First Console Game To Do FPS "Right" - Goldeneye vs Halo

[isiolia]

That's not how Halo was debuted at Macworld Expo. The first footage the public saw was action, with basic F/TPS physics. They may have considered that early on, but by the time Microsoft bought Bungie it was likely already an FPS.

True, I don't think what they showed was specific to anything, so it may have more been speculation at the time based on what they'd been doing with Myth.

[racketboy]

That's not how Halo was debuted at Macworld Expo. The first footage the public saw was action, with basic F/TPS physics. They may have considered that early on, but by the time Microsoft bought Bungie it was likely already an FPS.

True, I don't think what they showed was specific to anything, so it may have more been speculation at the time based on what they'd been doing with Myth.

I actually have this info in my draft. It did start as RTS. Then third person action. Once MS acquired them, they rebuilt the engine to be FPS.

[marurun]

When they debuted it to the public must have been during that 3PS window. I remember that footage and the music. It made me happy to be a Mac user. And then Bungie sold us out to the devil... oh god, the betrayal!

[dsheinem]

Goldeneye was likely one of the first that was a console FPS game that PC gamers were envious of. It was just ahead of the curve in a lot of ways.

I feel like this was a false narrative that kids with N64s liked to tell themselves and still persists. PC FPS players by the time Goldeneye came out in late 1997 were only a few months away from Quake II and had already been flooded with FPS titles - many, many of them far better than Goldeneye in most every design element - for about 5 years at the point the N64 game hit.

The only thing I really give Goldeneye credit for is doing couch multiplayer right...something that didn't really work in the PC world and hadn't been done well on a console. But otherwise it is a bland/kid-friendly FPS with a mediocre single player campaign that very few PC genre enthusiasts would have missed.

[dsheinem]

I'd add that, unlike Goldeneye, Halo was a console game that PC many gamers were jealous of - one of the few titles I can recall this being the case over the history of the genre in fact.

There's also a good argument to be had that much of what Halo popularized severely set back the genre's evolution on the PC - formerly PC-only developers started designing FPS games with console sales in mind (sometimes as the lead platform), often introduced more forgiving mechanics than what had been the norm in the genre on PC (e.g. regenerating health), and stuck with same/similar graphics engines for longer periods of time. The first decade of FPS games being popular in the PC space was very closely tied to the success of the new tech a game's respective engine brought to the table (read PC Gamer magazines from the mid 90s - early 2000s and there's a lot of talk about the connection between a game's engine and the gameplay possibilities). Since Halo, the genre has sorta slogged along at a much slower pace and with much less emphasis on pushing design technologies.

[marurun]

I actually found Halo pretty challenging, despite the shield recovery mechanic, even on PC with proper mouse and keyboard. But yeah, as soon as companies discovered you could make a good FPS on console that was visually competitive with the PC space, they never looked back. But at least Halo did it with a lot of new mechanical ideas designed specifically to make things work smoothly on console.

As for engine stagnation, that wasn't all Halo (but yeah, some of it certainly was). About that time Unreal Engine was cementing itself as the premier tech for FPS games, and when licensing opened up it made it easier to not have to do your own tech if you didn't want to. A lot of companies weren't also shifting to he incremental upgrades model. Only ID really stuck with the new engine version as a whole new beast.

[isiolia]

I feel like this was a false narrative that kids with N64s liked to tell themselves and still persists. PC FPS players by the time Goldeneye came out in late 1997 were only a few months away from Quake II and had already been flooded with FPS titles - many, many of them far better than Goldeneye in most every design element - for about 5 years at the point the N64 game hit.

Personally, I've never even owned a copy of the game, though others in college certainly did. I was mostly playing stuff like Action Quake II at the time.

I don't mean to imply that it was head and shoulders better than PC games. However, it was released when the genre started to take a slightly more realistic turn. So where most prior console games were either simply ports of PC games or derivative of them, Goldeneye was actually more forward-looking. When the genre was shifting from (or at least expanding on) things like Quake II and Unreal to Half-Life, Goldeneye was skewing a little more towards the latter, over a year earlier.

[ElkinFencer10]

Curious side-question: would you say that Perfect Dark improved on any mechanics or multiplayer from Goldeneye?

Definitely from a multiplayer perspective. The addition of AI bots made the multiplayer a LOT more fun for me. Since I'm naturally not a very competitive person, the ability to play in deathmatches WITH a friend instead of just against one made all the difference for me.

[o.pwuaioc]

Curious side-question: would you say that Perfect Dark improved on any mechanics or multiplayer from Goldeneye?

Definitely from a multiplayer perspective. The addition of AI bots made the multiplayer a LOT more fun for me. Since I'm naturally not a very competitive person, the ability to play in deathmatches WITH a friend instead of just against one made all the difference for me.

Seconded. I loved Golden Eye, definitely a game changer for me, but Perfect Dark just got so much more play time due to the AI bots. I think Red Faction was next to get that level of love (plus you could blow up the walls!).

[isiolia]

Oral history of Halo got posted today, which likely includes something of interest.