Ben X

The Big FPS Playthrough MISSION COMPLETE

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Aye, I only played Wolf 3D once or twice because I'd already played the hell out of Doom and I was like "this is crap".

 

So, you're not planning on playing with any source ports or any other guff? Commendable! I generally play with Zandronum, but there was absolutely nothing wrong with Doom the way it was. Is this your first time playing Doom?

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I've dabbled in it but never actually sat down and properly played it. I'm not even sure what the differences with source ports are, but I'm staying away from mods and stuff if I can. I'm playing the Ultimate Doom 95 CD version, or something. Not sure if that differs from the original '93 release...

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A formidable list you have there. The ones you colored are the ones you already played, right?

Sounds like you have some more specific goal behind playing them all "as they were" at the time (e.g. w/o mouselook). I couldn't play Doom or Wolfenstein as they were any more, but I might join you for Thief (Thief Gold). It is one of my favourite series, and I've started playing Thief The Dark Project / Thief Gold numerous times, but I don't think I ever finished it.

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Yeah, the greyed out ones are ones I own but have played already - they're basically on the list to remind me to dig up any posts I might have made about them elsewhere.

 

Well, my motivation behind playing them all as they were (or would we call it my meta-goal these days?) is to enjoy and monitor the progression of the genre and general gaming tech, plus I find mods or updated versions often lose something of the original intent in order to bring a game up to contemporary standards. It breaks my heart to see John Romero playing DooMTM with those ugly new effects all over it.

 

I played DooMTM a bit more with some adjusted controls, and it really is great fun. So well-balanced and satisfying - little stuff like seeing your bullets hit the wall when you miss, being able to play cowboy with the grunts by waiting for them to draw then popping them, taking two enemies out at once with a shotgun blast. Also, the increased speed of the player means that navigating without strafing is much easier (though integrating it into your movement is great for sweeping round corridors). The music is all so sweet as well - there's a great creepy John Carpenter-y track a few levels in. I'm breezing through the first episode on the 2nd lowest difficulty level, but I think I'll be glad of that choice when I get further in.

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I constantly get lost in FPS that aren't event oriented corridors like Half-Life 2 or CoD. I owned Halo 3: ODST for two years before I ever played it because the first four times I booted it up I could not figure out a way through the opening hub world. I'm playing F.E.A.R. right now and about 5 hours of it takes place in the same office building with the exact same textures everywhere, and it was insanely disorienting.

 

But I think it's because I actually have a terrible sense of direction. Neither of those games have nearly the amount of repetitive environments that Wolfenstein 3D has.

 

Have you tried Operation Flashpoint or ARMA series?

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Yeah, the greyed out ones are ones I own but have played already - they're basically on the list to remind me to dig up any posts I might have made about them elsewhere.

 

Well, my motivation behind playing them all as they were (or would we call it my meta-goal these days?) is to enjoy and monitor the progression of the genre and general gaming tech, plus I find mods or updated versions often lose something of the original intent in order to bring a game up to contemporary standards. It breaks my heart to see John Romero playing DooMTM with those ugly new effects all over it.

 

I played DooMTM a bit more with some adjusted controls, and it really is great fun. So well-balanced and satisfying - little stuff like seeing your bullets hit the wall when you miss, being able to play cowboy with the grunts by waiting for them to draw then popping them, taking two enemies out at once with a shotgun blast. Also, the increased speed of the player means that navigating without strafing is much easier (though integrating it into your movement is great for sweeping round corridors). The music is all so sweet as well - there's a great creepy John Carpenter-y track a few levels in. I'm breezing through the first episode on the 2nd lowest difficulty level, but I think I'll be glad of that choice when I get further in.

 

I can't wait for you to play Doom 2. I think the level design is even better in that one, and the super shotgun is the most satisfying thing ever. But I've played through those games so many times.

 

Once you play through the game it's worth downloading ZDaemon to play a few rounds of multiplayer Doom, if only for historical purposes. Zipping around and blowing people away with rocket launchers is still pretty fun for a brief diversion.

Have you tried Operation Flashpoint or ARMA series?

 

No, I've always assumed my laptop couldn't handle such rigorous FPS simulations. Why, is it way easier to get lost in those games?

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Once you play through the game it's worth downloading ZDaemon to play a few rounds of multiplayer Doom, if only for historical purposes. Zipping around and blowing people away with rocket launchers is still pretty fun for a brief diversion.

