The End of the Tactical Shooter.

[Kings_25 10]

Hi guys

I'm primarily a console gamer but I strongly appreciate a realistic shooter.

I'm sure many of you guys have seen E3 and been bitterly disappointed.

I feel like tactical shooters are slowly dying examples from 2007-now

Socom 4: Regenerating health, cover system and Linear..Linear levels.

Medal of Honor: (although not a tactical franchise EA certainly gave the impression that they wanted to create a soldiers shooter, one they could appreciate. They talked about unparalleled accuracy and attention to detail.

But I see zero recoil, health regen, KILLSTREAKSS!! and ice-skating-long-distance-reverse-knife-instakills.

GRFS: Instead of displaying military equipment that is 7-8 years in the future they chose equipment 20-30 years ahead which was based on pure speculation.

Thats just a few examples.

What I have observed in the gaming world is complacency in both customers and especially developers.

Developers seem to set COD as their benchmark to assist in the construction of their money forts, worst of all I see MW2 as a game that was developed with kids in mind sure its an MA15/R18 game but it is a childs impression of war and that seems to be the way that the entire console/shooter community is measured.

I see so many shooters that are the same, and whats worse people still seem happy to buy it. I see comments like (It's a lot like MW2 so I'm gonna like this as well). Do people really wanna fork out $60 for the same gameplay or is it a result of developers constantly producing this clusterfuck of clones and unoriginal ideas that have made people settle for different character models and slightly different level design.

It makes me wonder what developers of long running tactical franchises we're thinking.

Did they forget what made the franchise popular in the first place.

I like ARMA 2 and BI because they found a niche and stayed with it and supported the community like no other because their passion is games. Unfortunately my computer seems to only run A2 at about 3 fps :P on low settings. But I still love it, I love the concept I love the fact that you need to use your head. Unfortunately my computers limitations do keep me from playing it as often as I would like so I have to sit by and watch as shooters turn to a pile of conformist sludge

(please give me your opinion guys and If you think that tac-shooters will ever come back. I hope I actually did make a point and not a wall of ranting text :P

keep in mind its 2am over here)

Cheers

Kings

[4 IN 1 0]

Medal of Honor and COD are just NOT a tactical shooter since day one, they are movie shooter, Socom is a shooter but not into the "tactical" level. GR1 and its expension is the only GR that is a tactical shooter, same with R6. That said, there is no new real pure tactical shooter left on the market(with ARMA being multi-role)

[Kings_25 10]

Medal of Honor and COD are just NOT a tactical shooter since day one, they are movie shooter, Socom is a shooter but not into the "tactical" level. GR1 and its expension is the only GR that is a tactical shooter, same with R6. That said, there is no new real pure tactical shooter left on the market(with ARMA being multi-role)

Haha I totally agree with you

No way in hell would I call COD tactical.

I was just saying that tactical shooters are being abandoned in favor of creating a COD clone.

The word on the forums of the new MOH gave the impression of a realistic shooter that would be different from anything else but that turned out false.

I've always thought of SOCOM as realistic and I'm also a big GR and R6 fan.

[Jelliz 10]

Well, tactics in todays first person shooters include "nadespamming", camping, annoying people by screaming childish insults over the ingame VON, making people quit the servers by replying "tahts wut ur mom said last nite yo" to anything spoken over VON.

does that, in a perverse way, make them tactical shooters?

Anyways, most of those cinematic FPS'es that are released nowadays is just wannabe-clones of COD anyways. Just look at this new MoH coming out, hard to see the difference right?

[HyperU2 11]

Stupidity is what the people want. Even in their prime the best tactical shooters weren't the most popular games.

[roberthammer 582]

They could disable or minimize damage of nades - it should stop nade spam ,but then goes AT spam :icon_rolleyes:

[-)rStrangelove 0]

The game industry produces large quantities of those games which they know will sell in large quantities, dead simple.

More and more ppl become gamers (casual gamers at first) and only a small percentage play simulators that give you a brutally realistic experience of war. So we SIM gamers are a minority.

