Unusual features in First person shooters

Following on from the disussion of old first person shooters, I thought an interesting topic would be to list interesting features introduced by different first person shooters. Of course I might be wrongly attributing a given game as being the first FPS to have that feature, so please feel free to correct any mistakes, and to add any features and the games that introduced them.


I'm not listing Doom as I don't know what it introduced, and what it copied from Wolfenstein 3D, as I'm not too familar with Wolfenstein 3D (I played Wolf 3D after I'd played Doom, and do Wolf 3D seemed too simplistic for me, though I still love Doom). I imagine though, that Doom introduced variable height rooms, maybe lifts (elevators), poisoned ground that harms you when you walk on it, and maybe the ability for enemies to fight each other (or did that exist in Wolf 3D?).



Duke Nukem 3D (PC, XBox 360, N64, Playstation, Sega Saturn, and probably more)

- Jet Pack,

- Items you can pick up and use when you choose, rather than the instant use type,

- Monitors you can use to view different parts of the levels,

- If you walk/swim though water then when you walk on dry ground you leave watery footprints, and when you walk through a bloodied corpse you leave bloody footprints,

- Your weapons include trip mines, remote mines, a weapon that freezes an enemy in place, and a weapon that shrinks enemies (and yourself, if you shoot yourself via a mirror, though the N64 version doesn't allow this since it doesn't have mirrors),

- Mirrors, so you can see yourself,

- Real-time level deformation, such as earthquakes, and buildings being demolished.



Goldeneye (N64)

- Sniper rifle,

- Enemies who can actually use a ladder (doesn't sound like much, but it does seem ridiculous when an NPC (None Player Character) in a FPS can't do something as simple as use a ladder),

- Enemies who can choose to attack you or go for reinforcements, or to activate the alarm, and actually search for you semi-intelligently,

- Enemies who, when they don't know you are there, can walk along preset paths, as sentries do in real life (surely GE isn't the first game to do this, but I can't think of an earlier game that does this),

- Bullet Holes in walls and scenery,

- Crouching to steady your aim when sniping (strangely enough, I'm not 100% certain that GE does this - I LOVE GE, and still play it regularly, and would have said that there's nothing I don't know about it (I've played it so often), but since I never crouch to snipe I'm not sure if GE does this, though I know Perfect Dark does),

- Having to reload your weapon,

- Being able to knock out rather than kill enemies,

- Enemies randomly surrender,

- Proper (though simple) objectives rather than go from A to B or find a keycard or throw a switch, (GE probably wasn't the first to do this, but I can't think of any earlier FPS),

- Neutral and friendly NPCs (the neutral ones will often turn hostile if you attack them), and a friendly NPC who can fight (fairly) well,

- You control a vehicle in the game (I doubt GE is the first, but I can't think of any earlier FPS that does this),




Perfect Dark (N64, XBox 360)

- Counter-op mode, where two players play the single player campaign; one player plays the game as normal, and tries to complete the game, and the second player plays as an in-game enemy, and tries to stop player one,- The ability to disarm enemies (snatch the gun from their grasp),

- Being able to cause enemies to have temporarily blurred vision (really great as it annoys your opponents in multiplayer, but some people really hate it so it there should have been a menu option to turn it off),

- Being able to save multiplayer setup,

- Being able to shoot weapons out of enemies hands, and if the enemy is holding a grenade (ready to throw it) then if you shoot it then the grenade explodes!

- The ability to play any multiplayer mode with teams or as every man for himself (you'd think this would be standards in al first person shooter multiplayer modes (except for the necessary exceptions like Team Fortress, of course), but no, sadly),



Deus Ex (PC, PS2)

- You don't have to kill most of the enemies, or even most bosses, as you can knock out or sneak past them. If only all boss battles let you sneak past them... Deus Ex is in the Guiness Book of Records as having the lowest number of enemies in a first person shooter that you MUST kill to complete the game (it's three).

- You can destroy some locked doors by using a weapon you're carrying (a shotgun with the right ammunition, or a personal rocket launcher)! No more frustration at not being able to blow open a cheaply made wooden door, even though you're carrying enough weaponry to level a tank

- You start of rubbish with all weapons, and have to increase your skills with each weapon catagory to use those specific weapons better,

- Was Deus Ex the first FPS to have skillpoints and RPG elements?



Timeshift (PC, XBox 360, PS3)

- The ability to pause, slow down, and even reverse time, which incidentally looks extra nice on the levels with weather effects - Timeshift has really great rain, and it looks great when paused or reversed!

- Not a feature, exactly, but you know how in most FPSs, even though you're on the side of good, you often end up killing *lots* of innocent people such as soldiers or people who are trying to kill you but because they think you are evil? I.e. the hundreds of enemies you slaughter are mostly ignorant of their bosses evil plans, so they don't deserve to die, even though you have to kill them? Well Timsehift sort of bypasses that, as in this game, you are trying to restore the world to it's rightful timeline, as it takes place in a world, in about 1939, where an evil scientist has gone back in time and changed history so that he is a dictator. This means that it doesn't really matter how many people you kill (or what else you do or don't do) as if you do succeed in your task, then the timeline will revert to the correct one, and everything you did in the other timeline will never have taken place!



