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FAR CRY 2 DEFINITIVE REVIEW PCF220.cover 1
WARHAMMER: RVR MASTERCLASS 6/10/08 11:19:46 am
A brief history of the
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A brief history of the FPS
Two decades and a mountain of corpses later, the FPS is the PC’s proudest child. Richard Cobbett investigates how the killing spree got started or most people, it started with Doom. Doom wasn’t the first FPS, or even the first to win fans around the world, but that doesn’t matter. Super Mario Brothers wasn’t the first platform game either and Final Fantasy VII wasn’t the first Japanese RPG. In the field of steroid-pumped space marines running round mazes with a bag of weapons and the inability to jump over low ledges, it was Doom that wrote the rulebook. It created the concept of Deathmatch. Its weapon loadout remains a gaming staple – the ascension from pistol through shotgun, chaingun, rocket launcher, zappy futuristic weapon, and finally a Big Fecking Gun left largely unchanged throughout much of the 90s, and only recently sidelined in favour of more ‘realistic’ weapons. The history of FPS games is the story of id Software, and most importantly, programming genius John Carmack. Two years before Doom, Carmack coded the engine for the PC’s first FPS, a simple
F
maze shooter game called Hovertank 3D. This was in 1991, and game development being a lot faster in those days, the follow-up was released in the same year. This was Catacomb 3D, a conversion of an earlier id-penned topdown shooter. While a pretty terrible game, it pioneered several elements that would stick with the genre for years, including a view of the main character’s face taking damage, key hunting, magic health packs, and displaying the currently selected weapon in the viewscreen .
ROAD TO DOOM Catacomb continued in a spin-off series, The Catacomb Abyss, notable for some of the worst texture art in the history of anything and the first attempt at freezing time in an FPS. But id was aready moving onto its first true hit – Wolfenstein 3D. Not only was this a huge success in its time, it’s still around on Steam, and there’s a new game in the series on the way right now. How different history may have been, had id gone with its original idea - the genetics themed ‘It’s Green And Pissed’…
Wolfenstein used very similar technology to Catacomb. It was a very simple engine by 3D standards, known as a ‘raycaster’. Each level was simply a flat maze, with no attempt made to pretend that you were actually in a castle instead of a themed level. The engine was limited to a simple grid that would either be a huge lump of stone or not. No pits or staircases. No multiple levels. It couldn’t even do walls at anything other than a 90º angle. Even by the standards of the time, this was pretty simplistic stuff. Ultima Underworld could do all this and more. Earlier 3D games like Driller and Castle Master, and even the 3D Construction Kit were already pushing full 3D worlds. It would take id until 1996, with the launch of Quake, to do that. But those features are only part of the story. Underworld especially was slow, stodgy, demanded the best in hardware, and had a 3D view that only took up around 20 per cent of the screen. Wolfenstein was full screen, and it was fast. No complex interface, no particularly high requirements. The action flowed like scented water as you
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A brief history of the FPS blasted Nazis, pegged it round the mazes at 70mph, and ultimately faced off against one of the most memorable bosses in gaming: Hitler in a robot suit. Wolfenstein kickstarted more than the FPS genre. It was one of the first PC engines to be licensed out to other developers, most notably to Raven, who would make a career out of creating fantasy games out of id’s engines (Heretic, Hexen, and in the case of Wolf3D, an RPG called Shadowcaster). Programmer Ken Silverman would later be inspired to create Ken’s Labyrinth, which used a very similar engine with more focus on interactive elements like slot machines. He would go on to create one of PC gaming’s most interesting engines, Build, used in Duke Nukem 3D. As for id, Doom beckoned.
