Why were late-90s FPS games so amazing?

Why were late-90s FPS games so amazing?

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Because games were still largely made by people with passion and more importantly talent.

Because you were young and naive and had no expectations.

They still are.

This.
Rather than trying to "appeal to wider audience", the devs had a very specific target audience to aim at: gamers. They didn't want them to "experience our game", they wanted to CHALLENGE players to beat their game. Game which was usually a product of love, made out of things the devs themselves liked.

This is such a false, shallow assumption.
There's a day and night difference between the 90s shooters and modern counterparts when it comes to level of freedom, balancing and engagement of the games. Something I've noticed more and more nowadays when "going back" to play some older stuff, such as the BLOOD, which I actually beat for the first time last year.

>There's a day and night difference between the 90s shooters and modern counterparts when it comes to level of freedom, balancing and engagement of the games

You can say that again.

How's Turok(2008)?

youtube.com/watch?v=PTMPHzNapYo

why do people still make these threads when they get the same answer every time?

I never liked this third person takedown shit. It wasn't good in Brutal Doom, and it's not good now. If the whole game is in third person, it's fine, but it's lame as fuck when the camera comes out of your body.

Validation. Because DAE?
It also allows them to come to a (possibly valid) solution without considering exceptions or contradictions, like Depth Dwellers.

simple, just gameplay no bloated story or other shit it doesn't need
dynamic, flexible enemies levels weapons and movement

As amazing as it might sound, Sup Forums is not just one person, and it is just a healthy phenomenon for more and more people to kind of "realize" the appeal and truth about ye olde games.

Has any genre regressed as hard as FPS?

turok isn't that great compared to games that were out at the same time. It felt really limited and it doesn't help that the n64 development was prioritized instead of a PC version first.

The most noticeable thing is older shooters from the 90's were mostly corridor room-to-room shooters, you had exploration and some big 'rooms' sure but there was also a lot of narrow spaces like This was a good thing because enemies can be easy to spot or hidden around corners, enemy placement was a huge part of the games. Shit felt tight, fast and fun

These days it's all muh large immersive 3D world and muh sandbox which makes shit way too spaced out and enemy placement suffers due to all the different ways you can approach their spawning area. Now it's like 90% walking simulator and if it's not, it ends up CoD level cut-scenes everywhere and lazy re-spawning enemies to slow you down.

>turok isn't that great compared to games that were out at the same time
Not true. Shit was pretty damn NEXT GEN as fuck at the time. Plus, few people nowadays realize that the Turoks basically played like 3D pseudo-Metroidvanias.

Modern games are made by numales who'd rather make movies but for some reason decided to go into "tech" and now we're stuck with wannabe spielbergs and tarantinos shitting in the well.

Even the shadow warrior remake that people loved was really lame and farty compared to the original.

>muh sandbox
funny, no matter the years of open-world boom, my initial idea of "modern shooters" still is the literal pipe-line corridor shooters like CoD and shit.

Yeah, old FPS games had corridors too, but few of them truly funneled you in such linear fashion. Nor were they "set piece driven" like modern """cinematic""" trash.

That's actually not true.
Old build engine games were mazes with lots of dead ends and keys to find. Much like a small scope metroidvania.

Modern fps are either big kill rooms (shadow warrior remake) where you kill all enemies and then proceed or just a big hose with some smoke and mirrors to make it cinematic (battlefield and call of duty singleplayer), gameplay wise those are basically virtua cop where you can walk around.

The complexity went way down.

3D platforming. Hell, most 3D things barring action really.

What sandbox fps do we currently have, other than Far Cry?

WRPGs

RTS, if we take mobas as a "evolution" of the genre.

You can see the clean generational split between kids that grew up playing D&D and those that didn't. The creators of games in that time already had years of training on how to make a dungeon/game experience engaging.

Games now are hallway walking simulators because this generation has no idea how to create an experience or atmosphere.

And then capitalism came along and sucked the soul out of video games in order to maximize profit, just like it does to everything else.

If anything it shows more of a lack of thought of how to design realitic enviroments and not "a small zone closed off by high walls with lots of waist-high boxes separating you from point A to point B". You don't need to play D&D to know how retarded some level design is.

Good thing we have some great "AA" devs + tons of indie people fighting that cancer off.

turok fucking sucks

Gen Z is really mentally stunted in some regards.
Like to a frightening degree.
Some of them remind me of stoners I met who busted their brains with LSD. Completely circular thought patterns.

Why would you pirate a game that sucks?

This chart would be less retarded if they actually had a CoD single player map on the right rather than an exaggerated mock up. Like pic related.

Sorry, never mind. My reading comprehension sucks.

>muh captalism is bad

bad business practices is the thing to blame here, which in turn was fueled by """people""" who have zero taste in good games and keep buying the same garbage over and over.

everybody will choose the path of least resistance unless their goal tells them to do otherwise, it's natural for companies to capatalize off retards.

