Shrapnel Games Blog

One problem I’ve had with many shooters is the onset of shooter fatigue around the 80%-85% completion mark. By shooter fatigue, I mean there’s that point where suddenly the magic and excitement that has been carrying me is stripped away, and I’m left with a feeling of drudgery for the rest of the game. Even Bioshock, with as much hype as it’s getting, left me with this feeling. I reached a point and the thrill was gone.

As I thought about this today I reached the conclusion that I end up feeling this way because shooters are just so damn formulaic. By the time you tip past the halfway mark and start on the final levels you’ve seen all the bad guys, experienced the coolest levels, and have an arsenal which has reached its maximum. The only thing left is the requisite face off against hordes of enemies until the final level with the always uninspiring boss battle. Why are shooters locked into this?

When you consider the early shooters they were nothing more than arcade type games with a different player perspective. DOOM could have easily been a top-down action game, and well Hell’s Bells, Wolfenstein 3D was literally a 3D reimagining of the 2D 8-bit games that shared its name. Realizing this it’s understandable why shooters used a typical arcade scheme of the player growing in power (exemplified in shooters by more powerful things that go boom), because deep down that’s what they were. I’d also toss in D&D as an influence, since that works the same way. Higher levels = nastier spells and +12 Hackmasters.

So why in 2007 do shooters still play the arcade game, no matter what type of pretense they have for attempting to, as Rich of Digital Eel is fond of saying, “Create the holodeck without the holo.” (Or is it without the deck? Sorry if I screwed that up! :))

Typical feature bullet point list of a modern shooter:

• Interactive environment!
• Free roaming levels!
• Multiple weapon modes!
• Train rides!
• The Havok Physics Engine!

What they neglect to mention is the fact that the player always starts off with a weasely little popgun/tool from This Old House, and then moves onto pistol, then the shotgun, then the grenade launcher, and so forth. And as an aside, why is the crossbow suddenly the cool weapon to have in a game? And oh, the bad guys will start off easy but then get harder as you progress, usually in the form of more hit points and stronger weapons, not in terms of better AI.

Minor Bioshock spoiler: Bioshock does this too. For all the talk about trying to be the next generation of shooter you start off with a simple melee weapon, quickly find a pistol, and from that point on acquiring weapons is just like clockwork. Worse, for all the creativity that was poured into the art direction, none of it trickled into weaponry. Oh sure, some of the designs are clever, but from a functional viewpoint there’s absolutely nothing unique about them. You’ve seen them in every other shooter you’ve played. Shotgun. Grenade launcher. Machine gun. Crossbow. Zzzzz.

Isn’t it about time that shooters start trying to be truly interactive games and stop being pretty looking arcade games? Start mixing things up. We’re playing larger-than-life heroes, right? Instead of trying to create gameplay balance based on the power of the player’s weapons and how much damage the enemy can take, just make the entire game balanced from the get-go. Give us a sandbox to play in, with the cool weapons right from the start. Keep us surprised, since half of the fun of a shooter is the discovery factor. I want to think that there’s something cool around the corner when I’m ten hours into the game, just as I felt when I was one hour into it.

And please, definitely no more boss battles. One of the most impressive climaxes in a shooter I thought was the end Russian level in one of the Call of Duty games. Sorry, can’t recall which one—they sorta all blur together—but in it you were defending a train station. Now that was an end level! All types of crazy stuff was going on. Stukas screaming from the sky, tanks blasting away, krauts charging your position, and it rarely let up. That’s what shooters need more of in the end, unrestricted chaos, not bad guys pumped up with an insane amount of hit points.