This blog post explores the history of game development, from text-based adventure and role-playing games (RPGs) to first-person shooters (FPS). The first multiplayer, multiprogram video game system, nicknamed the “Brown Box”, was developed by Baer and his colleagues after several years of testing and advancements. Video games originated in the research labs of scientists in the early 1950s, with academics designing simple games like tic-tac-toe. Game developers can refer to single individuals or entire game studios, and the stages of development typically involve programming, coding, rendering, engineering, and testing.
The seven stages of game development include planning, pre-production, production, testing, pre-launch, launch, and post-production. The first-person shooter was officially established in 1992 with id Software’s Wolfenstein 3D. Most shooters during this period were developed for IBM PC compatible computers, while Bungie released its first shooter, Pathways into Darkness, on the Macintosh side.
First-person perspectives are used in various genres, including several distinct sub-genres of shooter games. The first true PC FPS was Hybrid Arts’ Midi Maze, released in 1987, where players became a Pac-Man-like orb in the game. The first real home computer FPS was MIDI Maze, released for the Atari ST by Hybrid Arts in 1987.
The evolution of FPS games is discussed, with a focus on their evolution and potential fading into obscurity.
📹 How To Fail At First Person Shooter Games
Come on, we know you want to make one…. admit it. So watch this video to know how to suck at it. Also. I drew a guy sitting on a …
How do first-person games work?
First-person games are typically avatar-based, displaying the player’s avatar’s perspective with their own eyes. Players typically cannot see the avatar’s body, but can see weapons or hands. This perspective is often used in flight and racing simulators to represent a driver’s perspective. Positional audio is often used to adjust ambient sounds based on the player’s position. First-person games don’t require sophisticated animations or manual camera-control schemes like third-person perspectives.
They allow for easier aiming, but may make it difficult to master timing and distances required to jump between platforms and may cause motion sickness in some players. Players expect first-person games to accurately scale objects to appropriate sizes, although key objects may be exaggerated to improve visibility.
Is it hard to make a first-person shooter?
The process of creating a FPS (Fantasy Perimeter Shooting) game is relatively straightforward, with numerous resources available to guide the creator through the process. Nevertheless, experience is of the utmost importance when dealing with conflicting assets or attempting to integrate them into a unified whole.
Who was the first-person to create a game?
In 1958, physicist William Higinbotham created the first video game, a simple tennis game similar to Pong. Born in 1910, Higinbotham graduated from Williams College in 1932 and attended Cornell University. He worked as an electronics technician at Cornell before joining the MIT Radiation Lab in 1941. In 1943, he moved to Los Alamos to work on electronics for a timing system for the atomic bomb. Higinbotham’s work on the first video game was a hit at a Brookhaven National Laboratory open house.
Why gamers can’t stop playing first-person shooters?
The first-person shooter experience is not just about the first-person experience, but also the shooting itself. This deviation from our regular life and the visceral situations make first-person shooters particularly compelling. Our brain craves this kind of interaction and stimulation, and we miss the adrenaline-generating decision-making that comes with it. In 2008, Nacke and cognitive scientist Craig Lindley conducted a study on the physical response of players to Half-Life 2, one of the most successful first-person shooters.
They observed their physiological responses using electrodes placed on their faces and other parts of the body to monitor muscle movements, pulse, and arousal. The study aimed to elicit moments of boredom, immersion, and flow. As the environmental complexity, variety of opponents, and difficulty increased, players’ faces registered greater positive emotion and their skin indicated increased arousal. Subjectively, they reported feeling happier and more immersed in the experience.
They also felt an increase of challenge and tension, as well as a heightened sense of action as their own identity melted away. Nacke had previously looked at other games, such as the third-person shooter Kane and Lynch and the real-time strategy game Fragile Alliance, and found that casual games did not have the same absorption and engagement flow that first-person shooters do.
How do you make your first game?
