State of AAA open-world FPS

[BurnedOut]

Playing AAA FPS Shooters has always been one of the fun things.
However, I will only talk about particular game series and 1 genre:
Semi-open world shooters (Far Cry 2 till present)

---

One of my favourite FPS games is Far Cry 2. It is a very weird
anti-game that plays more like a novel than an actual game. I cannot
play FC2 for more than 2 hours. However, some game designs in the game
I thoroughly laud:
- Completely immersive
- Good AI which does not respect stealth but ironically ends up making
stealth enjoyable because it has nothing that aids stealth but
common sense.
- Nice map. Probably the best map I have ever seen. I am not talking
about the 'game map' but the in-game map that you have to use to
travel around.
- Weapon handling and sounds are very good.
- Good currency system - Search diamonds.

The game has a lot of anti-game design and you can find it online. I
am not going to list it out. When I see the current FC series, it has
some elements in common that break the 'Far Cry' experience -
- Minimap: Come to despise them because they break immersion very
easily.
- Useless quests that involve too much traveling from one place to
another
- Shitty characters and mundane plot.
- Poor executions of many good mechanisms.

Let us excuse the first 3 points for now and examine the mechanisms
that I am talking about:

- Extremely bad buddy system in all installments
+ FC2 has the worst nonutilitarian buddy system with only one
perk - Safe House upgrades. The buddies only make your mission
much more tedious and the fucking buddy keeps going down in
their own mission. They are good at clearing enemies but are
virtually blind to any enemy that are close to them. The
funniest part is that these buddies are always aware of their
own suicidal confrontations that are bound to take place and
rightfuly get smacked right in the arse as soon as they land
in the said confrontation.

+ FC3 till present:
- Buddies are too utilitarian. You don't have the level of
attachment with them like you did in FC2. I always felt
very sad when my buddy went down. It was grisly and a
realistic reminder of how you can be in the same place as
your buddy.
- Good part is that they don't make your missions tedious
and tend to be good at doing their part.
- Sadly, the buddy AI is not yet refined. I feel that they
can still improve on it. What is indeed a shame that
F.E.A.R AI still blasts FC's out of the water and that
game came out 15 years ago... Not only that fucking CSS AI
is damn smart and that game came out in 2004!
- Buddies are more like your pets and they come running and
gunning whenever you need them. This sort of spoils the
immersion again because you know they are thoroughly
repleacable and just dumb AI trying to aid you.
- I wish they could bring some elements of FC2's buddy
system: Impact the story mission to some degree and tweak
it to make it slightly easier but also zanier. And that
does not include traveling to-and-fro several places.

- Missions seem too similar
- That is the price you pay for having an open world gameplay
or so they say. RDR2 opts for open world+linear missions and
I don't think that causes severe ludonarrative dissonance.

- I don't know if there is actually a way to solve this
problem. Studios keep trying to innovate with this aspect.
You have Rockstar's linear mission design or FC's anarchic
mission levels that suffer from similarity.

- Although all games have more or less similar levels, players
don't complain about this regarding L4D2 or COD. In the case
of L4D2, the simple gameplay is made unique by having a
dynamic AI called director which works flawlessly in a
closed-world design. FC3 also has a director but for some
reason, it seems terribly dumb. FC2 has the best CQB
(excluding stealth) among all FC games. The AI, as compared
to the other FC titles, tend to behave in a smart manner:
Hiding, converging on your position, having good aim (too
good of an aim). It still does not dwarf F.E.A.R's AI. Rest
all the FC games have really really bad AI. The stealth is
more broken than fixed. I don't understand why the AI cannot
detect the player even when the player is taking down one of
their buddies 20-30m away from them. Or why they don't react
to you stalking them from behind. If FC2's AI was
hyperreactive to player's presence, the later titles have
hilarious COD-type AI that just tends to run into your face
with no tactics. COD has one of the worst enemy AI's
according to me. Their idea of 'higher difficulty' is
nothing but lowered health and viola! Compare that with
CS's AI system where they have better reaction times, more
tactics and a learning of player's tendencies.

- How does this relate to missions' seeming too similar?
Without an AI that cognitively pushes your limits without
relying on cheap difficulty tactics such as lower health &
lesser reaction timings, missions are always going to seem
similar. Missions were and always will be similar to one
another. Their uniqueness is determined by the amount of
entropy the AI can cause during the gameplay.

- It is sad how games have ridiculous sizes these days simply
because of textures and sounds. Why not just take it slow on
the graphics aspect and focus on improving the AI? Deep
learning and good heuristic algorithms focused on improving
the enemy AI will always go a long way. Why do you think
L4D is lauded so much? The Director system is really good.
Another example of good enemy AI is SWAT 4's enemy AI. they
are certainly not dumb and do have heuristics that aid them
to make decisions same as F.E.A.R AI. Compare that to FC's
AI who in gameplay don't seem to have any understanding of
how the environment can actually affect their interaction
with the player.