Singularity (PC, XBox 360, PS3)

- Lets you age and de-age some items/enemies using a time-weapon, with interesting results.

- You can fire a 'weapon' that results in a sphere of frozen time (though you can still move through it, and fire your guns) and any enemies entering that sphere become frozen for as long as the sphere lasts, allowing you to shoot them (then they die instantly as soon as the sphere disappears) or just leave whilst they are frozen. Since the effect is a sphere, though, if does mean that if you say shoot it at a human, then the middle of the sphere will be at most six or so feet above the ground, so part of the sphere will be in solid groundl, which doesn't affect the game, but means that part of the sphere is, in that instance, useless.



Turok 3 (N64)

- Using one of the weapons, you can 'take over' an enemy, and control them for a short while. I'm almost sure you can do this in an earlier FPS, but I can't remember which one.


Timesplitters 1, 2, and 3 (All on the original XBox, and Gamecube, except for Timesplitters 1, which is PS2 only)

Each of the three Timesplitters has a great, and easy to use mapmaker, so you can make your own single player and multiplayer maps. Other FPSs do this too, such as Far Cry, and Pariah, but I think Timesplitters was the first FPS to have this, plus the Timesplitters are the only console FPSs that I know of that allow you to play against bots on the maps you make.

And yes, I Know that map making utilities long predate the Timesplitters games (Doom is the first I know of, but they exist for Half-Life, the Unreal Tournament games, etc) but I've not counted them as they are separate programs from the games, and are a lot more difficult to use than the Timesplitters map makers (though this is a consequence of the UT/Half-Life/Quake/etc map makers being able to make *much* more detailed and individual maps than the comparatively massively primitive Timesplitters map makers). I've know people to spend literally less than a couple of minutes to make a map in Timesplitters 2 or 3, and then play on it with their mates, whereas I've never seen this done on any non-Timesplitters map maker, as those map makers are seen as a different entity from the game(s) they cover, by most players.



Timesplitters: Future Perfect (Timesplitters 3)

- The game's story involves time travel, and several times during the game you are assisted by your future self when fighting enemies, so you in effect play the same battles twice, once as the present self, then again later on, when you are the 'future' version of yourself.




Edit: Thought of another one;


Operation Flashpoint

- Realistic war model, so that the war carries on all around you, regardless of what you do or don't do, unlike in almost every other single player FPS, where the gameworld is only alive when you are there, and even then (in most games) the game world is only active in the level or area where you are,

- Realistic war physics (i.e. if there's an explosion in the distance, then you see it before you hear it, due to light travelling much faster than sound)



Note: I don't like realistic FPSs, so for all I know, there might have been similar games that beat Operation Flashpoint to release, but OP is the first one that I can name.


Any comments, or other games/features you want to add to the lists?

 

If I'm not mistaken Blood had the bloody footprints too.

Also I spent hundreds of rounds so I could stare at bullet holes in Goldeneye.

 

This isn't a first. The earliest I can find for reloading weapons is Fortress of Dr. Radiaki.

My own contributions:

Quake 2
- Different texture on enemies used to show damage you've inflicted.

Red Faction
- Geo Mod engine allows for destructible environment.

Deus Ex
- In-game fully rendered cut-scenes. For example, if you are carrying a plant and initiate the cutscene, Jensen will drop the plant and it will be visible during the cutscene.

Soldier of Fortune
- GHOUL engine allows for full body dismemberment of enemies.
- Similar to Deus Ex, in-game cut scene can be effected visually because the NPCs are not invincible. It is possible to kill an NPC prior to initiating a cutscene, but that NPC's dialog will still occur even though the character model is dead or missing. For example, you can toss a grenade into a room that has a cutscene, enter it and there will be no one there but the dialog will still be present. It is also possible (yet difficult) to kill Saddam Hussein prior to his cutscene near the end of the game.

Terminator Future Shock
- driveable vehicles

 

I forgot about Blood, it's a great game. I didn't like the sequel, but Blood 1 is very good, and lots of people say it's their favourite Build Engine game, though I'd say Duke Nukem 3D.

Perfect Dark did it better, though, as it allowed for a wider variety of bullet damage, much more (number-wise), and also scorch marks from explosions and a lot more blood than Goldeneye. After a while, a multiplayer level in PD can have areas heavily pockmarked with bullet holes, explosion marks, and blood, and it really adds to the atmosphere.

Oh yes, I'd forgotten about that. It was great shooting at the wall and blowing huge chunks of rocks away, and then you'd try the wall next to it, and nothing would happen, grrrr. And you couldn't blow doors open. Or most structures. It was really annoying, not being able to destroy everything. I know why there was such a limit, of course, but it's a pity they couldn't had hidden the problem better somehow.