The Getting Started Guide for Building Your First Game covers various topics such as documenting your game idea, choosing an engine and development stack, getting organized, starting coding, getting involved in the community, and keeping in touch. It helps novices and veterans alike understand the resources available to help them get started on their next game. Topics covered include fast prototyping of levels, character models, asset texturing, and automation as a friend. By following these steps, anyone can create an amazing game experience.
What was the first POV game?
The earliest documented first-person shooter video games are Maze War and Spasim. Maze War was developed in 1973 by Greg Thompson, Steve Colley, and Howard Palmer, high-school students in a NASA work-study program. It became a maze game presented to the player in the first-person, with support for a second player and the ability to shoot the other player to win. Spasim had its debut at the University of Illinois in 1974 on the PLATO mainframe system, featuring a first-person perspective.
Both games were distinct from modern first-person shooters, involving simple tile-based movement. They spawned others that used similar visuals to display the player as part of a maze, such as Akalabeth: World of Doom in 1979. Another crucial early game that influenced first-person shooters was Wayout, which featured the player trying to escape a maze using ray casting to render the environment.
Futurewar, a dystopian 3D first-person dungeon shooter, has been argued to be the first true FPS due to its fully perspective-shifting 3D maze with enemies ahead and the earliest representation of weapons appearing in perspective in front of the player. Panther, a tank simulator for the PLATO system, is considered the first successful first-person shooter video game. Battlezone, modeled closely after PLATO Panther, is considered the first successful mass-market game featuring a first-person viewpoint and wireframe 3D graphics.
MIDI Maze, released in 1987 for the Atari ST, featured maze-based gameplay and character designs similar to Pac-Man but displayed in a first-person perspective. Later ported to various systems, it featured the first network multiplayer deathmatches using a MIDI interface. Despite the inconvenience of connecting numerous machines together, it gained a cult following, being called the “first multi-player 3D shooter on a mainstream system” and the first “major LAN action game”.
Are first-person shooters bad for your brain?
Competitive First-person shooter (FPS) games have been found to enhance human decision-making abilities, according to a study. Participants reported a positive impact on their cognitive skills after playing these games. The study also highlighted the use of cookies on the site, and the copyright © 2024 Elsevier B. V., its licensors, and contributors. All rights reserved for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.
Can a game be made by 1 person?
The development of video games by a single individual has proven to be a viable and fruitful avenue in the gaming industry. Despite the considerable challenges associated with creating sophisticated AAA titles, numerous remarkable games have been developed by independent developers.
What was the original first-person game?
Maze War, the first first-person shooter (FPS) videogame, was developed by Steve Colley, Greg Thompson, and Howard Palmer in 1973 on the Imlac PDS-1 minicomputer at NASA Ames Research Center in California. The game initially focused on exploring a 3D maze, but eventually evolved into shooting at one another. Networking the Imlac computers required a copy taken by Greg Thompson to MIT in 1974. The game was later incorporated into the early ARPANET, which later included an 8-player setup, AI-controlled opponents, an overhead display monitor, and a level editor. In the mid-1970s, it was claimed that around half of all data traffic on ARPANET was related to Maze War games between students at MIT and Stanford University.
Who developed the first game?
In the late 1940s, Thomas T. Goldsmith, Jr. and Estle R. Mann patented a Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device, which was an electronic device with screen overlays for playing basic games. William Higinbotham created Tennis for Two in 1958, but it wasn’t widely available. The first true video game was invented in 1967 by Ralph H. Baer, who created the first prototype of the Magnavox Odyssey, the world’s first video game console. Baer, known as the “Father of Video Games”, transformed electronic signals into pictures on a television screen via a raster pattern, creating what we now know as video games.
The original Magnavox Odyssey featured simple games like chase, checkers, and shooting, and came with paddle controllers and other board game accessories. It was a huge success, selling over 700, 000 units in its first three years of production.
What was the first 3rd person game?
2D third-person shooters have been a part of video games since the earliest days of video games, dating back to Spacewar!. Arcade shooters with a 3D third-person perspective include Nintendo’s Radar Scope, Atari’s Tempest, Nihon Bussan’s Tube Panic, Sega’s Space Harrier, Atari’s Xybots, and Square’s 3-D WorldRunner.
