Early FPS Megathread: the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Games > Early FPS Megathread: the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later

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Jordan7hm: Feb 17, 2011; Lipstick Apathy

Good post.

My favorite part of Doom (other than puzzles) is ripping through a dozen mooks in a matter of seconds.

# ? Sep 8, 2015 23:17

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# ? Jun 4, 2024 20:41

Klaus88: Jan 23, 2011; Violence has its own economy, therefore be thoughtful and precise in your investment

Zaphod42 posted:

Health point

A good post, and something that was directly related to what made black mesa unfun. There were tons of enemys and they absorbed too many bullets for it to be fun.

# ? Sep 8, 2015 23:27

Rupert Buttermilk: Apr 15, 2007; 🚣RowboatMan: ❄️Freezing time🕰️ is an old P.I. 🥧trick...

Mak0rz posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BowvffJX68

Kins thank you for using the TJ Combo theme for this.

Holy mother of christ, Kins, you are wonderful. This looks so :black101:

and

at the same time.

How many maps now?

# ? Sep 8, 2015 23:30

Segmentation Fault: Jun 7, 2012

9/11 can't come soon enough.

# ? Sep 8, 2015 23:56

Zaphod42: Sep 13, 2012; If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Mak0rz posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BowvffJX68

Kins thank you for using the TJ Combo theme for this.

Ahahaha, this loving rules. Was that the master sword?

# ? Sep 9, 2015 00:01

Mak0rz: Aug 2, 2008; 😎🐗🚬

Zaphod42 posted:

Ahahaha, this loving rules. Was that the master sword?

Looks like it! :getin:

# ? Sep 9, 2015 00:12

Rupert Buttermilk: Apr 15, 2007; 🚣RowboatMan: ❄️Freezing time🕰️ is an old P.I. 🥧trick...

Is that some sort of Mario 2 waterfall area?

# ? Sep 9, 2015 00:43

khwarezm: Oct 26, 2010; Deal with it.

Zaphod42 posted:

The enemies themselves may have variety in their appearance, but they all just stand there and shoot at you. None of them have any variety in their tactics really, and when it comes to FPS that's what really matters. Does seeing a red colored dude with more HP than the blue colored dudes you were shooting earlier do anything for you?

Now that's just not true, the enemies in Borderlands do try and dodge fire and take cover (I don't notice any serious AI differences between it and most other modern shooters). They'll even change their approach and behave more defensively or aggressively, or target one player over another if a high level enemy like a Nomad Taskmaster is barking order at them.

There are obvious differences when you're fighting the different types of wildlife, humans and robots, I genuinely don't understand how you didn't notice some of the huge changes in play-style between enemies, you can go back and have a look at my post about Varkids and Goliaths if you want, but as well as that you have Stalkers that can go invisible to try and sneak up on you from behind (and which try to get out of your FOV and go invisible again if they take damage), Threshers that can create Wormholes to forcibly draw you into their spiky hide, rats that will eat each other to regenerate health, can steal your loot and tend to be much more agile and difficult to hit than standard human enemies, Loader robots that can be de-limbed to deprive them of attacks and movement speed, Constructors that can barely move but will spawn lots of dangerous enemies if left alone, and surveyors that will fly around repairing all other kinds of machines (a pain to shoot out of the sky).

I could go on but I'll spare everyone the tedium, there's also the wide variety of elemental vulnerabilities and resistances, critical hit spots and whatever else to consider, there's a lot to criticize Borderlands 2 for, but really when it comes to proper enemy variety I can't think of any contemporary shooter that comes close to it.

quote:

Like, look at quake's enemies. There's no waste there. Each enemy behaves COMPLETELY different. The fact that they look different is second to the fact that one of them flies, one of them jumps, one of them crawls, one of them... shambles.... you know what I mean.

