http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/03/05/wot-i-think-tower-of-guns

Tower of Guns is very silly and it�s mostly very enjoyable as well, playing out like a blended distillation of old-school FPS systems and the current obsession with procedural everything.

The most important piece of advice, as in Quake or UT deathmatch, is to keep moving at all times ... Tower Of Guns requires you to keep your reticule steady while dodging hundreds of projectiles.

I am listening.

There�s a toybox full of arena designs, varying from walkways hanging over lava or infinite drops, to complex structures dotted with teleporters and boost pads.

Immediately, as the door closes behind you, enemies appear all around each chamber.

I am no longer listening. 

getting all giddy about how this game is like old school fps games. As someone who plays old school fps games all the time I have to think that maybe a lot of journalists play so many of these shitty new games they have forgotten what an old school fps game feels like to play.

It's sad really. Tower of guns looks ok but it's a procedurally first person bullet hell game. It has more in common with ikaruga than doom. 

I think after Half-Life came out everyone's memory of what games were like before that kind of warped into this image of "they didn't know any of the rules we have now so everything must have been shit and we just didn't know it." Rather than inhabit a world where it was okay for the level designer to directly use the level to interact with the player, apparently all anyone remembers Doom actually doing is seal you in a giant thoughtless arena, lock the doors, and spawn guys until it was time to open the doors again and let you into the next, bigger arena.

Did Doom *ever* actually do that, even once? Quake only did it once IIRC, in that long slow elevator ride to hell (so it didn't even have locked doors, just a natural timer). 

Doom, and by extension, Quake didn't just define the genre because they were first.

Old == Bad to the lazy minded, whereas comparing most modern games, in terms of content and creativity to in games from the 90's is pretty depressing.

Games have taken a serious downturn since they went mass market; the industry is still incredibly immature in this respect.

A good comparison is film. Studios will gamble billions of dollars on a production, and sometimes they lose.

Games studios wouldn't dare take such a risk, and with the cash cow of casual gaming they don't have to.

The small publisher / lone developer ('indie' is a misnomer) scene keeps struggling on, producing the majority of the genuinely creative content.

If games like Doom are misrepresented by the slack jawed gaming press then that's a shame - the young whipasnapper developers of tomorrow are growing up on such poor journalism. 

"Did Doom *ever* actually do that, even once?"

It did at least once. There's an exit trick where you go to press the button and, oops, floor drops out - combat bowl! 

Lun: you may be on to something there. I keep seeing people referring to older FPS games as 'arcade shooters'... and I think they actually think that Doom and such were 3d versions of Robotron or SmashTV 

http://vectorpoem.com/news/?p=74 

It did at least once. There's an exit trick where you go to press the button and, oops, floor drops out - combat bowl!

Yeah, I had that one in mind, but it signals itself as a trap (it's too early for the exit and you're carrying unused keys) and you're free to just dash across the room and leave by the escape route so I held off on mentioning it. It isn't really an arena with rounds of monsters, just a nasty 270-degree ambush.

"Let's lock the player in a big room and just spawn guys for a while" is like the level designer throwing up his hands and admitting he can't think of anything. 

They have environments and combat encounters, and never shall the two meet. 

Too wise czg. 

You old dinosaurs and your "Games". These days we prefer to call them "Experiences". 

similarities in the expectation of the player in ToG to dodge fire to survive. But the similarity to Doom ends there. Doom has nice level design and you feel like you're exploring as you progress due to the branching nature of the levels. Quake usually has this exploration element in a lot of its maps where you can deviate from "the path".

As soon as someone mentions a game feeling like a classic game, for example painkiller, I always get annoyed because for me the level design is always lacking in those games. I think the "getting locked in and killing predetermined number of guys" is a boring mechanic usually.
It can be done well though, like in Sock's maps where he mixes up the enemy types along with having the neat traps to play with. 

"A good comparison is film. Studios will gamble billions of dollars on a production, and sometimes they lose.

Games studios wouldn't dare take such a risk, and with the cash cow of casual gaming they don't have to."

Don't know if I fully agree with this, at least if we're talking about Hollywood, because that is one thing I feel both mass/casual AAA gaming and movies have in common - never daring to try anything new and just recycling the same old safe crap in the form of sequels, prequels, remakes and whatever else.

