Indie devs! It’s time to bring back Narrative Shooters!
I like a good boomer shooter as much as the next guy, but it’s time to face some cold hard facts. The subgenre is now oversaturated, and it’s been oversaturated for some time. So I want to make an appeal to indie game developers directly. Ditch the boomer shooters, guys, and usher in a new retro FPS revival. Shooters are dead: long live the shooters!
Let me just back up my accusation for a second. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of boomer shooters that you can currently play. There’s Dusk, Ion Fury, Amid Evil, Project Warlock, Project Warlock 2, Ultrakill, Nightmare Reaper, Wrath: Aeon of Ruin, Prodeus, Hedon, Hrot, Dread Templar, VisceraFest, Forgive Me Father, Golden Light, Postal: Brain Damaged, Turbo Overkill, Selaco, Trepang2, Ghostware: Arena of the Dead, Extraneum, Beyond Sunset, Graven, Strafe, and Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun.
Still not convinced? Here’s some more boomer shooters for you. There’s Incision, Impaler, Scathe, Hyperviolent, White Hell, Perilous Warp, Shrine, Shrine II, Devil Daggers, Metal: Hellsinger, Doombringer, Post Void, Hellbound, Bloom, Chop Goblins, Sprawl, Voidborn, Maximum Action, Deadlink, Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengeance of the Slayer, Supplice, Meatgrinder, and Cultic. And I haven’t even listed the boomer shooters coming through the pipeline, or the remakes of the classics. Am I making a point yet?!
But you know what? While I’m here, I might as well kill two birds with one stone. Because there’s another oversaturated subgenre I want to take aim at. Can you guess what it is? I’ll give you a clue. It’s in the horror sphere. No, I’m not talking about asymmetric multiplayer horror games, though frankly that arena is looking pretty crowded, too. I’ll give you another hint. They’re first-person games. That’s right. I’m talking about combat-less horror walking sims.
It’s been over a decade since Amnesia: The Dark Descent first popularised the idea of having a horror game where you couldn’t defend yourself. It was a neat concept at the time. But I can’t be the only one who has long since grown tired of walking around a spooky locale, slowly examining items, and – if I’m very lucky – having a short chase sequence where I have to run away from a monster that’ll instakill my ass if it so much as brushes against me. There are so many of these damn things that I’m not even going to attempt to list them. I’m not that much of a sadist. And it really hasn’t helped that for every hidden gem that follows this formula, there are literally dozens of poor-quality asset flips infesting Steam like corpse flies.
Two genres, two completely different ways of tackling combat. One has you mowing through hundreds of foes, one has a single foe mowing through you. One has you running at the land speed record, one has you crouching under tables half the time. One gives you guns galore, the other gives you none at all. Is there not some sort of middle ground here? Enter the Narrative Shooter.
Not to state the bleeding obvious, but nostalgia has become a dominant force in current pop culture. And the gap between the present and the nostalgic period being hankered for has been progressively narrowing, especially in videogames. Resident Evil 2 was 20 years old when it got a remake. Resident Evil 4 was 18 before it got the same treatment. Dead Space was a mere 15. Between this phenomenon, the overstuffed boomer shooter market, and the natural aging of the gaming Millennial demographic, it’s not exactly a leap to say that nostalgia for mid-to-late ’90s games has to move on at some point. My hope – my plea – is that in the FPS space, developers will rediscover what came after Doom and Quake: that sweet, sweet middle ground that blended gunplay with immersive storytelling.
Half Life, of course, was the patron saint of this. It redefined the idea of what shooters could be. They went from being labelled ‘Doom clones’ to constituting a genre of their own. Sure, technology played a role; having truly 3D environments remains probably one of – if not the – most important technical leaps in gaming over the last 30 years. But it was Half Life that really widened the horizons of what you could do in an FPS. You could have distinct characters, narrative arcs, and environmental storytelling. Most importantly, you had gameplay that was no longer just run n’ gun. Now, it was run, think, shoot, live.
This is what I mean when I talk of Narrative Shooters. I was a bit too young to be a part of the 90s FPS era. My formative gaming years were the early-to-mid Noughts. For me, a shooter was a singleplayer affair with a cutscene-driven story, an expanding roster of enemies and guns, a procession of themed levels, and a good boss fight at the end. You weren’t just speedrunning through levels, you were experiencing them, like your own personal action movie. And I feel gamers collectively have forgotten just how good this formula could be. Think of the greats from that time. Bioshock, F.E.A.R., Doom 3 (ironically), Half Life 2, Resistance, Killzone, freakin’ Halo, man: all these followed and innovated on the fundamental structure laid down by the original Half Life. And behind these titans, a whole raft of other solid titles; games like Darkwatch, Timesplitters: Future Perfect, Condemned: Criminal Origins and Prey.
It’s easy to look back at the Noughties and see only the undesirable trends the period gave rise to. The endless slew of grey-brown military shooters post-Call of Duty 4. The Interminable rail shooter sections. The samey cover shooters. Quick time events. But in this age of battle royales, survival sims and free-to-plays, it’s hard not to feel like the insights and highs of the era of Narrative Shooters have been too hastily left behind. There’s an art to the 12-hour campaign. There’s an art to FPS games that immerse.
I keep on seeing false dawns that promise to herald a revival. Titanfall 2 reminded the AAA sphere how to do a proper campaign, but it was a lesson everyone seemed entirely to ignore. I’d hoped Industria – a game you should all check out – would start a shift towards Narrative Shooters in the indie sphere. I still have a cautious optimism that, now that Frictional Games itself has embraced combat mechanics with Amnesia: The Bunker, weapon-less First-Person games will finally be relegated to the realms of shovelware.
The gaming industry has a recurring tendency to get stuck chasing trends. If you want to look for innovation, you’re always best looking at the indie scene. So please, indie developers, move on and go back to the past. Start giving me some of those old time Narrative Shooter campaigns. Better yet, give me some horror ones. This is Dread XP I’m writing for, after all. Make some action horror shooters, or some survival horror ones. Make some Immersive Sims in the mold of Bioshock, or some noughties power fantasies that follow the likes of Halo and Half Life 2. Just please, please make them.
Categorized:Editorials
