What defines a shooter?

[The Funslinger]

Odd, I thought it would be easy to define a shooter.

Also, your friend sounds like one of those guys who only plays CoD/Killzone and considers themselves MLG gamers because they never play anything else.

Oh, god, I despise "MLG" gamers because of my friend's impersonation of various stereotypes. Unfortunately, he seems to have justified this one to himself and is carrying on with it. Every time he's dominating in any form of multiplayer game he yells MLG like "EM EL GEEEEEEEEEE!!!!" in a pseudo deep voice. You have no god damn idea how annoying it is, we're on a match together against random people. *headshot* "MLG!!!!!!" *10 killstreak* "MLG!!!!!" *many kills with the chopper gunner* "MLG!!!!" he's even got the frustrated loser part down. *bang, falls dead* "aw, what duh fuck!? I totally put a full clip into him! It's not my fault there's always a second of lag on this game, CoD needs proper servers, like Halo. Gawd, Halo is so much better!"

*and so we play Halo*

*Armor Lock* "Aw, what the fuck!? Armor Lock is so fucking overpowered, it makes them invulnerable and there's always a team mate right around the corner to bail them the fuck out, and if you're too close it wrecks your shield!"

*BlAM* "Fucking power weapons! They should be taken out of regular slayer, they unbalance the game like hell! God, Call of Duty is so much better, at least it's balanced and more realistic. Halo is such an arcady piece of shit!"

And the cycle repeats eternally. I do sometimes wish I could fastforward to his inevitable rage induced aneurism and have done with it. At least that way, if he survived, all I'd have to do is show him a still of the halo reach Armor lock and he'd flatline again...

 

[Assassin Xaero]

apparently bioshock isn't a "proper" shooter because its not based on cover based shooting

No offense, but your friend should be beaten for that. Cover-based shooters are probably the downfall of the genre. A lot of the games that created the FPS genre had no cover at all.

But, to answer your question, I'd say a game with guns and a large amount of the focus on using them. For example, Mirror's Edge has guns, but the focus is more on the parkour then shooting, so it isn't really a shooter.

Also, just to clear this up, just because a game is in the first person perspective doesn't make it an FPS. Some dumbass I used to work with said Morrowind was the best FPS game ever, because, through is "superior to everyone" logic, if a game is in first person it is a shooter game.

 

[latiasracer]

GUNZ. That is all.

 

[Yopaz]

Alright, I'm his friend and I never said Bioshock isn't a shooter, just that it does too much of everything else to be compared to Killzone. Killzone, Homefront, CoD and Battlefield all stick to the core mechanics of a shooter. That doesn't necesserily make them better, but the shooter category is so vague that even within the category there are games that shouldn't be compared to each other. The term "proper shooter" isn't real, just something I use in the absence of a proper term to differentiate between games that have less innovation but stick to the genre from games that veer off and do other less common things for a shooter, such as Bioshock and Half-life. Its fine if you think I'm nuts for making up a category to make comparing games easier, but I wouldn't put Bioshock and Half-life in the same category as Killzone and CoD.
Also, I don't play CoD, and I'm definately not MLG, that made me laugh

Actually you said you cant compare killzone and bioshock because bioshock isn't a proper shooter
You literally said a proper shooter has to have "ADS, shoot, good cover system, grenades, melee, crouch"

Actually he said he doesn't think of Bioshock as a shooter because of the things that Bioshock does differently. Namely the part of the game that gives it the name Bio.
It's not a shooter because of the small parts where you get biologic enhancements that replace some of the shooting mechanics. He never mentioned cover mechanics in his post at all. He didn't literally say that BioShock wasn't a proper shooter for not including cover system.

In my opinion any game where you point with a gun and shoot with the gun are shooters.

 

[Danceofmasks]

If the bulk of the gameplay = point gun shoot stuff, then it's a shooter.

Mass Effect 2 is a shooter. Borderlands is a shooter.
Sure, there's loot and stats, but tell me Call of Duty doesn't have loot and stats ... I like me my sleight of hand pro, pl0x.

 

[Aiedail256]

The first-person perspective is not mutually-inclusive with the shooter categorization.

More importantly, having shooting stuff being the main form of combat also does NOT make a game a shooter.

What makes a game a shooter is having the main POINT OF THE GAME being ranged combat.

Gears 3 is a shooter in 3rd-person perspective. Portal is a puzzle game in first-person. Metroid Prime is in first person and the only way of killing stuff is shooting it, but it's still not a shooter for the same reason the first three Metroid games aren't shooters: the main point of the game is not combat, but rather exploration. Prime 3, on the other hand, is closer to a shooter than a Metroidvania.