- Fix the shitty AI, half the battle of missions seeming too
similar will be solved.

- Bad character design
- Even if mimicking body language convincingly is a very
difficult task even in this era, good story and good
dialogues make a sizeable part of the story.
- Again, FC2 has much better dialogues than the rest of FC
characters because despite the okay-ish dubbing, the
characters actually show more self-awareness of the in-game
events. Their motives are clear and they don't make it
extremely obvious. Moreover, they don't behave like those
side-characters in FC 3~now sound like gossip queen. People
in real life, intellectual or not do have views on issues
that are bigger than themselves.
- COD's dialogues are well-designed or so I feel about them.
They are corny at times but at least the characters'
dialogues don't break immersion during the mission. They
actually sound like adults and say useful things. Even if
COD has a linear gameplay, the dialoguing has been done
well. FC series and DL series which I consider as one of the
pioneers of FPS games really lack this. Hell, even L4D's
dialogues are fun to hear and usually not too much out of
context.

- Skill trees
- Rather than making the game easier, the purpose of the
skill-trees should be more focused on scaling up the
player's capabilities in accordance with the incrementally
increasing mechanisms of the AI that make them more
difficult to take out. FC3~, DL1,2 make the player lazier
than exciting new styles of gameplays.
- Imagine if in FC, the enemies get more and more aggressive,
adopt smarter tactics and improve communication with each
other. That would be much better than making the player some
kind of a superhero at the end of the game.

---

More? Let us wait for a discussion to erupt first

 

[Cognisant]

Many AAA games suffer for the fact that they try to include everything, like checking off items on a list, but if something is included and not implemented well it drags down the game as a whole. For example the stealth mechanic in the Elder Scrolls games, if the damage from bows is comparable to other weapons and you can do 3x that in a single shot, potentially taking out enemies instantly, why do anything else?

If leveling up doesn't change how the player interacts with the game world why bother? This was a serious problem in Borderlands and Cyberpunk, my damage numbers get bigger and the enemy's health bar gets bigger so it equals out and doesn't matter. Instead of giving me a feeling of progression these games were constantly making the guns I had meta-irrelevant which for an RPG where you're encouraged to specialize in a particular weapon type is just plain stupid. Sometimes gunfights would be piss easy because I'd just picked up a new weapon, other times I'm landing six headshots in a row with a sniper rifle and getting bored in the middle of a gunfight because these bullet sponges just won't die.

 

[BurnedOut]

If leveling up doesn't change how the player interacts with the game world why bother?

If all the AI does is get smarter psychologically (more communication, more alertness, etc), it becomes a battle of wits rather than lazily having bullet-sponge for enemies. If the player utilizes his new skills to rival the AI's greater intelligence, it will be a thousand times more exciting. Imagine if you are sent to clear an outpost and you see no enemy from above or from a distance (used to happen with me in FC2) because they have learned that you will always attack them from a distance, you will be forced to resort to smarter tactics.

If the enemy knows you headshot them frequently, they can hide behind covers more often and use grenades and try to flank you often.

If the enemy knows you keep calling reinforcements, they can send several snipers camoflauged among the trees and take out your buddies.

Stuff like this makes your new skills count. Sadly most playthroughs of FC3~ involve using a compound bow than an AR. Is that not a big joke? Damn, even counter strike AI does a fine job keeping its own. I can bet CSS' AI at expert is nearly unbeatable. They employ ridiculous levels of tactics and actually learn from your behaviour.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

Ik it's not FPS, but Rockstar made a monster with GTA 5, people still play that shit to this day and the community is undying there are some people that have been able to make a living from the game.

That being said I agree that games are trying to be to complex, spread their resources too thin over a large project. It happens in software in general.

The open world shooter formula has been perfected it's just that not many studios have the resources to build something that remains relevant to audiences.

Fallout 3 had an excellent lore to build off, and it's combat system made it unique.

The Elder Scrolls has had several predecessors like Oblivion and whatever the fuck.

These games are so good and polished compared to others.

We could technically say a game as complex as say, Jak 2, where the map is simply a tool for gameplay and story progression and little else would be a good choice for game studios to copy, but with new IPs it's a risky move and the question on everyone's mind is "how do we keep people playing".

I haven't been a gamer for years now, but the scene hasn't changed much. People that play FPS usually aren't hung up on open world. They rarely buy a game for the open world component. Bethesda is a niche case that they've worked decades to make a decent product.