To be fair to RF, though, I can't remember any other FPS doing it better, even now. Are there any?

Goldeneye did that, earlier than Deus Ex, well, you couldn't carry things into a cut-scene as such, but you could throw a proximity mine in, and then when cutscene started, *carnage*! I didn't know that DE did that (allowed you to sort of mess the cut scenes), I'll have to try it with the LAMs and see how much trouble I can cause!

BTW, it was JC Denton in DE, Adam Jensen was in DE: Human Revolution, of course.

I never played that. Would it still be worth playing nowadays?

 

My two cents would be the ability to telefrag/be telefragged in DOOM.

 

Serious Sam was the first that I recall messing with the direction of gravity. At one point, it had you (and hordes of enemies) moving all around the inside surface of a cylinder.

 

Halo was the first to implement really fun vehicle physics.

 

Sure if you ignore Tribes

 

Postal 2
You could pee on people (or anything else you'd like if that's your thing ) whenever you'd like, on Postal 2. On Duke Nukem this was limited to bathroom interactions.
You could kick some dead enemy's head (limbs?) and actually cause damage to other enemies. Setting someone on fire would also spread to anyone else in touch with it. And yes, you could piss on him or any fire to put it off.

Stick a gun up a cat's ass and use it as a silencer.

Etc...

Awww, Postal.

 

Prey - The use of real time portals was a game changing feature, and one that was well designed within the game. I still remember teleporting into the display of an asteroid and seeing the giant enemy looking at me though the display. So sucessful an idea that Valve later copied it and centered an entire game around it (the much loved but IMO boring Portal)

Thief - Groundbreaking idea in its time to mix the old fantasy hack and slash genre and turn it into a stealth game. Everything about the game was groundbreaking from its depth of story and gameplay to the characters/items, everything.

System Shock - one of the best tech horror games around, this game was ground breaking in alot of ways. Real physics, real system interaction and one of the first uses of an internet type network (cyberspace). Made by the same company responsible for thief.

Sin - Sin is a great FPS in its own right, but is notable for being the first one AFAIK to put the player into the unusual situation of being 6 inches high (the map Behind Zee Bookcase), in addition to being able to use computers, blow limbs/heads off, and fight in an underwater environment. There were also branching story paths.

 

Portal- an FPS where you don't shoot any sort of damaging power (bullets, plasma, rockets, etc).

Also wasn't Duke 3d the first game where you could stomp on enemies (with the shrink ray)?

 

I think super noahs ark did that first (food shots that make the animals go to sleep)

Yeah, Duke 3D was the first game to have a shrink ray, it sucked that when you were shrunk you were basically helpless. no jumping, shooting or ducking. Mind you it only lasted a few seconds.

The sequel Duke Forever took the Sin concept of permanent miniature size in the Duke Burger level (my favourite part of that game) a bit farther, being able to shrink and restore size at will, as well as having full articulation.

 

Portal isn't even an fps, it's a first person puzzle game. Some idiot on Youtube made the same mistake and also called Mirror's Edge a fps (it has some guns but they're far from the focus). One that no one here mentioned would be Quake Team Fortress because it introduced TF2's structure. Class based fps with each unit having its own special grenade. The medics could infect enemies with a disease, and a spy that could disguise as members of the opposite team.

 

It's a first person game where you shoot a portal gun. Yes it has heavy puzzle elements, but the core gameplay involves shooting things in a first person perspective.

 

Narbacular Drop.

 

If Metroid Prime counts as a FPS, then it was probably the first to be so heavily exploration based. I cannot think of a game the predates it that had such a large, open world to explore.

 

The use of portals with Prey goes back to 1997, when the original Prey was developed. the original game was cancelled due to schisms between management (3d realms) and the developers and was placed on the back burner until 2002-2003, when a new Prey was being developed using new tech (Doom 3 engine) by Human Head studios/3D realms.

No doubt the opportunistic Gabe Newell took advantage of these young developers (as he has repeatedly) to get in on the act. Prey's portal tech was a big deal.

If Newell got off his arse and produced Episode 3 of HL2 rather than emulate Vivendi Universal (a company he supposedly hates) with the Steam network, Id have more sympathy for him.

 

The first game with altered gravity (I am aware of) is Quake.

Sin came out in 1998.
Usable computers: Eradicator (1996)

Half Life had underwater levels, but was released about 2 weeks after Sin. So too close to call.
Aquanox could be considered an FPS (similar to Descent) and was underwater and released in 1996.

Regarding Terminator: Future Shock... It was difficult to play when it was released (read:buggy) ... I haven't tried it since.

 

If I'm not mistaken, Alien vs. Predator for the Atari Jaguar was one of the first FPS games to be psuedo-survival horror. Also having the 3 different single player campaigns.

 

Jurassic Park (1994) Super Nintendo. You can use computers.

And i really doubt it was the first.

Good thread idea, btw.