Home computers have seen third-person shooters like Dan Gorlin’s Airheart and Paul Norman’s Beyond Forbidden Forest. Konami’s run and gun shooter Contra featured several third-person shooter levels, while Konami’s Devastators featured two-player cooperative gameplay and various obstacles. Cabal inspired many of its own “cabal clones”, such as NAM-1975 and Wild Guns. Sega’s Last Survivor featured eight-player deathmatch with a perspective and split-screen similar to Xybots but with entirely different gameplay and controls.
In 1993, Namco released Cyber Sled, a two-player competitive 3D third-person shooter vehicle combat game. Elite Systems Ltd. released Virtuoso on the 3DO, an early example of a home console third-person shooter featuring a human protagonist on-foot, using polygonal 3D graphics and sprites in a 3D environment. Fade to Black was a fully 3D third-person shooter released around this time, featuring an on-foot protagonist and polygonal 3D graphics.
📹 Why Do People Hate First-Person Games?
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Also, add enemies with hitscan attacks to the FPS while meeting all the following criteria: 1. The player does not have any movement or other abilities to avoid or deflect the hitscan attack. 2. These enemies have perfect player tracking, or at least good enough tracking to hit the player at random times, no matter what the player does. 3. These enemies cannot be killed before they fire, and do not have any flinching mechanics to reset the time before they fire. 4. The level design does not allow breaking line of sight from those enemies, and also ensures you encounter a lot of them at the same time.
Remember you don’t have more than 2 weapons for each category, you don’t want players to feel like they have something like “variety” Also make sure that only one weapon in the whole game is good and the other ones are dogs**t but make that op gun avaiable from the start and the other ones would require a lot of grind and effort just to make players dissapointed
Other good bad advice: – make sure that a headshot deals a morbillion damage, while hitting any other body part is a viable option only when your opponent is afk. Also, when the win is determined not by the skill or strategy, but by who sees who first, make the respawn take as much of your time as possible. – add tons of guns, make one better than all of them in everything and lock it behind grinding, paywall, gambling, or all 3 of those. And also, as someone mentioned, INVISIBLE WALLS. Seriously, in a game where half of the classes can rocketjump or doublejump and in one mode everyone get a grappling hook, i can’t just explore the map? There are loads of houses, if their roofs weren’t blocked by the invisible walls, they alone would have more playing space than the original map.
Here’s some more great tips to help you fail at FPS development! 1 – Don’t try to find a unique idea or undercompetitive niche. Just make the same “We have DOOM at home” or “Titanfall clone” indie FPS that every other indie FPS developer is making right now! Surely your game being yet-another cookie-cutter lookalike in a sea of borderline identical games will make it not only be recognized and appreciated by a dedicated fanbase, but sell VERY well! 2 – It doesn’t matter what kind of gameplay style or movement system your game has, make the enemies hitscanners! Surely an FPS game where every mechanic is designed to encourage you to be out in the open and strafing around enemies will benefit greatly from hitscanners everywhere! (Ahem, Serious Sam 3. Ahem, ahem.) 3 – Story? Pfft, who plays an FPS for the story? Make it some generic variation of “Totally-not-demons-but-definitely-demons are invading” or “generic badguys are doing generically bad things.” Your “story” should just be the barebones explanation for why the bad guys are bad. Don’t bother explaining the player character’s role in this, why they’re going through these different levels, what their motivations are, nor explain the greater plot that the events of the game might affect, etc. This will definitely make a player invested and wish to continue past the first level! 4 – Sell your game as being this “Super gory retro FPS” when the “gore” is just giant red particles that cover the screen! Surely a game where you need to, idk, see what enemies you’re up against and react quickly with the appropriate weapon won’t be harmed by taking away your vision when you so much as sneeze on an enemy!
