I wish there was more classic style hitscan-focused FPS. It feels like every renaissance era shooter is just trying to be Doom, having the player weave around fireballs and other projectiles like it's a first person Touhou while dashing away from angry melee-focused enemies. Even the modern Doom games don't even have any hitscan enemies since their zombie soldiers also fire plasma shots instead of bullets. I'm talking about the kind of games that have >health/armor pickups rather than just hiding behind a wall to restore health >let you carry all your guns at once, or at least more than just two weapons >enemies are humans or humanoid primarily use hitscan weaponry >light/rudimentary stealth elements
They were fairly common throughout the 90s and even lived longer than its golden age Doom/Quake-style compatriots, surviving the Halo age of shooters going into the mid-00s with stuff like Half-Life 2 and its episodes, TimeSplitters, 007 games, FEAR and Resistance 1 and 3. Now it seems like the only ones really left in the modern market is Wolfenstein on the AAA end and Ion Fury on the smaller end of the scale, at least until Valve is done with VR and somebody there gives a shit about making single player FPSs again.
>nuwolf >ion fury Come on these games are literally just hiding behind grey corners to avoid hitscan humanoid enemies.
Bentley Cook
Thanks for responding.
Gavin Price
As opposed to what? Taking cover when being shot at is as valid a strategy as side-sprinting around an enemy that can't rotate as fast. It's not like you play Medal of Honor facetanking machine guns when landing at Normandy, or didn't pop in and out to bait out a pig cop's shotgun in DN3D.
Jeremiah Robinson
As opposed to getting rid of regenerating health and making enemies not to turn you into swiss cheese so that way if you kill them fast enough and know where the health items are then you can actually play the game.
Ian Hall
I feel exactly the same way, and I think hitscan-heavy shooters sadly get way too much negativity because of their strong association with the modern, post-CoD 4 military shooters that plagued gaming in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
Now, I'm quite a fan of the atmosphere of games that are more grounded in reality, and while that usually involves hitscan humanoid enemies, those aren't the reason why games feel "cover shooter-y". It's the sluggish movement where sprinting renders your gun useless that does that. It's not even a console thing, because older console FPS like TimeSplitters, Goldeneye, and Perfect Dark didn't have this issue. Regardless, hitscan enemies add a necessary intensity to the combat where you get instantly punished for lack of awareness of both the enemy location and surrounding environment. They're simply a more punishing version of projectile enemies in a sense. In old school FPS, both projectile and hitscan enemy types are meant to be beaten by utilizing your movement. With projectiles, you use your movement to strafe and dodge attacks. The strategy for hitscan enemies is to use your movement to break line of sight. To avoid a projectile you just need to dodge it, but to negate the damage of hitscan you can’t just dodge it – you need to use a cover provided by the level design. Utilizing cover, however, does not make a game a cover shooter just because it's in the name. There's a major difference between jiggle peaking a corner like in Doom and propping yourself behind waist-high cover and aiming down sights like in Call of Duty games. This is what classic shooters were based on – high mobility and constant quick repositioning, with the more hitscan-heavy titles like Episode 1 of Doom, Half-Life, RTCW, Soldier of Fortune, and Duke Nukem 3D maintaining their fast-paced nature for the reasons I mentioned above.
tl-dr: Hitscan-heavy FPS games are capable of being fast-paced shooters, and there should be more of them.
>give a dude a different type of gun like a shotgun or a sniper rifle or a grenade launcher >now have to approach the fight in a different way
It's easy to make enemy variety.
Jayden Butler
Enemy variety, while important, is only one facet. Scripting the enemy encounter design is just as important I find. The resources given to the player, the AI, the scripting of where and when they will confront the player, and the level design that facilitates that all go into a game's enemy encounter design. Basically, facing the same enemy in two different situations can still yield two entirely different strategies, despite being the exact same enemy type.
Owen Phillips
stfu u popamole sticky cover bitch learn to lead ur shots
Christian Cooper
>hitscan grenade launcher
Carter Adams
true this is probably the real killer. It's easy for doom eternal to make shitty arena room #0928345092835 but make it interesting because the enemies are projectile or melee and force you to play it shmup style like OP said.
You can make hitscan only enemies and levels interesting they just require more effort
Sebastian Myers
Hitscan enemies are hard to balance without it being too overwhelming to the player there's a good reason why they died out overtime.
I'm not opposed to hitscan foes they can bring a sense of variety to the game along with more fireball type foes but you have to know what you're doing when making them
