Wolfenstein and Doom were simple, playful, colorful. Even as game devices became more powerful, there was a playfulness to FPSes that you can see in titles like Perfect Dark and the Unreal series.
One of Halo's major innovations was that it removed the health bar. In a shooter like Doom or Goldeneye, you have let's say 100 HP, and different weapons deal a different amount of damage. It's just like any fighting game with a health bar. Halo replaced that with a shield system, wherein being shot repeatedly wasn't a game-ender if you could get away long enough for shields to recharge. It changes the pacing of the game substantially, especially in multiplayer. The jittery feeling of older games, where every shot counts and you always have to be on the lookout for your opponent, was made both slower (because other players weren't constantly trying to get a shot on you and wear you down) and a bit more mindless (because once you got into a firefight, your only choice was to shoot the other person repeatedly or else there'd be no damage left whatsoever).
This complements the self-seriousness of the Halo games, which absolutely inspired the direction of the next-gen titles. Halo was "grittier" and less silly than previous shooters had been. In Wolfenstein, you were fighting enemies like robo-Hitler. In Doom, the enemies you were up against were inventive, silly, and fun. And the push towards realism was by no means inevitable. Look at Unreal Tournament 2004, which was a touted push towards enhanced graphics and gameplay that took advantage of modern systems, but which remains an utterly comical game. The violence is whimsical and comic; the levels are far more ridiculous than Halo's or Halo 2's. It's a pretty game, as far as that goes, but the prettiness is used for exaggeration rather than for "grit". So obviously that path was not only possible for games, but it led to quite a few very good games over the last decade.
You seem to be missing a whole slew of games here, and most importantly, you don't seem to understand just how gritty, dark, and realistic Wolfenstein was for its time.
You cherry-pick robo-Hitler in order to paint Wolfenstein as a fun and happy game - but the fact of the matter is that when it was released, it was the most realistic game ever made (give or take), in which you killed nazis. Nothing but nazis. In a first-person perspective, in a dark and gritty environment, in what was seen as very realistic. The policor backlash to the game's realism and grittiness - and the nazi-aspect - was huge. Wolfenstein was far, far more realistic and gritty than Halo has ever been, when put in historical perspective.
Then there's the fact that other realistic console shooters existed long before Halo came out. Take Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark for the N64, for instance. Two highly-realistic first person shooters, accompanied by successful multiplayer elements. Or Medal of Honor for the PS1. On the PC, too - take Rise of the Triad, one of the most violent games I can think of. Its multiplayer was simplistic, straightforward, and incredibly violent and gory.
I know it's all the rage to talk down on console gaming and games like Halo in particular, but the fact of the matter is that this kind of gaming didn't start with Halo, and had been around for a long, long time before it. Games like this have always existed alongside deeper and richer games, and that's a good thing - I like more intelligent and rewarding experiences, but after a long day or a stressful week, I just want to get some friends together and shoot zombies in Left 4 Dead 1/2 - just as I don't want every movie I see to be Philadelphia. Sometimes, I just want Armageddon or Die Hard, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Not to mention Doom was not at all "simple, playful, and colorful". Running around through Hell with dismembered corpses on spikes being chased but gruesome demons was frightening in the early '90s. Maybe it was just cause I was 10 at the time :)
I think you've got some serious nostalgia going on there. I agre with the other posters - Wolfenstein and Doom were considered shockingly violent at the time of their release. Before Wolfenstein there were no high-speed 3d shooters; 3d was mostly the preserve of adventure and maze-solving games, or required settling for vector graphics. It looks silly and fun now because it's so primitivebut at the time it was startling.
Doom was also fun, but I don't think of it as playful or silly. it was horrific and scary, because it set the standard for realism back in its day - of course the monsters were unreal, but nobody had ever seen such a detailed or fluid-feeling environment before. And gameplay-wise, both Wolfenstein and Doom were largely blast-and-hope type games, because the AI wasn't very sophisticated and sniping/stealthing your way through was generally not an option.
