Working Title 08.07.09: The Perfect Shooter

Posted by Jordan Williams on 08.07.2009

Halo, Call of Duty, Gears of War, and Half-Life are all GOOD shooters, but what parts could be used from all of the shooters (3rd and 1st person) to make a PERFECT one?

Welcome to the #1 Column in the world to completely trumble everything Weston Smith says in two sentences because I have the mic.

It was a troll on Bobby due to the history we have from the 411mania forums. Some people (including Bobby himself) got the joke, others did not.

Trumple'd

Anyway, welcome back to Working Title and its current series Working Perfection, in where I take parts of other games from the same genre and make a ‘perfect' game with said parts. I have already covered the perfect Fighter, last week was the perfect Beat ‘Em Up, and this week was SUPPOSED to be the perfect First Person Shooter.

Then I realized that since FPS games, and just shooters in general have become such a stable of this generation, I decided to broaden it out a bit and instead opt to just go with The Perfect Shooter. Mostly because that gives me a wider selection of games I can pick from, and also because.

…and don't get angry…

A lot of first person shooters have A LOT in common. Yes, that's a nice way of me saying they are almost all the same goddamn thing. It's common for third person shooters to have the same thing in every game as well, but honestly it's just matter of what parts you decide to use and what parts you don't.

So with that being said, let's go ahead and cannibalize some games for the betterment of a one. It's the American Way!



Working Perfection: Perfect Shooter

Note: Shooter can (and is) used also to describe other type of shooting games like R-Type, Contra, Ikaruga, and the like. I am not talking about these types of games in this column, it is named Perfect Shooter simply because it sounds a lot better than saying "Perfect Third Person/First Person Shooter".

In this current generation (I am upholding my stance on the ban of the word "Next-Gen" when describing the current consoles) one thing is certain when it comes to games.

Shooters sell.

In what used to be mostly a PC-centric genre, it seems that you can barely go a full month without a new shooter being released. Be it a first person shooter or a third person shooter there always seems to be a game in which the main goal is to put bullets into someone looming just around the corner. The odd thing is that most of them are very forgettable.

Yes, you do have Call of Duty, Halo, Gears of War, but look how many other shooters come out on a yearly basis that get forgotten in the coming months? So how about we sit back, relax, and make a perfect one.



Play Style (Single Player/Offline Co-op): Gears of War

Now this might need some defining. By Player Style I do not mean character style or what not, I mean this as how the player can play the game. I use Gears of War as an example here because the game does a great job of crafting a single player and a co-op experience. If you play the game through as Marcus Fenix, you still get the story and all of the things that you could get. However, in Co-Op there are forking paths and what not you can take. The story will stay exactly the same but the idea of having a co-op experience where you are not tethered by one another is a great experience.

The moments where you would have to cover your partner from attack from an untouchable distance like in Gears of War 2, or sections where you both are simply taking on enemies from all fronts while not necessarily interacting with another is great. So this is why I think having a play style of Gears of War would work over say…Halo, there even in co-op the main goal is to just mow down everything in the room.

This isn't to say that the other shooters out there don't have good play styles; it's just that I feel there seems to be more weight into what you do with Gears of War than in the others. Running down a and firing into a crowd and taking tons of shots only to walk out unscathed (or at the very most, a bit hurt) just doesn't give well with me. Bullets are meant to kill, and when they don't live up to that purpose the idea of a shooter, futuristic or not, is lost to me.


Play Style (Online Multiplayer) : Unreal Tournament Series

Now yes…I did use a third person shooter and a first person shooter but I want to stress that this does I am just trying to make the perfect SHOOTER here. For example I mean if someone could take the weight of the campaign from Gears of War and translate that into a good FPS experience, then so be it. Obviously I am not going to think they will make a game where in single player you are in third person and in multiplayer you are in first.

But I will say that as far as online multiplayer goes for me, UT (UT2k4 especially) take the cake for me. So many online multiplayer shooters nowadays try to do this system with ‘perks' which I loathe with every fiber of my e-penis. I might catch flack for it but I think the whole "Play better and get better weapons" makes the playing field uneven and bloated. I like Unreal Tournaments style because if was...well, it was balanced.

You had your hack servers, you had your special servers for special map types, but there was none of this perk bullshit that you could do once you played long enough, there was none of this "Preorder and get this weapon right off the bat" shit you see now. You started with the same guns as everyone else and the same abilities (if applicable) and you worked with what you had.

If you were skilled, you were skilled, if you sucked, you fucking sucked. Of course the pro-perks will say that they really don't matter in the grand scheme of things, they might be right, but I think UT had the most balanced (whatever definition of the word you have) gameplay for online play. You find in so many of today's FPS games they give you ‘ranks' and ‘perks' and things of the like that you get really three types of players.

You get the players who are driven like hell just to get the next perk or rank up so they will resort to cheap tactics and exploiting to get every little win they can.