Like you said, the tactics of borderlands consist purely of "they have lots of HP and you have to whittle it down without getting hit too much"

Its like if you had a Doom WAD where the ONLY enemies were ALL CYBERDEMONS. It would be the most un-fun bullshit imaginable.

Mooks that die in one shot feel good. You as the hero have way more satisfaction dodging bullets to blap a thousand imps and marines than you do killing one cyberdemon that took you 10 minutes of dodging around a pillar while you fire rockets up his rear end. Big bosses are cool once in awhile to break the flow, but in general FPS games are about killing lots of dudes fast, not killing big dudes slow. I feel like this is a golden rule that gets largely ignored.

Its something in Destiny's game design (not a classic FPS but it matters to the discussion) that they're slowly learning. The original Destiny was all big bulletsponge bosses that you'd have to unload on for loving 15 minutes without any real tactics, just hide behind cover, regen health, fire bullets, hide behind cover, regen health, fire bullets, over and over until he dies. BORING.

Way more fun is you do something like make the boss leave the room for awhile and you have to clear all the little baddies and then he comes back. Or you give him an invincibility shield and make it so you have to kill the little baddies so the shield goes away.

Borderlands did on rare occasions come up with things like that, there was one raid boss that was invincible and you had to kill bad guys to create acid pools where they died to drag the boss through. That's a neat challenge, although can be tricky. But that's just one boss, and almost all the rest of them were just "its got a gently caress ton of HP, don't die and keep shooting" and that's it

I think that's actually part of what makes doom so good, that so many FPS games don't get right anymore. You need to run fast, yeah, but you also need to be killing huge hordes of enemies left and right. Its satisfying, it gives you constant feedback. Yes, doom is fast, but its not just the player movement that's fast, its the killing of enemies that's fast too.

Challenge that comes from quantity of enemies is more enjoyable than challenge that comes from one or two enemies with a huge quantity of hit points. There's a lot more tactically that can happen in big groups than with one big toughguy too.

Thats all well and good but to be honest, I've been playing a lot of early real 3d shooters (not 2.5d) like Quake and Unreal recently and I really found that the regular enemies in these games have had some of the highest amounts of health I've dealt with in a long time, and I assume that's because they simply couldn't handle having many enemies in a level at a time. Like in these games I don't think I've ever seem the onscreen enemy count go above 10, its a far cry from Doom I can tell you. In quake the most common enemy in the game seems to be the Ogre, and I've never played a game where the main trash enemy seems to have so much health. Likewise stuff like the shamblers are seriously beefy, going up against them without a Super nailgun, lightning gun or Quad damage can take a long time.

I don't think I can hold Borderlands enemy count against it in that light, we've never approached Doom-level enemy numbers since full 3d became the norm, and honestly it can have a pretty high number of enemies on screen at once. I think we both agree that Borderlands has serious problems with health scaling, but I a feel that if it were a shooter with better core gun feel, less constricted movement, reasonable enemy health and more balanced weapons its enemy roster would shine very well.

# ? Sep 9, 2015 01:04

Shadow Hog: Feb 23, 2014; Avatar by Jon Davies

Rupert Buttermilk posted:

Is that some sort of Mario 2 waterfall area?

I believe it's part of the Contra stage that was mentioned in the ZDoom thread, actually.

Either that or the updated RPG village stage.

# ? Sep 9, 2015 01:14

Zaphod42: Sep 13, 2012; If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

khwarezm posted:

Now that's just not true, the enemies in Borderlands do try and dodge fire and take cover (I don't notice any serious AI differences between it and most other modern shooters). They'll even change their approach and behave more defensively or aggressively, or target one player over another if a high level enemy like a Nomad Taskmaster is barking order at them.

