The Modern FPS

Running around a bit, got to study for a state pre-exam that must be passed before I can take the BAR. Don't ever go to law school, they save the best parts of the scam for last.

I jabbered about a trend in the industry I was noticing for Brainy Gamer. Basically, 2 decent games whose only problem was being linear corridor shooters got panned by metacritic and some gamers used to more modern sentiments. A lot of this is visuals and controls, the two games I cite are Dementium and The Conduit, but it's curious because a lot of gamers enjoy old fashioned graphics and designs. Technically, both games are really impressive simply because of the amount of juice they get out of their systems. I mean, look at the trailer for Dementium 2, that's a DS making those images. At 60 frames per second.

The reason for this seemed to be something that Rob Zacny recently commented on about COD 4. People are just sorta tired of having their hands held and having to crawl through a unicursal maze in these games. Once you enjoy a game like Far Cry 2 or S.T.A.L.K.E.R., it's really hard to go back to some designer making you play through a level exactly how they want.

It seemed a bit misguided to expand this to games entirely, people still enjoy linear games and that includes me. I just thought it would be appropriate to start really pushing towards a distinction between one being old-fashioned and one being the new paradigm. Games like Uncharted 2, from what I've played, seem to be slowly melding the two by making puzzles and combat sequences with numerous options. I used a lot of Steve Gaynor's ideas to expand all that out.

Makes you wonder what a post-modern FPS would play like.