At the time it came out Doom was pretty revolutionary.
True. It can't be overstated how much people just did not know how to design control schemes at all back then, and past that Doom required the creation of a bunch of innovative math to make its graphics work.
Also the gameplay hold up surprisingly well for how old it is,
No, that style of game is painfully awful and clunky, even with the later improvements that fixed absurd things like mouse-based movement.
there’s a whole sub genre of indie games replicating it.
Things being a genre isn't necessarily good. "There is a linear sequence of pictures and you press forward and that's it there's no mechanics or interactivity" is a genre. "Clone of a dogshit phone game that was a clone of a dogshit flash game from the early 2000s" is a genre. "RPGMaker game" is a genre.
I mean bad as they are boomer shooters aren't as bad as VNs, mobile games, or RPGMaker games, but still.
No, that style of game is painfully awful and clunky, even with the later improvements that fixed absurd things like mouse-based movement.
You’re wrong. Doom specifically had what would become the default version of non clunky controls. It wasn’t the first, but it was the first time the majority of people experienced something other than using key look.
The game itself was also notably faster in play than anything else. It made build engine games look slow for Christ sake.
Doom would be the fastest, slickest experience until quake came out and actually felt buttery.
What are you comparing doom to that it comes out clunky?
Doom specifically had what would become the default version of non clunky controls.
I did say it was innovative specifically because of how there just was no actual established knowledge of how to design a control scheme yet, for all that it was still awful.
The game itself was also notably faster in play than anything else. It made build engine games look slow for Christ sake.
Doom would be the fastest, slickest experience until quake came out and actually felt buttery.
My argument is that it hasn't aged well and the entire boomer shooter genre is shitty nostalgia bait, not that the standard when it came out wasn't even worse.
What are you comparing doom to that it comes out clunky?
Things that aren't shitty antiquated sprite shooters with like 3 fps animations and mouse-based movement?
Like Half Life slaps the piss out of Doom style games, and Half Life is unplayably clunky now. Half Life 2 was another massive step up, and is unplayably clunky now. Hell, even Halo was seen as groundbreaking for its time, and Halo is an awful game with shit core gameplay.
On account of it being a bad game with shit core gameplay. Like yeah it did this or that new and introduced such and such mechanical concepts, but it's just not good. It's got that thing old games did where bullets leave the barrel at a 45 degree angle at random so the standard bloom is physically larger than the enemy models, it's janky af, and the levels are repetitive and bland. And before you go "well clearly you just don't remember it very well" I played it again last year, it took two hours to run through the whole thing, and it was a miserable experience. It's just a bad game both design-wise and mechanically.
Like it's everything I hated about FPSes back in its era, and playing it again reminded me how much the general body of game design knowledge has improved in the past twenty years.
I don't know. Crysis of all things held up reasonably well when I played it five or six years ago, though its sequels were kind of shit (and its plot is pure Bush-era chauvinist lunacy). Any "bullets go where you point them and bloom happens after sustained rapid shots" game necessarily does gunplay better than Halo did. Ironically Destiny 2 has very good core gameplay, despite ultimately coming from Halo and for all its other problems.
Really I just think most games from the Bush era were just plain bad. They were overwhelmingly fascist wank with mid mechanics: the bizarre and experimental mechanical complexity of some of the late 90s games (not FPSes; 90s FPSes were all awful) was being abandoned in favor of a more standardized and basic form with shitty early 3d graphics eating up progressively more of their labor budgets and needing to be accommodated. And the shitty, shitty FPSes of that era were almost all following directly in Halo's footsteps creating bland linear corridors with bad gunplay and Fascist plots.
Can you give me an example of bizarre and experimental gameplay that wasn’t present in 90s fpses?
Sorry for all the questions. This went from being a chance interaction with a person of bad takes to a meeting with a human whose experiences are so psychedelically different from my own that it just prompts further investigation.
Can you give me an example of bizarre and experimental gameplay that wasn’t present in 90s fpses?
I meant weird complexity and people just throwing shit at the wall in other genres, in RPGs and strategy games, where they were just kind of randomly throwing a kitchen sink of ideas into mechanics that were mostly under the hood or represented through numbers more than visuals. MUD/MUSH games did a lot of that, and were free to do it since they were just text. Daggerfall did a ton of amazingly ambitious and weird things that didn't really work in practice but were at least bold ideas (and it was also a completely broken, garbage game mechanically, which hurt it more than anything else did). The Fallout games did a ton that just wasn't being done for over a decade after them (although both FO1 and FO2 have the absolute worst interfaces I've ever seen, wrapping back around to the point that there just really was no accumulated knowledge about how to make games playable or create usable controls and interfaces yet). A lot of that went away over the Bush era as games were pared down and most of the weird and complex shit wound up in indie passion projects like Dwarf Fortress (and I mean Dwarf Fortress suffers for its obsessive simulationism and complete lack of concern for gameplay mechanics or playability, but goddamn if it isn't weird and complex). It took so long for that to start coming back, at which point it started being done right as well.
Like, the state of things back then was so bad that Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines stands head and shoulders above its contemporary RPGs, despite being a half-finished and janky mess with absolutely dogshit gunplay (pretty similar to Halo's, really), simply because it focused on complexity and storytelling in a genre that had completely abandoned both of those things. Does it hold up now? Not at all, it's a problematic mess, but it was amazing for its time. FO:NV would be the next real standout RPG, that's how big of a drought there was then (and it also, despite its infamously bad gunplay due to being a Bethesda-engine game, had better gunplay than Halo).
