That sort of manic movement is, I think, what really sets apart the elite FPS players of the Doom, Quake, and UT era (and the games in the same vein) from folks in the CoD/Halo games.
Also, the level design is pretty much strictly better, because it mattered a lot more. With regenerating health and lots of ammo/easy pickups, you no longer have to be quite so careful when putting together a level, because you know that if the give the player X seconds of time without suffering everything will be okay.
> That sort of manic movement is, I think, what really sets apart the elite FPS players of the Doom, Quake, and UT era
In those days, my friends and I used to get into UT quite a lot. Most of the more experienced UT players I watched would use the double-tap of the left/right arrow button to trigger the short sideways leap as a means of rounding a corner (for a better chance of surprising an enemy), or to make it harder for an enemy to keep a bead on them when they were being fired on. I was always surprised at how - to me at least - this simple mechanic made such a difference to how dynamic the combat felt.
Watching the Quake video brought back memories of playing the Action Quake 2 mod, where the entire gameplay mechanics revolved around jumping and shooting.
By default it also moves fairly slowly, but the player is strongly encouraged and almost forced to use bunny-hopping to gain extreme agility and speed. Most youtube LPs showcase this quite well. "Asylum" and "Snowy Bridge" are imo the highpoint levels to watch for this.
There's an entire genre that's about maneuverability as defense: "bullet hell" shootemups. (Also known as "danmaku" or "curtain fire".) You know, the ones about flying a little spaceship through these huge, complicated patterns of slow-moving bright pink bullets.
And my experience of playing Dark Souls was all about "dodging around like a maniac and not being where enemies were putting their weapons".
I mean, if you want to constrain it to FPSs, yeah, there's not much like it. But there are a hell of a lot of games whose primary strategy is "Be Where The Bullets Are Not".
That's Dark Souls 2. Dodging in DaS1 is less I AM FUCKING INVINCIBLE and more I AM INVINCIBLE for a very short amount of time and oh please please let me be out of range by the time my limited invincibility frames run out, plus your dodge is shorter and you can wear a lot less stuff before your rolls get slow. The only way to get DaS2-like dodging in DaS1 is with the dark wood grain ring.
On the other hand, you can parry much more reliably in 1 and I've killed dark knights simply by parrying them 4 times successively. Or you can backstab, since the enemies don't turn as quickly as they do in 2.
I'll agree that a lot of strategy in DaS 1 and 2 comes from careful positioning, given that replenishing your health puts you at a considerable danger while you sit immobile drinking estus and can be interrupted at any time by an attack. However, I find that the two games have a definitely different feel to them, even though they're woven from the same cloth. Another thing is that the camera in DaS2 is much, much faster, due to being truly mouse controlled - you can turn as fast as you can swing your mouse (I still recommend using AutoHotkey to bind mouse buttons to keyboard buttons because otherwise you get lag on attack, due to the game waiting a frame or two to check if you're not double-clicking, since you can bind different actions on single and double click; it's not the end of the world, but it's annoying). In 1, not only is m+kb absolutely unworkable, the mouse has a negative acceleration applied and you can't turn any faster than with a joypad.
I like both, but if you play a long enough time these small differences start getting really obvious.
Also, I haven't seen someone mention the Serious Sam games, so there.
Actually I've only one I've been playing is DS1. As an armor-avoidant high dex thief type because that's generally my play style - see my love of being a tiny spaceship dodging giant bullets. Non-boss combat consists mostly of me rolling around like crazy until I can backstab. Also mouse and keyboard isn't any kind of option because I do 90% of my gaming on a console.
And that's somehow not super annoying and unreliable? What about titanite demons or bonewheels or mobs ganging on you? What about those tiny tiny ledges in Sen's? What about the archers in Anor Londo? What about the spiders and the mosquitoes and those toxic-spitting things in Blighttown? What about the demonic dogs? What about tiny spaces? Capra Demon?
Er.. I'm not expecting an answer to all of those, but I am curious how you pull off the playstyle in general. Do you mostly use ranged attacks?
I'm not saying it's impossible. Heck, there's speedruns where you can see people just rushing past every enemy and then stabbing the boss in the butt (i.e. the one true strategy for every boss in DaS) with some minmaxed weapon.
