Modern FPS PC gripes

As someone that has been PC gaming for over a decade now I've seen alot FPS changes that have seem to gone backwards common features back in the day have disappeared that should of never went away. Do you feel the same way? here's a list of features that are missing that I miss and stuff that should be adjustable.

• Server Browers in MP especially after playing the Doom beta it really needs one bad this Lobby crap shouldn't be on PC I don't want to wait when I could just look at a server list that has people and I can join within seconds.
• F5 to quicksave and F9 to quickload boy how do I miss this simple but effective feature I miss the days where I could get in a great battle then hit F9 to approach it in another way also it's just nice to quicksave if you have to go somewhere instead of waiting for a annoying checkpoint.
• Gun model FOV modern FPS guns are way to big on a monitor and clearly are made for TV's would it kill devs to gives us a FOV slider for this not only does the gun take up half of the screen it also can be disorienting and it just looks odd and out of place.
• A good anticheat system alot of these games don't even have anticheat for MP anymore I know it wasn't perfect in the past but it was better than nothing.

These are just the major ones that come to mind I know I'm forgetting some got any to add?

Movement speed. Most of your post-Halo FPS are just too damn slow. I'm not saying like Quake speed or anything, but a little faster would be nice.

My big thing is level design. I've been playing a shitload of Doom WADs, and it's really been reminding me how much I miss sprawling, open level design that encourages exploration. I don't miss keyhunts or spending an hour trying to find the one tiny corridor I missed to finish the level, but I prefer it to ultra-guided cinematic experiences that might as well be a lightgun game all the time. I mean, I like those as well, but not in nearly every shooter that comes out.

Even games that tout old-school level design as a bullet point miss the mark. Adding the occasional forked path is not the same thing.

Yeah, I agree. As for the last paragraph, I feel like lots of games that are touting old-school action just go for a linear progression through closed combat arenas (Serious Sam and Painkiller were mostly that, and of course Devil Daggers is based 100% around that idea), something I believe only was used in a single official Doom II level. I really miss being able to explore places in FPS games, as abstract as many of the levels were in those old games, they still had a sense of place to them, and you could navigate through them like they were actual locations instead of something that only existed to push you forward to the next encounter.

As for keyhunts, I vastly prefer them over "go to this location and hold E" that plagues so many games these days.

I also agree with most other points posted in this thread so far.

I guess I would add my disappointment with the prevalence of unlock and loadout mechanics in modern games too. Why can't all players start on equal terms in a match?

DOOM might have a server browser for your custom stuff (a leaked alpha had support for it). Then you have both, which is ideal. Most of the time server browser games boil down to in my opinion shitty server settings (playernumbers too high, crappy admins, shitty admin mods, horrible custom sounds and gameplay settings) with only a handful of servers that run legit cool custom stuff, so having a quick play option with vanilla settings is kinda neat.

Gun model FoV is kinda dumb yea, especially since engines usually have seperate values for camera and gun FoV. So please, let us change that.

Quick save and load is neat (although one might have to resist save scumming), but if the checkpoints are alright, I don't really miss it.

Anti-cheat kinda depends on the game. Even the console devil himself (read: Call of Duty) has a good anti-cheat system at times on PC (the Treyarch ones).

I understand plenty of people miss it, but quicksaving borders on cheating for me. The New Order felt nice and challenging because when I screwed up, I'd have to think my approach from the last checkpoint. I don't want every FPS to become a tool-assisted speed run.

I don't want super linear map design but key-hunting can also go fuck itself. Doom is a classic but those larger levels can piss off. Again, I think The New Order gave a good balance. The stealth option was nice too.

Pretty much this, I think the change is the result of the rise of console shooters. Not to deride console shooters but you just don't have the same reflexes with sticks.

It's kind of a chicken or the egg thing, but as FPS strived to become more realistic they got slower as a necessity. Take for example the first Call of Duty - that was a slower paced FPS, on par with current military FPS, and it was PC exclusive. Are console FPS slower because COD became so popular and they wanted to emulate that or are they slower out of necessity because they're played on a gamepad?

I think it's definitely a "realism" over limits of controllers thing. I've always found the ports of old-school shooters to be perfectly playable on controllers (given a decent controller for the task, that is). Yeah, KB+M still grants an edge, but modern controllers plus smart mapping and design are more than capable for the genre. I think the only time where they fall short is in super-fast and precise arena shooters like Quake 3 or UT.