What I mean is that this generation literally thinks that a hallway simulator is creating a good game. Making options and using their imagination doesn't even occur to them.

My theory is that they're stunted because all media is force fed to them and easily accessible. They've never had to create because they've been constantly stimulated. They can't picture another world because they've never had to.

Turok 2 Remastered makes my dick so hard holy fuck
Get it on the sale it's a timeless masterpiece

Bump with 90's titty monster

>turrok
>amazing
No it was fun, but it really wasn't amazing by any means.

When will they bring Turok 3 and Rage Wars remastered to PC?

They honed down the formula, and games were still gameplay focused rather than "narrative experiences".

Reminder that at the time, people were growing tired of games like this and WANTED games that were more "cinematic".

Devs also back then wanted to make the game they themselves wanted to play. Not something to appeal to the dumb joe schmoe.

The console market exploding was one of the large reasons for the shift in the market. It made making smaller products from more devoted teams harder to do. Yes, you could do it on the PC market, but that was swallowed by the console market for a long time. If we had the indie development tools and ability for smaller devs to make the games they do now a decade ago? We'd see more innovation and less control by the bigger box companies.

Nevertheless that most of gamings changes occurred from a change of intended market.

Raycast engine games make me nostalgic as FUCK!

RAGE WARRRRRS FUCKKKKKKK
GIVE ME FUCKING RAGE WARRRRRRRS
FUCKING TUROK: QUAKE EDITION
GOD DAMN THE BLACK CARTRIDGE WAS SO FUCKING COOOOOOOOLLLLL

To bad most people couldn't even 100% the game.
kek

Why user?

It's the WoW syndrome. All the casual shitters start crying and all of them are too shortsighted to understand that getting what they demand destroys the game.

Opinions of casual babbys have to be utterly disregarded. If you can't beat a game you need to be told that you fucking suck instead of having the game handed to you.

Games were made by the programmers

Today games are made by "artists"

The NA release (black cart) had a bug making getting a single medal impossible. which prevented you getting 100% of the games stuff. they were fixed, but most didn't even know about the recall (you could mail it in and they'd send you a fixed one).

I have personally no nostalgia for them, but I do like how they feel and look.
Especially BLOOD is practically how I'd assume a slightly more modern Doom game to be like. And how I'd want a modern Doom game to be like.

People grew tired of abstract "game games" and wanted "cinematic games". Now people are tired of "cinematic games" and want a resurgence of "Game games".

Because, in the end, there is nothing wrong with games being innately cinematic or actually attempting to have any sense of story. Does this mean they all need to be? No, and that's the issue.

Because games were made for customers, not shareholders.

You're full of shit. Game companies wanted to make "cinematic" games because they wanted to wank their own egos about being film directors. Gamers always wanted games.

>Gamers always wanted games.
Sales would imply otherwise.

I remember gaming mags always hyping up the next "thinking man's shooter" and "cinematic games". The idea was that these old games were passe, boring, and not as complex as newer games.

Blood was overlooked upon release for instance.

anyone else tired of 2000s kids discussing what things in the 90s were 'really like' when they weren't even sapient?

Blood was overlooked because it was a Build Engine game from 1997.

Games were made back then by people who wanted to play games and wanted to experience something exciting so they put effort into how a texture looked or how a game felt

Today games require so many people that the ceos use an algorithm to hire key designers.
The designers are exactly that, designers. They don't play games, they're experts at drawing. Sometimes it's not even a designer. Its just someone they owed a favor. The mixture of ceos not giving a fuck + autistic gamers who buy games no matter what leaves everyone in the company apathetic. A feminist gets hired to do a major story because she fucked some guy so she sees it as her only chance to "change the world" so she writes some bullshit SJW plot that makes no sense and is more of a lecture than a story.

Apathy
Loyalty
Business philosophy that says it's okay to fuck people over.

X-Com enemy unknown was what i consider the Full Circle.

Remember getting my kiddie child arse handed back to me by it when i was young and when it was released a few years back i could hear my childlike tears haunting me

>Blood was overlooked because it was a Build Engine game from 1997.

And this is the sort of game everyone was excited for. Blood? That's ancient history. But now we have time, so we see that Unreal's graphics aren't that impressive anymore so we can appreciate Blood on a deeper level.

Yeah. It's sad that such mentality is now seeping into AAA gaming industry, with all these "throwback" reboots claiming to be "exactly like in 1990s!!", while they play VERY mid-2010s.

>with all these "throwback" reboots claiming to be "exactly like in 1990s!!", while they play VERY mid-2010s.

Name one.

Doom 4

Shadow Warrior 2013
D44M
nuWolfenstein -games

All play like the originals.

bait

yes, so far as they're in first person (mostly) and you shoot things

Are you implying all 3 of these play anything like CoD or more obviously dull FPS games?

Since that would be a tad disingenuous.

Honestly? I thought all FPS games of the late '90s looked like shit.

It upset me that these ugly games were replacing quality 2D games.

