So, I’ve been playing Call of Duty: Black Ops II online for ages. The online community seems to be dying off, as Blops2 is 2 iterations behind current. I didn’t get into CoD Ghosts at all. I liked Black OPs for the way you could jump in for a few sessions and then move on to the rest of your life.
I loved Portal and Half Life, and I’m looking at Bioshock, but I really found virtually shooting other players very relaxing and therapeutic.
What now?
Can you give us a little bit more about what you’re looking for? If all you’re after is shooting other players, well, there’s no shortage of titles out there, several of which are free. Is there more you can tell us in terms of speed, or setting, or style?
Style: I liked the colour palette and visibility in BO2.
Setting: The current setting for BO2, and BO1 was good. I found Ghosts, Titanfall and other ‘stuff from the future’ games not to my liking.
I only played Free for All online, apparently I’m still not a team player. I don’t mind getting pwned by a better player who’s 12 years old.
Should I be looking a Battlefield?
If you loved Portal and Half Life, have you tried Valve’s Counterstrike franchise?
There’s also, of course, Team Fortress 2 by Valve as well if you’re looking for a more casual n00b-pwning experience and less serious teamwork.
Seems like you have a very narrow set of games you enjoy (FPS basically).
That’s fine. There is no better or worse about this. That said you are limiting yourself.
As for FPS you might like I have no opinion. There are a gajillion of them.
More than that, he seems to be primarily interested in multiplayer FPS’s. Which is again fine but it limits the choices if you want a popular multiplayer FPS with a modern military setting.
That said, I’ll go back to Counterstrike as my answer. Either that or Battlefield are your only realistic choices if you’re tired of the Call of Duty offerings.
Edit: Ghost Recon: Phantoms is free to play. Maybe try that.
For awhile I played a lot of Team Fortress 2, and it was scads of fun. IIRC, it’s free, so you may as well try it.
Are you on a PC or console?
A preliminary answer, pending further information: Congrats! You are lucky to enjoy the single most overpopulated genre in the gaming world, the Modern Military First Person Shooter. There should be no lack of good titles to choose from:
All the Calls of Duties and Medals of Honor: Virtually indistinguishable from one another, mostly high-production-value wrappers set a few decades apart, all using the same basic gameplay
Counterstrike: Arguably the game that started the trend, but horribly overplayed by now. If you’ve never experienced it, however, might as well do so.
Battlefield 2/3/4/Hardline/Bad Company 1/2: Bigger-scale than CoD, with vehicles in open maps. Action is more spread about by a lot of running/driving/flying and getting sniped/bombed/killed by a tank. Before BF2, they were set in WW2 and Vietnam.
Planetside 2: Large-scale persistent online war, sadly set in a rather silly sci-fi future. Just mentioning it because if you’re looking for therapeutic mass murder, that’s what the game is all about, and no other game has as grand a scale. WWII Online: Battleground Europe is a similar type of game set in WW2. All the ones after BF2 are in the modern world, except BF2142 which is sort of like Titanfall.
Far Cry 1-3 (4 due soon): Great single-player open-world shooter-RPG with progression and exploration and wingsuits. Multiplayer becomes mediocre, generic shooter set in tropical settings. Everything it does in multiplayer, CoD and Battlefield do better – except FC3’s coop campaign is a blast, but you’re not shooting other players, just working with them.
Rainbow Six Vegas 1/2: Tactical “police” action rather than military. Stealth, precision, and room clearing important. More thoughtful, more suspenseful, and less guns blazing than the other shooters above. (I’ll admit I’m biased towards this series, having been a fan since before there was a Call of Duty.)
Rainbow Six spinoffs… Ghost Recon is Rainbow Six in the near future, not quite laser beams but advanced drones and gadgets and fancy heads-up displays. Splinter Cell is Rainbow Six meets mission impossible, much less gunplay and a lot more stealth and gadgets.
ARMA 1/2/3: Modern military simulator with a lot more realism than CoD or BF. I find this series really hard to play because of its learning curve and poor graphical performance on my PC, but it’s got a strong, loyal cult following.
Spec Ops: The Line (only for single player): An attempt at a grandiose meta-analysis of the role of violent entertainment in our culture, and the way it affects our valuations of human lives
Portal and Bioshock have nothing to do with CoD. Bioshock is an objectivist dystopian action-RPG set a few decades prior, with you being this superhero with a few guns and several superpowers.
Portal is a puzzle game where you make teleportation portals that connect different parts of 3D mazes together.
Both are good games in their own rights, but they’re definitely CoD clones where you jump online to shoot people in the head for no reason.
“Both are good games in their own rights, but they’re definitely CoD clones where you jump online to shoot people in the head for no reason”.
…definitely NOT CoD Clones…
I’m not sure Portal and Portal 2 (aka the best games ever) qualify as FPSs. I also like Mariokart.
Nonetheless, it is the FPS niche I’d like to re-fill.
Thanks for the suggestions so far.
Quake 1
Doom 1-2, Final Doom (I bought 'em off Steam but play them with PrBoom)
Serious Sam series
Left 4 Dead 1-2
Killing Floor
Painkiller
I think the Doom games are the most therapeutic. Mowing down dozens of demons in an instant while running a million miles an hour takes the edge off.
Thanks for all the suggestions. I appreciate them very much.