You forgot the themes, a fps can only be : – a military conflict simulator – a sci-fi fight against alien – a post apocalypse survival (usually with zombies or russian/american atomic era) – a survival horror (usually a walking simulator) – a doom clone It is strictly forbidden to create an fps that wouldn’t belong to any of thoses themes
Some more tips to fail at making FPS games: 1.Guns need ammo! So you need to ammo counter. However, either give the players so little ammo that they’re afraid to use their guns in fear they’re going to run out when they really need it, or just add ammo packs everywhere so the ammo counter is just a formality. Never be like Doom Eternal where ammo counter is low so you pay attention to it, but easily replenishable so you’re not afraid to use your guns. Or never be like Ultrakill where the ammo is infinite and there are cooldowns instead. 2. Make sure that the enemies have either so much health compared to the variety of their attacks that they’re just damage sponges. Or die so quickly that they never get a chance to attack you, or demonstrate all their attacks. 3. Add platforming sections without adding various movement options. Coyote time? Sorry but we’re not making a platformer! Air control? No! We’re going for realism even if you’re jumping between floating islands. 4. Add invisible walls and death zones everywhere. The fancier your movement options are, the more invisible walls and death zones you should add. Bonus points if the game includes secrets that are harder to reach than those invisible walls. After all, we need all these things you can look at but never reach. 5. Never add a separate volume slider for weapon sounds. Your sounds of your weapons must either drown out the music or be so pathetically weak that they sound like they all have a silencer. That especially includes explosion sounds.
too much right here. when i see mods putting “realistic” weapons in doom my eyeballs roll so far backwards that i can see my own brain. I miss when people would make cool fantasy weapons. Remember the ASMD shockrifle from unreal? That is the single best gun ever made. I don’t care what you say, it’s impossible to convince me otherwise. And no one even tries to do something in that vein anymore… for the most part.
funnily enough i was inspired by the Bloons TD FPS Fan game to make my own just with zombies… im still figuring out movement, but i have some ideas for cool maps, they arent all going to be flat, also my ui is just going to be the essentials (a crosshair, a health bar, a mini map, and an ammo counter), although funny you mentioned snipers and assault rifles being identical, because in mine the assault rifle is just going to be an upgrade to the sniper making it shoot faster. another thing about the weapon variety section is that in my game is not going to have a shotgun and a machine gun (yet), but instead im going to add a pistol and a flamethrower.
You must also not forget to make your game in Unreal Engine (because it’s the future), and use the most basic model and Unreal default lighting. I mean that’s what every successful AA game sequel do, it’s sure to work. Orc Must Die 3, Payday 3, Killing Floor 3, all great games (there’s way more, but i’m sure you get what i mean)
I never thought of portal from the perspective that its a first person shooter. Not to say its wrong, but yeah, I just wanted to say I like how you pointed that out! Your articles are cool by the way, I have started experimenting with game development recently, and I am glad I found your website! Keep it up!
you forgot about adding 20 hitscan rifles that only differ in spread, damage and speed. making ttk so low that most weapons need just a few shots to kill and giving 30+ ammo mag to every single one. copying mechanics just because they were in a popular games (doesn’t matter if the game is 20 years old or if the mechanic is bad for your game). AND ALWAYS MAKE MISTAKE TF2 DID WITH SNIPER
If your game uses a lower poly style, make sure there’s a lot of open areas primarily for the combat. Once cleared, they, combined with the simplistic and repetitive graphics and poor lighting, should serve no other purpose than for the player to waste time looking for the next hallway in a mostly linear progression. Even better if there are room or even buildings that contain like, one enemy or health pickup.
Remeber that the player has to obtain the weapons in a specific order: Pistol, Shotgun, Machine Gun, Sniper Rifle, Rocket Launcher. You are NOT allowed to deviate from this order! Jokes aside, the way you talk about playing is also a big issue with fighting games. I feel like a lot of fighting games are afraid to break tradition due to severe backlash. You even think about taking away Motion Inputs and people go BALLISTIC.
