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DooM_RO

Let's talk about the flaws of old shooters.

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So it's no surprise that most of us love 90s shooters. For me, they will always hold a special place in my heart for their unique atmosphere, focus on gameplay and sprawling, interconnected level design.

However, even the good ones are not always perfect and could have used some tweaks here and there.

For example, I think the first rule to making proper old school shooting mechanics is to make projectile enemies as your bread and butter encounters. In old school shooters there is no hiding behind cover and no regenerating health which means that every last bit of health counts. If every last bit of health counts then it is important to be able to conserve it. Merely finding health packs is not good enough, the player also needs to learn how to skillfully survive encounters by dodgning projectiles and prioritizing targets.

If you want to implement hitscanners in your game then in my opinion they MUST be easily disposable because if not the player will be forced to find cover and cowardly alternate between pressing the A and D keys, slowly picking off one enemy at a time which does not encourage the player to flow around the level and to play skillfully making him frustrated.

Doom is the game that understands this best I believe. There are only four hitscanners in the game: one is practically useless and another one is very rare. The other two are potentially very dangerous but can be quickly dispatched. If you want to make a health sponge, make it a projectile or melee enemy. By health sponge, I don't mean just enemies that have 4000 health but everything that takes more than 4 shotgun blasts.

I'm pleased to say that the new Doom understands this very well but is maybe a bit too strict with this rule because there is only one hitscanner in the game. Hitscanners are an important tool in the "arsenal" of the level designer as implementing them makes the player ask himself "which target is the most dangerous at the moment? The couple of imps, the chaingunner or the four spectres"? The answer to this question depends on the environment the player is in and what weapons and ammo he has at his disposal. All these situations provide the player with interesting, improvisational gameplay.

For our next example, lets take Blood, a charming well-loved 90s game that incorporates every horror cliche you can think of. However, the game can often be very frustrating.

At first glance, the shotgunner and chaingunner cultists are very much like their counterparts in Doom but their health makes them much more dangerous. In the time it takes you to fire two shotgun blasts at a cultist, his friends can pepper you with shells and other nasty stuff. When there are more than 4 or 5 cultists in the same room, it quickly becomes very frustrating. In Blood, it's very hard to survive an encounter without taking damage. I am playing it right now and I have just finished the level on the train. The level was very interesting but there was this huge encounter in a dining hall that had about 8 cultists. As soon as I opened the door I was immediately sprayed with shotgun shells and bullets and I couldn't just enter the room and improvise while I was running. Instead I had to take cover behind the door and slowly and carefully take peeks at my enemies.

What do you guys think? What could have been better in our favorite shooters?

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I love Dark Forces. For me it is the only 90's 2.5D game that challenges Doom in its balance. On occasion, I'm known for saying it's even better than Doom.

The game, iirc, features no hitscanners, but pretty much all the projectiles are faster than in Doom. This means dodging and charging enemies is still possible, but you're likely to take some damage, especially because the imprecision of enemy fire often tends to lead your movement by chance, heh. Corner camping is less tedious than in Doom, but you probably won't be able to create fps danmakus maps like Doom's slaughter. Still, it works pretty goddamn well. Also the game has no in-mission saving mechanism, instead it still keeps lives. It works amazingly well and I'm sad the industry moved from that model, because it both made you cautious, but didn't restrict you from going Rambo. And you can feel your heart pulsating in your throat on your last life.

Flaws?
- Most of the game is much, much more vertical than even the Chasm, but the look up/down mechanism is keyboard only. That is an incredible hassle, given you need to use it frequently. A Build engine-style vertical mouselook as we know it today would be a godsend.
- Sometimes, mandatory level progression requires finding an explodable crack in a wall, bonus points if it's in a dark area. That kind of feels like a Sierra adventure despite the LucasArts origin.
- The dark trooper gun feels oddly anticlimatic. It's huge and OP, but it lacks the oomph of the BFG and I dislike using it. Which is ironic, because the goddamn concussion rifle (the penultimate weapon) manages to do exactly that, down to the delayed mega explosion effect and a very, very, very memorable firing sound. Actually, the game's arsenal would be Doom-tier balanced without the DT rifle (and the pointless, redundant cutter gun).
- And most importantly, the game was made by LucasArts and now it's owned by Disney, which means there was never a chance of a source release, and neither there will be. Open sourced DF with limit removing ports and reasonable map editors could've competed with Doom's popularity among modders. This way, any custom content is too painful to create and the "legacy" is very limited.

