Somewhere around the year 2000, it seems that the makers of first-person shooters got together for a secret gathering (probably somewhere in Oregon) to discuss the future of the beloved FPS genre. Now, at this retreat, between LAN parties, talking about which Hollywood celebrity they’d bang, and shooting BB guns at local fauna, they apparently came to a fateful conclusion: FPS games are too long.

So, they began the process of making the shooters shorter and shorter. Out with the complex, back-tracking and in-depth gameplay of System Shock! In with the run-and-gun-and-yawn of Doom 3! Of course, it would be almost half a decade before their Oregon Pact would come to fruition…games take some time to make, don’tcha know.

And here we are, 2006 years after the birth of Cassius Veronicus (some Roman guy), and when you have a need for some first-person shooting action, what do you do? You go to the store and spend your (or, in some cases, your parents’) hard-earned thirty to sixty bucks to get some right-handed, gun-firing action, and then head home in a state of giddy anticipation (oh, I hope there’s a shotgun in the game!).

After a hastily-eaten dinner you throw the disc into your console or PC, then hope
you didn’t scratch it too much in the throw. Next comes the installation or in the case of consoles, a stupid splash screen that tells you to “Press Start”. You configure a few options, sit back in the chair and start shooting. All right, a pistol at first. Classic. Let’s keep going.

Midnight rolls around and you’re really into it. You keep telling yourself: One more shoot-out and I’ll stop, and, being the responsible acme of evolution that you are, you do.

If the next day’s a work day, you are in a daze waiting for the day to end, so you can get back to it. If the next day’s a weekend, you may shower before you turn on your computer or console, or you might not. Really, it’s up to you. I’m not in the room with you, so stink it up as much as you want.

The second session! A quick loading up of the game, and you’re back into it. All right, all right…things are going good. Hey! These guys are some tough sons of—oh, that’s all I have to do to kill them? Okay, moving on. Hey, this must be the end of the first part; it’s a tough boss battle. Fire a few rockets, keep the SMG firing…okay, down he goes. Good. Never liked that guy. Okay what’s next? What the–? “Lead Programmer: Larry Schultz”? Why am I seeing credits?!

Yes, you just dropped half a C-note for ten, maybe twelve hours of gameplay.

What the f***?

It seems that the Oregon Pact is in effect, as games are getting shorter and shorter. The original System Shock took me two weeks to finish of casual, two-hours-a-night gameplay (of course I was stupdier—er, more stupid back then). Half-Life was a long, on-going affair that when you finished truly felt like you had just done something epic.

Cut to today. Doom 3 I finished in about ten hours, ditto Half-Life 2…both on the hardest available setting. Now, there is something to be said about the fact that I’ve been playing first-person shooters since the original Wolfenstein, and therefore my experience means that I’ll finish games a little faster than others. Still, both those games (and others like FEAR) are becoming little more than rail shooters. What’s a rail shooter, you might ask? A shitty genre that’s all but died out, where the computer does the movement for you (along a “rail”), and you just shoot at enemies as they pop up.

Anyways, the FPS genre is not only milking the same themes over and over (see my last post), but they’re also becoming more and more limiting. In System Shock 2, you had to decide which weapon to use, based on skill. A Hybrid at the end of the corridor could be dealt with in a dozen ways, and none of them a guaranteed win by any stretch. Perhaps avoidance was the best course of action, and you’d double-back and try an alternate route.

In the more modern FPS games, you basically are always being pushed from one doorway to another; there are no real alternate routes beyond maybe going through Room C to get from Room A to B. You also get warnings broadcast to you about upcoming battles, which make them a little less challenging. Usually, the warnings come from the randomly-dropped supply of a specific ammo type. Rockets? Something airborn or really tough. Grenades? Something up ahead is hidden by cover. SMG ammo? A bunch of the weaker-to-moderately tough enemies are going to come streaming at you soon.

It’s time for the companies to start creating games that aren’t so linear, and aren’t so short. Stop spending your time and money creating the Amazing New Lighting Engine or the Awesomely Realistic Physics Engine. At this point, everything’s pretty fucking good in both departments. If you programmers are trying to figure out a way to make dust particles in the air actually swirl around the bullets as they are fired, just stop. Instead, try to figure out a way to give a player five different paths to the next point/objective in the game. Open the vast number of locked doors in the game’s corridor and put alternate routes behind them. Not only will the game be more interesting to play, it will allow for replayability: “Hmm…I went across the bridge last time I played, what happens if I go under the bridge and through the sewer grate this time…?”

Well, that’s enough about that for now. You get the picture. We don’t need a fancier carpet in the hallway; we need a longer damn hallway!

Wow, that metaphor was terrible.

The Monsignor