 

[Phlakes]

Let's see. A platformer is a game where you jump on platforms. A racing game is a game where you race. A fighting game is a game where you fight. A stealth game is a game based on stealth. So what would a shooter be?

 

[JediMB]

Yeah agreed with your friend. There are two terms: FPS and shooter. FPS is any game that's in first person and where you shoot things. A shooter however, is a game where the primary focus is shooting. Here's a quick explanation of the difference that I'd give:

In a game like BioShock - you pursue the story. Shooting, whether first or third person, is merely the combat mechanic of the game.

In a game like CoD - you shoot things. The story is (usually) there - but it's not interactive. You don't spend much time talking to people, exploring the world/environment or digging into the story interactively in any way - you just shoot stuff from one point to the next and at certain points, story happens around you.

No.

A first-person shooter is... a shooter played in a first-person perspective. Then there are third-person shooters, side-scrolling shooters, etc., etc.. Furthermore, there are plenty of first-person games where you get to shoot things without the game actually being an FPS, such as Mirror's Edge and Metroid Prime.

And the story in BioShock isn't particularly interactive. A simple trinary variable determines what sort of ending you get.

This is just a matter of the mainstream shooter fans wanting to distinguish what they play from the rest of the genre in a way that makes their games seem "pure" and "proper"... because apparently they abhor the unfamiliar.

EDIT: Also, see -Dragmire-'s post below mine.

Fair enough, yeah, it's not a perfect definition, but I stand by the crux of it. In a "shooter", you go around shooting things and stuff happens around you, nothing much, basically just backstory thrown in a few checkpoints. In a non-shooter FPS, there's more to it than shooting. It's not just the story, it's exploration, it's puzzles, it's everything. A shooter is defined by it's shooting - if you took it out, there'd literally be nothing left. If you took out the shooting from something like BioShock, you could just replace it with another combat mechanic and the game would still be there.

Narrative style really has no bearing on the game's genre, since game genres refer to game mechanics. Any game genre could have either heavy story focus or none at all.

Wolfenstein and Doom are shooters. Half-Life and SiN are shooters. Halo and GoldenEye are shooters. BioShock and Call of Duty are shooters.

 

[Atticus89]

Umm... shooting defines a shooter. Hence the name.

Okay, okay! So if your friend's definition of a "proper" shooter involves hiding behind cover, then any game before or after that has all elements but this is not a "proper" shooter. That's a bit narrow-minded.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

apparently bioshock isn't a "proper" shooter because its not based on cover based shooting

Erm; what? So... Wolf 3D isn't a proper shooter?

A shooter is a game in which combat primarily involves aiming ranged weapons.

Shooter

Shooter

Shooter

Give this guy a medal. "Shooter" is the subset of action games that primarily involve shooting. That's it. Asteroids, Space Invaders, Contra, Gradius, and Doom are all archetypes of different subgenres of shooter. It's only in the last decade that people have started using "shooter" as short hand for "first person shooter;" in the 90's, people who said that were usually referring to side scrolling shooters, or what we refer to today as SHMUPs. It's similar to how "games" has come to be shorthand for videogames; videogames are only one small subset of what can legitimately be called a game, but because they're so popular at all age levels, it's rare to hear someone who isn't directly involved in the tabletop gaming subculture to use it to refer to boardgames, tabletop games, or card games, and it's even more rare for people to just say "games" when they're referring to things like sports or the games children make up on a daily basis.

Edit: Although looking more closely at the picture, that was actually Spacewar/Computer Space at the top. I do know my gaming history well enough not to get it confused with Asteroids

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

id agree that bioshock isnt a true fps. It doesnt have that fluidity of motion that other shooters have these days. But that would have been normal 10 years ago.

Plus its totally an action rpg anyways.

 

[The Abhorrent]

As many have already said, a game is a shooter if you shoot something.
Nothing fancy, just that the game has shooting as a core gameplay element.

As for the idea of what is a "proper" shooter (as silly as the whole thing)... well, this is probably easier to answer than one might think:

Is the primary if not sole intent of the game shooting things to make them fall over dead?

Especially if the game has a strong focus on multiplayer (particularly of the online variety), where the vast majority of gameplay boils down to shooting the opposition? That's probably closer to the idea of the so-called "proper shooter". Shoot, shoot, shoot! Kill, kill, kill! It's fairly absurd, but I suspect that this is what's going on here.

