How an FPS Should (and Shouldn’t) Reward Experience

While I’m not the Valve-only gamer I was a few years ago, I do seem to always find myself coming back to Valve’s pre-eminent titles. No matter how many times I grow tired of their old games and branch out in the hopes of finding similar but fresh content, I always eventually come crawling back for more Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress or Counter-Strike. Recently I took a bit of time to try and puzzle out just what exactly Valve had done to continually attract me so. And I think I’ve figured it out. The single best thing about Valve games in… [Continue Reading]

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On Stealth

Stealth and Shooters have always been strange bedfellows ever since they first met. On one hand the genres don’t appear to mesh well, what with your standard FPS starring a one-man army who plows through hundreds of mooks with an ever-increasing assortment of deadly weapons, and stealth involving slow, laborious sneaking past individual guards and relying on not making sound or setting off alarms. On the other hand, that’s exactly why stealth games have a dedicated niche fanbase, exactly because it goes against the conventions of the genre and uses the core elements of an FPS in a creative new… [Continue Reading]

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On Melee

First-person shooters have always loved the melee weapon, even as they render it essentially obsolete. No amount of situationality can prevent the visceral joy of beating something to death (especially something wielding real guns) with the bludgeoning instrument of the dev’s choice. Melee hasn’t changed very much since the early years of Doom and Wolfenstein. It often has the following upsides: · First or second weapon found in the game, if not just equipped from the beginning · no ammunition required to use · sometimes makes less noise than other weapons, or other unique combat advantages (usability underwater for example) · sometimes… [Continue Reading]

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On Fire

  Flames are weird in video games. In real-life, they’re impossibly debilitating and would make continuing to do anything, much less fighting other people, an excruciating experience. Also, real-life flamethrowers can shoot yards of deadly liquid flames that put every video-game flamethrower to shame. In video games you generally want the players to still be functional and you want flamethrowers to fill the “close-range combat” role, so these aspects of flamethrowers are often toned down. You can read more about it on the TV Tropes page Video Game Flamethrowers Suck. Monolith Production’s Blood was the first game to have afterburn,… [Continue Reading]

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On Grenades

    Let’s cut right to the chase: Grenades were famously removed from Team Fortress 2. Why? I’ll let Adrian Finol of the Hydro Developer Commentary speak for me: One of the main changes between Team Fortress Classic and Team Fortress 2 was the removal of thrown grenades. Most classes could carry a standard hand grenade along with a secondary grenade, tied more closely to the class. Team Fortress 2’s focus on unique class roles led us to notice that the standard hand grenade was a more powerful combat decider than some of the primary weapons. This made the classes… [Continue Reading]

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On Double- and Single-Barelled Shotguns

Not really TF2-related, but I thought I might take this opportunity to talk about a trend in shooters I’ve noticed. Loads of games seem to like giving you two shotguns, one of which is pretty much twice as good as the other. The Ur-Example is probably Doom II, which introduced as its only new weapon to the franchise a double-barrel shotgun, which was the first weapon in the game to have a clip you had to reload (which really cast an odd light on all the weapons in Doom I, I guess that pistol can carry 200 rounds without having… [Continue Reading]

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