Favorite first-person shooters

I didn't include no one lives forevers, because of this paragraph… otherwise both would be
in my top list! Same thing for Deus ex.

For hybrid games - maybe the "rule" should be that people can list them if they treated them at least partly as shooters, otherwise we could end up with a few lists that are essentially someones favorite stealth games…

Originally Posted by Fluent
Man, great choices there, including a few of my all-time favorites like Half-Life, Halo and GoldenEye.

I would say my favorites have to be Doom, Doom II, Final Doom and Doom 64 (am I missing any original Doom titles?), as well as the 3 I just mentioned.

Was never really that fond for Quake. Unreal Tournament was really cool, though.

Duke Nukem 3D never really caught on with me. I liked the urban setting but I would just rather play the (in my view) superior Doom games.

Can't make a top 5 and I'm sure there's some I'm forgetting, but can't go wrong with any of these.

Good man with good tastes. :-P

I could have wrote it with just few variations. Doom can be replaced by Ultimate Doom, Doom 64 removed (never played it). I enjoyed anyway DN3D first parts and play it pvp over modem, but even if it's MP was fun, it could not match Doom with 4 players sessions at job, all in same place. In Single Player I enjoyed Q3A but for MP UT was a rather big stuff and it won also because it was the big stuff, hence it was grabbing most players and the best players diversity, still I have only despise for those dev rippers. Q2 was the best Single Player of the Quake series and even captured back a bit of Doom mood, still no match with Doom.

Otherwise, I must confess that my top can't stick just to that, so my own, pure Single Player point of view :
1 - Doom 1&2
2 - Po'ed
3 - Selection of Doom 1&2 wads (sorry too far ago, no list)
4 - Marathon 1 (eventually 2&Infinity too)
5 - Far Cry
6 - E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy
7 - Mass Effect 3
8 - System Shock 2 (remove the close combat crap and the respawn abuse and I'll reconsider it to some 2/3 position)
9 - Far Cry 3
10 - Doom 3

And a mention for Pathway Into Darkness, Serious Sam 3 BFE, Half Life 1&2, Aliens vs Predator, Clive Barker's Jericho with QTE removed.

EDIT: I quote my top 4 is fps where you had a lot of dodging not just anticipated dodging or smart moving. If I knew 10 fps focusing on real dodging they would take all ten places.

The new old school is missing a bit in the list, it's not dodging it's focus on anticipated dodging and smart movements, Serious Sam 3 BFE is a typical example, Doom 4 I don't like is probably another example.

Otherwise there's in the list the open world focus, the linear focus, the cover focus, the RPG focus, 3 classic sub genres of modern fps and one that should become a classic.

I suspect I'm now incompatible with fps, my current last hope is New Wolfenstein. But I need come back to play it.

Ohhhh, I cannot name my top 5 … way too many games I love:

• The Catacomb 3D family
• Dark Forces
• Ken's Labyrinth
• Wolfenstein 3D + Spear of Destiny + Return to Castle Wolfenstein + The New Order + The Old Blood
• Doom + Ultimate Doom + Final Doom + Doom II
• Heretic (Shadow of the Serpent Rider)
• Hexen + Death Kings of the Dark Citadel
• Hexen II + Portal of Praevus
• Quake + Quake World Team Fortress
• Quake II + all addons
• Duke Nukem 3D (Atomic Edition)
• SiN
• Realms of the Haunting [HYBRID!]
• CyberMage [HYBRID!]
• Strife: Quest for the Sigil
• Rise of the Triad + Extreme RotT
• Unreal + Return to Na Pali
• Serious Sam + Second Encounter
• Corridor 7
• Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold + Planet Strike
• Half Life + Opposing Force + Blue Shift
• CyClones
• Unreal Tournament 99 + 2003 + 2004 + that one in between where I can't find the box anymore + the current one (in the alpha version)
• Clive Barker's Undying [HYBRID!]
• Battlefield 1942
• Day of Defeat
• Red Orchestra (mod version)
• Counterstrike (pre-Source)

Well yes, those are my favorites. I probably forgot some.

The 'newer' games (like HalfLife 2 or FarCry or …) - while I played many of them - just didn't captivate me the way the older games did (and still do to this day - I replay many of them regularly). But even among those oldies were games I thought were okay but not great (Blood I, for example - nice ideas, but not the atmosphere I liked), and then there were games I didn't like at all like everything with the Max Payne label on it.
The only newer games that had 'the vibes' were the Wolfenstein ones. While I kind of liked HalfLife 2, Doom 3 and Quake 4 (the latter a little bit more than Doom 3 because I had written a Q2 fanfic back in the days that described pretty much what happened in Q4), they did not have the impact on me the earlier games had.

Oh, who remembers Hugo's Nitemare 3D? Not a fave like Ken's Lab, but similar in tone …

Imo half-life 2 is quite overrated. The physics were kind of cool at first, but otherwise it was quite boring game to be honest. I even played it quite soon after the release, so its not that.

Half-life 2 setting drew me in and I thought that the game's story was actually quite intresting. However gameplay just felt so unsatisfying. I quess it boils down to weapons. Imo the weapons in HL2 are not simply that fun to use. Most of the time they felt quite weak and inaccurate. And the sound effects… I never felt like I was shooting with a real gun.

