Will newer shooters with depth uplift the genre?

[grandpab]

Hoping against hope. If the game was as good as they want people to believe, they wouldn't need to spend an embarrassing amount of money taking out an ad in Times Square to raise awareness of it.

4.6 million people played the beta. On a Saturday they had 850,000 players on at once, which is more than what they had for any of their previous games. Reception to the beta has been largely positive. Destiny is also the most pre-ordered new IP in history. It doesn't seem like it on MMO-C since for whatever reason this community hates consoles, but the game is already pretty damn successful.

[87Octane]

I was fairly surprised at the dead thread myself.

[Piglord]

There is a lot of rose colored glasses in this thread. I'm in my late 30's and I can assure you we didn't play Goldeneye until 3 in the morning because of its depth.

[Dudemanguy]

Depends. I see old-school style FPS (Doom 4, Unreal Tournament 4, BlueStreak, Shadow Warrior, and Toxikk for example) making a resurgence...but as long as Call of Duty lives and uses the same model, I don't think we'll be seeing newer shooters that will uplift the genre. I don't see games like Destiny or Halo 5 uplifting the FPS genre at all.

[Lothaeryn]

I had always put some of the blame on the stagnation of the previous console gen. There was limited avenues really. I had always hoped something like "Tribes" would catch on.

Too bad Hi-Rez milked the fuck out of Tribes: Ascend by making a cash grab semi-pay to win model.

[Dudemanguy]

Too bad Hi-Rez milked the fuck out of Tribes: Ascend by making a cash grab semi-pay to win model.

According to Hi-Rez, SMITE saved Tribes: Ascend's servers, and that tribes ascend's free to play model didn't make them money. I never found it pay to win, but it was quite grindy at launch. Hi-Rez should develop a new Tribes game and actually sell it for like $15 or something on Steam.

[PizzaSHARK]

According to Hi-Rez, SMITE saved Tribes: Ascend's servers, and that tribes ascend's free to play model didn't make them money. I never found it pay to win, but it was quite grindy at launch. Hi-Rez should develop a new Tribes game and actually sell it for like $15 or something on Steam.

I don't trust Hi-Rez anymore. I think they've got talent, but they don't seem to understand their audience very well. Global Agenda was going great, and then they murdered it by trying to shoehorn a bunch of WoW-like elements into it instead of working with what they had.

Tribes Ascend had so much potential, but it seemed like they didn't have a clear design goal at any point. It's like they were trying to court the hardcore Tribes fans and also trying to milk the never-played-Tribes audience, too. I'd never gotten into Tribes back in the day (never had a computer good enough to run them), so TA was my first experience with Tribes, and it was definitely something I could've gotten into if the game had grown enough.

But the constant changes they kept making trying to please both groups made it hard to get used to the game, and alienated the hardcore Tribes fans they wanted to make the core of their playerbase, so the game just kind of ended up stagnating. I haven't touched SMITE, but Hi-Rez is two for three so far.

[Dudemanguy]

I don't trust Hi-Rez anymore. I think they've got talent, but they don't seem to understand their audience very well. Global Agenda was going great, and then they murdered it by trying to shoehorn a bunch of WoW-like elements into it instead of working with what they had.

Tribes Ascend had so much potential, but it seemed like they didn't have a clear design goal at any point. It's like they were trying to court the hardcore Tribes fans and also trying to milk the never-played-Tribes audience, too. I'd never gotten into Tribes back in the day (never had a computer good enough to run them), so TA was my first experience with Tribes, and it was definitely something I could've gotten into if the game had grown enough.

But the constant changes they kept making trying to please both groups made it hard to get used to the game, and alienated the hardcore Tribes fans they wanted to make the core of their playerbase, so the game just kind of ended up stagnating. I haven't touched SMITE, but Hi-Rez is two for three so far.

I would actually love Hi-Rez...but the problem with them is that they have amazing concepts, but poor, poor execution. Like Global Agenda, it was interesting to see an MMORPG Third person shooter, then you see WoW-like elements and then the game died. Tribes: Ascend, originally a Tribes MMO, but scrapped it and made a new F2P installment of Tribes. Tribes has always been unique, but then dies off once SMITE comes along. SMITE, a third person MOBA...Now i'm waiting to see how long this game will last...So far, I expect it to last quite a while, especially with an upcoming Xbox release.

I've played Tribes 2 back in the day, my favorite multiplayer FPS to date. I do see dumbing down in Tribes Ascend in terms of adding a class system, being floaty, and vehicles being a massive disappointment, but it did stay true to it's Tribe's formula, and Tribes Ascend was one of the most fun multiplayer FPS I've played in a while at the time too. Hi-Rez could've done a lot better with Tribes if you've asked me. The fact that Tribes: Ascend was downloaded 1.2 million times, over 800k registered accounts, and over 600k followers on Facebook, I still see a market for the Tribes IP.

