By Hic on 11.10.06 9:51 am

I’m certainly no 360 fanboy, and I’ve not played a game by Epic in years; but this is the first game to use their U3 tech, and (honestly…from a former game developer’s perspective) the Unreal Engine 3 is the most exciting thing for me since I saw it demo’d to me privately at Epic’s closed booth at GDC in 2004.

Chris, as a tinkerer of tech, if/when you get your hands on the new editor, you’re going to platz yourself.

But back to the real meat of your post: are all FPS just another FPS? No. All games are different. Certain gameplay loops cross over from game to game and those things, those actions confine that game into it’s genre. Many people think that if a game falls into any genre that it’s trite, derivitive, or an instance of sequelitis. There has to be a certain level of familiarity with the interface of a game for it to be playable, and so we make games that are sorta like previous games. If every game went for a completely new interface every time, gamers would become frustrated, and many would say “this sucks, and you only made it different to say that it was different”.

Is GeOW another Halo? No. Is Halo 2 another Halo? Weeellllllll…..No? (as in: I’m saying ‘no’ with no confidence behind it). To someone who doesn’t enjoy that sort of game experience, they identify the type of gameplay that they can/could have, they try to relate it to previous games of it’s kind that they don’t enjoy playing and write it off as one that they won’t play. To someone who does enjoy that kind of game experience, it’s much easier to pick through the details and notice all the miniscule differences that distinguish this title from previous titles of the same genre.

Hell, I bet a Madden fan could tell you a dozen ways that 07 is better or different than 06. To me, though, I can’t tell any difference between Madden07 and 10-Yard Fight for the NES. Are they football games? Yep. Do I like football games? Nope. Thus, I will say to others on the interweb that they are the same.

By TL on 11.10.06 2:20 pm

Aw man, I really hope you can sort this one out in our lifetime. Really, I do. The suspense alone is raping me like a dead horse.

By edgar on 11.10.06 3:19 pm

i will reserve judgement until i’ve seen it …

but comparisons to halo are less than stellar imo. i’ve always been a big anti-halo guy because halo is (despite the hailing of the masses) mediocre at best. level design, backstory, weapons, characters, etc … halo/halo 2 are 5-10 years too late imo.

if halo woulda come out back in 1998 – i woulda loved it. maybe it’s just because the gaming (console) masses didn’t touch an fps until halo … i dunno – but as i watched my friends play a halo 4-way deathmatch on the same tv screen (tiny viewing area, no element of surpise since your enemies are watching your view area) i lol’d and remembered superior classics such as quake 3 arena, unreal tournament, and half-life (all of which came out a couple years before halo).

maybe we can all just chalk it up to marketing and/or console pleasibility – but talk to anyone that played (with any kind of depth/regularity) pc-based fps’s in the mid-late 90s and you’ll be hard-pressed to find one that has anything positive to say about halo.

i think a lot of people say GoW is like halo only because that’s the only fps they’ve ever played (and i guess i’d also love halo if it’d been the only fps i’d ever played).

but halo is halo … GoW is GoW … unreal engine 3 is wicked shiny, and if the game is actually scary (not just gory/corny) then i can only hope for a pc-port

By Chris on 11.10.06 8:38 pm

Great points Hic.

Edgar, even if there was a PC port, it’d really be slow on anything other than the very latest cards out. The 360 will only be trumped by the 8800gtx and the r600. It’s not just unified shaders, it’s just raw console pipelines vs a bloated general-purpose computer.

By Hic on 11.11.06 8:09 pm

You make a great point, Chris, about the new gfx pipelines of DX10 which’ll be out for Vista next year.

I can’t wait to see what the Epic guys put together for it….maybe a GoW port for PC that uses DX10?

By Wookie on 11.27.06 10:00 pm

Holy shat, does it matter if they port it? Hell, it’s not even a question of if but rather when, and when that happens the entire argument will be moot because nobody will care about GoW. Here’s why:

They ported Doom3 to Xbox and Halo to PC. You could see more pixels and the gfx were nicer in the PC port of Halo because of the obvious advancements in graphics processing but nobody cared because it was a port.

Secondly, and this is where I wax philisophical a bit; shooters as you point out are all clones. Forget the fact that GoW is (from what I think I read when I was hyped to buy it) the Unreal engine. It’s unreal. Quake6 is Doom4 and Halo3 is Halo2 with nice textures and a lighting effect. But anyway I said forget that.

Lets look at the genre as a whole. This is hard for me to admit but I’m growing tired of shooters. Initially I thought I was jaded, maybe bored of boring plotlines with the same invading rebel alien force or zombies or nazis or combinations thereof. I thought if someone came out with a more engaging story it would stiffen my proverbial gamer boner. But alas, in a moment of clarity it hit me that the idea of a plot is the point.

IN any game (shooter at least) you have a mission: start here, kill these, destroy this, save them, grab a medkit, go “wow” when you see your first blur-motion effect, and when you’re done forget about the other things you can buy for $20 and instead sink it into the expansion pack where we add a camo outfit and 2 new maps we stole from our modder community.

It’s always playing in a can, a tunnel, a predestined sequence of events where my performance is graded pass/fail. Maybe this is where you all interject that I am simply jaded and that the “real world of gaming” can’t be a sandbox. Or Chris is pitching WoW again and I’m not biting.

Is it too much to ask for to have a MMOFPS? Maybe a game where I can path infinitely through an unending cycle of cause and effect? Probably reaching. But please try to understand what I’m saying – the finite march towards the Phobos anomoly, Black Mesa central core, Locust Hive, not exciting anymore. I know I can kill everything in my way – you made it that way. The system is designed against deviation.

I can on ad nauseum about this until you all stop reading and Matt pukes with rage at my blasphemy, but thats where I’m at with shooters.

One final point; the shooter I still love? CS:S. Why? Obvious – it’s multiplayer with (almost) no plan for me. Dynamic. New. Strange. After playing it nonstop for a year you will still likely get that tinge of uncertainty about how to proceed. AI – no matter how good (or not in GoW’s case) cannot make up for human ingenuity.

(end rant)

I heart bacon.

By Chris on 11.27.06 11:04 pm

CS:S has a good game loop, maybe that’s what you really like. I dunno man, have you seen GoW yet? It’s not a whole lot different than Halo(s) but it’s worth checking just for the coop action.

I’m not really pitching WoW anymore. I haven’t played in a month. I’m breaking for the expansion. But if you want really massive MMOFPS you might want to talk to Matt to see if Warhammer Online has any scrap of FPS in it, it’s talking pretty massive goals from what I’m reading. Like you march and burn a city down launching your enemies through cannons at their walls. Of course, it’s very WoW-like (I’m not biting).

It seems every genre has a few walls it can’t surmount:
- FPS = too much shooting, too much first person
- MMO = too much online, too much massive
- RPG = too much role playing
- RTS = too much strategy, too much time

Right? Isn’t this kind of where you’re heading? I’m asking non-confrontationally. :P

GoW was fun but it’s a bit too dark for me right now. If I want “dark first-person” I wake up at work and pay attention.