There's nothing you can do about it other than telling all casual gamers to stop buying colorful mainstream crap and hope that mainstream will eventually eat its own legs and collapse one day. They're doing good so far imo:

- game can be played through in 8 hours

- game single player forces you to be connected online (hello Ubisoft)

- game forces you to run 2 other applications in the background (hi steam, hi games-for-windows)

- game costs 70 eur

- game performance is lowered by copy protection (hi .....)

- games are just console ports sharing problems like dumb ass menus, one-button-for-everything-controls and smeared low resolution textures

- games are pushed out while still in beta, making your new i7 & GTX480 PC cry a river

- direct-x features on your gfxcard are used in a game 2 years later

- game follow up titles bring no new features, just slightly better textures and all the bug-fixes you're dealing with in the old title

- games are released with half-content so they can make more $$$ via DLC

- even if promised, all DLC is released for consoles first. PC gamers can wait 1 more year.

Rant over.

[Kings_25 10]

I understand that full on simulators are something very niche but at one point tactical shooters were the top selling shooters.

Even the original flashpoint sold around 2 million copies I believe, The first two SOCOMS were a runaway success, the original rainbow six and Ghost Recon games were extremely successful. Developers are forgeting what made their games great in the first place. Now everything is being dumbed down to be marketed to kids who scream at their parents to buy these games which shouldn't be played by them in the first place.

I mean how many of the 25 million MW2 players are over the age of 15.

If one of these recognised franchises actually went back to their roots I could see a huge influx of adult gamers who remember the old series buying it.

There is a drought of tactical shooters and I'm waiting for a developer to take advantage of that.

eg: Bringing out a new R6 that was true to the original, there would be a strong chance that not only original R6 players would buy it but also GR, SOCOM, OFP and SWAT fans would as well as there is nothing to compete with. thats just my opinion.

I mean look at Dragon Rising, it showed that there were people still out there (even on consoles) looking for a war simulator, unfortunately continuous broken promises and major gameplay elements were removed essentially dumbing down the game resulting in mediocre sales as well as a real assfucking for those desperate enough to still buy the game.

If someone actually cared and put in some effort a tactical shooter may completely redefine the shooter genre.

[HyperU2 11]

I love R6 and I'd like a true to the original sequel, but it never approached the popularity of Counterstrike. That's kind of what brought us to our choices today.

[sic-disaster 311]

This thread entices me to go on with another bible-sized rant about how Vegas and Lockdown were the death of Rainbow Six, and how Advanced Warfighter fucked up Ghost Recon.

It's my Pandora's Box. To me, Vegas symbolises everything that is wrong about gaming today and i'd rather cut off my mouse-hand than play it, just for the principle of it.

Touching it is defiling my body.

But long story short, looking how things turned out for old R6 and GR, and with Dragon Rising too, i can only be damn glad those corporate cocksuckers dont try to restart the Hidden and Dangerous or SWAT franchises because that would be more than i could handle.

Mainstream gaming has destroyed the games i have loved most, and Vegas, Lockdown and GRAW1/2 are still casting a shadow on my enjoyment of gaming.

I'm up to the point of quitting, if it wasnt for ArmA 2.

EDIT: Since ArmA 2 and OA are already out, the only game that adresses our niche and has great potential of fulfilling our needs is Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad.

This and ArmA 2 will be my top two games. It's a shame our market is this small, that we only have two choices to play.

Other than that, we can only fall back on the golden oldies, but as years go by that gets more and more problematic. Like now, Rogue Spear is dying on me. I still love playing it from time to time, but now i'm getting problems and it just isnt playable any more with no hopes of improvement :(

Edited July 23, 2010 by SiC-Disaster

[sesdelta38 10]

After reading this, I'm starting to understand the situation.

People in this day and age would rather just play a game that requires no tactical thinking and just have their characters run all over the place shooting at other players. As result, we are left with a brand that's getting old and stale. I'm currently a console gamer and I never played TRUE tactical shooters. Because, I played Rainbow Six Vegas and GRAW.

However, if a developer can develop an TRUE tactical shooter that can work for ALL platforms without unnecessary dumbing-down, It would bring innovation back the shooter genre.

