STRAFE is The "1996 Style" Hyper-Violent FPS We Deserve

[Kahani]

There's no reason why consoles should be limited in their level designs, outside of the processing power to render them. Most of these complex-level type games aren't even present on PC to any significant extent anymore, I don't think this has much to do with simplifying it down for the lowest common denominator.

The reason for simplistic level design is very simple, and has been covered by Shamus before [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/experienced-points/9331-The-Big-Cost-of-Small-Places]. In a word - graphics. Designing levels for old shooters was easy; you were essentially drawing a 2D map made out of simple repeating blocks. That means there was plenty of time to spend on actually designing said map; making it big, interesting, and complex. With modern 3D games, much more work goes into filling in all the little details that not only is there much less time to actually design an interesting map, but the bigger the map is, the more resources will be needed to flesh it out.

It's nothing to do with consoles or processing power at all. Doom only ever showed a small amount of corridor at any given time, it's just that you had a big maze of corridors rather than a single linear one. The difference isn't the platform, control system, or anything like that, it's the actual games themselves and the time and resources needed to produce one now compared to back then.

The particular irony being that Strafe is deliberately boasting about having crap graphics, but then goes out of its way to put even less effort into level design than the worst of modern AAA shooters. Modern shooters tend to sacrifice level design for graphics. A game that sacrificed graphics for level design could be good. Strafe sacrifices both for no apparent reason.

the actual shooter audience that exists both in PC's and consoles where a big chunk of it showed a lot of interest in linear pipe level design making it a popular choice for developers.

I don't think it's a matter of the audience actually showing interest, but rather that they simply don't show enough disinterest. That might sound a bit silly, but there is a difference. In the former, people say "This is awesome, please give us more of the same", while in the latter it's rather "If this is what we get with better graphics, I guess it will have to do". It's not that people prefer simplistic linear games, they've just been willing enough to accept them when that's what they're given. And of course this is has been going on long enough that many younger gamers won't have known anything else.

 

[josemlopes]

the actual shooter audience that exists both in PC's and consoles where a big chunk of it showed a lot of interest in linear pipe level design making it a popular choice for developers.

I don't think it's a matter of the audience actually showing interest, but rather that they simply don't show enough disinterest. That might sound a bit silly, but there is a difference. In the former, people say "This is awesome, please give us more of the same", while in the latter it's rather "If this is what we get with better graphics, I guess it will have to do". It's not that people prefer simplistic linear games, they've just been willing enough to accept them when that's what they're given. And of course this is has been going on long enough that many younger gamers won't have known anything else.

That is a lot of the audience that used to play the old games, I was talking about the general audience, even including the one that only buys Call of Duty, Madden and Fifa, the more casual one. That was a big chunk of the audience Call of Duty has and they (I presume) like that style of level design, and since a lot of other publishers tried to copy COD to get a piece of the success they are targeting that big chunk of audience too.

I still agree with what you said regarding not showing disinterest, almost everyone enjoyed COD1, 2 and 4. Only after that it became very repeating, not only in level design (even 4 suffured that already) but in everything and that is when people really started making fun of it, the series selling more and more each iteration didnt help though.