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bzzrak said:

^ if there is no source code, how do we have that DarkXL port?

the initial version of DarkXL was originally actually just a recreation with the author trying to mimic the game logic closely, but it had some flaws, since at the end of the day, it was just an approximation

currently he's working on reverse engineering the game, but don't expect a release in the near future. Lucius is plagued by constant delays with work and the like.

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Powerslave, PC Dos version, the levels are huge, a lot of exploration, however the lack of saving or quicksaves can make the game frustrating, along the grenades, which bounce off walls, can instakill you even with full health, which makes using them dangerous if you're not careful, also the controls, you can't properly strafe left or right, instead you have to press strafe which makes killing enemies difficult due to not being able to auto-run.
And let's not forget the console versions of that game, the damage you take from hazards such as lava, fireballs or acid can kill you in a matter of seconds, until you get a certain artifact that allows to walk on lava and acid, but even then you still take damage.
Plus falling damage, which makes some levels frustating and tedious to play.

Also the 3 big Build engine games, Duke3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood, they suffer from various issues that while adding to the games challenge can make the games frustating, Blood has cultists that aren't playing around and kill you very quickly, not to forget explosions, those phantoms with sickles.

Shadow Warrior, too many jumping sections and explosions which require careful movement as well explosive weapons, in particular the grenade launcher which is dangerous to use due to the grenades bouncing off walls and high damage that can kill you or remove a great amount of health, as well ninjas with rockets and coolies(those guys with a box with dynamite) which can get out of thier body as ghost coolies, annoying enemies that dissapear and reappear.

And finally Duke3D, battlelord and minilords are hitscan enemies that kill you in a matter of seconds, as well shrinking yourself, which is required in some levels can leave you very vunerable to enemies stomping you, tripmines and squishing.

Overrall, to me the flaws of the Build engine games is that they have some cheap and nasty traps that can be frustating to avoid, plataforming sections that can be difficult, as well enemies that must be killed quickly, one mistake can be fatal in these games.

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I've been thinking now and i've realised i can't really find any significant flaws in old school shooters i've played. I just really like them the way they are.
The only thing that bothers me is the lack of score system in most of those games. It existed in Wolf 3D and why it doesn't exist in subsequent games is unknown to me. It was also going to be in Doom and i don't see the reason why it was removed. I'd prefer the score system over kill/item/secret count in shooters. To me it seems like a better way to show how good the player is at the game.

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They can be unforgiving and puzzle-like. A lot of people see this as an asset. But one can also see how designers over the years have tried to prevent cheap-feeling deaths. To most people, they just aren't fun. I think this is part of where the tendency toward cover came from (along with the push toward more realistic subject matter). One can't imagine a newer shooter having something like an arch vile where, if it catches you too far from cover, your only chance could be a pain stun. And then there's the "you're hurt! take cover!" regenerating health stuff. Each approach, old school and contemporary, has its drawbacks.

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ChekaAgent said:

I've been thinking now and i've realised i can't really find any significant flaws in old school shooters i've played. I just really like them the way they are.
The only thing that bothers me is the lack of score system in most of those games. It existed in Wolf 3D and why it doesn't exist in subsequent games is unknown to me. It was also going to be in Doom and i don't see the reason why it was removed. I'd prefer the score system over kill/item/secret count in shooters. To me it seems like a better way to show how good the player is at the game.

due to how the game works, scores would probably end up being incredibly uniform, which would make game hi-scores look fairly identical in e.g. UV-Max runs, unless they added variations to the scoring mechanic, with combo-strings, point doublers, and how much resources you have at the end of a level. makes sense to remove that stuff then, rather than spending time adding in extra score-system fluff that could've been removed with a simpler to understand K/I/S ratio. though an arcade mode now for Doom would've been cool, which is probably why some GZDoom authors have opted to add in score systems into their mods.