Because they were focused on PC first and consoles second. Even console FPS games were better back in the 90s, because rather than make dumb downed PC FPS games they instead made FPS games that played to the consoles strength by not focusing on twitch shooting.

Turok for example had tons of platforming that was well suited for console games as 3D platformers were huge on consoles at that time. Aiming was also simplified by focusing on body shots, with the enemies being quite large at that.

Created by people with passion, and the fact the tech was so limited forced them to innovate, lest they all become clones of each other.

Tragic irony considering the shooters of today.

>hating the system that made vidya possible in the first place

>muh 3D came to early shitter

2D games had already peaked as proof of 2D games on the PS1 and N64 looking only marginally better than their SNES counterparts. Stop trying to hold back technology.

Game dev nerds from 80s and 90s look like alpha chads compared to numale soy boy cucks from today.

Ill worm ya spaghetti brains into a fine paste ya pinhead

>All play like the originals.
You have clearly never ever even played the originals.

Fuck, are we seriously going to have a 20 year old debate?

There was enough room for 2D and 3D games together at the time. The lack of triple A 2D games in the sixth gen was an embarrassment.

>Are you implying all 3 of these play anything like CoD or more obviously dull FPS games?
No, I'm not implying they play 1:1 LIKE CoD and such. I am saying that they are nothing like their original counterparts, and are heavily rooted to modern, console-game design trends, with their upgrade-trees, cinematic set-pieces, spawning enemy waves you have to fight in small "arenas"... so on and so forth.

nuwolf was damn good
nudoom was honestly trash

i dont know how they managed to flip flop the quality of the games like that since old doom was miles better than wolf 3d

It's so sad that the XL Engine is dead. We could have had an ultra-modern remake of Blood and a structured platform for porting old DOS games, but no, the sole developer (by choice) would rather complain about having to commute to work than release the source code.

I only played Nuwolfand it was just incredibly bland and mediocre so I doubt d44m could be worse

>nuwolf was damn good
>hitscan enemies: the game: the movie ft. obligatory tacked-on stealth and broken AI was good

I'm LMAOing at your life.

Both are shit

...

how far did you get though? it has actual boss fights and cool half life type energy guns with weird uses later and alt fires for every weapon and dual weilding. i wasnt expecting much going in but i was pleasently surprised with the quality. i dont give a shit about polotocs either i just liked playing an american good old boy fucking up nazis.

nudoom on the other hand i had looked forward to and argued would be good but god damn why did they turn doom into some meme push melee to win game and also remove all the punch from the weapons and make the level design shit? i will never understand why v likes this game and not brutal doom because this is more of a modern skin for brutal than actual doom.

they didnt have strict schedules for shoveling out garbage like today.

probably because some smaller competent team had a chance at a dream with nuwolf and made it the best they could while bethesda just wanted a quick paycheck after fallout 4 with nostalgia pandering doom so of course they completely missed the point.

>cool half life type energy guns
>literally just a semi rifle and a assault rifle with different colored tracers and a special attacks t the end that forces you to stare at that wallcock for even longer
>actual boss fights (all of which are shit)

I was gonna reply to the rest of your post but this is enough to prove your taste is absolute shit

They focused more in interactivity and well designed maps over cinematics and garbage that constantly takes control away from the peripherals.

>uses subs instead of dubs and calls my taste shit
g,night everybody.

Vidya would have come to be regardless of the economic or governmental systems in place. Vidya is only entertainment with technology. As technology gets better, people use it for entertainment.

goodnight reddit

JRPG
platformers in general
wrestling
graphical adventure
visual novel
sports

Limitations spur creativity.

Because they were made by people like this.

>subs instead of dubs
>bad

Poor quality bait.

Most were absolute garbage, but the genre had it's highs among the lows

modern FPSes removed the really shit trends, like harmless bulletsponge enemies and swer levels but also the good stuff like more than 2 enemy types and levels that aren't hallways

I don't think just playing D&D makes you smart or anything, but having good ideas about how to engage people and knowing when and how to force an engagement with what options is an important aspect of game design, both for vidya and tabletop RPGs.
Lately I've been meaning to read the DMG for my Pathfinder group because my DM, while a great guy, hasn't had a whole lot of luck coming up with new ideas for a campaign and the writing for Starfinder's Incident on Absalom Station is just BAD when it comes to the bottlenecking. You learn a lot about engaging people in a game as a DM, or even as a player hearing stories about campaigns and silently judging how your DM stacks up against others.
TL:DR Learning how to engage a player is something a good D&D player should pick up. That's not even a priority among devs these days, and the ones who do are heralded as gods (Hideki Kamiya, Todd Howard) despite other critical shortcomings in their approach to game design.

...

RPGs seriously. We started with Ultima, wizardry, M&M etc now skyrim is the gold standard...

>stare at that wallcock for even longer
drawing a penis with the plasma cutter was literally the first thing i did when i got it in wolf