Through the Lens: Video Games - Game Design Theory - page 119

FPS Games

Examples: Doom , Halo , Quake , Team Fortress 2 , Battlefield, , GoldenEye 64

First-person shooters are the games I probably have the most experience
with. As early as 1994, I hooked up two PCs (a 486 and a 386) by way of
their soundcards' serial ports in order to play Doom multiplayer. I played
a lot, and these led to some of my earliest forays into some light game
design in the form of level designs for Doom . Since then, I've always had
an FPS game icon (or several) on my desktop ready to go at a moment's
notice.
As with the other genres, two major subgenres have developed. One
is the high-damage precision-based games with more realistic guns,
such as Counter-Strike or Day of Defeat , and the other is an older, slight-
ly more arcade-like style with high health, fast movement, and imagi-
nary, exotic guns (i.e., Quake , Halo , and Unreal Tournament ). The latter
style is often a bit more of a simulation, oftentimes loosely simulating a
real conflict In fact, the US Army created an FPS game called America's
Army that is very much a literal simulator.
Besides these two subgenres, there are also FPS games that are more
creative and game-like. If you read the sections on sports games or rac-
ing games, you can probably already tell which of these I think is the
better route for a game designer. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Ditch Silly Conventions
The FPS genre is a genre of many silly conventions. Among these are
health and weapon pickups, armor, and respawn locations. The health
and weapon pickups are small boxes that are located in specific places
around the map that either give you health or a new weapon. They're
stupid to different degrees depending on the game, but they're almost
always bad. In old deathmatch-style games, weapons were found in spe-
cific locations. Often, these locations would be camped (kept under sur-
veillance) by a player so that another player couldn't get to them. The
items respawn after about 30 seconds or so once they're picked up, so
what can happen is you'll be in a duel with another player, and the health
or weapon just happens to respawn next to your opponent while he or
she is near it. The other player picks the health up and wins the match.
Now, it would be one thing if the game was about positioning: mov-
ing each other in such a way so as to move your opponent out of the
range of the pickup. But this is instead a vestigial design element that's
there just because it is. It should be rigorously questioned before going
into your game design.