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as someone who's played Unreal lately, i have to say that while i can see why the game was so amazing and praised, i find playing the game isn't as fun as i'd want it to be. the main thing that irks me are the non-standard weaponry and bestiary.

the thing is, the guns don't feel that good to use, like the guns in Doom, Quake and Duke 3D does, for instance. there's a lack of punch in their animations and function. the Dispersion Pistol is a technically cool idea, with getting upgrades for it and having it increase gradually in power if you can find them. but the net result ends in a gun that can shoot LESS rounds at something than it initially can, at a SLOWER firerate. this is annoying, as the power of the gun doesn't really come into place until you've got all the upgrades, at which point you have other guns that are more efficient to use and there's ammo for everywhere.

the rest of the guns are just different shades of hitscan weaponry and projectile weapons with splash damage. they have technically different functions, but they don't really feel unique to use (well, they ARE unique in design for the most part. i meant unique in terms of variation), nor are they very fantastic-feeling to use. and that just doesn't really go hand-to-hand with the enemy bestiary.

every enemy in the game is typically agile, can fling lots of projectiles at you, and some of them dodge your weapons. your projectile weapons, which has typically a 50/50 chance of hitting the enemy, or they dodge away from it (except the Flak Cannon alt-fire, apparently, which is a great thing to know about!) i can understand that this is a different type of game, and that enemy encounters are harder and have to be dealt with more gracefully. but when all the guns feel wimpy, although unique, and all the enemies feel frustrating to deal with at times, and take in factor the insane length of the game, it just feels a bit annoying to take all in, for me. i definitely felt that Na Pali had a more tolerable length than the base game, even though it has its fair of bullshit too (looking at the Prometheus fight on the deck...)

at least the music is absolute top ace and the environments are really atmospheric feeling. that's what i feel holds the game up and makes it still worth going back to.

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J.B.R said:

Powerslave, PC Dos version, the levels are huge, a lot of exploration, however the lack of saving or quicksaves can make the game frustrating, along the grenades, which bounce off walls, can instakill you even with full health, which makes using them dangerous if you're not careful, also the controls, you can't properly strafe left or right, instead you have to press strafe which makes killing enemies difficult due to not being able to auto-run.
And let's not forget the console versions of that game, the damage you take from hazards such as lava, fireballs or acid can kill you in a matter of seconds, until you get a certain artifact that allows to walk on lava and acid, but even then you still take damage.
Plus falling damage, which makes some levels frustating and tedious to play


I've never played Powerslave, but I've often heard that the Playstation version is better than the PC version. The upcoming remake is going to be based on the Playstation version.

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DooM_RO said:

(...)
If you want to implement hitscanners in your game then in my opinion they MUST be easily disposable because if not the player will be forced to find cover and cowardly alternate between pressing the A and D keys, slowly picking off one enemy at a time which does not encourage the player to flow around the level and to play skillfully making him frustrated.
(...)


you do say it's "your opinion", so I'll go ahead and asume that it's *you* who gets frustrated.
I, for one, just *fuckin* love 'slow-down' play style, abusing of "A-and-D" peek techniques and playing like 'it's a movie'.
my 0.1 cent.

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DooM_RO said:

At first glance, the shotgunner and chaingunner cultists are very much like their counterparts in Doom but their health makes them much more dangerous. In the time it takes you to fire two shotgun blasts at a cultist, his friends can pepper you with shells and other nasty stuff. When there are more than 4 or 5 cultists in the same room, it quickly becomes very frustrating. In Blood, it's very hard to survive an encounter without taking damage.


While I love Blood, I have to admit that the cultists are very cheap, specially considering they're the most common enemies in the game. But Blood's manual does warn you that Blood is different from other shooters in the fact that you shouldn't just charge guns blazing into a fight. I do think they were trying to play up the horror element of the game by making it a little more realistic than other shooters at the time, discouraging you from engaging hitscanners head on, and instead using your wits and cover to your advantage.

