I'll give it a shot!



This reminds me of another old favorite of mine: bioforge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioforge

While it was not an FPS, the concept that you did not know who you were, could discover that as you played the game and that choices you made in the game determined who you were ... that was just cool! And, yes, it made you want to play again to try and determine a different outcome.

I absolutely agree that this is vitally important to an FPS, otherwise the "F" is missing. An FPS is all about "FIRST" with the that "PERSON" being me, the player!

Quake 4, as an example, removes this and makes you simply a cog in the big machine. You may be an important one, but you are a cog none-the-less.

Looking forward to hear what you think about "the suffering"!
Hope you have that much fun like me...

Only, very few notes:

You can't compare FarCry with Crysis, the first was a success, the second wasn't, for good reasons. IMO, the demo of Crysis is a mess, there is no fun at all, while I enjoyed playing the demo of FarCry for hours, and it is one of the very few games that I bought in the year after it was published. And, I never was tempted to stock piling any weapons. I think that FarCry actually is a game that you can play the way that you described about playing Unreal. You don't need to care about the story.

Another game is Gothic, I never played its whole story, I'm absolutely bad in role playing, because I don't care of careers and rewards.
BTW, I didn't play through the whole story of FarCry, too.
Nonetheless, I played FarCry and Gothic for hours, enjoying to discover the landscapes, to fight against (often, too) strong enemies (because I didn't level up), trying to trick their intelligence, trying to isolate single enemies from their group, and got defeated by surprise attacks, because I didn't expect them to follow me at such hidden or 'safe' places where I escaped to.

Don't miss to play FarCry, it _is_ K.I.S.S., and it has its very own challenges.

I agree with almost everything you wrote:

Crysis vs. Far Cry. Yes, I still did not buy Crysis, Far Cry was just better than the demo of Crysis promised. I could just play and it still looks very good.

Bioforge: This was a great game, I am still waiting for Bioforge 2, the end of the game promised a second part. It was so movie-like at this time, what a nice feeling to be part of this sad and deep story.

Unreal 1: I love this game. It was so much better than Unreal 2. The mixture of fantasy and sci-fi, the story, the beautiful peaceful world in contrast with the evil invaders. The Nali were such a nice race, helping me on my journey. The setting was so varied. The balancing was fine and technology was just impressive at that time.

Quake4: Here I have to disagree. I enjoyed it to be a part of the game, not the über hero. I very much liked the missions with some marines helping me, lighting the darkness with their flashlights. It felt a bit more real to know that I am not the only one, that I am just part of a big invasion. I got the same feeling in "Star Wars - Republic Commando" and I really like the AI of the other commando members, taking strategic positions for sniping, grenade launching and so on.

HL2: I think this game and the following episodes are very well made. It is still an old-school FPS but contains a lot of extensions (placing turrents, using pheromones, vehicles, solving puzzles, using physics). But every new element is introduced so carefully, you find hints to solve puzzles everywhere. This game is made for everyone. You can get the idea how they did it if you replay it with comments of the developers. They really tested the gameplay a lot and balanced everything after this.

Bioshock: Did you realize that they tried a lot to make it easy, more easy than System Shock and co? And it helped, they sold much more units now. You can play it like a shooter, you can just follow the arrows in your HUD to find the next goal and you can ignore all the special magical abilities, the turrets and the tricks like burning oil, electrical shocks in water.
So it offers both: a simple shooter layer and a more advanced layer for people who like to dive deeper in it. This approach is quite good.

And now I compare the old games often to the new FPS games. What is happening now? If I hide behind a rock then all my life energy comes back, magically. I dont get into this. It just feels so fake.
Then all these new games use third person views for shooting around corners. This breaks the idea of FPS and also feels strange to me.

I really would like to have the budget and time to be part of a project similar to the first Unreal, maybe smaller, with a few nice extensions and modern visuals. A short prototype would be enough for the first run.

I downloaded and started to play The Suffering. I have to say that I was not impressed (but that's me). The game is not all that old, right? Released in 2004? But the graphics seem more dated than Unreal, which preceded it by six years!

During the intro movie one of the prisoner's hands kept going into the wall of his cell (his hands were supposed to be against the wall). One of the creatures with swords for hands and feet ... his sword feet passed deep into the floor. The player character could swing his knife at posts and glass windows, etc, and his hand and knife would just pass through. The prisoner models for the intro were poorly created in that animation caused them to contort over much (arms would get strangely thin with some motions or edges would "pop" with others).

After getting to the part where I meet a living guard and he starts his speech about us working together, I decided to strike him with my knife. He fell to the ground, stood up and started his speech all over again as if I had not struck him. So I did it again. And it repeated this. About the fourth time the guard suddenly decides to pull his pistol and start shooting me. Then I was finally able to kill him and get his gun. Duh!

I went down the stairs, attacked the next creature and then got bored, shut down the game and uninstalled it.

I am sure I did not give this one a fair shake, but it failed to suck me in from the beginning.

Frank,

I loved Bioshock. That is one of those games that I would like to see a modern remake of. They are make a lot of remakes of movies, how about video games?

Perhaps you and I should talk about making some sort of Unreal like game some time. Hint. Hint.

Yes, absolutely. I will write you a PM now.

Unreal was a fantastic game, I played it 5 years late but enjoyed every second of play. I wish Epic had continued with this (Unreal 2 wasn't the greatest though) rather than focus on the Unreal Tournament spinoff series

I'm feeling a deja vu about Dan's plan exactly one year ago ?

Keep it simple, otherwise you´ll fail.