 

Ooh, interesting..!

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No, I've always assumed my laptop couldn't handle such rigorous FPS simulations. Why, is it way easier to get lost in those games?

 

In a way it is because maps are gigantic with little to no landmark to speak of (every other town look alike, but you will mostly see bunch of trees and hills).

 

But on the other hand, you are given a map, compass, and handy waypoint on your UI so it ends up being interesting mix of two.  Ultimately I think if you just use the map frequently, it's very easy to not get lost because unlike smaller games, there is no "maze-like" areas that would make you go in a circle.

 

Ben X, I'm eagerly waiting for you to get to Operation Flashpoint to hear about what you have to say about that game :)

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iirc from watching Dan play it back in the day, it's crazy difficult, so I might not last too long on it! Also, I'm playing from disc, so god knows if it'll work on my current PC. I'm not really up for fucking about with partitioning and multiple OSes etc. DOSbox is about as far as I go...

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Ahhh so...

 

YOU. already. KNOW. ABOUT. THE. voice. ACTING.

 

It's on steam if disc ever gives you trouble BTW, under name ARMA Cold War Assault.

 

"MACHINEGUNNER. is. History."

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Ha ha, I don't remember that! I do remember the cool feeling of being able to do anything, and Dan winding up nicking a shitty little rustbucket car and pootling along to his target destination in the least cool way possible. Then he got fucked over by an autosave at the beginning of a mission seconds before a tank randomly ran over the tent he was in.

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I loved the Dark Forces games growing up, curious to see how they'll hold up for somebody going in without prior experience.

 

I would be shocked if games like Quake or Unreal don't still click, but those Dark Forces games may not have aged as well as i'd hope.

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In a way it is because maps are gigantic with little to no landmark to speak of (every other town look alike, but you will mostly see bunch of trees and hills).

 

But on the other hand, you are given a map, compass, and handy waypoint on your UI so it ends up being interesting mix of two.  Ultimately I think if you just use the map frequently, it's very easy to not get lost because unlike smaller games, there is no "maze-like" areas that would make you go in a circle.

 

Ben X, I'm eagerly waiting for you to get to Operation Flashpoint to hear about what you have to say about that game :)

Simply navigating the world was one of my favourite parts of DayZ. I only played on servers that didn't mark your position on the map (you had to find a very rare GPS item for that) and it changes the game quite a lot. You actually have to read the landscape and use your compass. Even after several hundred hours when you're familiar with a lot of the map there will still be so much of it you're not familiar with, it's simply too huge to memorise. The PVP aspect makes it even more interesting, because it makes the terrain matter. You never want to walk along an exposed ridge, or cross a large field. There's also the element of hiding your base camp. Fighting in those areas is so different too, in a forest there are no distinct landmark to call out enemy positions etc. You actually have to bring up your compass and use that.

I also remember that we basically had pirate maps (in our heads) for how to find things, go to the big rock, face north, walk past the third bush etc. It's the only way you can reliably find things you've hidden in such a massive environment. Ah, I love that game, it's a shame it doesn't really exist anymore.

One time a friend of mine had a bike accident (in the game), he didn't know exactly where he was (you don't, when you drive a fast motorbike over massive fields) and was going to die, so he took a screenshot and logged out. I then spent something like two hours trying to work out where his body would be when he logged back in, just based on his general whereabouts and a completely desaturated screenshot that could've been almost anywhere. I managed it in the end, and that was so satisfying.

As for Operation Flashpoint, I think that's still a brilliant game, it captures better than any other game what I imagine infantry combat is really like. That also makes it quite frustrating to play at times. A lot of those missions are looong too, there's a speed up time function for a reason.

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In a way it is because maps are gigantic with little to no landmark to speak of (every other town look alike, but you will mostly see bunch of trees and hills).

 

But on the other hand, you are given a map, compass, and handy waypoint on your UI so it ends up being interesting mix of two.  Ultimately I think if you just use the map frequently, it's very easy to not get lost because unlike smaller games, there is no "maze-like" areas that would make you go in a circle.

 

Yeah, I think I'd be fine with that. I rarely get lost in open world games. It really is the maze aspect of branching corridors that screws me up.