When I think of playful and silly from that era, I think of early Duke Nukem and Rise of the Triad, which started out as a serious game but rapidly went into silly territory with unlikely weapons, wildly unrealistic platform mechanics (giant trampolines) and wacky pickups (magic mushrooms that caused on-screen 'hallucinations'), and practically encouraged the player to cheat (god mode etc.) for the giggle value. Incidentally, there's a ROTT reissue in the works: http://riseofthetriad.net/web/app.php/features/
Just a minor nitpick, but Halo did have a health bar. It was Halo 2 that removed it. Bungie briefly brought it bak in Halo ODST (which was why my friends and I loved its firefight the best).
Halo 2 wasn't the first game to remove the health bar either, Red Faction 2 had an almost identical vitality system to Halo's shields.
If you think FPS's with shields Halo-style are slow, you've never played a modern Call of Duty. If anything, this unrealistic choice made it much faster and funnier, since no one needed to hunt for medkits again; it also gave players a realistic choice for hiding in cover, or doing anything else at all. With health bars, it's shoot back or die.
If you think Halo was gritty and serious, you've never played Halo. Grunts are some funny bastards. Multiplayer with vehicles and rocket launchers is damn silly.
Also, complaining about the "excessive competitiveness" of Halo (of all games), compared to that of, say, Counter Strike or damn fucking Quake 3, is pretty fucking disingenuous. Harvest Moon is more suitable to competitive play than Halo.
>Wolfenstein and Doom were simple, playful, colorful.
You were in middle school when Halo came out, so I can be fairly certain you were too young to remember Wolfenstein and Doom being released. And you're completely wrong. Those games were not simple and playful and colorful. They were gory, and violent, and brutal and complex. I had to play them when my parents weren't paying attention because of the excessive gore and satanic overtones. Doom was not some simple little game, it introduced the concept of circle strafing and multi-level enemies in FPS.
>The jittery feeling of older games, where every shot counts and you always have to be on the lookout for your opponent
Ha, really? Quake introduced the term run-and-gun. You didn't make every shot count, you just fired a barrage of rockets and bullets all towards your enemies.
>Halo was "grittier" and less silly than previous shooters had been
Yeah, demons from hell with miniguns for arms and blood dripping off their fangs are super silly. And the those Covenant grunts run around comically when you throw a sticky grenade to them... so gritty.
I think the OPs objections is that older games don't look grittier, but these days they don't because it's hard to look past just how bad the graphics are by todays standards. However back when they were released, Wolf3d and Doom had my heart racing and even made me jump -frequently- because picking up a red key opened a secret room filled with hell demon. Doom and Doom 2 were terrifying at times.
Then you have games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill and even (albeit to a less extent) System Shock 2 which all predate the Xbox and were all pretty scary.
As much as I hate to bring age into the debate, I think the OP is too young to remember or too young to buy such games.
You know what, it's totally possible! I've studied games from a critical perspective, but never a historical one; while my criticisms of Xbox's marketing make sense from the games that I know, it may be that I have completely misinterpreted what the games that game before it were like. Age is a factor when we're talking about the change of games over time.
I still think that there's been an unfortunate shift in games over the last decade or so, and that Halo exists along the spectrum of that shift. This guy's essay made a lot of sense in the context of what criticisms I have of games in general, but I might be giving it more credit than it's worth. Sorry for being so annoyingly wrong about things; I'll try to understand this better for future discussions!
I may be wrong, but I think the parent's point is that nitty gritty realism/brutal/gory/violent games were niche before the advent of halo/xbox.
What would really be helpful is a sales chart for FPS games between 1990 and present, but I'm not sure where we could go to obtain such information. I suspect that there would be a burst in the popularity in FPS games from niche to mainstream status around the release of either halo, counterstrike, call of duty 4, or one of the quakes, but I'm not sure which one.
Halo (and really, Rare's FPS platform) brought the FPS niche from PC+keyboard+mouse to console and controller. This introduced casual gamers to the world of the hardcore competitive nature of Doom/Quake/Unreal Tournament, a multiplayer environment where winning meant shooting your friend in the face.
