4 Ways to Fix the Broken FPS Genre

3) Less Checkpoints and 2) Death to the Hide and Heal Mechanic

OK, so it might be bad form to combine two items on a list of only four items, but it had to be done to serve the greater good. Let€™s look at this from an objective standpoint by analyzing the philosophy of challenge for the two dichotomous approaches to the genre. Today:

Your modern shooter is based on a series of intense challenges, each with a save point immediately before or after. The player starts the challenge with full health, beats the challenge after however many attempts it takes, and eventually reaches the next checkpoint, where the cycle starts over. The end result is a game that is broken into thousands of mini-levels, each to be faced with full health and no penalty for failure. The main difficulty here is that the individual challenges are near impossible, and the player cannot save at a time or place other than those designated by the game. Use to be:

You started the level with whatever health or ammo you had. You then had to get through the whole level without dying. Oh sure, you could save whenever you wanted, but that didn€™t really help that much. Instead of being based on individual encounters, the challenge was focused on surviving a long term conflict, in which your health was slowly whittled away. Players had to scrounge for ammo and health, because not doing so could easily leave you with low health, making it impossible to beat a level boss or whatever. I liked the first 2 Halo games. They were fun and creative. The idea of being able to heal yourself between fights gave a new pace and feel to the game. The new pace/mechanic was the perfect vehicle for encouraging multiplayer campaign modes, and reinventing the way we think about FPS death matches. However, that doesn€™t mean every game in the world had to follow suit. The resulting flood of €œhide and heal€ games with 8 million checkpoints per level killed the overall challenge of the FPS genre. No longer does an FPS game present a singular task that you may or may not be able to beat. No no. That would be too fun. Instead, the player of the modern shooter is asked to mindlessly blunder through the same hallway full of flying bullets, dying thousands of times, until they finally succeed on advancing the 15 feet necessary for a checkpoint by sheer force of statistical eventuality. That€™s not a game. That€™s Hell.