Now I know most people here are PC gamers, but before you criticize me for mentioning consoles when I say ALL platforms, you guys remember Ghost Recon 1. If you also remember, Ghost Recon was ported to the original Xbox. Believe it or not, the Xbox port of Ghost Recon 1 was VERY popular among console gamers, so much that people stilled played it before original Xbox games lost Xbox Live support in April. It had a lot of the features that PC version had (except mods and mouse and keyboard).

So in my view, TRUE tactical shooters can work on consoles. It's just that people would rather play run n' gun titles like COD. As I said, If a developer can an actual tactical shooter for consoles, than it could be popular and bring a back originality for the genre. But for now, that won't happen as long as developers keep bringing out the same old stuff.

Edited July 26, 2010 by sesdelta38

[LJF 0]

I'm up to the point of quitting, if it wasnt for ArmA 2.

EDIT: Since ArmA 2 and OA are already out, the only game that adresses our niche and has great potential of fulfilling our needs is Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad.

This and ArmA 2 will be my top two games. It's a shame our market is this small, that we only have two choices to play.

Absolutely, cannot wait for HoS. I'm currently playing the hell out of original Red Orchestra and the Darkest Hour mod (first time since the mod days really).

[slatts 1978]

my fate in these games faded when at an irish army ordnance corps display

a kid saw an sks, and yelled "cool! a M21"

a soldier corrected him

the kid replied, eh noooo

i then walked up to the soldier and said cheekly

can it have stopping power attached?

which led him to shake my hand lol

[celery 8]

The amount of genre hate in this thread is off the charts. If people'd stop profiling themselves as superior intellects who scoff at any game that isn't meant for the "thinking man" that they picture themselves to be, they'd lead much happier lives with more variety in their free time.

[paplate 10]

The amount of genre hate in this thread is off the charts. If people'd stop profiling themselves as superior intellects who scoff at any game that isn't meant for the "thinking man" that they picture themselves to be, they'd lead much happier lives with more variety in their free time.

The problem is that series that were designed to be FOR "the thinking man" are being dumbed down for the masses, not that there are a lot more arcade games than thinking games.

[sic-disaster 311]

The amount of genre hate in this thread is off the charts. If people'd stop profiling themselves as superior intellects who scoff at any game that isn't meant for the "thinking man" that they picture themselves to be, they'd lead much happier lives with more variety in their free time.

Hey to me this is just a preference. I can play all kinds of games and have fun, BUT my preference is tactical shooters or heavy RPG's that make me think before i act.

All other games can hold me for a day or two before i move on. It's quick, senseless fun, but like all senseless things they can only entertain for so long.

Example: Bad Company 2. I enjoyed playing it. But after 5 minutes i knew all there was to know about the game, and by now i dont bother playing anymore because there is nothing left to learn.

I'm still not done learning new stuff in ArmA 2 even though i've been playing since Operation Flashpoint, and there is still room for refining my skills in even Rogue Spear. Swat 4 is still a captivating challenge, while BC2 has grown stale even though it has many the times of bullets and explosions flying around (which, as i am lead to believe, is the primary source of a game being cool these days. Point in fact: Call of Duty and similar games being best-selling shooters. These games cant have a single minute of you not killing somebody, apparantly.).

And besides that, Paplate is very right when he states that all the tactical shooters that were already here have been dumbed down for the masses.

ArmA 1 and 2 being the only two that i can think of out of the top of my head that has stayed faithful to the original concept.

Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Operation Flashpoint, it's all been thrown out the window and 'adapted' to offer more enjoyment for people that cant sit still and cant go a minute without a kill.

That leaves 'us' with nothing. What once was has now crumbled before the mainstream posse, and there is now only one game left to look forward to.

And knowing full-well what kind of attention and effort that is being poured into that new game, it won't sell even a quarter of what it deserves to be selling once it's out.

It is not strange that people who do love and care for these types of games get upset and have hostile tendencies towards the thing that destroys our ability to enjoy new games, because it's just as much a hobby for us as it is for you.

[HyperU2 11]

It's not just the shooters, flight sims are dead too.

[Second 0]

I see some people who can't look forward. It seems they have like list with thousands of things which game has to fulfill and if it doesn't then it ends up into corporative-bullshit-mainstream-game genre. To put that list shortly: It has to be 99% same game as some classic game in youth was. OFP is classic example in these forums. GR is another.