There are obvious differences when you're fighting the different types of wildlife, humans and robots, I genuinely don't understand how you didn't notice some of the huge changes in play-style between enemies, you can go back and have a look at my post about Varkids and Goliaths if you want, but as well as that you have Stalkers that can go invisible to try and sneak up on you from behind (and which try to get out of your FOV and go invisible again if they take damage), Threshers that can create Wormholes to forcibly draw you into their spiky hide, rats that will eat each other to regenerate health, can steal your loot and tend to be much more agile and difficult to hit than standard human enemies, Loader robots that can be de-limbed to deprive them of attacks and movement speed, Constructors that can barely move but will spawn lots of dangerous enemies if left alone, and surveyors that will fly around repairing all other kinds of machines (a pain to shoot out of the sky).

I could go on but I'll spare everyone the tedium, there's also the wide variety of elemental vulnerabilities and resistances, critical hit spots and whatever else to consider, there's a lot to criticize Borderlands 2 for, but really when it comes to proper enemy variety I can't think of any contemporary shooter that comes close to it.

Eh, some modern games do AI better (Halo) but for the most part I'm saying how modern games kinda suck and where they could improve, not that all other FPS do AI great and borderlands 2 is the one sole exception. Maybe that came off as overly critical on the singular work on that point. I mean most FPS these days are like call of duty where its just a shooting gallery of enemies that pop up from cover and then back down until you pop them and move on, so that's not any better. But still, Borderlands shooting feels like a slog.

For the most part wildlife vs robots aren't significantly that different. There are the stalkers and tunnel worm types, I did kinda overlook those, but those were more annoying to fight against than anything else, not really fun or challenging. Just made you wait, that's never a fun mechanic. They are different though than the other guys so you've got me there, I was using some hyperbole :cheeky:

Now, elemental vulnerabilities and resistances, that's exactly the poo poo I'm talking about. Borderlands 2 got itself so bogged down with those things that it forgot about making the plain shooting itself fun. You're just constantly scraping by based on elements and stats and using your class abilities for little bursts of effectiveness and the basic shooting itself never really feels great. Destiny has a lot of the same problems but they're (very slowly) learning and improving at least. I haven't played pre-sequel yet but it just looked like more of the same. I'd like to see more from other shooters too though.

Rupert Buttermilk posted:

Is that some sort of Mario 2 waterfall area?

I was wondering that too.

# ? Sep 9, 2015 01:24

juggalo baby coffin: Dec 2, 2007; How would the dog wear goggles and even more than that, who makes the goggles?

How do you guys get reelism working in multiplayer? I've never had any luck with multiplayer in gzdoom, i always fall back to zandronum.

# ? Sep 9, 2015 05:08

Rocket Pan: Nov 3, 2011; Anything can be sent, as long as it's less than 1200 bytes

FirstPersonShitter posted:

How do you guys get reelism working in multiplayer? I've never had any luck with multiplayer in gzdoom, i always fall back to zandronum.

While I can't vouch for Zandronum running Reelism in a stable manor at the moment (it has some rather expensive bandwidth requirements when it does work), G/ZDoom presently does work and is internally tested even with Reelism's development builds, so that's confirmably safe. Is there a particular issue you're having that the rather-obscenely-detailed-in-hindsight multiplayer FAQ doesn't cover (and thus would need to be added)?

# ? Sep 9, 2015 06:37

tonytheshoes: Nov 19, 2002; They're still shitty...

I've recently gotten back into some Doom/Doom II single-player, and now that I've beaten the vanilla games a few times, I've been interested in playing through a bunch of the 'Cacowards' material... unfortunately, I'm playing on a Mac, and I can't seem to find either a frontend that allows command line parameters or a tutorial on how to use them on a Mac... I've waded through a bunch of sites and wikis, but they are sort of a mess. Is there anything floating around out there for OSX that I might have missed? If not, I'll just skip the single-level replacements... Not a huge deal as there is still a metric shitton of stuff to play through.