It’s licensing the technology behind games like Unreal that brings in the real money
ALL DOOM, NO GLOOM The most impressive thing about Doom is just how much fun it still is. The ability to walk up and down stairs, the nonorthogonal walls, or the sheer mass of art on offer may no longer impress on a technical level, but the gamecraft behind it all definitely should. People are too quick to dismiss it as a simple shooter. Go and play it now. Right now. Note how the environments slowly morph from the pure military look into the hellish, flesh-tearing horrors of later levels. Spot the little tells and flourishes, like the way Barons of Hell are typically foreshadowed by an ominous picture of one. Savour the way that each level at least pretends to be themed around a specific location, even if many of the details are lost in the simplistic design. Listen to that wonderful music. Very little of this is an accident. When Tom Hall wrote the design bible for Doom, he had something much more narrative-driven in mind than the pure action game it ended up as, including a choice of four characters with different stats, specific locations like the officer’s mess and locker rooms, specific plot moments, like finding your buddies dead after a game of poker, and missions built around teams, instead of one lone space marine. The characters would later show up in the bloody, but largely godawful,
Above Hovertank 3D: Rescue the kids and hear the least enthusiastic “Yay!” sound effect ever
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“The most impressive thing about Doom is just how much fun it still is” Rise of the Triad. The original setting, a planet called Tai Tenga rather than Mars, would show up in a set of user levels that stretched the engine to bursting point. The rest was largely sidelined, but the push towards a ‘real’ environment is very much present in the game – if not to the level we now expect, certainly more than when we were stuck pretending big stone mazes were a Nazi science lab. Even so, two things made Doom a hit: modding and deathmatch. Deathmatch was most PC owners’ first exposure to online gaming in the early 90s. This was the era of 28k modems, of linking machines via serial cables and of phone bills that had to be delivered by truck. If you were online, you paid for it by the minute – to whatever service you were connecting with, and to BT, for the call. Free evening and weekend calls? Forget it. Kids around the country would spend at least one morning a month dripping with sweat at the incoming bills. But Doom was worth it. Four players. Rocket launchers. Headphones. The small player count made the action closer to Hide and Seek than the arena based games of today, particularly on the standard single-player maps, but that was fixable. Level-editing tools like DEU spread like wildfire, giving anyone
with the patience to learn the ability to create anything from a cool deathmatch arena, to one of the million and one sadistic mods that threw the player in against five rocket-armed Cyberdemons and got harder from there. One of the most fun tools you could get was Dehacked, with which you could do cool things like making the chaingun fire exploding barrels instead of bullets. Never before had a game been so free to play around with. Never had players been so hooked, long after ‘finishing the game’. Damn near every FPS game worth its salt for the next few years learned the two cardinal rules: be moddable and don’t forget deathmatch.
THE LONE GUNNER Nothing could touch Doom with its deathmatch and 3D technology wasn’t even close to being ready to create particularly realistic environments for the next level of games. Still, this era saw some impressive releases. On the Mac, Bungie released the Marathon games, which combined relatively simple graphics with a hefty narrative focus and the first hints of squad-based combat. That was later honed by the Doom-engine based Strife on PC, which added Zelda-level RPG elements, character conversations, and specific
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A brief history of the FPS missions in a free-roaming fantasy city. One of the most impressive sequences came during the middle of the game, when you and a small army of rebels took part in a siege on the baddies’ main castle . Fighting alongside AI, even if it had all the intelligence of a particularly stupid breadbin, was a real rush. Rainbow Six would be the first FPS to push this element, hitting the streets in 1998, with full team dynamics at its core. It wouldn’t ,however, be the game that mastered it – that would be SWAT 4 in 2005, with Operation Flashpoint and Call of Duty/Medal of Honor picking up the baton for all-out war and moviestyle teamwork respectively. In 1995, Descent offered a very different twist on the FPS. Instead of playing a marine or similar, you were in a ship, steering around full 3D mines with afterburners, and fighting enemies made up of polygons. Up until this point, most enemies were sprites – cardboard cut-outs that fired back. In the same year, Bethesda released one of the most underappreciated shooters in FPS history – Terminator: Future Shock.
THE MAGIC OF DUKE NUKEM 3D
Above Wolfenstein – fast action, then-lush textures for the walls, and of course, Robo Hitler
It featured full 3D graphics, vehicles to drive, real-time lighting, and, of course, the Terminator licence, but no multiplayer until the sequel, SkyNET. In most cases, the easiest way to see why these games didn’t last is to compare them against id’s equivalent. They’re usually too stodgy, too clunky, too ugly, or just generally behind the times to stand up to modern eyes, even ones with rose-tinted glasses firmly attached. That’s especially true
The story wasn’t deep, but Half-Life 2 did more to give character to its principal cast than any game since, well, Half-Life
An FPS often has to pretend that its world is more complicated than it is, and nobody did it better than Duke. Its engine was technically 2.5D, and thus incapable of handling situations like rooms above rooms, or even pools of water. The level designers got around this by linking distinct areas – zones – with invisible teleporters that let the player pass seamlessly from the room with the pool, to the actual pool itself – in reality, a whole other part of the map. Tricks like this were used throughout the game (and its less successful follow-up, Shadow Warrior) to build one of the most coherent worlds gamers had ever seen. Duke was also one of the first games to really push ‘frobbing’ to players – something that sounds rude, but really just means activating items and wall textures to get a response. Whether it was flicking on a film projector, having a wee, or encouraging a strangely oblivious stripper to ‘shake it baby’ in the middle of an alien invasion, it made the world feel like more than just a collection of shooting galleries. By comparison, Quake was simply a space base and four trap-filled castles thrown together with no apparent rhyme or reason, and couldn’t help feel less ‘real’, even though its engine alone was capable of stamping Duke’s testicles into a fine paste. These concepts ran throughout the whole game. A mission where you started out in an electric chair. Exploring a porn store. Blowing a hole in a cinema screen. That was just the demo…The technology may have been far from the best, but when it comes to making the most of what they had, creators 3D Realms were smart cookies to bet on Duke.