True. It can't be overstated how much people just did not know how to design control schemes at all back then, and past that Doom required the creation of a bunch of innovative math to make its graphics work.
No, that style of game is painfully awful and clunky, even with the later improvements that fixed absurd things like mouse-based movement.
Things being a genre isn't necessarily good. "There is a linear sequence of pictures and you press forward and that's it there's no mechanics or interactivity" is a genre. "Clone of a dogshit phone game that was a clone of a dogshit flash game from the early 2000s" is a genre. "RPGMaker game" is a genre.
I mean bad as they are boomer shooters aren't as bad as VNs, mobile games, or RPGMaker games, but still.
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You’re wrong. Doom specifically had what would become the default version of non clunky controls. It wasn’t the first, but it was the first time the majority of people experienced something other than using key look.
The game itself was also notably faster in play than anything else. It made build engine games look slow for Christ sake.
Doom would be the fastest, slickest experience until quake came out and actually felt buttery.
What are you comparing doom to that it comes out clunky?
I did say it was innovative specifically because of how there just was no actual established knowledge of how to design a control scheme yet, for all that it was still awful.
My argument is that it hasn't aged well and the entire boomer shooter genre is shitty nostalgia bait, not that the standard when it came out wasn't even worse.
Things that aren't shitty antiquated sprite shooters with like 3 fps animations and mouse-based movement?
Like Half Life slaps the piss out of Doom style games, and Half Life is unplayably clunky now. Half Life 2 was another massive step up, and is unplayably clunky now. Hell, even Halo was seen as groundbreaking for its time, and Halo is an awful game with shit core gameplay.
Wait hold on a second. How are you saying that halo is a bad game with shit core gameplay?
On account of it being a bad game with shit core gameplay. Like yeah it did this or that new and introduced such and such mechanical concepts, but it's just not good. It's got that thing old games did where bullets leave the barrel at a 45 degree angle at random so the standard bloom is physically larger than the enemy models, it's janky af, and the levels are repetitive and bland. And before you go "well clearly you just don't remember it very well" I played it again last year, it took two hours to run through the whole thing, and it was a miserable experience. It's just a bad game both design-wise and mechanically.
Like it's everything I hated about FPSes back in its era, and playing it again reminded me how much the general body of game design knowledge has improved in the past twenty years.
Okay so what would you say is a good shooter with good core gameplay?
I don't know. Crysis of all things held up reasonably well when I played it five or six years ago, though its sequels were kind of shit (and its plot is pure Bush-era chauvinist lunacy). Any "bullets go where you point them and bloom happens after sustained rapid shots" game necessarily does gunplay better than Halo did. Ironically Destiny 2 has very good core gameplay, despite ultimately coming from Halo and for all its other problems.
Really I just think most games from the Bush era were just plain bad. They were overwhelmingly fascist wank with mid mechanics: the bizarre and experimental mechanical complexity of some of the late 90s games (not FPSes; 90s FPSes were all awful) was being abandoned in favor of a more standardized and basic form with shitty early 3d graphics eating up progressively more of their labor budgets and needing to be accommodated. And the shitty, shitty FPSes of that era were almost all following directly in Halo's footsteps creating bland linear corridors with bad gunplay and Fascist plots.
Can you give me an example of bizarre and experimental gameplay that wasn’t present in 90s fpses?
Sorry for all the questions. This went from being a chance interaction with a person of bad takes to a meeting with a human whose experiences are so psychedelically different from my own that it just prompts further investigation.
I meant weird complexity and people just throwing shit at the wall in other genres, in RPGs and strategy games, where they were just kind of randomly throwing a kitchen sink of ideas into mechanics that were mostly under the hood or represented through numbers more than visuals. MUD/MUSH games did a lot of that, and were free to do it since they were just text. Daggerfall did a ton of amazingly ambitious and weird things that didn't really work in practice but were at least bold ideas (and it was also a completely broken, garbage game mechanically, which hurt it more than anything else did). The Fallout games did a ton that just wasn't being done for over a decade after them (although both FO1 and FO2 have the absolute worst interfaces I've ever seen, wrapping back around to the point that there just really was no accumulated knowledge about how to make games playable or create usable controls and interfaces yet). A lot of that went away over the Bush era as games were pared down and most of the weird and complex shit wound up in indie passion projects like Dwarf Fortress (and I mean Dwarf Fortress suffers for its obsessive simulationism and complete lack of concern for gameplay mechanics or playability, but goddamn if it isn't weird and complex). It took so long for that to start coming back, at which point it started being done right as well.
Like, the state of things back then was so bad that Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines stands head and shoulders above its contemporary RPGs, despite being a half-finished and janky mess with absolutely dogshit gunplay (pretty similar to Halo's, really), simply because it focused on complexity and storytelling in a genre that had completely abandoned both of those things. Does it hold up now? Not at all, it's a problematic mess, but it was amazing for its time. FO:NV would be the next real standout RPG, that's how big of a drought there was then (and it also, despite its infamously bad gunplay due to being a Bethesda-engine game, had better gunplay than Halo).