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DooMTM's 2nd episode is starting to introduce teleporters (scary for someone who gets lost so easily) and a few new baddy types, which is good. I think one thing an FPS should do is introduce new baddies on a regular basis. The only thing I feel a little disappointment with HL2 for (to get ahead of myself chronologically) is the relative lack of enemy variety, especially compared to the first HL - different types of head-crabs, different types of zombies, different types of Combine - which makes it feels like nothing really new gets rolled out after the first hour or so (even though there's so much variety in the level, mechanics and encounter design to make up for it).

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I think I'm nearly at the end of episode 2. It took a backseat to The Swindle for a while, but I just beat that game this week, so I should be getting through DooMTM quite quickly now. Although it isn't an easy game to sprint through if you don't know the layouts - lots of switches and cards and doors to find and backtrack to (backtracking not a negative, though - it's part of the slowly unfurling level design which is very cool and will probably give way to linearity once I progress through the years).

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Looking at the list on at the start of this thread, can I argue for including Marathon (the series, or any one of the 3 games if you only want one - I'd argue for Marathon 2 if you're doing just one). Only Marathon 2 was ported to PC from Mac, but they're all available on PC now via the Aleph One project. For the time they were made, they're interesting examples of how development might have gone if people had different priorities (just as System Shock is).

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Yeah, it's backlog and PC only. Maybe when I get to the end I won't hate FPSes and will ask for recommendations! If people want to discuss other FPSes in here, that's great, but I think it will only work if it fits loosely within my chronological order (so around when I'm playing SiN would be a good time to bring up Shogo, for instance).

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Sure, I mentioned Marathon because it's from 1994, and therefore roughly in chronological order with where you are (just after DooM, and before Quake in terms of conventional tech developments), and because it is free and open-source now and so is at least not hard to acquire if anyone wanted to. [And, honestly, is more relevant to understanding the history of FPSen than SiN, for example...] 

If you don't want to grow the backlog any further, that's fine, but I was just making a friendly recommendation :)

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Thanks for the recommendation! As I said in that quote, if I get to the end and actually want to look at an FPS ever again, I'll deffo check out all the recommended ones. But doing backlog-only doesn't work if I keep adding new games to it!

Also, I'd be very interested to hear more about Marathon and its historical interest/general quality if you fancy elaborating?

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So, the main thing about early FPSes is that the popular view is driven by id's output (Wolf3d, DooM, Quake, QuakeII... arguably by about 1998 we're out of "early FPS territory). id's stuff is very "story-light" - Carmack famously opined that story plays the same role in games as it does in pornography:  providing an excuse for the experience you're actually paying for. And, in id-style early FPSen, that experience is killing everything that isn't you in each level, whilst solving button/keycard puzzles to open up areas.

 

The Marathon series (and their more RPGish antecedent, Pathways Into Darkness), while still mostly linear experiences that involve solving puzzles with push-buttons and shooting enemy aliens, are also much more story-focussed and attempt something more complex in your interaction with the world. For a start, there are both (not very smart) allied combatants and allied civilians in many levels - some levels effectively mark you on how well you manage to protect the civilians (although this has no lasting narrative impact) - and the design is smart enough to play with this even in the first game by introducing hard-to-identify enemy clones of the civilians, which explode if they manage to approach you. 

 

More significantly, perhaps, the levels are also interested in telling you a story, via computer terminals distributed throughout the levels - whilst serving as a means of providing you with your mission for each level, they also provide your (strictly one-way) interaction with the personalities in the games; the AIs Durandal, Leela and Tycho, for the most part - and in doing so also provide both the ongoing surface narrative, and also hints at deeper aspects of the plot. Those deeper levels are sufficiently interesting that there is a very complex website devoted to discussion about them, something which the id games have never managed. (Notably, time does not stop when interacting with a terminal, so you can be attacked if you've not cleared out an area before using one.)

 

[There's also more ambitious use of different environments - there are airless vacuum levels in each game, which require you to periodically visit oxygen-dispenser panels to top up your air-tanks - shades of Doom 3's outside-on-Mars sequences, a decade later].

 

So, my argument is that the Marathon series (like System Shock, which kinda approaches from the opposite, RPG-heavy direction) is one of the early harbingers of Deus Ex and Half-Life 2 styles of narrative-centred FPS games. Their isolation on Macs, for the most part, is probably the reason why they're considered so obscure today, but their influence on later titles is still visible.

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You know what, as it's free and you make it sound so interesting, I may slot it in as a breather between DooMTMs. How not hard is not hard to acquire..?

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