FPS's have always belonged to a separate category of products in the world of the gaming industry. There was no other genre able to give gamers so many new impressions throughout the years. FPS projects were real game-changers.
In this article, we would like to honor legendary FPSs which expanded the genre at different times and showed that FPS games aren’t only about dumb enemies without any sense. Let’s see the top 5 FPS games which changed the reality of gaming.
1993: DOOM
Released in 1993, DOOM is thought to be the evolutionary jump for the whole industry of game development. But what matters the most for us in this article, its overwhelming fame directly influenced the future of FPSs.
DOOM wasn’t the first 3D-shooter game. It was the first extremely popular and cruel shooter game. Actually, DOOM showed games can be full of blood, violence, and controversy. In addition, the concept of “deathmatch” multiplayer sessions was first used in this game.
Thanks to its engine being relatively simple, community-created several easy to learn level editors for this game. Many game developers started their career exactly with the level construction in DOOM.
The set of weapons used in DOOM including a pistol, a shotgun, a machinegun, and a rocket launcher became canonic for FPSs, and the chainsaw possible to find in a game became the symbol of the whole DOOM franchise.
1999: Counter-Strike
In 2019, the community of Counter-Strike fans celebrated 20 years of this franchise’s existence. Minh Le and Jess Cliffe, two video game programmers created the multiplayer mod to the other epic FPS title – Half-Life.
Why didn’t we include this gigantic name into our list then? The answer is simple: Half-Life is worth a separate article exclusively about it. Otherwise, it is impossible to describe its greatness and influence it caused in the world of video games in general.
When speaking of Counter-Strike, every gamer knows what it is. Millions of players all over the world belonging to different generations (from 10 to 30+ years old) play the latest version of this shooter named Counter-Strike: Global offensive. Many of them dream of becoming professional esports players and look for ways to improve their skill. Counter-Strike is, without a doubt, a separate culture. It created the whole gaming galaxy with its stars, fans, and ways to earn money on gaming.
Counter-Strike games belong to that rare category of projects which don’t lose popularity throughout the years.
2007: Call of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare
The year 2007 was the period of rapid development and revolutionary events for the gaming industry in general, and for FPS games in particular. The fourth part of the Call of Duty franchise was a brave and risky project by Activision and Infinity Ward who decided to change the setting of FPS games.
In the early to mid-2000s, two main FPS series was Medal of Honor and Call of Duty. They both concentrated on the topic of World War II since the beginning of their existence and started to bore gamers while using the same concepts over and over again.
As the title of the 4th Call of Duty part tells, developers from Infinity Ward tried to find a new way of realizing the FPS game and moved the timeline of events to the age of contemporary wars. Combined with quite good graphics and the incredibly impressive narrative experience, their decision made Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare a bestseller and one of the most wanted games of all times.
Modern Warfare did great in the multiplayer and even esports, too. But developers and publishers from Activision had just realized their “one year – one game” release scheme and never supported esports competitions in the discipline of Modern Warfare too much.
2007: Crysis
If Call of Duty 4 was the best “railway” FPS game in history till 2007, then the crazy PC benchmark created by Crytek was a vast, carefully designed and processed open-world shooter.
In November 2007, when Crysis had been released, nobody could officially buy a PC hardware powerful enough to launch this game at 60 frames per second. Crysis became the huge evolutionary jump in video game graphics. Even today, after almost 12 years passed since its release, local landscapes of a tropical island in the Philippines look extremely well. Many AAA projects launched in 2010 and even 2013 had their picture much worse than that of Crysis.
Contemporary video game reviewers and magazines frequently criticized Crysis for its weak story and wooden characters, but these aspects weren’t considered as project features by developers. Graphics, animation, and physics they showed in Crysis showed the direction of the future evolution of FPS games and the whole video game industry.
2011: Battlefield 3
According to the opinion of numerous community members and reviewers, Battlefield 3 was the top of the creative mastery EA and Dice could offer in the field of large-scale multiplayer shooters. Their game had everything.
There were intense clashes between two armies on maps of different scales (from 8 to 64 players in 2 teams), the choice of balanced character classes, the comfortable system of subordination and battle commanding, the set of transport options (armored vehicles, automobiles, tanks, aircrafts, and helicopters). Weapons were widely customizable. User interface solutions were easy to understand and use them. The in-game graphics and physics were incredibly realistic.
All the following franchise iterations (Battlefield 4, Battlefield Hardline, Battlefield 1 and even the freshest Battlefield V) were in fact just remixes of the successful formula Dice developers found back in 2011.
To Conclude
This was our top of 5 FPS games that influenced the world of FPS genre and were the best of their kind at different times. The list is definitely biased and your opinion might (and probably should) be different.