Of course, many other games use shooting elements... but aren't really something that could be called a shooter. The Mass Effect series uses third-person shooter mechanics for the combat, but it also has many other elements which could be called more important: character progression/customization, dialogue tress, character development, and storyline. For another perspective, there's also the Metroid Prime sub-series; very strong focus on puzzles and exploration, significantly moreso than the first-person-shooter-based combat (most of the bosses are puzzles rather than grudge matches).

Both series of games are technically shooters, but neither have shooting as their primary element... because they aren't just about combat. Their combat is shooter-based, but they have more to it than that.

Back to the absurdity of a "proper shooter"... it would seem the friend of the topic creator seems to be of the opinion that the entire point of a shooter (hence the "proper" label) is just shoot things and nothing more. A self-reinenforcing narrow mindset, really.

 

[Zantos]

I can kind of see the point he's trying to make. There is some difference between games being based around guns and games including guns. I'm pretty sure (though I wouldn't like to try it) that you could actually play through Bioshock without actually pulling a gun. If anyone cares to correct me then please do so, but I can't actually think of a single part of the game that can't be done with purely with the non gun mechanics. The same cannot be said for games like Call of Duty or Killzone. I think from his post you might be taking quotes out of context, clearly the cover based thing is pretty stupid.

 

[Torrasque]

Like others have said, a shooter is defined by shooting things.
If you spend most of your time in the game, shooting things, you are in a shooter.
It might not be JUST a shooter, but that doesn't change the fact that it is a shooter.

 

[F4LL3N]

Wow. That's all I can say! The four shooter types I know of are:
-FPS
-TPS
-Side Scrolling shooter
-Top down shooter

That's all dealing with camera perspective. Combat focusing on guns or vehicles with guns define a shooter. Than again, I'd probably define a game as a shooter if the main combat mechanics were bow and arrows or projectile magic.

 

[DementedSheep]

To be a shooter you just have to have a focus on shooting shit with a ranged weapon. Thats it really and you can be a shooter and have other things, like bioshock has light RPG elements.

 

[anthony87]

I'm sorry but....the fuck?

A shooter is a game where you SHOOT PEOPLE/PLACES/THINGS!!!!

What the hell needs to be questioned or complicated about that?

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I can kind of see the point he's trying to make. There is some difference between games being based around guns and games including guns. I'm pretty sure (though I wouldn't like to try it) that you could actually play through Bioshock without actually pulling a gun. If anyone cares to correct me then please do so, but I can't actually think of a single part of the game that can't be done with purely with the non gun mechanics. The same cannot be said for games like Call of Duty or Killzone. I think from his post you might be taking quotes out of context, clearly the cover based thing is pretty stupid.

You can do it using nothing but Plasmids and melee, but Plasmids are just guns that use a different ammo system, really. If being able to use plasmids disqualifies it as a shooter, then Hexen, Heretic, and that Wheel of Time game that ran on the original Unreal Tournament engine are all in some separate, non-shooter genre, which is just ridiculous; they're all first person shooters.

 

[MagnetoHydroDynamics]

If the majority of the game is making things dead with some sort of projectile attack, then it is a shooter.

Substitute projectile for blunt body parts, you (usually) get beat-em-up.
Substitute for bladed weapon, you get hack-n-slash.

 

[Macrobstar]

Alright, I'm his friend and I never said Bioshock isn't a shooter, just that it does too much of everything else to be compared to Killzone. Killzone, Homefront, CoD and Battlefield all stick to the core mechanics of a shooter. That doesn't necesserily make them better, but the shooter category is so vague that even within the category there are games that shouldn't be compared to each other. The term "proper shooter" isn't real, just something I use in the absence of a proper term to differentiate between games that have less innovation but stick to the genre from games that veer off and do other less common things for a shooter, such as Bioshock and Half-life. Its fine if you think I'm nuts for making up a category to make comparing games easier, but I wouldn't put Bioshock and Half-life in the same category as Killzone and CoD.
Also, I don't play CoD, and I'm definately not MLG, that made me laugh

Actually you said you cant compare killzone and bioshock because bioshock isn't a proper shooter
You literally said a proper shooter has to have "ADS, shoot, good cover system, grenades, melee, crouch"

Actually he said he doesn't think of Bioshock as a shooter because of the things that Bioshock does differently. Namely the part of the game that gives it the name Bio.
It's not a shooter because of the small parts where you get biologic enhancements that replace some of the shooting mechanics. He never mentioned cover mechanics in his post at all. He didn't literally say that BioShock wasn't a proper shooter for not including cover system.

In my opinion any game where you point with a gun and shoot with the gun are shooters.

Oh I forgot you where there in the conversation we where having when he said what i said, that was a quote from the message he sent me