But now, let me tell you about the Pig cops in Duke Nukem 3D. Those swines have NO business having that much health, and on top of that, using those powerful shotguns.

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I personally love charging into fights in Blood. I duck and jump around, circle strafe, and hitting an enemy dead on with the TNT then switching to the Tommy gun or sawed off to blow the rest away is immensely satisfying. I don't think the cultists are cheap, except maybe the red one's beast form, though Blood's difficulty bug sure is cheap.

I do however think Shadow Warrior's ninjas are the epitome of cheap. How are you supposed to guess when one of them is magically going to shoot a rocket out of their chest? Or a grenade? There is no animation for this alt. attack so it becomes frustrating to read their next move when you think they're just going to use their uzi and instead get blown the fuck up so quick and sudden. Their uzi also zaps your health away at a pretty considerable rate, and these bastards are everywhere. They're more dangerous then some of the later enemies in the game!

Rise of the Triad's goons are also guilty of shooting rockets out of their chest on harder difficulties. It's such bullshit.

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I'll do some Wolf3D for the time being.

Being able to shoot through doors as they're opening/closing, unless you find out about this exploit early on you'll be getting shot by someone before they're on the screen.

Being able to shoot through corners. Kind of hard to explain but every edge of a wall is the same as the door opening/closing, you and the enemy can 'see' each other through the corners even if you both can't see each other on screen and this can result in you being shot in a blind spot. Similarly if an enemy is to your immediate left or right when going through a doorway you cannot move forward due to their hitbox and they'll shoot you point blank out of your FOV. To avoid this, open a door, try to push forward and if you feel yourself blocked immediately back up as it means someone is literally around the corner ready to blast you.

Mutants' instant reaction. They're bad enough as it is being almost completely silent save for attacking and dying, are the second strongest enemy with the SS being the toughest, and their attack is just as lethal as an SS. But their attack is unpredictable, there's no 'facetarget' before 'bulletattack' in their case it's just immediate shooting and hoping you will beat them to the punch. Cheap bastards.

Knife isn't silent. Now while some addons remedy this I'm not sure why id decided to make it equivalent to firing a gun when attacking an enemy in the original game.

Enemies being able to shoot through each other in a lineup. This makes groups of SS extremely dangerous using anything but the chaingun and even then you'll still likely get injured if you're not moving frantically back and forth while firing (and keeping your distance).

Lack of source code changes in the Spear Missions by FormGen. The maps are already pretty bad but they couldn't be arsed to actually change the text strings for the intermissions or create entirely new behavior for enemies and weapons? It's literally reskinned Spear of Destiny with worse level design. And they re-use their own bosses twice!

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I want games to return more to oldschool style level design, and we saw a bit of that direction in Doom 2016.

But to be fair, when done poorly, there was some bad 90s level design too. Random mazes of samey looking rooms and places, misc weird progression, lots of backtracking, confusion (in a bad way, I enjoy some puzzley design).

SiN for example, maybe this is a controversial opinion (love you Levelord), but I think that game is an example of poorly done level design overall. Also not too fond of a lot of Quake 2's level design. Though it's a lot better than Quake 4's level design.

Though I'd take a return to abstract backtrackey mazes good or bad over the current trend of big open realistic spaces, running across big fields etc. I'd just prefer that they be masterfully good abstract mazes.

(Or some happy medium, which to me is the best of Duke 3D, Quake and Doom maps. And by all means try new stuff too)

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As much as I love me some Duke3D, I'm not a fan of the mini-Battlelords from a gameplay perspective. Their Chainguns are way too powerful for a hitscan weapon and they keep firing it for a while after you take cover. It would have been more interesting if they primarily used their grenade launcher or fired some mini-rockets as a secondary attack to make them more fun to fight.