I guess I'm just noting it won't be fun for me to play that way at all. Well both not fun and nearly impossible.
Ranged attacks are a definite part of it! I love sneaking around and sniping and am generally peeved that it refuses to let me do that to bosses. I was ECSTATIC when I finally found the dude in the undead burg who sold me a bow. Blighttown bugs, I deal with by a combo of shield and a targeted magic missile; I diversified into a few experimental spells and liked that.
I also haven't played in a while; I got to a point where I couldn't make serious progress in any of the avenues currently open to me, and then the keeper of the initial bonfire got killed, and I accidentally used what the internet tells me is the only item that could bring her - and the flame - back. I really didn't want to continue and I also really didn't feel like starting fresh.
Also use the environment! Pull gangs of mobs into a place where there's room to pick them off one by one, or just circle around and lose them. Aggro a mob, vanish around a corner, and beat heck out of it as it rounds the corner and tries to figure out where you are. Hell, I cleaned out ALL the dragons in the dragon valley by cheerfully abusing having an arrow range longer than their aggro distance...
the Descent series is all about this, even in multiplayer.
Here's a video of two of the best players in the world: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8eCULTB3IQ (with audio commentary from some of the other best players, starting at around 7%.)
> That reminded me that Descent is the only game to really* make me feel nauseous - great game though!*
What a coincidence, I mentioned Descent's notorious nausea inducing properties on HN a few days ago.
The version I played was on the Playstation One. Because I was resident in Britain I was playing an incomplete NTSC to PAL conversion. This resulted in noticeable object warping if you did a barrel roll. I swear it intensified the effects.
By contrast DOOM on either PS1 or PC wouldn't make me sea-sick at all.
Many people are under the impression that Descent is no longer playable. I was under that impression until a year ago -- it had quit working when I switched to Windows XP.
Thankfully, due to the hard work of several people, Descent runs beautifully on modern hardware.
FWIW: the guys behind Miner Wars (Keen Software House) are working on a new game, Space Engineers, which has full 3D, Decent-like movement. The game is more about construction than combat, though weapons exist in the game. It's currently in beta, but they have been consistently cranking out weekly updates. One of the more tantalizing features they want to add: in-game C# scripting so players can automate a lot of the functionality and build their own communications systems.
Painkiller does feel more like Doom than most other more modern FPSs, but I never felt like the bunny hopping really measured up evasion wise.
The game that I felt captured this dynamic really well, at least in multiplayer deathmatches, was Half-Life. You were surprisingly zippy, and the long jump module gave you a lot of ability to get out of where you were in a hurry. I enjoyed this sort of dynamic because it played well to my strengths. Having mediocre aim but being able to dodge well worked out okay in this setting. Doom and Half-Life are probably the only shooters I've ever been decent at.
You should try out the Marathon series then (the precursors to Halo from Bungie, sort of set in the same universe). They are available in open source at:
I wholeheartedly agree. I love Painkiller as well, but it (the original, at least) never quite got "maneuverability as defense" right in my opinion. I think one reason for this is the integration with the Havok physics engine. The character would often become stalled on debris from broken crates, vases, etc. Stairs were also an issue.
If anyone else is into these kinds of shooters, and wants to try more recent titles, I also highly recommend both Hard Reset (2011) and Shadow Warrior (2013) by Flying Wild Hog. I believe some of the developers were part of the original Painkiller team.
There is a critical gap between the sensibilities of Doom/Quake/Duke and Painkiller/Serious Sam: level flow. The latter camp is in varying degrees a series of rooms you get locked into as enemies spawn in waves. The former involves navigating a highly varied environment as you attract the attention of pre-existing enemies.
Sure, on the avatar scale, they play at a similar level. The environments are what really set the earlier generation apart, and in that respect very little approaches that sort of design.
Painkiller sometimes does that, but other times it gives you levels like Docks, where as much vertical traversal is expected as horizontal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-0yJ2V41Jk
I'll happily agree that Painkiller has some more variation then SS, but on the whole it's much more focused with wave-based arenas. This isn't a knock against Painkiller at all, it's a favorite of mine - yet it's still a bit inaccurate to regard it as classical level design.