Above Duke Nukem Forever? Never heard of it
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A brief history of the FPS of one of the most famous competitors, Duke Nukem 3D. At the time, it was jawdropping. Real world locations? Oh yes! Shrinking enemies and stamping on them? Holy cow! Nothing was even close to Duke’s level of environmental interaction and sack of cool things, but now that other games have caught up… hell, we’re hailing new kings now, baby.
THE GREAT DIVIDE Quake in single-player mode was a terrible, terrible game. Some will argue, but they’re wrong. When id’s successor to Doom finally came along (and having had much the same development process, starting out as something much more complex, before being turned into a basic shooter), the battle lines were finally drawn. The fact that Quake’s single-player levels were a mess of boring design, bland colours, ugly monsters, and vapid puzzles didn’t matter, because everyone was in it for the deathmatch, and the liberated modding of that magic full-3D engine. It was with its 3D physics that rocket jumping was invented, by accident. Id didn’t know about it until being shown,
Above 3D Monster Maze was a precursor to the FPS
“Quake III rocketjumped id back to the top” Crysis Warhead is the state of the art as far as FPS technology goes, but is it the best? We’re having far more fun in Far Cry 2
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especially in the Quake Done Quick videos that skipped people through the whole game in less time than it’s taken you to read this article, but it quickly became an expected feature in FPS games, to the point that a rocket to the feet is one of the Team Fortress 2 Soldier’s designed class functions. Developers took notice. A singleplayer game was only alive in the player’s hands until the credits rolled. A multiplayer focused one was a gamble – it’d fall flat on its face if nobody showed up to play, as happened to Unreal Tournament 3 earlier this year – but it could pay off. Successful as Quake II was, it was the deathmatch-only Quake III that rocket-jumped id back to
the top. Epic’s burgeoning Unreal series was quickly switched for Unreal Tournament, with the single-player Unreal II only showing up years later, without a hint of the excitement that greeted its predecessors. Sadly, few others made it so big. A large part of this was that it wasn’t the original games most people were playing, but user-made content. Games became almost parasitic hangers-on to their engine, handing over assets and getting out of the way for mod teams to play with the tools a decade of living in the shadow of Doom had provided. Jailbreak. Day of Destruction. Rocket Arena. And of course, the two everyone knows: Counterstrike, and Team Fortress. For the first time, gamers themselves were the kingmakers, and there was plenty of incentive to do so. Creating a popular mod became a standard way of breaking into the industry, keeping the quality high, and the stream of new stuff flowing.
THE WEAPONS OF WAR Multiplayer games were the highest profile FPS sub-genre, but far from the only ones. Thief brought us hide-andseek, making us vulnerable. System Shock, Realms of the Haunting, Deus Ex, and many others brought RPG elements, like character upgrades, options to get past situations without resorting to pure gunplay, and a focus on plot over simple setting and levels. Terra Nova bombed on the shelves, but lives on in our hearts for its fantastic squad-based tactics. Operation Flashpoint picked up where earlier battlefield games like Project IGI left off, giving us not simply levels to explore, but huge vistas packed with options and tactical possibilities, especially in co-op mode. And then of course, there was HalfLife. It’s hard to remember now, but there was only moderate excitement about it before release. Everyone knew it had some cool features, and Valve seemed competent enough, but it was a game that had already gone back to the drawing board once, and early videos and screenshots were, at best, ‘s’alright’. When it hit the shelves, it did for the genre what Doom first did to create it. It rewrote all the rules, especially when played next to its contemporary, SiN. A game with its helicopter gunship sections and driving bits, and one of the least sexy sex symbols outside of a cross-dressing geek pretending to be Lara Croft in a tight-fitting XXXL croptop with rolls of flab poring out from under sweaty cleavage. Half-Life’s innovations were legion, from its, then, unbelievable AI to the continuous gameworld, and the way it
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A brief history of the FPS never snapped you out of your firstperson viewpoint. Like Doom, it was more than the sum of its parts. It felt right. It welcomed you in, instead of knocking you down. It challenged and kept you surprised, without ever becoming frustrating or boring. Half-Life 2 didn’t push things as much as it could have done – your writer for one was very disappointed at how little City 17 was used – but it definitely carried on these traditions, from the character technology used to create Alyx Vance, to Valve’s pitch-perfect design philosophies. Try finding many games before it that would show you Ravenholm on the horizon before you head there, or feature something as effective as the Sword of Damocles that was the Citadel towering over you for the entire game.