It’s also really important that you spend 99% of your dev time focused on making the gun shooting feel like the latest cod game including copying the animation style 1:1 and having an extensive customization system (That no one will use). AI? Level design? Uhhhh just forget about those! Just focus ENTIRELY on the shooting because that is the only thing players care about and absolutely nothing else will matter! Surely there will be no issue focusing on exclusively this.
How to fail at FPS game: 1. Make an mil-sim as they are clearly not over-saturated by games like Squad, Arma, Post Scriptum, OHD etc. 2. Make it slow as possible, add stamina meter that depletes after 2 sec and requires drinking water after each 5 sec to run farther 2 meters 3. Add insane recoil, shaking and flinching weapons when aiming ironsights as realistically soldiers can’t stably hold guns especially when moving 4. Make ultra-realistic graphic, shadows and foliage so you can’t distinguish or see an enemy at all, made RTX 4090 as minimum requirement as majority of players already used the newest GPUs 5. Place respawn points and objective areas at least 2 km away and set 2 min respawn delay, to incentive players to not die and when they get killed by sniper it’s their skill issue 6. Make it online only and don’t let players host their own servers, make sure that players can only use your own server that will not die after a year since your game will for be populated by tens of thousands of newcomers 7. Don’t forget to about making fake realistic gameplay footage with fake interactivity and fake UI 8. Add Lootboxes, Skins, Microtransactions and Battle passes. Don’t forget about setting price tag as 69,99$
forgot to mention to do it in any other engine but Unreal, since Unreal is already set up and contains all the essential mechanics you need to make a shooter of any kind. Much bigger chance of failure if you use Unity since you have to make everything from scratch, or better yet make your own engine, because by reinventing wheel you can make all sorts of mistakes you wouldnt make otherwise 👍
You forgot to: 1. if it’s something cool and interesting like a flamethrower make sure to botch is and make it completely useless or stupid 2. it’s either that there are 2 viable weapons, or every weapon is a random 10% stat tweak 3. make sure that the map is either gray or dark green or a mix of both, both teams should also be gray and dark green 4. the speed at which you notice your enemy should be the main determiner in winning 5. choose the best most high level graphics possible, so that it will take 5 years to develop the first chapter, if it fails say how now games are harder to make because you were supposed to have top tier graphics. 6. if you wanna be quirky add some stuns, slowing the enemy and maybe shields and stuff. 7. and the most important: don’t forget to add random mechanics and detail, as long as the main gameloop is: go in random direction > notice > shoot > repeat. No change should alter this.
As someone who wants to make a generic FPS game, this was nice. Got my shopping list. Frankly, I think 4 guns is too many. Really, all you need is 2. Big gun, little gun. Maybe another big gun that looks different for variety sake. When you go the realism route, you quickly realize, all guns are the same. It only takes one bullet to do the job, so you’re choice in gun is kinda trivial. You only need as many guns are there are sources of gun. If you’re in a post apocalypse where everything is slap-dash and one off, a large variety of shitty guns makes sense. But in your bog standard military FPS, everyone uses the same standard issues shit, so you really only need as many guns as you have factions fighting each other. Much more important than variety is depth. How you use the gun is more important than the hard stats of the gun. For example, cover based shooting is such a big can of worms, its treated as a sub genre of FPS all by itself. Mergeing cover base mechanics with movement is a really difficult design, and there lies the challenge. Most FPS games thus far, including the polished AAA games, don’t push really try to capture anything more than the appearance of realism… for one really good reason no one in the realism camp wants to admit: Responsive controls and realism are mutually exclusive. In order to form a physical bond between yourself and your virtual avatar, your inputs needs to be received instantaneously. However, flicking a joystick, pressing a button, or swiping your mouse, is physically much less demanding than turning 180 degrees in the middle of a full sprint, leaping mid sprint while off your right leg, wielding a heavy weapon, etc.