You get the Pub Stompers who just play on low level to exploit the noobs (Trial by fire of the worst kind for these types of games. It makes it seem like the only way to win is to cheat)

And then you get the MLG Crowd, which can be seen as a good or bad thing depending on what side of the spectrum you are on.

I think that having such an even playing field and an abundance of modes (Old school Assault being a personal favorite of mine) makes Unreal Tournament the type of multiplayer I'd like to see in the perfect shooter. With no ranks and what not you are playing to actually play and (gasp!) have fun, if you are a ranked player or a MLG world player or whatever you are playing to hone your skill. You aren't as driven to play cheap just for something to show off online. E-penis be damned.

Protagonist: Duke Nukem

When looking for a protagonist for the perfect shooter, I looked through our recent heroes, and the ones of the past. I find that many of them lack that…'it' factor. The ones that actually ended up having the most personality were often based on another form of media and not stand alone video game creations. So people like Riddick and James Bond couldn't be used.

So with the past I looked at the originals like Doom Guy…who…was a silent protagonist, in fact, most FPS heroes tend to be silent protagonists while most TPS heroes tend to be more outspoken and have character. I don't know if that has to do with them trying to make it seem like in first person you are immersed in the game rather than playing a character or not, but it makes for some shitty protagonists. People often claim Gordon Freeman as a great character and hero…but he doesn't do anything. He never speaks, has no personality that isn't given to him vicariously though other characters insights and dialogue or any sort of real purpose besides to ‘be the player'. You have recent heroes like Master Chief, who in his own right IS a character, but he really isn't much of a good one because you never seem to have a good connection of who he is, just who everyone else knows him as. But then on the flipside with third person shooters you have characters like (and I find it odd they all come in teams) The Mercs from Mercenaries, Delta Squad, and Salem and Rios from Army of Two.

They are all animated (sometimes overly animated) characters with personalities, now they might not be the best personalities in the world but if I am going to be staring at the back of someone's head the entire game they need to have SOMETHING worthwhile. With that said, I think Duke Nukem is the best compromise between the two.

His one liners might get on your nerves, but it gives you some sort of character to go with. You know who Duke Nukem was as you played his games, he wasn't just a silent face like Doom Guy and he wasn't someone who rarely talked like Master Chief. He didn't have anyone to play off of like The Ao2 guys or Delta Squad, but when he would spout a line at least you knew you were playing as SOMEONE, and he was a hero. To me that does more for a story than just being a silent shell and watching everything. Hail to the king, baby.


Story: Half-Life

Despite me just bashing Gordon Freeman above, I will praise his game. Now I am not saying the perfect shooter will have Half-Life's story, this is in the same vein as when I picked Mortal Kombat to be the story for the perfect fighting game. In my eyes there perfect shooter would have a story that is handled with such care and…love that the Half-Life story has been. While Freeman may be a weak character, almost every other character in the game is all thought out, well acted, and just overall very good and more than you'd find from a first person shooter game. This might lead the purists to go on a rant and rave about how Half-Life (and 2…and e1 and e2) are not pure FPS games, but I still think even with the puzzle elements the game is still primarily dealt in the realm of an FPS, it just takes a slower pace to it rather than the run and gun pace we are all used to.

With a story like this game has, it's easy to look beyond what you are doing at the moment and what will happen in the end. In many games you are only focused on what enemy you are currently shooting, not necessarily what is going to happen after this chapter or what sort of turn the story will take. It kept you playing not for the thrill of busting a cap in someone's ass, but to actually see what happened in the end.

I am sure others can say the same for games like Halo, Gears, and etc. But more and more those games single player campaign and stories just feel more like practice for online multiplayer rather than a full single player game. We are trying to pick parts to make the perfect shooter, which means everything has to be equally perfect.

Weapons: Perfect Dark

Good ole Perfect Dark. I did not like this game as much as everyone else did, but I really did like its weapon selection. You have FPS games that have nothing but futuristic weapons, and they tend to be out of place or just underpowered, but with Perfect Dark you have the right mix of practical real weapons and then some of the super sexy spy like weapons (Reppin' for the Laptop gun) and then you have the fucking alien weapons that just all kinds of awesome.

The fact that you have the practical weapons everyone knows and loves leads to good recognition of the weapons. You don't have to look up a damn manual or do some trial and error to know what weapon does what. Also with each weapon having an alternate fire mode, if effectively doubles the amount of weapons you have. Carry those sons of bitches over into Multiplayer Mode and you have a wide array of goodies to shoot your friends with…just leave out the FarSight.

No, seriously. Fuck the FarSight. The creator of that gun can eat a dick and die in a fire.

I mean it.

Difficulty: Resistance Series

Difficulty actually means a bit to the Shooter Genre because without the game being reasonably hard or at least a challenge, there is no real fun to be had. You need AI that can think on its feet and actually try to kill you, not just stand there and take countless bullets to the face until they notice you only to shoot at you and miss horribly.

