Having decided on my main idea for my game being a collaboration between two of my favourite game franchises I felt I should try to think about all the FPS (first person shooter) games that I have played and what type of shooter I would rank them as.
I produced a mind map in Bubbl which you can see below.
I early on decided that I would split the games into two main categories, ones which focused on the single player experience and ones which focused more on what I felt was the multi-player experience.
About halfway through I realised that this was not actually a brilliant way of doing it purely because so many of the games have strong single player, PVE (player versus enemy) and PVP (player versus player) components.
Games that I would consider have all 3 would be:-
Serious Sam (less so PVP)
Left 4 Dead
AVP
Call of Duty (recent versions)
Battlefield
Doom 1 & 2
Duke Nukem 3D
Farcry 3
Opinions amongst PC gamers as to whether certain games have a decent single player component or not (ahem...Battlefield, COD) can be very polarising and attract strong opinions from both camps.
Speaking purely for myself I would say that the games that I have listed all had single player campaigns (of varying lengths) which I enjoyed. They all have multi-player (MP) modes I played and enjoyed. They all had co-op modes that I played and enjoyed.
I suppose that I should point out that these are all my own opinions and I know different people would probably have put a lot of the games in different categories, or even into multiple categories more than I did. I have mostly tried to put each game into the category that I spent the most time playing it in.
Before I started the mindmap I would have said that it's only been more recently with games like Call of Duty that FPS tended to ship with all 3 play style modes (ie PVE, PVP & SP). However going back to even the earliest game on my list, Doom, it had all 3. Deathmatch which I never really played. Co-op which I played a lot of with a friend. Plus single-player (SP) which I probably played the most of and is how I fondly remember the game. In my mind map I have straddled Doom between SP & PVE but there is a good call for it being PVP too. Duke Nukem 3D was the same.
I think the co-op experience was actually present in quite a few of the earliest FPS, anything after Catacombs and Wolfenstein. Then when games started to come out that tried to tell a specific story the co-op option was a hindrance to it. Half-Life introduced various set pieces that resolved around being triggered when a player did something or passed a certain point on the map. This meant that if two players were playing special events could trigger for one player whilst another would be miles away from where that event happened.
As games became progressively more structured in this kind of set-piece story telling there was a shift away from co-op fps. However with the launch of Left 4 Dead by Valve in 2009 the co-op shooter was really given a big boost. Also in 2009 Borderlands was released by Gearbox. Both were games that were specifically designed around a shared experience for the players and both had immediate success. A lot of players shy away from the competetive aspect of PVP shooters and therefore played most of their games in SP mode only. When PVE was "re-introduced" into the mainstream PC market these players found it still a lot of fun to play with their friends but without the hyper competetive aspect of PVP.
Call of Duty which is one of the games that really focused on the SP set piece experience has in their more recent titles put in co-op missions for people who prefer to play this mode. Modern Warfare 2 & 3 had Special Ops and the more recent COD: Ghosts has a full co-op mode, similar to Left 4 Dead except with aliens rather than zombies!
So, where does this leave me?
Well, I had always planned on adding all 3 modes into the game. The co-op mode would be the main draw although every game ideally needs to have the option of just being played as single-player. The multi-player aspect also makes a lot of sense given the two characters and how there have been many discussions over who is the better "hero".
I suppose it does mean that I do need to make all three playmodes something that I use as games features on the case, which I wasn't necessarily going to do. Each person has their own preferred style of gameplay and trying to attract all three is what would be key to making the game sell well. This is definitely something that I will include in my planning from now on.
No comments:
Post a Comment