Another comparison between movies and games is that flashy stuff sells more than actual content, even with productions that are supposedly "critically acclaimed", like Gravity - real pretty to look at, but not much more depth apart from that. Same goes for alot of overhyped games. 

As soon as someone mentions a game feeling like a classic game, for example painkiller, I always get annoyed because for me the level design is always lacking in those games. I think the "getting locked in and killing predetermined number of guys" is a boring mechanic usually.


Nail + head. 

http://www.theastronauts.com/2014/03/secret-immersive-game-worlds/ is nice. And this is HL2 http://www.theastronauts.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/barrier_1.jpg 

I dont mind barriers as long as they make sense. As a designer it can be a real slog to make intricate levels without them conforming to the flow of the level, however it's also poor to constrain your gameplay too much because you want to make something that is fun to replay.
The reason why Doom and Quake are nice to play is that you can approach the levels differently each time if you like, this is especially true for Quake as the rocket/grenade jumping allows for lots of very creative routes. 

who gives a shit about a light showing you subconsciously where to go next, when most games still can't even get the basic gameplay right (fun)? 

Immediately, as the door closes behind you, enemies appear all around each chamber.

I am no longer listening.

Yeah, sounds boring if that's all the game is. But this pattern can be sparingly put to good use, can't it? I'm thinking of the horde of zendar, sock used this at least twice (the cathedral, and the final fight before the exit unlocks) - imo it was a significant part of the gameplay - and the map was pretty universally loved.

In Daz's videos, he's recently pointed out several points in Q1 maps where a fight is boring because the best strategy is to wait at the entrance to an arena and snipe enemies, rather than going in.

I wasn't about to put one of these locking arenas in a q1 map or anything :P 

1) I'm pretty sure the final monster-deathmatch was not why Zendar was loved.
2) The solution to a player standing in a doorway shooting all the enemies is not to wait until he goes through it to spawn them and then arbitrarily block backward progression. That's a forced fix; a level design hack. 

That's a forced fix; a level design hack.
So whats the conclusion then? Is it that bad? 

Perhaps an open enough layout and good enough AI that the enemies flank and come from behind. 

Ideas:

1. Put a quad or other powerful weapons in the middle of the room. Players want the power, they will run in and grab it. Quad also has the built-in timer as an incentive to do as much damage as fast as possible, rather than being slow and cautious.

2. Create a space inside the arena that is tactically better than the entry point. For example, the player enters the room through a low tight hallway which all of the ogres in the arena can easily target. That hallway would be death and it's much easier to move into the larger central space and dodge grenades that way, than sit in a trench and have 10 grenades all bouncing around you.

3. This might be almost the same as the locked door, but have the player drop down into a space from above. This makes backtracking impossible until they find a new way out of the arena. What makes this different than locking the door behind you is you know and choose to go through the point of no return, rather than it being a cheap surprise. 

4. Built fun close encounter combat instead of filling your big open spaces with toy soldiers.


Metl's Idea 1 is an instant "oh whoopie, how exciting... :|" to me. 3 can be ok if done well. 2 sounds good! 

2. Create a space inside the arena that is tactically better than the entry point.

E.g. Backspawn tarbabies behind the player, yay! 

It's actually a hard problem because the doorway is the safest spot in the room. It's a funnel, you're protected from all threats and can easily scoot to the side when you need to reload or whatever.

You'll be hard pressed to give me a better vantage point than the door to the arena. Unless I'm low on ammo and HAVE to enter the arena to get more but even then ... I'm going to circle back to the doorway.

Back spawning isn't the answer because that's pretty much universally loathed and considered cheap.

"This might be almost the same as the locked door, but have the player drop down into a space from above. This makes backtracking impossible until they find a new way out of the arena. What makes this different than locking the door behind you is you know and choose to go through the point of no return, rather than it being a cheap surprise."

This is usually a good solution although it's also pretty obvious these days. There were several times in RAGE I saw a drop down and saved immediately - you KNOW there's an ambush waiting just beyond that invisible trigger brush on the floor.

But Left for Dead and Uncharted developers have talked about this tactic. L4D has a name for it but I can't recall right now ... but yes, it's all about player initiation. They don't have to activate the encounter until they're ready. That at least gives them some empowerment and control over the situation.