggest problem with video games is that they are too hard.
I loved the first four levels of castle wolfenstein. I couldn’t make it past the first few minutes of the fifth level so I gave up and got the cheat codes. It was still fun because there were some cool later levels where I didn’t have to cheat much, but I don’t have those twitch reflexes.
The first person perspective should be used for one reason, and one reason only: to make the game feel as much as possible like you are “inside the body” of the character you are playing. The corollary to this is that you must also take careful note of how much it affects the gameplay itself.
Some games do it better than others… shrugs. I tend to like my MMORPGs in the first person - which makes sense, because I put a very high value on that type of game making me feel like I am part of a conceivable world. I like my fast-paced FPS games in the first person - which makes sense, because a large part of the thrill of those games is the vicarious experience of running around with a gun in your hand. Other than that, I’ll take it or leave it. Some RPGs do it well (Might and Magic series), some do it not-so-well (not a fan of it at all in Oblivion). Metroid Prime was a great game… but yes, I think I would have enjoyed it more if it was third-person, and I might have finished it instead of getting bored and wandering off after a shiny object. Goldeneye for the N64 is about the pinnacle of where I think consoles can go as far as first-person perspective (yes, executed even better than Halo, IMO).
So one part personal preference + one part execution = hard to make a hard and fast rule about first-person in gaming. On the other hand, I think we CAN all agree on one thing - to see all computer gaming as we know it slowly converge on two genres - FPS games and MMO games - is very, very depressing.
I couldn’t agree with you more, except for this paragraph. From the beginning I was never good at and never enjoyed FPS’s, and I’ve tried a wide variety of them on PCs and consoles. But Metroid Prime is one of my favorite games of all time. Somehow, at least for me, it worked. It didn’t matter that it was in the first person perspective, the ability to lock-on anything shootable made it so aiming was never a problem. This allowed the game to keep the focus on exploration and finding power-ups to unlock new areas, the heart of the Metroid series. One nice thing about the Prime engine is that you’re much more mobile than in an FPS, so if an enemy gets a surprise attack from behind you can space jump out of the way or use the morph ball boost to make a quick get-away. I still maintain that Metroid Prime isn’t an FPS, but a classic adventure game that happens to have a first-person point of view.
I can understand not liking FPS style gaming, but I don’t get the complaint that mouse/keyboard is awkward. In my experience, there is nothing as intuitive and responsive as a mouse/keyboard control system: and nothing clunkier than console controllers (though I haven’t tried the Wii yet)
You guys know you can use a third-person view in Oblivion, right? I used it almost exclusively, in fact, switching to first person only when I needed more accuracy with the bow. I found that first person was just an annoyance for anything else, while the third person view allowed a freer field of vision, plus I could actually see all my cool gear.