I just want to complain about FPS’s in general. 99% of the time they’re just clunkier versions of a 2d experience, and 99% of the rest of the time, the stuff that makes it not 2d is also the stuff that makes it suck, so why is this even a thing article games bother with at all, let alone make multiple genres out of? I hate the way controls have evolved for 3d games, and I’ve been waiting 40 years for the rest of the gaming community to figure out that the third dimension is just a way to ruin a bunch of perfectly good 2d game ideas with a clunky UI.
If you decide to make a Doom clone/throwback shooter, make sure that it’s somehow as bland as possible and completely misses what made those games so beloved. Also if people start criticizing your game for being too difficult or just unplayable tell them that it’s “the whole point” and that they just need to “get good”
alternatively, go the other route; just slap a camera on your dude’s forehead and do nothing about how jittery motion actually is making your players completely motion sick (in all seriousness though, this can be averted through a mix of inverse kinematics and camera smoothing, hardest part is getting it to not clip through shit) FPS games do have one saving grace for scope though; a lot of the mechanics are really straightforward to implement. I’ve implemented both first person and third person shooting in testing before, and third person requires a lot more really hard to explain math than first person does; you have to calculate the angle between where the gun is pointing and what the camera is looking at and create procedural animations that aim your gun at where the player is pointing, whereas in first person the gun pretty much just points forward all the time.
The best way to fail at making an fps game is by removing the fps, so make sure to add a bunch of useless physics props that are very unoptimized, and then poor shame the players that currently dont have a military super pc on their houses, after all, it’s an fps game, and nothing screams fps like needing a military super computer, see, that’s just immersion!
Another example of failing, make sure when you have a gun, the gun should lose all accurate after the first bullet so automatics become less viable. Especially when the weapon’s intention is meant for medium to possibly far ranges in a prone or atleast using the bipod, the medium machine guns are to be hipfired when you smell the enemy’s breath.
Indie Games should never Aim for Multiplayer anyway. All Relevant E-Sports have grown from Established Franchises that have build their Playerbase from Singleplayer. That’s why they tend to be Sequels. (They Play Age of Empires 2, not 1) A Game like Quake 3 Arena could only work because the Singleplayer oriented Quake was popular in the first Place. And Counter-Strike started as a relatively low-effort Mod for Half Life.
you know Ive been trying to get into indie development, not exactly an fps but its complicated, but i swear this article was just gonna describe the concept im trying to make, but no it literally just says dont copy the mainstream games do something neat and creative so I feel a lot more confident about my plans now.
could you imagine a fps game that take some of the meachanics of cod and other popular modren shooter and try to reimagine them in a new intersting way. like maybe you can sprint at any direction you want and even shoot while sprinting, but its on a meter that can run out really quick and your weapon is less accurate, or mayber something simple like wen you run out of ammo you reload faster, just some ideas for any dev out there
You forgot the part where the best way to fail at making a fps that’s team based is by making a set number of classes that each have their own role in the team that need to be followed for success. And then have those classes chosen before they can communicate with their team or see what they are choosing either.
I think the reason sone people think 3rd person is more immersive is because 3rd person game usually allows more actions than 1st person game, in a 3rd person game, u can see the character scratches head, coughs, or does backflip and kickes the enemy, but in a 1st person game, if the protagonist himself has too many actions, it will make the game visually unpleasing, imagine if the screen frequently goes dark because your character rubs his eyes, or the whole camera goes upsidedown because the character did some stun jump.
Only speaking for myself here, but I never feel all that “immersed” when I play a first-person game. It always feels like I’m floating across the ground, not actually walking. I don’t feel like I “am” the character, I feel like I’m controlling a flying camera with a gun attached to it. The only game that came close to making me feel truly immersed like I was actually the character was Metroid Prime. Nothing else has really done it, which is why I’m not a fan of first-person.
In the real world you have a field of vision of 180 degrees and can easily locating things around you with small head movements. FPS can feel constrictive compared to what you are used to. With Cyberpunk 2077, the game puts a lot of work into clothing, then makes sure you almost never see it. I found that very odd. Some situations however, are just more appropriate when in first person so it’s always good to have the option.
