Crysis by Crytek the Poster Boy for DirectX 10.

Vista has been released for nearly five months now and we are about to see an onslaught of DirectX 10 games being released, including Halo 2. Well, it is not quite an onslaught but there will be a couple coming out soon. It must be said that Halo 2 is not a game which has been developed from the ground up for DirectX 10 as the game is a port of the original Xbox release. So, the levels and game design are indicative of the Xbox's limitations and not of current hardware standards. The game which will be the show pony for DirectX 10 will be Crysis. A game developed entirely around the DirectX 10 software and current hardware standards. Crytek's game will be one of the most anticipated upcoming releases and should follow on nicely from their first release, Far Cry. How is it that a little game developer from Europe is going to show the big boys of the gaming world exactly how it is done? Maybe the limitations of First Person Shooters hasn't been due to developers catering for hardware but more to the market they are trying to sell to.

Of course, First Person Shooters have been around for some time now. Wolfenstein 3D is the game which originally set the standard for the current crop of this genre. It was released on the 5th of May in 1992, fifteen years ago. Some people would say that the genre has come a long way but the apple really hasn't fallen far from the tree as the most popular shooters haven't pushed the genre very much beyond the parameters which were established in this initial game.

So, why haven't first person shooters come a long way since Wolfenstein 3D? They have made advancements graphically. They have also made advancements conceptually (although some people seem to forget that Wolfenstein 3D was the first WWII shooter), so why is it that we haven't come very far from the original concept? Wolfenstein 3D was, after all, just a corridor shooter. It was your objective to advance in levels by achieving certain tasks or defeating specific enemies. The most popular shooters of the last fifteen years have pretty much followed the same basic themes. Consider some of the largest shooters such as: Doom (and that entire franchise), Quake, Half-Life, Medal of Honour, Brothers In Arms, Duke Nukem. None of these titles have really tried to push the genre in a new direction. Unfortunately, those games which have attempted to provide a large scale open world in which to adventure, ultimately, haven't been very successful. Games such as Operation Flashpoint, Boiling Point and ArmA: Armed Assault, have attempted to break away from the corridor conventions established with the FPS genre, however, they have struggled to find mainstream success. We also have several other titles to add to those games which have managed to mix open world with level based gameplay and these are Far Cry (by Crytek) and the recently released S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. Both of these games have managed to mix an open world type of environment but not on the scale of Flashpoint and Boiling Point.


Left: Doom 3 Imp. Centre: Operation Flashpoint. Right: Brothers In Arms: Earned In Blood
How is it that I can talk about Wolfenstein 3D and a game like Half-Life 2 or Doom 3 in the same sentence? Because they use the same principle of a small gameplay corridor in order to define and control the movement of the player. In fact, games of this vein use the same methods in order to control the pace of the gameplay and also to use this structure as a means to "tell the story". Just because a game gives the player the ability to construct a rudimentary bridge out of boxes floating in a tank of water doesn't give you freedom of choice. Every single player who plays the game has to construct a rudimentary bridge to overcome the obstacle. You don't have the choice to go around it, or drain it, or find another way in which to cross it, let alone go through a completely different path. So, what you have is exactly the same method used in most popular FPS games since the creation of the genre. In this way every gamers experience during the game is going to be pretty much the same. Not really offering the possibility for a unique gameplay experience. Just because you used a shotgun to kill the five Combine leading up to a particular Strider and your friend used a submachine gun doesn't make for a unique experience. This is the problem with FPS as a genre. Shooters have become boring and taken on the much-of-a-muchness existence of every successful shooter being comprised of the same basic principles in gameplay and structure. This is a genre which needs a real shake up.

Over the past fifteen years there have been a number of limitations on gaming as a medium. One of the primary limitations has been hardware. Wolfenstein 3D was a game developed before graphics cards were a standard part of the gaming landscape. Shooters have been one of the genres which have managed to further develop the graphical advancement of games. As a result of pushing graphical boundaries to their limits the size of ingame worlds have to become reduced. It is in this way that the development of games has been a matter of give and take. You give a little bit to the size of a level and you take a little bit from the quality of the graphics. This is not to say that shooters have necessarily required corridors in order to define them as a genre, however, this has been the easiest way to provide a game environment. The ability to produce large scale ingame worlds has been fleshed out best in other genres. Those players who preferred role playing games were more prepared to immerse themselves in a large scale open world. This is where we might find the limitations between the two genres is not with the hardware but the players themselves. It seems that players of Role Playing games are more suited to being self-motivated in their pursuit to develop their characters whereas those who play shooters are not. Maybe those gamers who prefer shooters have shorter attention spans - preferring a five or ten minute deathmatch game to four hours of farming objects in World of Warcraft.