I'm not interested in mp, so I don't really care about server browsers and cheating one way or another.

No quicksaving though is a real shame. Here we are, in an age where console controllers have more than a dozen buttons (+ touchpad + voice commands), and instead of just having a dedicated button to quicksave and quickload and bring consoles up to par, we have checkpoint saves on pc.

Manual leaning with q/e is another thing I've not seen in a while.

The real issue though is that none of them is NOLF3.

I miss speed, I miss real gun variation, I miss server browsers, I miss mods, I miss map control, I miss playful design.

Modern meta game progression in shooters is fucking terrible, just make the game something you want to play without being led along by bullshit on a stick. I can't stand time to kill values of like 3 seconds. And I never want to see an AK47 again.

Hokay, venting done. Maybe.

Old map design. Places felt like places, not a series of halls with a simulacrum of a real location as a backdrop.

Map lists. I still remember downloading a crap ton of maps for Battlefield 1942/Desert Combat. You didn't need XP/weapon progression because you had so many maps. I have more hours in 1942/Desert Combat than I do all the other modern Battlefield games combined.

Please, please, get let us change those jumbo weapons. If I were to hold a Beretta to my face so that it filled my FOV as much as they do in games, I'd be missing an eye and have my nose broken in a dozen places. I -hate- that rifles take up 1/4 of the screen...

Overwatch sounds like your kind of jam (except for the server browser and mods thing).

@yothatlimp: Yeah I'm actually pretty excited for it. Never managed to get into any of the testing phases even though I'm on opt-in since 2014. T.T

I've not really enjoyed a good FPS game for awhile because of most of those reasons you just listed. It's not been since BC2 in 2010 that I can remember a game that didn't require me to run an external service to access a server browser. Everything has matchmaking now, even casual play limits the pools of players you can play with. I don't care if I'm in a server of 32 people and 1 dude is 30 ranks higher than me and vice versa I don't give a shit if everyone is 30 ranks lower than me. In the end it just doesn't matter it's just casual play.

I feel like FPS games have been butchered the most with the rise of shooters on consoles. There's been so many design concessions both on a gameplay level and a user interface/client front end level, more than I can think of in other genres. It used to be so easy for me and my friends to get into multiplayer games together. In 2005 BF2 we would all jump into a VOIP program say "alright join this server it's got 8 slots" and then we'd all join, if it was a good server we'd all favourite it and check for it next time we played, that would be that. Now you have to party up but certain games don't even let you party up with 8 people now do they? I think Battlefront is the most recent one off the top of my head that only allows you to party with 1 other person. The other issue is new games always force partied players onto the same teams. I loved versing my friends and I still would but that's another thing a lot of newer games lack is the ability for the player to choose to switch teams.

Forced matchmaking didn't just affect server browsers either. Frequenting the same servers you could build a knowledge of other players and get to know them. I still frequent a Teamspeak with over 30 people I've known for more than 10 years. People that I met online and have never met in person because of Community servers.

So yea, I share your sentiment.

Wolfenstein The New Order was the most recent game that reminded me of more open level design.

@gundogan said:

It varies from game to game, but your experience with server browsers is generally my experience with server browsers. For the most recent example I can think of, the TF2 server browser was a nightmare of a bunch of assclown server admins with terrible custom settings. Instant respawn, which ruins basically every mode since they're all objective-based and it's hard to make any serious push when everyone respawns 0.5 seconds later, walks for 7 seconds, and is back defending whatever objective. This is also the reason that listening to Jeff talk about shooter multiplayer is a waste of my time, because he is also so impatient that he wants every multiplayer shooter to be instant respawns. That is objectively the wrong thing to do with certain gameplay design. Not everything is just straight DM or TDM. Some modes need respawn timers, and fucking no one in TF2 understood that. Also, like you said, player numbers way too high, player numbers that the maps were never designed for, are also a really frequent issue, as are shitty, unfunny custom sounds or music.

I'm absolutely fine with generic map playlists and matchmaking, instead of server browsers, because A) it sometimes allows for better skill-based matchmaking, and B) usually I'm pretty fine with the vanilla multiplayer settings, and usually server admins would just fuck it all up.

I don't know where this idea that COD is slow is coming from, but it absolutely not true. COD is faster than 90% of current shooters. Obviously it's based around ADS rather than classic twitch shooter style gunplay, but you move around the maps in those games almost as fast as 90s arena shooters.