Oh well.

One great example is OF:DR, game which was broken but it atleast tried to set some new standards to shooters (suppression and morale model, squad behavior, mission editor, open endness... to name most important). But sadly because it used name OFP it was squashed utterly and with out remorse. Then when it was but splatters on walls then geowd returns to their mediating positions and start to repeat their: "Ommm... Fuck!ng mainstream eats my cake and dumbs down my genre.... Omm." ... Now we have possibly more polished game coming and again same stuff seems to happen again. And at same time people are whining how nobody does games like the old days and thinking is left outside the game.

Which tells pretty nice story of scitzophrenia. "GRRRRR!!! You can't come to my playground!" [after a while] "Why don't you come to my playground? Why do you go to mainsteam's playground?" FPDR

Oh well... Not my problem. Of which i'm clad of.

[CW001 10]

I just want sims in general to make a huge comeback. That would make me very happy.

[celery 8]

One common thing about almost all tactical shooters from the "golden age" of such games is that today they're awful to play. I've recently tried Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, Hidden & Dangerous and Ghost Recon, and all of them suffer from unfair yet bad AI, awkward controls and no feel for the weapons to speak of.

However nostalgic it may be to remember playing those games when there wasn't anything better to play (the traditional fps games mainly sucked until Half-Life came along), there isn't much else to those 1990s tactical shooters other than the difficulty level caused by an AI's superhuman perception and aiming speed. Gaming sessions were pretty much trying to get the missions done right one frustrating mistake at a time. If those games were truly tactical and for the thinking man, well planned instructions for the AI teammates would have been the only thing required to win the game. Alas, the teammates are dumb as rocks and it's up to the player's super soldier to bring down the equally super tangos in split milliseconds. That's irony if I've ever seen it.

[LJF 0]

I just want sims in general to make a huge comeback. That would make me very happy.

Yep. Currently I'm playing 3 games lol, Combat Mission Shock Force, DCS Black Shark and occasionally A2 (I'm quite taken with CMSF atm). Hopefully there'll be more sims in the future.

One common thing about almost all tactical shooters from the "golden age" of such games is that today they're awful to play. I've recently tried Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, Hidden & Dangerous and Ghost Recon, and all of them suffer from unfair yet bad AI, awkward controls and no feel for the weapons to speak of.

However nostalgic it may be to remember playing those games when there wasn't anything better to play (the traditional fps games mainly sucked until Half-Life came along), there isn't much else to those 1990s tactical shooters other than the difficulty level caused by an AI's superhuman perception and aiming speed. Gaming sessions were pretty much trying to get the missions done right one frustrating mistake at a time. If those games were truly tactical and for the thinking man, well planned instructions for the AI teammates would have been the only thing required to win the game. Alas, the teammates are dumb as rocks and it's up to the player's super soldier to bring down the equally super tangos in split milliseconds. That's irony if I've ever seen it.

It's the idea of those games though, however bad they were in comparison with modern games for things like AI or weapon handling. Now all the games want to be like CoD, or worse: like Gears of War.

You know it's bad when you look at BF2 and think "gee, I wish games these days were at least THAT realistic.

It's even worse when CoD/BFBC2 are refered to as "realistic" shooters: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1546-Battlefield-Bad-Company-2

Edited July 29, 2010 by LJF

[Big Mac 19]

I just want sims in general to make a huge comeback. That would make me very happy.

I wouldn't mind seeing space sims making a comeback. I miss the Wing Commander games, Starlancer,Freelancer, Freespace.

[-)rStrangelove 0]

I think the main problem for me personally is the feeling that the 'evolution' of shooters goes backwards rather than forward.

If you compare RoqueSpear to GTA4 for example its easy to get a vision of how a TRUE RoqueSpear 2010 would be like IF the devs would stay true to the scope of the series.