You didn't have to maintain a massive gaming rig or be committed to computing in order to get into FPS now. All you needed was an xbox.
That signals the divide. What PC games were cute in the 90s? If one removes the 'educational' ones like treasure <x>, it's always been one of grittiness and machismo. Halo bridged the gap and let that scheme flow into consoles. And its clear that it is more successful with the consumer.
> Halo (and really, Rare's FPS platform) brought the FPS niche from PC+keyboard+mouse to console and controller. This introduced casual gamers to the world of the hardcore competitive nature of Doom/Quake/Unreal Tournament, a multiplayer environment where winning meant shooting your friend in the face. You didn't have to maintain a massive gaming rig or be committed to computing in order to get into FPS now. All you needed was an xbox.
Quake III was released on the Dreamcast. Duke Nukem 3D was released on the Saturn and Playstation. Doom was released on the Megadrive/Genesis. Halo wasn't the first FPS to be released on the console. Not by a long shot.
I certainly agree that those games appeared earlier on the timeline. But Halo/Rare FPSs were the first to be outstandingly successful in their control and playability scheme. The console versions of those games you list were hampered by their platforms and would all likely be considered less playable than their PC counterparts. Thus the genre could not break in as it could with Goldeneye or Halo.
Westwood Studios' Legend of Kyrandia series arguably although it's themes were somewhat darker, the overall style was definitely more light-hearted than today's visceral FPS.
Even before the Quakes you had Duke Nukem 3D, Wolfenstine, Doom I and II. Then you have the dozens of games that used Doom's engine (Hexen and Heretic being the big two that I remember, but there were others).
The reason why FPS might seem more popular now is likely just because graphics have advanced so much that it's hard for big game studios to justify releasing a 2D platformer. And you see this with all of the old third person 2D games that have been updated to 3D (Sonic Adventure and later games, Mario 64 / Super Mario Galaxies, Zelda, Final Fantasy, etc).
to remember Wolfenstein and Doom being released. And you're completely wrong. Those games were not simple and playful and colorful. They were gory, and violent, and brutal and complex. I had to play them when my parents weren't paying attention because of the excessive gore and satanic overtones.
I was early 20's when Wolf 3D came out. It was shockingly graphic, but like everyone else at work I played it all the way through.
Doom on the other hand... just too gory and satanic. No thanks.
Fast forward to the present, I've played all the Halos. They're completely mainstream and not very gory.
Currently playing Borderlands 2. I dislike the constant theme of sadism and torture, but it's fun game and I manage to get past it.
I bought an Xbox magazine the other day. Literally 80%+ of the games involved shooting rotting-corpse zombies. I really don't get why people like that stuff.
One of Halo's major innovations was that it removed the health bar. In a shooter like Doom or Goldeneye, you have let's say 100 HP, and different weapons deal a different amount of damage. It's just like any fighting game with a health bar. Halo replaced that with a shield system, wherein being shot repeatedly wasn't a game-ender if you could get away long enough for shields to recharge. It changes the pacing of the game substantially, especially in multiplayer. The jittery feeling of older games, where every shot counts and you always have to be on the lookout for your opponent, was made both slower (because other players weren't constantly trying to get a shot on you and wear you down) and a bit more mindless (because once you got into a firefight, your only choice was to shoot the other person repeatedly or else there'd be no damage left whatsoever).
This complements the self-seriousness of the Halo games, which absolutely inspired the direction of the next-gen titles. Halo was "grittier" and less silly than previous shooters had been. In Wolfenstein, you were fighting enemies like robo-Hitler. In Doom, the enemies you were up against were inventive, silly, and fun. And the push towards realism was by no means inevitable. Look at Unreal Tournament 2004, which was a touted push towards enhanced graphics and gameplay that took advantage of modern systems, but which remains an utterly comical game. The violence is whimsical and comic; the levels are far more ridiculous than Halo's or Halo 2's. It's a pretty game, as far as that goes, but the prettiness is used for exaggeration rather than for "grit". So obviously that path was not only possible for games, but it led to quite a few very good games over the last decade.