Are retro shooters a growing market or merely a fad?

[Graf Zahl]

Maybe it's because all the free press nonwithstanding, it wasn't really that compelling? To be honest, the game just didn't look interesting to me.

[Rachael]

90% of gamers who complain about stuff like this just suck. As I pointed out earlier, most gamers are casuals who don't care about getting better. They just want to feel good about themselves for finishing the game. The only time I consider good AI in a fps to be unfun if it's things like the AI having unrealistic ability to always hit the player the moment he pops out of cover. But things like being able to use tactics and behave smart will never make any fps bad.

God forbid someone doesn't have 48 hours per day to dedicate to "gitting gud" in a freaking video game.

Seriously - if this is going to be your attitude you might as well just turn around and walk away from here. Gaming attracts all sorts of personalities and if "casuals" bother you then you really need to take a long hard look at your life because whether you like it or not, one day you will become one of those "casuals" due to actually having to live, and you know, pay the bills.

[Shadelight]

90% of gamers who complain about stuff like this just suck. As I pointed out earlier, most gamers are casuals who don't care about getting better. They just want to feel good about themselves for finishing the game. The only time I consider good AI in a fps to be unfun if it's things like the AI having unrealistic ability to always hit the player the moment he pops out of cover. But things like being able to use tactics and behave smart will never make any fps bad.

and this is why I hate the new dark souls era of elitism.

[Matt]

You aren't alone here. I don't like Quake much either, in spite of having made many attempst at liking it. The biggest problem I have with the game is that on one hand, the new 3D graphics meant it was too realistic for the abstracted level design to look any good, and yet on the other hand it wasn't good looking enough to actually be visually pleasing. This and the fact that the animations feel/look stiff and lifeless means that the gunplay feels unsatisfying. The texture design for the tech base levels is also utterly horrible and make my eyes bleed.

The oddest part is this is, like, the literal 180-degree opposite of how I feel about each and every one of these things. The sounds, the way everything looked and sounded like it was hastily carved from wood and stone and old rusting metal parts, the way everything sounded like it had an actual impact rather than just being "we recorded the sound of an X happening and this is supposed to be an X" (not sure how I can really convey this)... Quake always felt like it brought its own reality with it that was not accountable to any previously existing tropes or expectations, and it's something I've wanted to re-experience ever since in all these 21 years with at best mixed results.

90% [snip]

Further to my previous comment, please download the latest git commit of Hideous Destructor, start a game with it on Doom2 on Grimdark, and warp to Map15. Let us know how it goes.

[wildweasel]

90% of gamers who complain about stuff like this just suck. As I pointed out earlier, most gamers are casuals who don't care about getting better. They just want to feel good about themselves for finishing the game.

As is their right, as a person who plays games. Not everybody plays games for the same reason.

[Bigger C]

90% of gamers who complain about stuff like this just suck. As I pointed out earlier, most gamers are casuals who don't care about getting better. They just want to feel good about themselves for finishing the game. The only time I consider good AI in a fps to be unfun if it's things like the AI having unrealistic ability to always hit the player the moment he pops out of cover. But things like being able to use tactics and behave smart will never make any fps bad.

and this is why I hate the new dark souls era of elitism.

Don't blame Dark Souls. Before Soulsborne it was masocore platformers like I Wanna Be The Guy (or at least the kind of platformers IWBTG was spoofing).

[Shadelight]

90% of gamers who complain about stuff like this just suck. As I pointed out earlier, most gamers are casuals who don't care about getting better. They just want to feel good about themselves for finishing the game. The only time I consider good AI in a fps to be unfun if it's things like the AI having unrealistic ability to always hit the player the moment he pops out of cover. But things like being able to use tactics and behave smart will never make any fps bad.

and this is why I hate the new dark souls era of elitism.

Don't blame Dark Souls. Before Soulsborne it was masocore platformers like I Wanna Be The Guy (or at least the kind of platformers IWBTG was spoofing).

IWBTG is niche. Soulsbourne helped popularize the idea that every game needed to be so masochistically hard to be any decent at all. If it was at all difficult "it's like dark souls!!" is all you ended up hearing. So, yeah. I'll blame Soulsbourne.

[Bigger C]

Fair answer.

[Chris]

The sounds, the way everything looked and sounded like it was hastily carved from wood and stone and old rusting metal parts, the way everything sounded like it had an actual impact rather than just being "we recorded the sound of an X happening and this is supposed to be an X" (not sure how I can really convey this)... Quake always felt like it brought its own reality with it that was not accountable to any previously existing tropes or expectations, and it's something I've wanted to re-experience ever since in all these 21 years with at best mixed results.

