the answers, and a rant

[solipsistnation]

1. Doom 3
2. Half-Life
3. Far Cry
4. Doom 1 (which I thought was on the moon. am i remembering that wrong?)
5. System Shock 2


Unreal didn't have labs-- you were an escaped convict. That's a whole separate sort of plot, along with the "cop forced to work outside the law" plot and the "halfway through you have to fight your old allies" "twist," which at this point is so hoary that anytime I see a place with a lot of anonymous well-armed guards, I start looking around for ways to kill them, even if they're supposed to be allied.

Deus Ex isn't in here because it actually tried to do something different, and mostly succeeded. (See the mention of the "now you fight your allies" plot complication in the previous paragraph). DX2 has its own side-rant, though, for all the stuff it failed at.

World War II plots are all pretty much the same, too, although they at least have some kind of basis in history, no matter how tenuous. People really did pull off ridiculous spy missions behind enemy lines and so on, so that's fine.

Spy games and sneakers are another side-genre. The No One Lives Forever games were such stylin' fun that I find it hard to hold anything against them, and Thief I and II were truly groundbreaking (Thief I moreso, but Thief II was lots of fun and addressed most of the problems with Thief I.)

Part of the problem is that anytime anyone comes out with a new mechanic and writes a game around it, that new mechanic is imitated with varying degrees of success in the new round of games to be released.

For example, Thief's stealth and mission structure obviously highly influenced No One Lives Forever (and everything else since, really), event hough the stealth and list of mission objectives appeared to be sort of tacked onto the game after most of the engine was in place. Deus Ex tried to incorporate stealth, but largely failed. Unreal's creepy flashlight-exploration level spawned a number of imitators, including Doom 3, which takes it to an extreme-- you can't hold a gun and a flashlight at the same time, but you can whack things with the light if you're attacked.

Zombies, by this time, are pretty damn old. I'm very tired of saying, "Oh look, it's a marine, but his eyes are glowing. He's a zoooombie now." Half-Life's headcrab zombies were cool and creepy, but even that sort of thing is pretty tired now. (Let's not talk about the damn Flood from Halo.) In general, One is Creepy; A Few are Scary; Lots are Boring.

The Doom 3 imps are pretty scary so far, and crawl along walls and throw fireballs. They aren't quite as nasty as the xenomorphs in the Aliens vs Predator games, but they aren't there as overwhelming fodder, either.

So, as far as being about an hour into playing Doom 3, I've got to say that it's very pretty, it plays nicely, but I fear that I have just foreseen the entire plot from beginning to end, and while I'm looking forward to making my way through it, I sincerely hope that they do something interesting with it. I suppose that I shouldn't really expect lots of innovation from a sequel to the sequel to the game that defined the first-person shooter and which is obviously meant as a tribute to that first game (as well as being a re-imagining using modern technology), but still-- it would be nice.

Comments

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Come on, did you really expect Id to innovate? They haven't found that to be a successful business model as of yet. When they were making Quake, they had some crazy plans about it using all medieval weaponry, then gave up when they realized they couldn't write a good game without rocket launchers.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

Doom 1 (which I thought was on the moon. am i remembering that wrong?)

Mars, I think.

[sirroxton.livejournal.com]

I think you're both right. If I recall correctly, Doom was centered around a teleportation experiment between Phobos and Deimos, both moons of Mars, going horribly wrong.

I remember John Carmack saying in an interview that thematic elements were a complete afterthought to allow for truly solid gameplay.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Didn't Wolf-3D "define the first-person shooter"? Doom always seemed like a Wolf-3D clone to me, though I didn't much like any of them.

(Wolf-3D was a huge let-down as it wasn't anywhere near as good as the original Wolfenstein games.)

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Almost. It began it, but Doom was what really started the craze. There were a few shooters before Doom that had everything built on big cubical blocks-- Wolfenstein 3D, Blake something and the Alien something, I think Corridor 7-- but not until Doom showed up and had floors on different levels and arbitrarily-placed walls did people really pick up on them.

There's probably room for debate in there, but I know when it first got interesting for me, and when people really started talking about shooters (and when it got high-profile enough that the general public noticed) and it was Doom.

[sauergeek.livejournal.com]

Somewhere early on was a Mac-only first-person shooter called "Pathways Into Darkness" -- arguably the single worst one ever made. I think it predated Doom, but I'm not positive.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Also arguably one of the best, and the plot is tied in with Marathon, if you can believe that. It was isometric, but did some clever things. It was also set up more as an RPG than a pure shooter...

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

hm, but I'm not sure when it came out. I think before Doom but after or right around Wolfenstein 3D.