It's a shame that T:A is an online-only free-to-play game, meaning that developer Hi-Rez tightly controls distribution and servers and thus hobbles the modding community.
Interesting article. I played with making Doom levels back in the day and it wasn't exactly easy. The tools (DEU, DETH, etc.) were generally clunky DOS apps that resembled very simplified CAD programs. Documentation was non-existent or spotty at best, so you really had to spend a lot of time figuring out how to do simple things. It would easily take you months to ramp up and start building levels that were more complex than two rooms with a door (and even that was pretty complex to figure out the right line defs, sectors, actions, etc. to just make a door work!). This was before the web took off so you couldn't just Google for a Stackoverflow answer when you got stuck!
Duke Nukem 3D and the Build engine were pretty interesting for level creation. The game engine included the editor so you could actually drop into a mode where you walk through the level and directly modify textures, floor/ceiling height, etc. Was a very cool experience at the time.
The Wolfenstein Map Builder on the other hand was really easy and straightforward. I spend a lot of time building maps with that. Especially silly ones with a lot of hidden corridors (space bar on the wall). First "map" I ever built was just a big room filled with treasure :P
Granted Wolfenstein was a much simpler game. But man I spend hours with that editor.
Having submitted myself through the same process but with modern tools (see DoomBuilder and XWE) and Google, I can only concur. Anything more complicated than room-corridor-room winds up being a major pain in the ass. :)
That was part of the point: back then things weren't supposed to be easy nor documented and investing months to really learn how the intricate details of a Doom map worked paid off in giving us years of fun creating our own levels and episodes.
I just finished reading David Kushner's Masters of Doom, which tells the story of DOOM development, as well as the id software story around it. It was well-written and thoroughly researched story, should be a good read for many in here.
Fair warning though, if you don't want to see the dark side of your heroes maybe skip it. Because the book is very thourough and they did some morally questionable things. Repeatedly. I was horrified. I thought maybe some of it is not true but then no one sued for defamy.
Well, there was a definite rocker component to their actions, something possibly not compatible with the idea of programming idol. At least the number of times breaking keyboards was mentioned was quite high ;).
I think I missed the meeting that established the criteria for a "programming idol" :P
The guys back in the old id were rockstars - plain and simple. They were trailblazing an entire new industry and setting a lot of firsts. Now that the gaming industry is more "mature", the major players are more relaxed, trying to show their artistic side, and no one's smashing keyboards or putting their coworker's bloody heads on sticks as easter eggs[0].
What a great analysis. I'd like to see stuff like this on other games : what about shooters with instant-hit and slow physics where the player is still definitely NOT a tank (2-3 bullets from most guns will kill you), still capturing the same sense of gameplay-over-narrative and experience diversity -- Counter-Strike. In fact, I'd like to see an article like this on every archetypal shooter type. Goldeneye, Halo, System Shock, Counter-Strike... does anyone know of more game analysis like this?
re: how mod-friendly Doom was, Portal 2's simplified level editor (released 2012, after this was written) was pretty well-done--only exposed a tiny fraction of the things one could do, of course, but enough to build real puzzles, and with just enough default visual interest that the product didn't necessarily look awful.
Of the user-made levels, it's surprising how many used the full level editor anyway--even though, as the post notes, building levels ain't quite as simple as it was in the Doom days. User-made level gallery:
There is one level with a Cathedral.... you walk in through the entrance to see a few dozen imps standing at pews, and there are a couple of Knights of Hell and a Baron on the front stage giving a sermon.
The mock up was pleasingly realistic, then I noticed that the crucifix on the front wall was inverted.
It's helpful to have dates on things that aren't "news". If (for example) a doom-like game had become extremely popular in 2012, the [2010] tag would give readers more context so they know why it's not mentioned.
Speedrun of Dead Simple from Doom 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfijpjvS9Q8&feature=player_de...
Quake Done Quick: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpiNDxssUL0
~
That sort of manic movement is, I think, what really sets apart the elite FPS players of the Doom, Quake, and UT era (and the games in the same vein) from folks in the CoD/Halo games.
Also, the level design is pretty much strictly better, because it mattered a lot more. With regenerating health and lots of ammo/easy pickups, you no longer have to be quite so careful when putting together a level, because you know that if the give the player X seconds of time without suffering everything will be okay.