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rileymartin said:

As much as I love me some Duke3D, I'm not a fan of the mini-Battlelords from a gameplay perspective. Their Chainguns are way too powerful for a hitscan weapon and they keep firing it for a while after you take cover. It would have been more interesting if they primarily used their grenade launcher or fired some mini-rockets as a secondary attack to make them more fun to fight.


Speaking of rocket firing mini-bosses, the Overlord is now a mini-boss character too in the upcoming Duke Nukem 3D World Tour's new episode. Previously as a quirk you could put him in user levels as a mini-boss but he'd have one hitpoint. (unless using the Duke Plus mod)

I agree with the posts that Battlelords and Archviles etc may be a bit harsh by modern standards, but honestly I just hit the quicksave key a lot in Doom and Duke.

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rileymartin said:

As much as I love me some Duke3D, I'm not a fan of the mini-Battlelords from a gameplay perspective. Their Chainguns are way too powerful for a hitscan weapon and they keep firing it for a while after you take cover. It would have been more interesting if they primarily used their grenade launcher or fired some mini-rockets as a secondary attack to make them more fun to fight.


A lot of 90's FPS like to make "mini" versions of the bosses, and I always found that extremely lazy. Wish they would have just made a new enemy all together.

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PsychoGoatee said:

But to be fair, when done poorly, there was some bad 90s level design too. Random mazes of samey looking rooms and places, misc weird progression, lots of backtracking, confusion (in a bad way, I enjoy some puzzley design).


I agree!

I'm in the church level from Blood and while it is very interesting, I've been stuck there for 30 minutes. This very rarely happens in Doom or Duke 3D.

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I remember there's this thing in Blood where the big gray gargoyles just don't want to die. Sometimes shot all ammo from all weapons and it's still alive. But no shooting is required.. just crouch in front of it and poke it with the pitchfork. It takes some time, but it never attacks if player is crouched.

Both the inconsistent health or damage done to it and the crouch fork glitch were a good way to completely ruin that enemy.

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Jimi said:

I remember there's this thing in Blood where the big gray gargoyles just don't want to die.

Oh yeah, i remember that. One of those gargoyles is a first episode boss and i remember how long it took me to finally get rid of it. In fact, aside from the pitchfork tactic you described, the only effective way of killing it for me was finding the guns akimbo secret and stunlock and kill it with continuous sawed-off akimbo fire. Shooting it with non-akimbo weapons simply didn't do enough damage and explosives did no damage to it at all.
And i'm talking about medium difficulty, because on the hardest difficulty there're 2 of those things accompanied by a horde of regular gargoyles and according to the Blood wiki, on the hardest difficulty stone gargoyles have almost 10000 health which is insane. That's why i've never attempted playing Blood on hardest skill level - all enemies are just too beafy for me.

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Stone Gargs are weak to electrical and spiritual damage, so the Tesla Cannon and Voodoo Doll work the best. Unfortunately you don't have those in the first episode so guns akimbo with sawed off alt fire is the most effective method.

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CARRiON said:

I do however think Shadow Warrior's ninjas are the epitome of cheap. How are you supposed to guess when one of them is magically going to shoot a rocket out of their chest? Or a grenade? There is no animation for this alt. attack so it becomes frustrating to read their next move when you think they're just going to use their uzi and instead get blown the fuck up so quick and sudden. Their uzi also zaps your health away at a pretty considerable rate, and these bastards are everywhere. They're more dangerous then some of the later enemies in the game!

Yeah, the ninjas can be cheap, but if you look at thier pants color you can see what alt. they have, red are normal rockets, orange are heat seeker rockets, grey are grenades and green/invisible are guardian head users.
As for the common brown, they throw shuriken, but are easily dispatched with the katana or any other weapon, i find the riot gun effective against the tougher ninjas when using 4-burst shot mode as well rockets at long range and grenades by bouncing them off walls towards a ninja.
But if you think these ninjas are cheap, then i tell ya, the chinese mafia in Wanton Destruction are much worse, because the only way to tell what alt. weapon they use is by looking at thier hats.

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You basically have to be on your toes with those kinds of enemies, you will eventually get the hang of it.