In a true RoqueSpear2010 we would:

- get a HQ message while walking around in a huge training center, then enter a temp briefing room, get a report of an emergency situation

- get gear ingame, then mount our police vehicle and drive to the crime scene through a huge city

- block all entries around the target building, setting up guards / additional police

- recon the building

- get back to field hq, study blueprints of the building, mark target zones and stationary tangos with heat scans from a helicopter

- get in pos, wait for the GO

- storm in , do the job

Instead we get shooters where you kill hundreds of ppl, have unlimited ammo (hundreds of rifles around), can jump 30m without getting a scratch, dodge hundreds of bullets and just get a weird marmelade effect on screen.

Thanks, mainstream.

[sic-disaster 311]

One common thing about almost all tactical shooters from the "golden age" of such games is that today they're awful to play. I've recently tried Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, Hidden & Dangerous and Ghost Recon, and all of them suffer from unfair yet bad AI, awkward controls and no feel for the weapons to speak of.

I'll grant you that Hidden and Dangerous is by now quite hard to play, but Rogue Spear and Ghost Recon? Really?

I assume you are pretty good at ArmA 2 by now yet you complain about control schemes for Rogue Spear? :p

Rogue Spear is by far the smoothest experience in shooters i've had so far, i still love playing it because playing it just feels great. Maybe you have not grasped the concept of moving effectively?

The controls arent any different than other shooters right now, and far more simple and accessible than OFP or ArmA 2 ever were, but you need a certain type of movement to be truely efficient.

I really dont have too many 'bullshit AI' moments because i know how to move, and it's still great fun, even more so than Raven Shield or Ghost Recon.

Ghost Recon in CQB environments is a true hell to play, i'll grant you that, but truth is that GR was focussed on the outside environments more than CQB.

And saying that GR has horrible AI is just a plain lie, because they are still some of the smartest AI's i've seen so far.

When you come across a 3-man patrol and you shoot one guy, you'll see stuff like one soldier kneeling down to provide covering fire in your general direction if they havent really spotted you, and if they did they will bring out controlled fire.

Meanwhile the other soldier will run to cover, preferably hard cover, and if he cannot find it he'll hide in a bush and will even lie down in it's shadow for optimal concealment(!!!), from where he will take over cover fire so the first guy can move.

Their only problem is that they shoot and spot you too fast in CQB, but even there they move pretty realistically, trying to sneak up on you through hallways when they hear shots, sometimes they'll rush a room, sometimes they will crouch and sneak in etc.

Yeah these games are hard. So is ArmA 2. Their difficulty is a big part of the appeal. From what i gather from your posts you seem to want a more casual relaxed experience. That's fine, but no reason to give off on older tactical shooters which have no real gameplay breaking problems. It's just you who does not know how to handle them.

Bad AI is a mute point, because there is no game that has perfect AI. AI has always, and will always do stupid stuff.

[celery 8]

Rogue Spear is by far the smoothest experience in shooters i've had so far, i still love playing it because playing it just feels great. Maybe you have not grasped the concept of moving effectively?

Believe me, I played the shit out of that game when it was new and I liked it. Today I'm too bothered by the quickest AI in the west and the fact that you have to learn every little thing about the mission by mistake before you can prepare for them and complete the mission without sending half of the team to the morgue (or alternatively you go solo with Ding Chavez backed by soulless reservists).

And saying that GR has horrible AI is just a plain lie, because they are still some of the smartest AI's i've seen so far.

In theory they have great algorithms and all, but in practise it all comes down to that they spot you far, far away just by seeing the top of your hat behind a ridge.

Yeah these games are hard. So is ArmA 2. Their difficulty is a big part of the appeal. From what i gather from your posts you seem to want a more casual relaxed experience. That's fine, but no reason to give off on older tactical shooters which have no real gameplay breaking problems. It's just you who does not know how to handle them.

Bad AI is a mute point, because there is no game that has perfect AI. AI has always, and will always do stupid stuff.

Bad AI is a completely valid point because it can prevent a game from showing its full potential. Imagine Rainbow Six games with a little slower and less accurate terrorists, Hidden & Dangerous without Germans who see through walls and fog, or Ghost Recon with enemies that don't always spot you and your team so that you could actually recon the areas and decide where to start the fight. The way they are, they're games with somewhat realistic premises and game mechanics, but the AI narrows down the tactical possibilities.