Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
Who dosen't Love a WW2 based shooter, but they're missing the other war.
The other day after watching the movie 'Lost Battalion' (really good by the way) in my Wars class at school and then later that night, a friend of mine made a joke about there are too many WWII shooters. We laughed and keep talking, then it came to me: why the hell are there no World War 1 Shooters? I can understand that WW1 was only 20 years older and more people remember WW2, but I think that there is a whole untapped genre of FPS. You could argue that there isn't enough material to work with, but there are still a lot of neat things you can do. For example:
Mission 1: Boot Camp (i.e. the tutorial).
Mission 2: a simple attempt to take the German line.
Mission 3: Go out into No Man's land and fix your barbwire (Stealth)
Mission 4: go over the top to only have to retreat.
Mission 5: be a machine gunner while the Germans attack.
Mission 6: Go do a scouting mission at night.
Mission 7: Be an artillery man.
Mission 8: Hold off a German assault in the trench (melee and hand to hand)
e.t.c.
It would be pretty realistic, but they would have to raise the survival rate up a bunch. There is so much that could be done and yet the VG industry has ignored it.
So, does anyone have any thoughts about why there isn't a WW1 shooter?
Mission 1: Boot Camp (i.e. the tutorial).
Mission 2: a simple attempt to take the German line.
Mission 3: Go out into No Man's land and fix your barbwire (Stealth)
Mission 4: go over the top to only have to retreat.
Mission 5: be a machine gunner while the Germans attack.
Mission 6: Go do a scouting mission at night.
Mission 7: Be an artillery man.
Mission 8: Hold off a German assault in the trench (melee and hand to hand)
e.t.c.
It would be pretty realistic, but they would have to raise the survival rate up a bunch. There is so much that could be done and yet the VG industry has ignored it.
So, does anyone have any thoughts about why there isn't a WW1 shooter?
Comments
That's not to say it wouldn't be an amazing idea to actually make this kind of game. Especially if you add in some interactivity into the game, that other shooters leave out. Like there being a chance that your gun will just fall apart in your hands, or a round explodes in the barrel, since the bullets back then were unreliable. Maybe even play as the Germans in the war. A game based on the info given from the book "All Quiet on the Western Front" wouldn't be too bad. I think it would be a good idea for something like a Source Mod to try and create and see how it goes.
Exit trench. Get killed by machine gun. Hooray.
Or...
Get machine gun. Shoot guy who exits trench. Repeat.
And why wouldn't those missions you've named as example be possible in a WWII FPS?
All fpses supposedly based on a real war are not really about historical accuracy. Even the obligatory reconstructions of real battles, e.g: Normandy, are nothing like the real thing was. All those fpses are the same. They are just normal, bland, fpses that choose to have a different theme. You could easily turn a WWII into a WWI fps, change the look of the guns, change some of the flavor text and voice acting, and boom. You've got a WWI fps. The games aren't historically accurate anyway, and they wouldn't be fun at all if they were. Westwood Studios realized this when they made Command and Conquer: Red Alert. You play games to escape from reality, because reality is not fun, especially not the reality of war.
If you really want a new genre of fps you need to move in a new direction like Portal. However, if you like the tired old war fpses, and you just want to spice up the theme a bit, I recommend adding more fiction to the historical fiction. Harry Turtledove style if you know what I mean.
What would work is a fighter plane game set in WWI. If you have ever played the "board" game Wings of War you will understand. The original game was based on WWI planes and each plane flies different, some more so than others. They made a WWII version of the game and there is a lot less diversity in the way the planes fly.
You want to take the FPS in a whole new direction? How about the Ender's Game FPS? Remember when they would do their battle training inside a zero-G sphere?
Think how different it would be if you were playing an FPS with there is no gravity, no up or down. Even the 3D FPS games do not take into account the full nature of 3D. As far as we have come since Doom it is still is a gravity based game where everyone is standing on the same plane. What if you had a TF2 type game where players could come at you from above as well as below? Now that is the next stage of FPS evolution.
(I think Descent worked on this principle.)
See the boy with the pistols? Yeah, that's Joe.
I think people are right about WW II having more to do as far as gaming. Also, It is much less ambiguous morality-wise and it has the best villainous enemy of all. Those Viet Nam shooters weren't very good, and I don't expect a Korean War shooter would be very good either. They've even had what is basically an Iraq shooter called First to Fight. It was tres crappy. Face it. WW II was just the coolest war EVAH.
Load musket... shoot... take 60 seconds to reload... repeat.
I'm kind if surprised that there hasn't been a really good submarine simulator for some time now. Maybe there just isn't enough action in a "stealth" environment. I remember playing "Wolf Pack." That was a pretty cool game.
Actually, it's a HL1 (and HL2, too) mod, and it's not quite as bad as joe put it but it does take a significant amount of time to reload. And those muskets are very VERY inaccurate.
It was a lot of fun back when I played it with a bunch of friends, partly because there were some ridiculous kills (headshot across half the map when you were aiming at another player o_0) and partly because it was a lot less dangerous to get up close and try to kill someone with your knife than it is in other FPS's.
Oh, and it has some battlefield-esque gameplay, too (i.e. you have to "conquer" flags and there are multiple classes).
Watching Saving Private Ryan above 110 Decibels is a good simulation of the experience (I'd wager).
Well not funny but the super action kind of thing.