Retro FPS - What would you want in it

So with all these retro fps titles making a come back slowly what would you want from one. Taking ideas from all the 90s and early 2000s what would be your ideal and fun retro FPS.

Mine would be a mix up of doom and quake 2. Like a mash up of both.

Guns and things to shoot at with them with some psychedelic maps that vaguely look like possible locations but are more built around gameplay than looking like real places. I guess. 

I tend not to like linear corridor-like maps. Where it is basically hallway to hallway and room to room in one direction. The retro games I am into tend to have more open maps, where the layouts have you going in all directions and not just forward all of the time. It is more representative of real environments in my opinion.

No more than 32MB of mem usage. Whatever comes out of that ought to feel retro enough.

To take one relatively rare idea from a 90s game:

I've always had the idea of a Sonic Adventure style character wheel for an FPS. In other words- the storyline is generally the same, but instead of a singular campaign each character goes through a set of personalized levels mapping their perspective of the events transpiring. At the end you'd get access to the final story that'd tie things together.

Here's a few things:

1 - The shotgun being powerful further than an arms length.

2 - Epic, memorable songs.

3 - Lack of cutter. Seriously, I HATE modern FPS games for how cluttered and over-detailed they are. I get lost/snagged on geometry too often.

4 - Many guns to blow up many enemies.

5 - Cheesy easter eggs.

6 - Landmarks. Quite a few FPS games back in the day rewarded you for remembering certain "landmarks" in levels so you know where you need to back track to when you pick up a key.

It's not characteristic of the FPS golden age (like I care about such authenticity) but I'd want dedicated replay modes like time attack and/or a score attack (which would necessitate a rewarding scoring system, another thing I'd want).

Oh. And a decent shotgun. To me, an FPS lives or dies by the satisfaction of its boomstick.

Doom but reskinned

.Satisfying to use weapons (Also satisfying feedback from those weapons both by sound and the effect they cause on the enemies)

.Open and well made level design with plenty of variety and eye candy

.A great soundtrack, either catchy or atmospheric (or both)

.Clever secrets, secrets are usually always fun

.Lots of different enemies to shoot at with different attack patterns

You check all those boxes and you have a decent shooter.

On 3/22/2019 at 8:25 PM, furyweb said:

So with all these retro fps titles making a come back slowly what would you want from one. Taking ideas from all the 90s and early 2000s what would be your ideal and fun retro FPS.

 

Mine would be a mix up of doom and quake 2. Like a mash up of both.

A retro FPS title in the style of Duke Nukem that resembles a Terrywad mocking both political parties within the USA.

Paint and color. Something with a different style than 90s pixel art or 90s era 3D.

Gothic art direction, actual level design as opposed to procedualy generated levels(or at least have those as an optional thing), guns that are satisfying to use, and no extra mechanics added on top. Like, I know it's important to appeal to some aspects of modern gaming to not be alienating, but I would REALLY rather not have stuff like weapon upgrades, "lite ironsights", or 2 million fire mdoes for the weapons. Keep it simple, at most add very slight RPG elements like upgrade health and damage, and maaaaybe scaling enemy health, since that's, in my opinion, always fun regardless of the game(or, again, make it optional).

Last but not least, additional game modes. That is, Deathmatch, Coop, or even horde mode like the one Dusk has.

I think reality is borderline a videogame right now- what with attack drones and EM rifles. I think a stylized real world (like Half Life 2 or Rage) but with these cyberwar influences would be cool. Sure, hacking minigames are retro and dope- but having a VTOL boss that spawns drones would be super duper dope.

Drop it with a synthwave midi soundtrack and call it HYPERWAR:2099 or something.

1 hour ago, Mk7_Centipede said:

I think reality is borderline a videogame right now- what with attack drones and EM rifles. I think a stylized real world (like Half Life 2 or Rage) but with these cyberwar influences would be cool. Sure, hacking minigames are retro and dope- but having a VTOL boss that spawns drones would be super duper dope.

 

Drop it with a synthwave midi soundtrack and call it HYPERWAR:2099 or something.

so Deus Ex but Doom?

I'd unironically love that.

Deux Ex with gibs :)

I think there'd be a decent market for a retro-styled FPS with a modern warfare theme, ala Soldier Of Fortune. I'd figure you'd take some basic Call of Duty-like mechanics like sprinting and ADS, and combine it with a projectile system similar to ww-nazis (or maybe a system where you shoot hitscan but the enemies shoot projectiles), with enemy variety inspired by Metal Slug.

i want them to stop popping up.

I'd like to see retro FPS where you can pick a character at the start and each character has a unique set of weapons. Kinda like Hexen. Also have a Doom styled status bar where you can see the characters' face. Also would be cool to see an FPS based on a popular franchise from other media like Scooby Doo or KISS, but that would be very unlikely. Heh.

I would like it to be retro. And an FPS. 

To be serious, I loved Quake. I don't think we need any retro Wolfenstein clones, because it's boring. We don't need 2.5D Doom clones, because it's a fantastic game, and the modding tools allow you to do pretty much whatever any game studio can do. 

What I loved about Quake was the atmosphere, and the completely abstract level design. The addition of a "third" dimension to this makes it memorable. The ability to jump between floors in a level, the amount of movement it provided, but most important was the level design. It wasn't based on the real world; if you wanted to jump down to a lower level, or jump to a ledge and get yourself to another level, all while fighting Lovecraftian horrors in castles and caves, you could do that. It felt freeing, because jumping is pointless if you're inside a military base. I mean, you can jump on a box to get to a vent, but that's it.

The next PC FPS I played after Quake was Shadow Warrior, and it was all real world levels, built well, but it wasn't interesting to play around in. Then Quake 2, which was essentially a nice, straightforward military shooter. 

I think Dusk (especially the third episode) has perfectly shown what I want in a retro FPS. Amid Evil is pretty damn close, but even with the enemy and level variety, the movement feels less free than Dusk.

And I was going to say I want a new Quake, but seeing what Zenimax has done with Wolfenstein, I think I can let Quake rest in piece. I don't want a new Quake from them; I'll stick with the indie authors who actually know how fun the old games were, and are capable of bringing them into the modern age.