# ? Sep 9, 2015 14:52

Rupert Buttermilk: Apr 15, 2007; 🚣RowboatMan: ❄️Freezing time🕰️ is an old P.I. 🥧trick...

tonytheshoes posted:

I've recently gotten back into some Doom/Doom II single-player, and now that I've beaten the vanilla games a few times, I've been interested in playing through a bunch of the 'Cacowards' material... unfortunately, I'm playing on a Mac, and I can't seem to find either a frontend that allows command line parameters or a tutorial on how to use them on a Mac... I've waded through a bunch of sites and wikis, but they are sort of a mess. Is there anything floating around out there for OSX that I might have missed? If not, I'll just skip the single-level replacements... Not a huge deal as there is still a metric shitton of stuff to play through.

I'll PM you and sort you out. There's a goon who was making a 'nightly' build from the source code available, but I don't think they kept going. I have a version from months ago, works perfectly with everything.

I'm one of the few Doomers on here who is constantly complaining/talking about OS X stuff, so I've been there.

# ? Sep 9, 2015 15:46

tonytheshoes: Nov 19, 2002; They're still shitty...

Rupert Buttermilk posted:

I'll PM you and sort you out. There's a goon who was making a 'nightly' build from the source code available, but I don't think they kept going. I have a version from months ago, works perfectly with everything.

I'm one of the few Doomers on here who is constantly complaining/talking about OS X stuff, so I've been there.

Oh man, that would be amazing! Thank you so much. It's funny, Mac gaming has come a long, long way, but it's some of this old stuff that can be the most frustrating.

# ? Sep 9, 2015 15:52

Rupert Buttermilk: Apr 15, 2007; 🚣RowboatMan: ❄️Freezing time🕰️ is an old P.I. 🥧trick...

tonytheshoes posted:

Oh man, that would be amazing! Thank you so much. It's funny, Mac gaming has come a long, long way, but it's some of this old stuff that can be the most frustrating.

It's so much more accessible now, with OS X running on Intel chips. I think I heard once (maybe in this thread?) that old mac stuff is harder to run than old PC/DOS/IBM stuff, due to front-ends and source ports.

# ? Sep 9, 2015 15:56

The Kins: Oct 2, 2004

Rupert Buttermilk posted:

It's so much more accessible now, with OS X running on Intel chips. I think I heard once (maybe in this thread?) that old mac stuff is harder to run than old PC/DOS/IBM stuff, due to front-ends and source ports.

Old Mac stuff is harder to get running on modern systems due to a mixture of a major processor change from PowerPC to Intel and Apple's general disinterest in backwards compatibility. Most pre-OSX stuff does well enough in SheepShaver, thankfully.

# ? Sep 9, 2015 16:03

Casimir Radon: Aug 2, 2008

tonytheshoes posted:

I've recently gotten back into some Doom/Doom II single-player, and now that I've beaten the vanilla games a few times, I've been interested in playing through a bunch of the 'Cacowards' material... unfortunately, I'm playing on a Mac, and I can't seem to find either a frontend that allows command line parameters or a tutorial on how to use them on a Mac... I've waded through a bunch of sites and wikis, but they are sort of a mess. Is there anything floating around out there for OSX that I might have missed? If not, I'll just skip the single-level replacements... Not a huge deal as there is still a metric shitton of stuff to play through.

No idea on your technical problems, but play some Pirate Doom when you figure it out.

# ? Sep 9, 2015 16:51

tonytheshoes: Nov 19, 2002; They're still shitty...

Casimir Radon posted:

No idea on your technical problems, but play some Pirate Doom when you figure it out.

I'll definitely check it out.

# ? Sep 9, 2015 18:47

Mischievous Mink: May 29, 2012

Zaphod42 posted:

Its like if you had a Doom WAD where the ONLY enemies were ALL CYBERDEMONS. It would be the most un-fun bullshit imaginable.

Actually, that exists and is pretty fun and creative. http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Cyberdreams

# ? Sep 9, 2015 20:39

Zaphod42: Sep 13, 2012; If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Mischievous Mink posted:

Actually, that exists and is pretty fun and creative. http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Cyberdreams

Okay that's interesting, you've got me there man. but there is one HUGE twist

quote:

which the player is forced to solve without the use of weapons.