OH, THE HORROR, THE HORROR
Above The Thief series made sneaking the whole point, FPS magic happened
OLD ROPE, AGEING GUN Even with those games though, time isn’t necessarily kind. FPS games focus more on technology than any other genre, as well as being reliant on making your interaction with the game as smooth as if you were really there. Menus, complicated hotkeys, and even fiddly aiming are all anathema to the concept. This makes FPSes some of the fastest ageing games on the planet, and even a handful of missing features we’ve come to expect since their release can be a game killer. Small levels. A lack of interaction with objects. The lack of
1) Doom The granddaddy may be a bit long in the tooth, but don’t let that put you off. Tricks like the big Warrens reveal, the teleport traps, or the spinechilling music before meeting the Barons of Hell can still work their magic, and playing it in co-op mode is an experience every gamer should try at least once. 2) Quake III/Unreal Tournament We’re not going to risk picking just one. Instead, we’ll say this. QIII was the better ‘game’, when it came to feel and satisfaction
FPS KINGS & QUEENS
Above Pelting through maps, railing, rocketing and forever chasing the elusive flag carrier – QIII CTF was the nuts
ragdoll physics. No mouselook. Murky, low-res environments. Not having a jump button. Sprites. Doom is very much an anomaly for being as much fun as it was on release, even among id games. Neither Quake I or II stand up that well. Even Doom II repeatedly falls on its face, especially when its engine tries to render ‘cities’ with giant obsidian blocks. The FPS is a genre that’s happy to recognise its history, but really, it doesn’t look back. It’s all about the next technologies, the next graphics upgrade, the next chance to take the action to whole new heights. What the future holds, nobody can say. But we can say this. It’s going to make Crysis look like Hovertank 3D. And it’s going to be fantastic. ¤
and skill. UT had more imagination in its levels and modes than most genres get in a decade. 3) Half-Life 2 The genius of HL2 is how subtly it works its magic. It’s the art direction, the character design, the moments of humour in the desolation, and above all, the raw satisfaction of pounding the streets and Combine alike that make HL 2 still the best FPS of all time. 4) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare The absolute pinnacle of cinematic FPS. CoD4 was a fusion of everyone from Tom Clancy to Andy McNab that kept its pace at fever pitch and wasn’t afraid to forge new ground. The sniper mission. The bit with the nuke. And of course, that ending. 5) No-One Lives Forever There are two kinds of people in this world – those who love NOLF, and those who haven’t played it. This fantastic mix of Bond parody and 1960s attitude went on forever, to the point that the sequel struggled for new ideas. 6) Deus Ex Playing it now can be close to torture, thanks to a clunky engine, dim-witted AI, and terrible looking graphics, but don’t be fooled. Deus Ex remains a fine game, and one of the most ambitious FPS titles ever released.
The FPS is one of the few genres that puts you right in your character’s shoes. Without inventory menus and complex hotkeys, there’s nothing to keep hammering in the fact that you’re just playing a game. The screen becomes your eyes; anything on either side fading into insignificance. You’ll have seen it yourself, leaning in to peer round corners, as if it’s actually going to do any good, or the sudden shocking moment when a FACEHUGGER ATTACKS! Horror is especially helpful here. Your limited perception means that you can’t see the monster creeping up on you, while the designers can make full use of darkness and architectural design without the fear of a thirdperson character getting tangled up on a chair. The field of vision can be set for stifling claustrophobia or wide views of the area. Sounds like breathing and muffled growls set up the horror to come, or get you pumped to take it on. Above all else, there’s a fusion between you and your character. If that facehugger jumped on a thirdperson character, it may be a shock. When it does it to an FPS view, it’s as good as ramming its proboscis down your throat. Walking a Resident Evil character down a tunnel may tingle the spine, but it’s nothing compared to you, directly, sneaking into hell. All this can lead to problems too. Spiders frequently cause problems for arachnophobics (there was a fan-patch for System Shock 2 that took them out), just as the fear of heights and the feel of falling with your character can put the wind up players scared of heights. The idea that playing FPS games will make you a cold killer is nonsense. That doesn’t mean they can’t make some things feel disturbingly more real than the flat screen and keyboard would suggest.
Above The cuddly side of face-ripping terror. Good old Heddy
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