What does this mean?

I'm not trying to be snarky or anything--I just don't understand it. I'm working on a blog series overview of FPSes, why they're awesome, what makes for a great one, and so on and so forth, and moving from there. Knowing what people perceive to be generic FPSes would help me out a bit.

Halo's got this epic plot about how these dudes crashland on an alien artifact and discover it was a research facility/superweapon, and desperately attempt to stop it. Call of Duty (let's go with Modern Warfare 2) was a loving homage to The Rock, one of the best action movies ever, and a multi-part story that had two main elements. The first element was that it examined the concepts of loyalty and patriotism (and ultimately concluded that these things were bad, as evidenced by Makarov's loyalty to Russia and Shepard's loyalty to the United States). The second element was its examination of the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Is a retaliatory invasion a good thing based on the attacks of a few people? Modern Warfare 2's conclusion was... well, no.

Halo and Call of Duty have varied, interesting plot beats. The main reason people don't think they have good stories are because, unlike Half-Life 2, they never really stick you in a position to get to know the characters. In Half-Life 2, one of the first things you do is get stuck in the level A Red Letter Day, where you basically listen to three of the six primary characters in the series yammer on about how bad life is. Later on, you'll meet two more of the primary characters, and it'll take you about five or ten minutes of unskippable dialog. Half-Life 2 does more with its characters than the other games, but in terms of actual characterization and plot? It kinda sucks.

Having a PHD in theoretical physics was actually pointless in Half-Life 2. Meanwhile, Halo and Call of Duty were driven by their silent protagonists and the kinds of people they were. "Oh, hey, have this scientist plug in a plug! Cool, it's science!"

Man, I'm exhaused and my writing is bed. G'night.

Also, I discovered that I used the pistol more, because I didn't have to listen to its horrible little sound effect. It's one of the best pistols in a video game, but that sound makes me use it less.

However, this is one of its few redeeming moments.

"The sound effects here are key. The wind, ripping into your ears, cutting through the air beneath this massive metal structure. It truly feels as though it could blow you off."

This is why. One of the few things Half-Life 2 does well is its aesthetic design, particularly in terms of music (sparse, unmemorable, unintrusive, and, most importantly, mood-altering in the best possible ways) and sound.

A lot of people really fail to understand just how important sound design can be to a game. Red Dead Redemption's not a very good sandbox game (empty world), nor is it a very good Western (it apes too much Peckinpah, and it does so poorly), nor is it a very good shooter (ugh). Also, it's buggy as hell. The sound design, though? Brilliant. No, seriously, the sound design in Red Dead Redemption isn't just amazing because of its music (which are kinda boring, being all in A-minor as they are, at least according to Eidos Montreal's music guy--the one working on Thief 4, which I'll get to in a moment).

The same's true for Mass Effect 2. Bad game, worse characters and storytelling (no second act, in fact!) than the second game, bad shooter, bad RPG, bad systems design... amazing aesthetics.

Honestly, I think that's the secret sauce to making people love your high-budget game.

Nail the aesthetic appeal, and so long as your game is at least somewhat passable, people will shower you in accolades. Uncharted's a game with naturalistic voice acting, at least when it comes to Sully, Nate, and Chloe. They sound like people. That, with a great, snappy visual appeal, makes people go "wow, this is amazing!" and they miss all the bad bits.

Halo's got fantastic guns and music, but is a bit weak in the voice acting departments... and you get a critical game that isn't loved for its story (despite the story and writing actually being pretty good in comparison to most video games--storywise, it's arguably the best thing I've listed in this post; a good case can be made for Red Dead).

Gears of War has some amazing storytelling, but the characters don't LOOK like normal people, and the protagonist talks in a ultra-macho manly Bender Bending Rodriguez voice, and what do you get? A ton of people shitting on the best anti-war video game out there.