Which kinda completely does away with the whole "bullet sponge" problem. If every fight is a puzzle, well, that's a horse of a different color!

# ? Sep 9, 2015 21:06

koren: Sep 7, 2003

Zaphod42 posted:

Its like if you had a Doom WAD where the ONLY enemies were ALL CYBERDEMONS. It would be the most un-fun bullshit imaginable.

tom19.wad map31 beckons.

# ? Sep 9, 2015 23:16

Geight: Aug 7, 2010; Oh, All-Knowing One, behold me!

Cyberdemons are actually badass and the key to a good videogame bestiary is enemies of varying offensive and defensive strength, not just having paper soldiers or bullet sponges.

# ? Sep 9, 2015 23:17

Zaphod42: Sep 13, 2012; If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.

Geight posted:

Cyberdemons are actually badass and the key to a good videogame bestiary is enemies of varying offensive and defensive strength, not just having paper soldiers or bullet sponges.

Yeah that's definitely true. Halo had a really good mix imo, you need your grunt types that die en-masse and you need your elite-types that are challenging to fight against and require you to take cover.

But even the tough Halo enemies like Elites and Brutes could be killed with one or two good shots, if you used the right gun and hit them in the right place. Their difficulty comes from their offensive power and their maneuverability and tactics, not from raw HP pools.

So I guess in addition to FPS golden rule "you need mooks to kill to feel good", we can add rule "big enemy/bosses' challenge should come more from pulling off a specific thing rather than doing the same thing over and over and over that you've been doing, but more"

There's probably an easier way to say that.

Cyberdemons fall kinda in-between. Their threat comes mostly from how much damage they can do to you, so you have to use cover quickly, and they run around fast, but mostly fighting them is just about landing rockets over and over until they go down, so they're a little on the bullet-sponge side. Still, killing one never took 10 minutes of landing shots continuously like a Destiny boss or a Borderlands raid boss can. And you can always slide up and smack them in the butt with a BFG shot if you have ammo.

# ? Sep 9, 2015 23:39

Woolie Wool: Jun 2, 2006

FPS bosses are generally terrible. The idea of a boss battle is usually for a "final exam" that tests the skills you learned during the game. Especially in a classic FPS game, a battle against one big enemy is inherently less interesting than a massive staged battle against regular enemies, where all of your skills, from accuracy to evasion to crowd control to tactical awareness, can be put to the test. Even the best designed boss will be fairly one dimensional in comparison.

# ? Sep 10, 2015 01:31

Douk Douk: Mar 17, 2009; Take your pervert war elsewhere.

I never saw Cyberdemons as an enemy or a boss, so much as a walking rocket launcher wall that might be shot down if you have enough ammo. They're more akin to the cannons that shot bullet bills in Mario. Cyberdreams was excellent because that's precisely what the author made them gameplay-wise.

# ? Sep 10, 2015 01:43

Rupert Buttermilk: Apr 15, 2007; 🚣RowboatMan: ❄️Freezing time🕰️ is an old P.I. 🥧trick...

I'm confused by some of the monster replacements in Demonsteele. I know the floating weird monks are cacodemons, the dark enemies are the cloaked pinkies, but what are those disappearing or teleporting samurai/ninjas? And the ghosts?

That big skull tank is the cyberdemon, right?

# ? Sep 10, 2015 01:52

closeted republican: Sep 9, 2005

Woolie Wool posted:

FPS bosses are generally terrible. The idea of a boss battle is usually for a "final exam" that tests the skills you learned during the game. Especially in a classic FPS game, a battle against one big enemy is inherently less interesting than a massive staged battle against regular enemies, where all of your skills, from accuracy to evasion to crowd control to tactical awareness, can be put to the test. Even the best designed boss will be fairly one dimensional in comparison.

