Before you get all up in arms over a recent remark made by Stuart Black, the senior designer of Criterion's Black, allow me to elaborate; the Destructoid headline character limit, she is a cruel mistress. Speaking to OXM, Black -- the man, not the game (bummer, I know) -- went off on the current line-up of shooters.
"There's a lot of cover-based shooters out at the moment. But when a guy hunkers down behind something, you've just got to sit there and wait for him to pop his head up. Pops up, couple of bullets to his head, pops back down again ... and I'm waiting for him to pop back up again? F***ing boring. I can't be bothered hanging around like that."
I'd say that accurately describes the general cover-based shooting experience. What's so great about Black expressing this rather typical outrage with the genre is that he's working on a shooter himself. Whether the project he's attached to ends up being Black 2 or not, it doesn't matter.
You'd think he wouldn't be in the trash-talking mood unless his game was up to snuff, so it'll be infinitely entertaining to see how that goes. Good luck with that!
Black creator: current FPSs are "f***ing boring" [OXM via That VideoGame Blog]
Jordan Devore is Destructoid's PC gaming manager and founding ginger editor. He is said to be easy to love but difficult to know. When Samit inquired about his curious bio photo Jordan simply replied:
"bitches love sandcastles" ... yet, there is no sandcastle in that photo. We may never truly understand his ways.
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Contest:
4:00 AM on 02.24.2010
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I totally agree with this Black fella, the "wait for head to pop up and shoot" mechanic is pretty overdone now, sure, I know people take cover in real life, but cerial, super cerial, I'm kinda bored of that mechanic.
I'm intrigued as to what Black is working on, his comments have coloured me so.
That's how I see it, anyways.
FPS games have lost their charm.
Also he is right. Most shooters are fucking boring.
I know. You just do nothing in a shooter but just shoot at stuff. How boring! Maybe if i can talk someone to death instead.
Also, Black was ok, but this guy needs to have something pretty special up his sleeve, if he's gonna talk shit. Also, cover mechanics made third person shooting work, and made them a hell of a lot of fun - at least in the case of Gears and Uncharted.
-Dynamic Interactive environments (Spec Ops - The Line/Brink/Mirrors Edge)
-Location specific damage (Fallout 3)
-Weapons other than guns and knives (AvP)
-Items/Abilities to enhance gameplay aspects and increase user interactivity with the game world(SS2)
It all comes down to distilling a game down to its basic elements and figuring out ways for the player and AI to exploit those elements to create dynamic situations that encourage player activity. Movement aspects like speed and momentum, visual properties like the player camera and the way the player can view objects and sprites, AI and how it responds to other AI and specific actions, and player interaction with the game world like leaning on walls, grabbing ledges, etc.
It doesn't take much effort to add more to the FPS genre by design, it's just a lot of work implementing said designs.
Cover IS boring (and stupid, and easy, and enforces regenerating health with no risk) and it's about time people wise up to it!
And what the fuck man? The guy who made the game Black is called Black? Guy's got a big ego.
@Gene Eric
Ah, so you finally came back after a six month hibernation?
The environments weren't as destructible as they claimed and you could always tell what was and what wasn't destructible because every thing had graphical breaks in them, the points where things would be destroyed at or reduced to.
Also, while I don't care about jumping too much in most FPS it was a little aggravating in Black when I'd come across obstacles that were only about shin high and couldn't just walk over them and since there was no jumping you'd have walk around it even though logically you should be able to just step over the god damn thing.
Then there was the rather blank and vague story to go along with the game. It wasn't a bad game, but it wasn't a great game either.
How many FPS's use a cover system? How many of them are any good, or boring? Why doesn't this guy distinguish between 3rd person shooters and FPS's? Oh right, PR talk to "cover" for his utterly average previous game.
I would love a sequel to BLACK, its not a great game but opening doors with a shotgun, and watching debris literally fly everywhere, glass, dust, bricks smoke all going off at once made for a pretty game. I also liked the soft focus when you reloaded....but I guess thats just me.
Yeah, that would be an awesome idea. Remember in MGS3 where you had to fight The End? That was brilliantly done and it felt so good to finally take him down.
I don't know if this has been used in any third person shooters, but in order to solve the "cheating" issue of being able to see around walls and such from a third person perspective, the game should utilize a "cone" radius which projects from the character's eye vision. Think of it as fog of war in rts games. Anything that is in the character's vision range is in color and anything that isn't in range is in gray and only shows what he saw the last time. For example, let's say that in Gears of War, you run up to a small wall and hide behind it, when you hide behind the wall, your character's back is against the wall, so the character can't see any behind the wall. From the player's perspective, pretty much everything is in gray since your character is facing the camera sort of. So when you ran up to the wall, you saw an enemy at the bottom of some staircase walking up. When you hide behind the wall, the enemy is gray color and is "frozen" at the bottom of the staircase. When you turn around and climb over the wall, the image of the gray enemy at the bottom of the staircase is gone and you immediately see that the enemy is now at the top of the staircase.
Fuck, that was kind of hard to explain, I hope I didn't confuse anyone.
Isn't that what multiplayer is for?
You explained that really well, i get it and think it's a fucking brilliant idea! Somethig like that would really push forward the realism in 3rd person games a whole lot.
Me likey.
The fact is that there are lots of elements of any game of this type that aren't "realistic":
The ability to run around for as long as you like, with no compromise on your ability to aim down the sight and shoot perfectly every time. In real life you'd get tired and your aim would suffer.
Never mind the fact that every game on the market has a maximum of three states: Alive, crawling on the ground, or dead. You never get shot in the arm and drop your weapon, or get shot in the leg and have any issue with sprinting to a cover point.
Never mind the fact that you reload and that clip half full of bullets you dropped magically reappears in your bullet total.
So if you wanted to pick apart realism in third-person shooters (or pretty much any shooter) you could make a huge list pretty quickly. Often there are programming, or enjoyment constraints to implementing these.
What you do have there though, is a cool idea for a gameplay mechanic that is also more realistic.
Yeah that's a silly thing to say. Fact is that's how combat in most shooters is done with a few exceptions because it's representative of real life. Unless you have some crazy super powers or something. Or it's Halo on anything but Legendary.
But fuck that I wanna know if a Black sequel is coming out or not. Christ.
Oh hi. I missed the fun times here.
i'm just saying that if you want to freshen up the FPS experience, stop throwing henchmen at me. make every battle a boss battle. it's a simple matter of quality over quantity.
You also have to consider that this trash talk is coming from the guy that made "Black", a completely mediocre shooter than did absolutely nothing to change the genre in any way. This guy is seriously a dumb fuck and if he doesn't make the best game ever then I reserve the right to slap him in the face the next time he talk about how bored he is when he plays video games.
It's refreshing to hear an unapologetic declaration of happiness with the shooter genre. There has tended to be a lot of snooty anti-FPS posteuring in the gaming world of late, and it's nice to see an unabashed positive appraisal of what the majority of gamers are actually saying with their wallets.
Regardless, Tribes was the best FPS evar. No exceptions.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate shooters that much, but the design of shooters now days is some crazy blend of pegging it to the next check point while attempting to dodge bullets that are impossible to avoid so you can find cover and heal up.
Since shooter titles sell by the bucket load, it seems the perfect place to try doing new things like Left 4 Dead or Mass Effect. But we still get trashy FPS games that bring the whole lot down like a wave of bad platforming games on the SNES.
Console shooters didn't exist until the 360?
Are you joking?
I agree with your other points but I don't understand your first sentence.