- HaI0Fighter92
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- Fabled Mythic Member
"Apparently people don't like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bull-blam!-, then maybe just once, one of them will say, 'Oh! Wait a minute I was wrong.' I live for that happening. Rare, I assure you."-Lemmy of Motorhead
i belive shhave funzes suppos
Yes, I'm the guy who had the Flood admit to being furries.
I've been thinking for a while, almost all the new shooters these days are linear, there's no thought on how or where to progress to finish the level. Just keep slicing bad guys down a very guided route (possibly filled with waypoints) and you win. All buttons you push are marked and require no thought or alternative ways to finish the level (Gow only does this to an extent, the left/right path choices lead to the same path eventually and don't deviate much in how they play).
Linearity isn't always bad, it keeps up the tension when there's always opposition in front of you, which is nice, but it gets old and some games get the idea it needs to be a line and very closed in, so there's little options in flanking, just shoot forward.
Compare them to older shooters like DOOM, Marathon, Duke Nukem 3D, Turok 1 and 2, Blood and to an extent Bioshock(yes, Bioshock is pretty old now :P) and these shooters had a map button or display to help you find your way around, because the level design was not only complex, but realisitc in it's derivative pathways. A spaceship isn't one long twisting corridor, it's multiple rooms, levels, bulkheads, elevators, all interlinked in some fashion. They felt real because you COULD get lost, easily at that. Making it immersive and memorable due to the exploration and pathfinding needed.
I think one of the best and clearcut examples is MAP13 of DOOM II; Downtown. DOOM has very antiqueted graphics, but even with the basic geometry and 16 bit textures, that level almost felt like a real city because it had a realistic layout, not a straight line of buildings you'd see in GoW or CoD. Anyone who's played Marathon knows the levels have an incredible amount of hidden doors, floors, corridors and rooms that took some time to get to and figure out, some of the first levels of Marathon were tiny, but took a good amount of time to get through because of how labyrinthine they were.
And parts of levels didn't get closed off like they always are in modern shooters, you could traverse and backtrack the level if you miss anything, you can't now, which is why people rely on guides now so often, because if they miss that secret, then they need to start the level all over again (and sometimes, the game).
I'm not using nostalgia goggles here, It was clearly more invigorating and thought provoking to have these more open levels that made the user think and figure out how to navigate a world.
I hope the recent rise of retro style shooters and HD/source port projects of older titles make the market think "Hey, let's make a more in depth world, even if this isn't an RPG." People play longer and REMEMBER that world more, making them have that feeling of homeliness(almost, demons don't tend to compliment that well!)
This video illustrates exactly what happened to level design: here (Nice main menu back round though :P)
It's no wonder story/campaign/single player is so throw away these days, it's just a tutorial for the multiplayer or a half baked attempt at story, with mediocre gameplay. Looking at you Halo 4. Though the Broadsword mission was fun. It would have been amazing if we could fly somewhere outside of a trench...