After playing Q1SP maps for a bit, a good and challenging battle is a far better end to a map or map series than an actual boss. A tense battle with powerful enemies spawning in is a great capstone for a map.

# ? Sep 10, 2015 04:11

Mak0rz: Aug 2, 2008; 😎🐗🚬

I'm more fond of "boss maps" than boss monsters too. Dead Simple (and the Doom 64 "sequel" map Even Simpler) is pretty good. I'm not sure I remember a FPS boss monster I legitimately enjoyed, unless cyberdemon counts. Icon of Sin comes close, but it's missing something and I can't quite get what it is. Maybe if they had a better way to make scoring hits a challenge instead of using the pillar.

Doom 3 had a sort of neat idea for a final boss that could have went somewhere, but the execution of it was just awful.

# ? Sep 10, 2015 04:43

Woolie Wool: Jun 2, 2006

closeted republican posted:

After playing Q1SP maps for a bit, a good and challenging battle is a far better end to a map or map series than an actual boss. A tense battle with powerful enemies spawning in is a great capstone for a map.

I played so much Q1SP in the last month that I'm kind of burned out on it.

But I went from zero to being able to complete Honey on Normal in a month so at least I got pretty decent at it pretty fast. :v:

# ? Sep 10, 2015 04:49

my bony fealty: Oct 1, 2008

The key to having fun in Borderlands is to pick the sniper class and only pop heads. The base gunplay is pretty boring, but the sniping is super fun and didn't get old after the 200 hours I played in BL2 with Zer0.

On a related note, are there any Doom wads that have good sniping? The Temple of the Lizardmen series comes to mind as having a satisfying sniper rifle, but not many actual opportunities to use it.

# ? Sep 10, 2015 04:49

Geight: Aug 7, 2010; Oh, All-Knowing One, behold me!

the sniper rifle in project MSX uses the model from Halo and beefs up the actual shot to feel like a railgun and a tank cannon's offspring

# ? Sep 10, 2015 04:52

closeted republican: Sep 9, 2005

Woolie Wool posted:

I played so much Q1SP in the last month that I'm kind of burned out on it.

But I went from zero to being able to complete Honey on Normal in a month so at least I got pretty decent at it pretty fast.

I'm parceling it out so that I only play Q1SP like one or two days a week so I don't get burned out.

# ? Sep 10, 2015 08:33

Johnny Joestar: Oct 21, 2010; Don't shoot him?

...
...

Zaphod42 posted:

Yeah that's definitely true. Halo had a really good mix imo, you need your grunt types that die en-masse and you need your elite-types that are challenging to fight against and require you to take cover.

But even the tough Halo enemies like Elites and Brutes could be killed with one or two good shots, if you used the right gun and hit them in the right place. Their difficulty comes from their offensive power and their maneuverability and tactics, not from raw HP pools.

So I guess in addition to FPS golden rule "you need mooks to kill to feel good", we can add rule "big enemy/bosses' challenge should come more from pulling off a specific thing rather than doing the same thing over and over and over that you've been doing, but more"

There's probably an easier way to say that.

Cyberdemons fall kinda in-between. Their threat comes mostly from how much damage they can do to you, so you have to use cover quickly, and they run around fast, but mostly fighting them is just about landing rockets over and over until they go down, so they're a little on the bullet-sponge side. Still, killing one never took 10 minutes of landing shots continuously like a Destiny boss or a Borderlands raid boss can. And you can always slide up and smack them in the butt with a BFG shot if you have ammo.

the halo games actually did a lot of good things in general, to be honest. maybe things got dumb around the time halo 4 came around, but i had fun with what i played of the first 3 games.

# ? Sep 10, 2015 08:43

Assepoester: Jul 18, 2004; Can't post for 10 years!; Melman v2

So someone made a game that looks to be entirely about the Hall of Mirrors effect and similar visual glitches

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nptXAYlRhFo

# ? Sep 10, 2015 08:51