I feel the opposite, that it tried to hold on to what Doom was while also wanting to be something different. It was a hodgepodge of various ideas that failed to create any kind of identity; it wanted to be gothic horror fantasy with a gameplay style that was unlike what they had done previously, but they added modern weaponry simply because modern weapons were cool, and as development dragged on, they decided it should essentially be Doom-but-better. They were making stuff without any real plan in mind, the art and palette got locked down before the artists were finished, and they expected to be able to pull it all together at the last minute. It could've been better if it had more focus, but from the sounds of it, they didn't really know what they wanted to do after Doom and expected to have an epiphany as they worked, but they never really did.

[Freaklore1]

Seriously i would like to see more games like the original Unreal and the ol Turok trilogy.

You can have a game with great gameplay,but you also need an excellent ambiance/atmosphere with a superb soundtrack.

[Viscra Maelstrom]

i didn't think Unreal's gameplay was all that hot, tbh. i found it very annoying to get back into compared to other classic FPS gams.

[zrrion the insect]

Build engine games seemed to hit the balance between "levels are gameplay-shaped" and "levels are shaped like places" just right. I've played through Duke Nukem like 1 time, but I can remember a bunch of the levels pretty clearly, and I played Redneck Rampage to death and can picture almost all of Rides Again in my head. Doom on the other hand I only remember as much about it as I do is because I have played it for countless hours and even then a bunch of the levels kinda blur together.
A modern doom clone with levels that made no attempt to look like real places wouldn't attract near as many players (who aren't already retro fps fans) as something with the visual coherency of Duke or RR.

And I'm not sure I'd even call all of these crap wolfenstein clones retro shooters. Wolfenstein feels like it's a bit to simple for anyone to really want to go back to that style of thing and any game that does feels like a waste. I mean it's basically hovertank 3d with better graphics and almost no one would hovertank a contemporary to doom or quake. Shadow and return of the woolball are the obvious exceptions to this but those games are going for a simpler look, so simpler design plays right into that and being wolfenstein clones was a very good design decision. Plus a lot of the environments still manage to read as places.

[Graf Zahl]

A modern doom clone with levels that made no attempt to look like real places wouldn't attract near as many players (who aren't already retro fps fans) as something with the visual coherency of Duke or RR.

Agreed. But that's not really a property of the engine. Doom ports can easily provide the same kind of visual realism because it only depends on the texturing how realistic something is. I guess aside from the moving geometry, like the car in the first level, most of Redneck Rampage could be recreated in ZDoom - that is, if someone took the effort in making such a project.

I actually miss that kind of map making. The ultra-realistic looks of modern games do not much for me.

And I'm not sure I'd even call all of these crap wolfenstein clones retro shooters. Wolfenstein feels like it's a bit to simple for anyone to really want to go back to that style of thing and any game that does feels like a waste.

I never got into Wolfenstein. I played it in 1992 but got bored very quickly because the game is just inane mazes where you got to shoot Nazis. As a result any game that tries to recreate that feeling has instantly lost my support. It's absolutely not something I enjoy playing.

[Zan]

Build engine games seemed to hit the balance between "levels are gameplay-shaped" and "levels are shaped like places" just right. I've played through Duke Nukem like 1 time, but I can remember a bunch of the levels pretty clearly, and I played Redneck Rampage to death and can picture almost all of Rides Again in my head. Doom on the other hand I only remember as much about it as I do is because I have played it for countless hours and even then a bunch of the levels kinda blur together.
A modern doom clone with levels that made no attempt to look like real places wouldn't attract near as many players (who aren't already retro fps fans) as something with the visual coherency of Duke or RR.

And I'm not sure I'd even call all of these crap wolfenstein clones retro shooters. Wolfenstein feels like it's a bit to simple for anyone to really want to go back to that style of thing and any game that does feels like a waste. I mean it's basically hovertank 3d with better graphics and almost no one would hovertank a contemporary to doom or quake. Shadow and return of the woolball are the obvious exceptions to this but those games are going for a simpler look, so simpler design plays right into that and being wolfenstein clones was a very good design decision. Plus a lot of the environments still manage to read as places.

This so much.

[NeuralStunner]

I never got into Wolfenstein. I played it in 1992 but got bored very quickly because the game is just inane mazes where you got to shoot Nazis. As a result any game that tries to recreate that feeling has instantly lost my support. It's absolutely not something I enjoy playing.

I always felt the same way, but having ECWolf (map, dedicated strafe keys) takes a lot of the tedium out of it. Secret-hunting is one of the more interesting aspects of it. (Mutants are still one of the most evil things a game developer has ever done.)

Have you played Blake Stone? I think it improves on the formula in pretty much every way. New level elements (triggers, traps, switches, barriers) and more enemy variety. (Plus dudes you shouldn't shoot - less of a mindless "kill everything that moves".) Plus it's brimming with secrets and secrets-within-secrets. I think the only real weak part is the bosses.