Aesthetics is a HUGE deal. You can have a game with flawless gameplay (Gears) with bad/boring art design, and it will suffer as a result. At the same time, you can have a game with horrible gameplay, utilizing enemies with X-ray vision (this is objectively the worst kind of enemy you can have in a video game), like Uncharted, but it won't matter so long as you nail the sound and visuals.

Thief.

Thief is amazing. I can overlook the bad graphics; sure, they might have been good-looking in 1998 (it was no Unreal, mind you), but they just make me gag now. However, that sound design is GODLIKE. Seriously, no stealth game uses sound as effectively as Thief, allowing you to navigate by sound, and, more importantly, making enemies track you through the sound you create. By implementing the sound design into the very gameplay, Thief transcends every game ever, even Red Dead, which cleverly uses of classic Western Foley sounds to trigger MAXIMUM NOSTALGIA.

Okay, basic history/game theory lesson: RPGs and their skill systems/dice rolls exist so DMs don't just randomly say "you fail, you succed." The idea was to simulate a real world. Progression in video games from Ultima in... what, 1981? to Ultima Underworld, in 1991, was all about advancing this forwards. Ultima Underworld was a first person RPG--I think it was the first of its kind, but I could be wrong. Anyways, Underworld was developed by a team of people who had gotten together to make flight simulators (and old Ultima guys from Origin Systems), who thought that some of the logic behind simulators could apply to games, particularly RPGs, which were already attempting to approximate those systems (actually, this is why JRPGs are not true RPGs, but a new genre entirely; they fail to understand why these systems existed in the first place).

So we got games like System Shock, Ultima Underworld, Thief, Deus Ex, and so forth. They don't simulate reality 100%. They're not trying to be un-fun. The idea is that they provide immersion through simulating or approximating a world. Defining elements of this include the merging of FPS and RPG mechanics (One of Fallout 3's leads, Emil, said that he viewed it as an Immersive Sim more than an RPG, and Skyrim leans even further in that direction, by totally demolishing the need for a class system and truly making you a blank slate who can grow on the fly) and advanced AI that allow for emergent gameplay.

STALKER is the pinnacle of the genre, from a mechanical perspective. Essentially, it combines role-playing elements (defining your character) with shooter elements (shooting other characters).

There's no leveling up, no numbers, nothing like that. It's not what you might think of as a traditional RPG, because it doesn't NEED those numbers to be visible to you, the player. It's trying to remove all the extra junk between the gameplay and you, and, plus, it wouldn't make sense to go from some random guy to a superhuman badass in a matter of weeks.

So basically, you "level up" by going to harder areas, being introduced to harder monsters, and gaining access to better equipment. A new suit might help you carry more equipment or take more damage, for instance, where in an RPG, these would be your STR and DUR (?) stats.

You still talk to characters, take sidequests, and all that jazz, but now, XP is money and character growth is defined by your equipment.

Essentially, it's fusing RPG mechanics into something a bit more real life.

As a world, it's one of the most believable in a video game. It's a world where a guy you meet at the beginning might have "leveled up" alongside you.

Now that I've sung its praises, a word of warning: it's an Eastern European game. It's as unforgiving as Clint Eastwood (bad joke? bad joke). It expects you to understand a lot more about its gameplay. There is no tutorial. It's best to find someone who has played it and talk to them about it. If you want, I'm on Steam, going by DocSeuss, though there might be a "has alan wake" bit attached to it, as I'm trying to get everyone I know to buy it.

STALKER is a game that is hard to play but... it'll click with you. When it does, you'll love it.

ALSO: Why did you buy it on Amazon? iirc, that comes with DRM. Steam version is usually really cheap (goes on sale all the time) and, I thought, was DRM free? Could be wrong. Oh well. s'just the place I get most people to buy it on.

Also, totally understand wanting a light-hearted game.

Onimyst, you're welcome to be tired of the genre, but it's not right to say that they're similar or samey or anything of the sort.

The second thing you should know is that JRPGs aren't actually JRPGs, the way that that one amphibian/reptile critter I can't quite remember isn't actually a snake, even if it looks like one.