I finished HL2 because of Barney, but I found the game a bit boring as well.

It's interesting that very few games on peoples lists are from the past 8-10 years. I guess the genre has become somewhat stale. I think the genre is quite diverse today, but there's obviously a smaller space left for core innovations, fresh settings, new weapons, etc.

As I said in my first post, for a long time I didn't play many shooters - I felt the genre had become predictable. But in the last couple of years, I've become fond of the genre again, even though only few games have done something significantly new in recent years. Playing shooters with better graphics is kind of enough for me at the moment, because I had that long break. But that also means that I will probably need another break 4-5 years from now

I think both Half-Life games are just bloody excellent.

I recently watched an entire parody series Let's Play called "Freeman's Mind", where Freeman is a sociopathic funny guy. The person who made the series, whose name is Ross, plays the entire first Half-Life game from the viewpoint of this character, and it is damn funny.

But yeah, those games are just fantastic to me. Not my #1 FPSes of all-time, but still really, really good games.

Originally Posted by jaes
It's interesting that very few games on peoples lists are from the past 8-10 years. I guess the genre has become somewhat stale. I think the genre is quite diverse today, but there's obviously a smaller space left for core innovations, fresh settings, new weapons, etc.

Diverse? I don't see that much diversity, but I don't try follow the genre closely.

The number of releases seem rather low if you remove all fps that are much more Multiplayer games and Single Player is more a fake short campaign.

I quoted few interesting indie stuff, but really few, EYE Divine Cybermancy, Ziggurat, Tower of Guns. And alas last two was a bit too difficult for me, plus not really fps but more short fps roguelite attempts based on random generation and unlocks. I also quoted a few more to try, but I haven't found yet the curiosity to do so. Overall it seems pretty short, in term of number and diversity.

But my point of view is probably flawed because I don't put much effort to follow the genre since some years.

Originally Posted by Sanglon
Diverse? I don't see that much diversity, but I don't try follow the genre closely.

It's probably slightly less diverse than from the late 90s to mid 00s, but more diverse than the other time periods. Fewer tactical FPS are released, but in the past 5 years or so we've seen a resurgence in many other sub categories:

(These are just some of the released games; I've included some of them in multi categories if it makes sense; Disclaimer: I haven't played many of them, but reviews etc are pretty clear of what to expect).

Open world FPS (Far Cry series, Borderlands series, Destiny)
Stealth FPS (Dishonored, Deus Ex, Thief)
RPG FPS (Borderlands, Deus Ex, Ziggurat)
Roguelike FPS (Tower of Guns, Ziggurat, Heavy Bullets)
Survival FPS (ARK, 7 Days to Die, DayZ)
Fast paced FPS (Shadow Warrior, Doom, Hard Reset)

There is also Metro 2033, which is somewhat story driven.

Had Metro 2033 in my backlog for ENTIRELY too long.

… I didn't include the stealth games in my list because somebody said we shouldn't? Otherwise, just add all instances of Thief and Dishonored to my list.

I traveled across town (40 minutes on a bus, 30 on a ferry across the harbour and then walked for about 10 minutes and then all again back home) to pickup the Wolfenstein demo on 3.5" floppies for $10 back in the day

Fav's that I played a lot
Doom
Duke Nukem
Quake
Operation Flash Point
Call of Duty 1 and 2
World War 2 Online
Planetside 1 and 2

Recently I played and really enjoyed Sniper Elite 2.

Honorable mentions
Crysis (I really liked the zero G level - first new thing I'd seen in an FPS for a while)
Borderlands

I somehow missed Deus ex but for a long time I was online gaming and missed out on many of the classics when they were first released. That's one excuse I have for my backlog

-kwm

Dang, completely forgot about Borderlands! That's a fun game. My dad and I co-oped it for many hours. Love the gun variation and the gun advantages/disadvantages system they used. Very cool!

Originally Posted by jaes
It's interesting that very few games on peoples lists are from the past 8-10 years. I guess the genre has become somewhat stale. I think the genre is quite diverse today, but there's obviously a smaller space left for core innovations, fresh settings, new weapons, etc.

The genre definitely feels a bit stale to me, and doesn't appeal to me like it did in its heyday. One aspect is that many of them now focus on multiplayer, with the SP campaign almost an afterthought.

The FPS genre has actually regressed imo, if we're talking about pure shooters. The graphics are better of course, and the multi-player aspects might have improved, but it seems like it went backwards in a lot of other categories.

And I agree that the diversity doesn't seem all that great lately. It might seem diverse when you include hybrids like Deus Ex, Thief, and Dishonored, but those aren't really shooters.

Originally Posted by Zloth
Had Metro 2033 in my backlog for ENTIRELY too long.

Good game. You should give it a shot (no pun intended ). Metro 2033 and Last Light are two of the better shooters in recent years, especially in terms of atmosphere.

The last shooter I bought was Far Cry 3 (2012) and I really liked it. Pretty world, fun open world, gripping story and good gun play. I did feel bad about shooting all those animals for upgrades.

Speaking of Farcry - loved Blood Dragon. Not for it's gameplay but the humor was great.

Alien vs. Predator(s). But mostly for being inspired after some of the greatest movies in human history.

I hope you're refering to Alien and Predator films, not alien vs predator films