As someone who prefers third person to first person, I would disagree that first person is more immersive. For me, it feels like I’m controlling a floating torso or looking through a camera strapped to someone’s head. No first person game on a flat screen has ever been able to truly emulate what it’s like to experience the real world through your own eyes: there is no peripheral vision; there is no ability to move your eyes and head independently; and there is ususally no accurate translation of putting one foot in front of the other when walking or running, with movement feeling more like it’s on wheels. Third person perspective alleviates some of those issues. Character animations can convey a better sense of shifting weight during movement. The pulled out camera gives you a better view of your surroundings, even if it is far greater than mere peripheral vision. It can also give you more options in melee combat, allowing you to attack enemies behind you or at your sides without needing to reposition yourself to get them “in frame” in front of your character. More generally, I also find the third person perspective more visually interesting because I can see the character animate, showing the level of effort in a thrown punch or the acrobatic movement of a successful dodgeroll/evasion, similar to enjoying good fight or stunt coreography in TV and film. Most, if not all, of that nuance is lost in first person perspective without feeling more “immersive” to me. Bringing it back to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, it seems even MachineGames admitted that seeing the character was important, which would explian why cutscenes and some traversal shots were all in third person.
Personally Im not a fan of 1st person for the most part. The only times I do tend to enjoy it is in an online shooter setting like COD or Titanfall 2. I know you had a point about immersion, but I ironically feel less like the character whose eyes I’m supposed to be seeing the world through, and more like a floating pair of arms carrying a gun or sword. Maybe VR first person could work for me but I dont have a VR peripheral to try. I understand there’s an audience for it, but it doesn’t do it for me.
There’s no increased hate for first person games. This is only coming up because of Indiana Jones and what people’s expectations were. There are only very few people who genuinely either don’t like first person games or are upset that Indy is in first person that are being loud about it. Anything else is mostly fanboy stuff over Indiana Jones exclusivity.
I would say it goes broader than that — games in first person are built completely differently than those in third person. The world scale, how you interact with the environment and npcs, the animations, how narrative is delivered, the fact that the fourth wall is now loosely defined, your awareness and how you take in information, and the players abilities are all defined by this change. While aiming and precision is a concern, the same can be said about third person games — how pin point accurate are you required to be given you have inherently less control than if it were first person. In my game dev journey, I nïavely thought that if games like Ghost Recon, Metal Gear Solid, and PUBG can have a swap between first and third person that its essentially the same systems at play, but I was very wrong and if anything they were stop-gap solutions to foundational problems. That said, I don’t think the average gamer thinks about all of this. But in the big picture of things, you can just visually see that there’s less pressure and more freedom in a third person game than in a first person game — not saying this is true, but thats just the illusion you get. First person levels can be tighter, more scripted, and immersive, hence why horror and shooting games do best in this category, whereas in third person games levels need to be more open with verticality being emphasized as to not make the camera awful to handle, which is why adventure/open world games do best in this perspective.
Bioshock 1 in particular is an fps game that would feel completely different if it was switched to third person. It fully utilizes the first person perspective to highten the tension, atmosphere, and combat. The first time you fight a Big Daddy would feel radically different if it was in third person. Both persective have their merits, pros, and cons.
This reminds me when RE7 was first revealed, where you had some people saying that it wasn‘t true Resident Evil cus they switched to FP. Mind you the very first RE was a fixed camera perspective 😂 So it literally doesn‘t matter from where you look the only thing that matters are its trademark survival mechanics from 1-3, which from what I remember were all intact.
