Vault101 said:
Soooooo....thing of the past?
or will it make a "comeback" like the "fun" shooters
I dont know waht Bulletstorm is like anyway can anyone name a relitivley recent shooter with decent single player?
Depends on what you mean by "decent".
I'm of the opinion that the reason why first person shooters are so popular is that it's relatively easy to make a decent one. I can count on one hand the number of FPS I couldn't be bothered to finish and only one of them I considered irredeemably bad. For the record, that was the original Call Of Juarez... Call Of Duty 3 for the PS3 had me quit because of its god-awful stupid motion controls and the original Halo was a borrowed game (with borrowed games, I find I have a low boredom threshold... if I don't like it, I'll find any excuse to stop playing it).
Anywho, the core weapons and game play don't change much from game to game, so it's pretty easy to release something that is palatable to the fanbase.
The problem is that it's increasingly difficult to find a way to make your game stand out. You need to introduce some game play mechanic and make sure you polish it enough to make it fun. Go through the major franchise/title and you'll see that almost all of them advance the genre in some way. Wolfenstein 3D put down the basic rules, Doom introduced a z-axis (you still couldn't look up and down, but the game wasn't on a single plane) and turned the volume up to 11 on Wolfenstein's game mechanics. Duke Nukem 3D had realistic environments, destructible scenery, and usable items. Quake introduced true 3D. Unreal had lush expansive outdoor environments. Goldeneye introduced the sniper rifle, escort mission, and stealth elements. Half-Life introduced new narrative techniques. Halo was the first AAA campaign to incorporate vehicles seamlessly into the game play. I could go on and on.
Every new game is struggling to come up with some hook that makes their game stand out. For up-coming releases, we have Brink introducing the SMART system to simplify movement. Homefront is trying to convince us that they're making the single player story a much more visceral experience. Bulletstorm came up with a skillshot system. None of these things really just jump out at me as being a major game-changer... Brink's SMART system (if it works as well as they claim) will probably become a popular control scheme, but that doesn't necessarily sell the game... the first game that introduced mouselook wasn't a huge success.
As for length... I see two distinct issues.
First, a linear game is going to be shorter than an open-world one. Sandbox games can pad out their length by having you go back & forth and tossing random action at you. Once you create the world, they can easily create side-missions with text directions without having to deal with the expense of animated cut-scenes and voice acting. All content in a FPS has to be fully crafted and that's increasingly expensive, so you're not going to see a whole lot of campaigns that are longer than 10 hours.
Secondly, the major multiplayer franchises have discovered that they can get away with horribly short single player campaigns of around six hours. Not a huge deal if you're going to be playing on-line every day for the next six months... but the practice starts filtering out to the wannabe titles. I recently picked up three shooters (two third-person and one first-person) and not a single one of the campaigns took longer than six hours. Only one (Quantum Of Solace) seems to have had any life as a MP game, while Stranglehold had a MP mode that no one seems to have ever wanted to play and Wanted had no MP at all. Unless you're dealing with a famous license (007, Star Wars) or come from a popular developer (Epic, id); you're not going to be able to get away with this. And I think a lot of developers know this, which is why when they're launching a new IP, they focus on the single player game, as they did with Bioshock.