Basically, back in the day, some Japanese devs saw Wizardry and Ultima, and went "we like these games! We should make something like it!" So they did. This was Dragon Quest, which all JRPGs come from. The unfortunate side effect of cloning Ultima and Wizardry was that they hadn't even gotten to their best respective games (Ultima VII/Underworld and... Wizardry 8, I believe), so basically, all they really got was the class system and RPG stats. The concept of role-playing got lost in translation somewhere, so basically now you have a genre that kept all the bits that were done only because computers weren't powerful enough (stats, being turn-based, class systems, and I think random encounters), while not implementing any of the stuff (like role-playing and world simulation, which is the ENTIRE point of a stat system) that RPGs were actually about.

For WRPGs, you can either browse the lists of great RPGs on GoG.com (great stuff there), or pick up The Witcher/Witcher 2. The Witcher is a game that was obviously designed as they went along, and starts out weak but ends on the strongest possible note. Dragon Age Origins is another easy way to get into RPGs. Games you'll want to check out are anything made by Black Isle and Troika, such as Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, and Vampire: The Masquerade, and it's worth picking up some other games as well, like The Bard's Tale, Betrayal at Krondor, Ultima Underworld, Deus Ex, and System Shock/System Shock 2, though by that time, you've worked your way into immersive sims, which is basically the evolution of the RPG ideal, and you're always welcome to take a half-step backwards into RPG territory with Bethesda's games, particularly Morrowind and Skyrim. Another neat evolution of the RPG is the Gothic/Risen approach to things--those were developed by Pirhana Bytes.

For JRPGs, I couldn't say. I'm not the genre's biggest fan. Turn-based games with bad writing don't do it for me. Pokemon is always fun, though, and Earthbound is godlike. Final Fantasy XII is pretty cool as well, and Xenoblade is praised to high heaven and back.

Being like Uncharted is exactly the opposite of what it should be.

"Come back when you can actually have some salient points where you aren't comparing the absolute pinnacle of what you believe everything to be and preconcieved notions of a genre that haven't been correct for a decade"

The strangest thing about this specific remark is that both you and Archaotic recommended almost exclusively old games. I'd say that speaks volumes about the current state of the genre more than anything else. That it was true back then does not mean it isn't still true now.

"Continue to make excuses for why western games don't get as much attention for their story when the correct answer is that they just aren't as good though."

I only made two: that for various reasons, the PC didn't have as many people, particular young, impressionable ones, playing back in the day, so the genre didn't get much love (this is indisputable fact; WRPGs were targeted to high-end adult PC owners, rather than children with simplistic console controls), and because the main WRPGs out there, Bethesda's games (I mentioned Bioware, but this was an error, as Bioware games ALWAYS get story praise, even though they shouldn't), are exploration and lore-focused, rather than story focused.

Hardly a litany of excuses, don't you think?

"If you don't see how a game like Fallout 3 is a massive time sink filled with basically stretches of nothing but padding masquerading as "exploration" it's because you don't want to face it."

Okay, I've got to know this, because this is something I've heard from big JRPG defenders before: what's the difference between exploration and exploration masking as padding?

Because, you know, the primary element of the immersive sim genre (which Bethesda's games are) is that it's a hybrid first-person/role-playing hybrid (but removes as many rpg abstractions as it can, because they're unnecessary) that attempts to simulate a real world. Various methods of conveying a real, immersive world include advanced AI, real-time gameplay, and having an open, non-linear world to explore.

Fallout 3 isn't a game that pads, it's a game that gives you the closest thing it can to a real world to be in.

Ultimately, that's what RPGs are all about. Think about it. The point of an RPG is to be a role-playing game. To that end, you'd want to remove as many abstract elements as possible to truly allow you to play that role. You want to improve the genre until it borders on reality. That's what the genre's been doing since Ultima, the game that's generally credited with birthing the video game RPG.

I don't see how an open world could do anything less than enhance the experience. It's definitionally impossible.