So many games would be better as first person. Sure, your Souls, Spidermans, DMCs, and all that will continue to work best in 3rd with all the melee combat animations and lock-on/magnetism… but anything to do with aiming or true immersion, 1st person is king. You hit on it in the article, controllers are terrible at aiming and incredibly unresponsive, made way worse with the default FOV of most titles, so at that point of course it’s going to be a far nicer experience if you pull the camera back (which in some ways has the same effect as raising the FOV, allowing you to see the floor and your immediate surroundings) plus autoaim/lockon mechanics suited to assisting the sluggish controls. Take all of these same people obsessing over the 3rd-person console schlock, and stick them in front of an ultrawide at >120hz with a high FOV and a big mousepad, and it will absolutely blow their mind. It’s such an astonishing difference that 30-60fps narrow FOV 3rd-person nonsense barely feels like gameplay anymore in comparison.
I’ve always disliked first person, I’m glad everyone hates it now lol. Third person is more immersive because it’s like perusal a movie but you’re in control of the protagonist. First person is your hands doing one thing while a virtual set of hands do something else, you sit, they move, there’s a disconnect. It’s almost like the uncanny valley, the closer you get to the real deal the more fake it feels. That’s why Hardcore Henry flopped. I liked Alien Isolation, and Halo, and Super liminal, it’s not all hate from me, and I get your AAA open-world complaints, but mindless FPS military style shooters were the top of the heap for a good 20 years while I was miserable waiting between Rockstar releases. You gotta acknowledge the dark side of first person.
FPS have become like 90% of articlegames nowadays with forced online modes, which is the way to make sure people spend money on your game since the XBOX 360 and PS3 era. It’s frustrating that youu go shopping and find that almost every single game is an FPS or a Sony movie. No platform games, except for Nintendo. No adventure games, except for Nintendo.
I actually get the hightend immersion in thrid person games. I have much more of a tactile connection between my character and the world. In RDR2, I often ended up roleplaying an arrival in a town as if it’s a movie. That’s something I rarely do in first person games. Sometimes I try, but I eventually default to running and bunnyhopping. That being said, I am much more immersed in first person games if the focus is on details in the envirement.
Hideo Kojima proved that third person could be more immersive with just the first Metal Geal Solid alone. 1. Snake could leave foot prints in the snow and guards could follow them back to Snake. 2. Getting the guards attention by knocking on walls and they could hear footsteps. 3. Using cigarette smoke to see infrared lasers. The list goes on. Immersion is more than “seeing the world through the eyes of an embodied character”. It’s also how the world reacts to your player/character. Even GTAV had things like sweat on the player characters back, the sound of your vehicle ticking after you’ve cut the engine off, water dripping from the bodies after getting out of water (tomb raider did this back in the day also, and other games). Personally I prefer tpp but don’t mind fpp, I’d rather see my character do dope and amazing stuff rather than salivate over npcs in 1st person.
never been a fan of FPS games. took me a while to enjoy shooters too, something about 3rd person games does indeed make me feel more immersed in the game. Dont think I’ve ever been as immersed in a game as when i was playing AC2. Saying that because the view is from the first person automatically makes it more immersive also just feels wrong and glosses over the immersion one can have at the way their character moves through the world and what it says about them. Honestly i think they feed 2 types of players though. 1 player who wants to be a character and feel what it feels like to be them and the other who wants to have the life and abilities of a character and place themselves in that scenario.
1. Aiming is boring for most people, and developing the muscle skill to aim quickly is just not fun for a lot of people and movement can be far more interesting than aiming. 2. 99.99% of shooters are laser-tag with capsule colliders and the guns are for all intents and purposes, your character. 3. There’s no concept of a body: No self-representation, no relative position to surroundings, no body language, no posture. 4. This means for first-person games, set-dressing and scoring basically defines the whole game because the number of things you can do well is actually quite small, when your primary verb is “shoot”. FP games are defined far more by assets and illusions over gameplay, and if you see through that illusion the immersion totally crashes. 5. The right answer is to let players decide what their camera is, and to have many options. 6. This is a cyclical thing. It happened with Gears of War. The positions change up every few years. Also: The logic of “but first person mimics irl” is nonsense: Your FOV IRL is wider, and you can see your own body most of the time. You have spatialized hearing in real life. Playing an FPS game is like being partially deaf and wearing a cone of shame.