Now this was hard to pick because AI has become a LOT better in FPS and TPS games as of late, but for me personally the Resistance games have always had that air of "Fuck, give me a BREAK" when it comes to it's AI just being all sorts of stupid crazy. It's not to say that the game is impossibly hard, that is a lie and a half. But the AI does react in a way that makes you believe they can pull some rabbits out of its hat and kick your ass if you are not on your toes. If you try to run and gun you will get moved down, and if you try to play too defensively you will get overwhelmed and picked apart.

Another game I almost used for this was Left 4 Dead, but I think the difficulty in that game is almost too uneven. Depending on what mood The Director is in the game can sometimes be laughably easy, but at other times it can but painfully annoying. Notice I said annoying and not HARD. Unless you ratchet the difficulty up to Expert L4D is rarely ever a HARD game, it just gets a bit more cheap and annoying.

Call of Duty (namely 3 and beyond) was also a choice, but I feel that those games aren't so much hard as it is just trial and error. Pain is the best teacher and when you are trying to play forward and end up getting mowed down by an impassable group of soldiers with weapons you know right away that that is not the right way to go. Then you try again, get mowed down on that other direction, and then try another way. Most people will keep doing this until they find the ‘right' way simply because CoD (again, namely 3 and on) don't really penalize you for dying. You die, read a quote/load screen and start back up maybe a minute or two away from where you were last. This allows you to play the game in a Trial and Error type way. Just run and gun until you figure out which way is the ‘right' way.

So I think Resistance is the best bridge between the two there, the game is smart enough to present a challenge to you, but it's not so hard that it goes to the side of frustration.

Antagonist: Mass Effect

And then there is the Antagonist. Any good FPS/TPS has to have an antagonist that you really want to shoot. In Halo you have The Flood, in every WWII shooter you have the Nazis, and in Half-Life you had the Combine and others. I think, however, that Mass Effect had the best antagonist I can think of in an FPS.

It was a mixture of the fact that Saren was a dick overall, but he was a dick with a purpose. In too many of these games you just have the general "I want to destroy the world/planet/race" type people. But Saren was actually trying to hold that off and got lost on his way. In a sense Saren isn't even the MAIN villain; he is just a pawn being used by The Reapers to do their bidding.

Despite Saren being a giant dick, his intentions were good depending on how you looked at them. In his mind The Reapers were going to have a feast either way that much was for certain. The thing was Saren wanted to try to bargain with them so they would either only feast one race or just not all of them. Kill a million to save a billion. It's quite Ozymandian if you think about it. He was even working on a cure for the genophage that was killing off the Krogans, of course it was just to make them his personal soldiers but it was still going to keep them alive.

But of course Saren got corrupted and ended up doing way more harm than good in the long run, but I think that's what makes him a good villain and a decent one. He was skilled, no matter what you did he was always a step ahead of you and he posed a serious threat with his Reaper buddies.

In too many of these games we see the villains that really have no real personality on their own. They are simply just evil to be evil. With the exception of Doom, any game that just goes "These guys are bad, mmkay?" and that's that is just sort of lazy. In the Perfect Game EVERYTHING needs to be perfect. Which of course means the perfect game can't possibly be made because everything in video games is open to interpretation thus someone SOMEWHERE will hate it. But hey? What's the point of having imagination if we can't indulge in some fantasy now and then?

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Working Question

So at Comic-Con Bungie said that Halo: Reach will be the last thing it does with Halo. Microsoft has launched 343 Studios to take over all things Halo-related from now on. Do you think this move is going to help or hurt Halo? Seeing as Microsoft now has complete control over what it can do with it, do you think we will start seeing Halo whored out to Guitar Hero levels or do you think they will do the fans right and keep Halo a good thing.

Personally, I am not looking forward to 343's reign over Halo. I am not the biggest Halo fan in the world but it was very obvious that Bungie knew what it was doing with its franchise and where it was going. One might say Microsoft has wanted to do other stuff with Halo but Bungie pretty much shut them down. Coupled with the fact that Halo 3 really put a button on the end of the whole storyline, I can't see 343 doing anything ‘new' with Halo outside a ton of prequels and expanded universe stuff. It's already evident that even Bungie knows the Halo story is over with ODST being a prequel to a sequel and Reach apparently being a super prequel.

So what say you?

Look familiar? It should. It's the SAME question from last week because everyone was too busy with the Zelda shit to answer it...and I REALLY want to know what you all think as this may be a future column. So ANSWER.


Next week will be the last part of this series…in which I will flip everything on its ear. We've been talking about perfection and good and yadda yadda. Next week I will take parts from any genre I want and make...

THE WORST. GAME. EVER.

That is going to be fun.

Until next time, I'm Jordan Williams…and people who are bitching that Turtles in Time doesn't have a ‘retro' mode are idiots who are complaining about not being able to pay new money for the same old game. Explain the logic there to me, please.