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Only thing I can think of off the top of my head is bad placement of power-ups, which a lot of old-time shooters (and games of other genres) are guilty of.

Like entering a room full of enemies and clearing it out normally and only then do you discover a not-so-easily accessible power-up that would have been a huge help in clearing out the room, but now, there's not a single enemy left to use it on, so you just wasted the power-up.

I've always found this flaw infuriating, because I dislike wasting resources and power-ups are just much more fun when you get to properly exploit them.

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dsm said:

Only thing I can think of off the top of my head is bad placement of power-ups, which a lot of old-time shooters (and games of other genres) are guilty of.

Like entering a room full of enemies and clearing it out normally and only then do you discover a not-so-easily accessible power-up that would have been a huge help in clearing out the room, but now, there's not a single enemy left to use it on, so you just wasted the power-up.

I've always found this flaw infuriating, because I dislike wasting resources and power-ups are just much more fun when you get to properly exploit them.


On the flipside, the powerups in Doom 2016 are always in super obvious places.

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Build Engine games after Duke seemed t favor platforming sections for some reason, which are notably hard to execute. PowerSlave might be the worst examples, as falling generally means death in a lava pit, as opposed to being able to find a way back up. Worse yet, there's only a mediocre checkpoint system that often sets you far behind the platforming section.

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I don't like hitscanners with too short attack preparation animation/time. For example, when Doom's Shotgunguy walks around and decides to attack, he stops and stays roughly 0.3 seconds aiming at you while displaying a gun-aiming sprite distinct from his walking animation, and only then he fires his hitscan attack - and that's a relatively good attack preparation animation/time. It gives you a chance to see that he's going to attack and react to it - if you're near a cover, you may hide in time, and if you're aiming at the monster, you may shoot it before it shoots you. Now, for example Duke3D's Battlelord or Shadow Warrior's Ninjas walk around and suddenly fire their hitscans without any preparation animation/time at all (or maybe almost at all), and that makes them annoying for me. Especially those hitscanners with high health. I'm convinced that high-HP and/or high-damage hitscanners are more than tolerable if they have long-enough attack preparation time (the higher health or greater damage, the longer preparation time) and provided there's some cover in the map. IMO, Doom's Spider Mastermind could be a good enemy if only his body wasn't so large and he didn't move so slowly, but it's these 2 unfortunate traits that make him my least favorite monster in Doom, not the fact that he's a hitscanner. Large slow-moving enemies are another flaw of shooters that I can think of.

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scifista42 said:

roughly 0.3 seconds

Randomly, that's the "attack point" of a lot of DOTA heroes with nice attack animations, basically the delay before the attack actually connects. I feel like this is worth noting, because it's pretty important in that game to time your attacks carefully ( you have this get the killing blow on a NPC to get gold from it, after all ) and while the amount of time isn't much - you don't have to "lead" your attack to much to land it with the right timing - it's still plenty of time to stop your attack if you realize you started it too early.

The point I'm getting at is that a fraction of a second like that is a pretty good delay, as someone who's paying attention will have plenty of time to react but it's still fast enough to catch an unaware player off guard, allowing the enemy to be a threat as an ambusher.

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J.B.R said:

Yeah, the ninjas can be cheap, but if you look at thier pants color you can see what alt. they have, red are normal rockets, orange are heat seeker rockets, grey are grenades and green/invisible are guardian head users.
As for the common brown, they throw shuriken, but are easily dispatched with the katana or any other weapon, i find the riot gun effective against the tougher ninjas when using 4-burst shot mode as well rockets at long range and grenades by bouncing them off walls towards a ninja.
But if you think these ninjas are cheap, then i tell ya, the chinese mafia in Wanton Destruction are much worse, because the only way to tell what alt. weapon they use is by looking at thier hats.


I knew that, I beat Shadow Warrior and the expansion packs. I stand by the fact it's lazy to not tell the player what attack an enemy is about to do if an enemy has multiple attacks, plus it just looks stupid seeing it fly out of their chest.

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