[PizzaSHARK]

I played TA from almost the time it went into beta until I just gave up when it seemed like there were never any people really playing anymore. I'd either get matched against people from halfway across the planet that were teleporting everywhere or one of the like six people who actually gave a shit about the game and were basically obliterating my entire team while carrying the flag while fucking everyone's mom.

I think F2P was definitely the wrong way of going about it, no doubt. Having defined classes instead of just doing "light, medium, heavy" and picking what you want is anathema to Tribes.

[Deleted]

The Current generation of FPS shooter's fail in one aspect, and one aspect alone. Mapping.

The reason CS, UT, Quake etc where also so successful and still are is the user generated maps that add YEARS of replayability. Look at CS for example. There are still people playing 1.5. Now Game companies don't want years of people not buy games, which is why the don't let the mapping tools out, and charge for map packs. Where on CS etc there are quite literally thousands of maps.

[PizzaSHARK]

The Current generation of FPS shooter's fail in one aspect, and one aspect alone. Mapping.

The reason CS, UT, Quake etc where also so successful and still are is the user generated maps that add YEARS of replayability. Look at CS for example. There are still people playing 1.5. Now Game companies don't want years of people not buy games, which is why the don't let the mapping tools out, and charge for map packs. Where on CS etc there are quite literally thousands of maps.

Oh yeah. Even the best games like UT2k4 and Q3A shipped with absolutely stellar developer-made maps, and there were still tons of great community-made maps out there. The best maps tended to get collected and shipped out as a free "map pack." I know that happened at least once for UT2k4, a bunch of fan-favorite community maps were collected and released along with a major patch.

[87Octane]

Right, I mean I expected the Halo/Farcry "forge" to be pretty standard in a decent FPS, even on consoles going forward. Two steps forward, one back.

Then again... I could say the same thing about warcraft. Blizzard could have had user generated/contests. Things like music, character models, skins, BGs, Arenas. People would have been more than happy to help them out, and give them money :P

I'm just sorta disappointed that my experiences with mods/maps with Halflife/Quake/Unreal never transitioned to consoles. Instead you have subsequent shooter titles (just "mods" of previous ones) charging for DLC (which is really just a patch, of a mod, of a game). sadface. Drawing it out:

Buy Half-life - download CS - download patch - download patch - download patch - repeat
Buy CoD1 - buy patch - buy patch - buy patch - buy patch - Buy Cod2 - repeat

I know i'm experiencing "good ol days" nostalgia - but I really expected some progress. I know costs have gone up, and charging for DLC is just another way to keep up with inflation (games being 60 bucks has been constant for a while) - but so has the repeated use of existing engines. Less "work" is being done. Don't get me started on shared engines - sometimes that really pisses me off, looking at you Assassin's Creed.

[theturn]

Depends what you mean by depth. Gameplay wise I'm looking for games that go beyond everyone charge at each other and the best twitcher wins. Games like COD and CS are essentially that. BF is an example of a variety of gameplay. Sure you have the corridor maps but then you have plenty of other maps where you can attack vertically and horizontally.

Modes: New modes are nice but ultimately people go to Team deathmatch. Variety is good though so I approve of devs bringing more modes.
Custimization: I want alot of guns of different types, I want to be able to customize them with items, skins, etc

[RoninaThorstone]

I feel like Firefall is trying very hard to create some new stuff with their shooter MMO.
I just feel like they are struggling with a lot of stuff :/

[Kaneth]

The Current generation of FPS shooter's fail in one aspect, and one aspect alone. Mapping.

The reason CS, UT, Quake etc where also so successful and still are is the user generated maps that add YEARS of replayability. Look at CS for example. There are still people playing 1.5. Now Game companies don't want years of people not buy games, which is why the don't let the mapping tools out, and charge for map packs. Where on CS etc there are quite literally thousands of maps.

This is a great statement, and rings very true. Hell, TF2 is still going strong and it was released in 2007. Tons of community generated maps that are very fun to play. As you pointed out, many of these developers want people to purchase their new iteration year after year and purchase all DLC maps as well. Which is sad, because so many of these older shooters are fun games, especially the ones with the community maps.

Unfortunately, I don't see the genre being "uplifted" anytime soon. Not while CoD, BF, etc keep pumping out "new" games each year. I hope with the success of Destiny (which seems like it's going to be a runaway hit this year) will at least show developers that we don't always want TDM maps. Sure Borderlands and other titles do that, but not with the apparent mass success that Destiny looks like it will have. It'll be interesting to see someone else come along and move the co-op side of the genre forward.