Going back to broad strokes genres, this week’s topic concerns the FPS (First Person Shooter), a staple of the overall gaming scene.
A First Person Shooter is the type of game where you play from a first person perspective (big shocker) and focuses around shooting (bigger shocker there), whether that’s other players or NPC enemies. It’s nice for a genre to be so plainly self-descriptive! FPS games also involve the navigation of a 3D environment, and often times incorporate standard concepts that are ubiquitous at this point like ammo management and loadouts of different weapons. This genre was heavily shaped by Doom (the original, released in early 90s), to the point where before the name FPS fully took hold, one term often used was “Doom clones”. Nowadays there are many subgenres and styles paired with the FPS - class-based shooters, “boomer shooters”, milsim and/or tactical shooters, twitch shooters, and others.
Here are some questions and subtopics that I encourage people to discuss:
- What are some of your favorite subgenres or styles of FPS, and your favorite games from them?
- Do you enjoy secondary concepts often associated with FPS games like ammo management and loadout adjustment?
- What genres do you like to see crossed over with an FPS?
- Do you prefer multiplayer or singleplayer FPS games? For multiplayer, Co-op or PvP?
- What are some of your favorite weapons from FPS titles? What’s been memorable?
Also feel free to bring up anything you like related to the topic! If you have suggestions for future discussion topics, leave them in the suggestion thread.
Additional Resources
- List of first-person shooters from Wikipedia
- First-Person Shooter tag on Steam
What defined Ego shooters for me wasn’t doom but unreal tournament. Played a lot of it when I was younger. I liked to just mentally check out and play this game on high speed which put me in flow-mode. There wasn’t too much strategy to it. Just know the map, run around and kill stuff with fast reflexes. I was really good at it. Beat all my friends on LAN-parties.
There was ammo but no reloading and that was absolutely fine. Made for some amazing mmmonster-Kills to not have to reload.
My favorite weapon was the flak-Canon with it’s shotgun-style primary attack that suited my jump-around-and-be-on-the-move-constantly Playstyle. The secondary attack was like a grenade and very handy for AOE or when people were following you.
Nowadays I don’t really want to play egoshooters anymore after having worked 8 hours+ on the computer. Stresses me out. Especially multiplayer where I would have to train to be able to keep up.