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We all know of the First Person Shooter genre. This generation of gaming has undoubtedly made it very familiar with everyone.  Games like Halo, Battlefield and, most importantly, Call of Duty, have lead the charge of the modern FPS game. It’s the most popular genre amongst gamers, largely due to their multiplayer components. Yet, the FPS, unbelievably, has come a long way just like any other genre. Most of us here are old enough to remember the days where FPS games were quite different. Did we move into better days? If you younger folk ask, “How much could change with holding a gun on screen?” the answer is “A lot”.
 
Guns, Guns, Guns!!!
In a modern FPS game, things seem quite simple. You pick up a gun, and you start shooting. You push a button to switch to your secondary gun, and you start shooting. Then, if you like, you can hold a button down to pick up an enemy’s weapon off the ground whilst dropping your old one. Then you start shooting. Believe it or not, this was almost unheard of a couple of generations ago. You see, originally, FPS games were ALL about weapons. They were all about acquiring them. At the start of the game, you might start out with a pistol, but as you progressed, you would find weapons like a shotgun, and then an Assault Rifle, and then a Sniper Rifle, and so on. With this setup, acquiring a Rocket Launcher of some sort was practically like stumbling upon the Holy Grail. In today’s games, things are very different. Near any weapon could be found by the second mission, possibly depending on location and who your enemies are. They’re just laying around for you to take and use. The upside to that is you have a whole arsenal of weapons to use literally at your feet. The downside is you can only carry two of them. To add “realism” to our shooter video games, many developers have seen fit to limit the player to just two weapons. This is quite a jump from how things used to be, as there once was a time where players held every weapon in the game at once, and getting a new one was like Christmas Morning. While there are still a few games out there that use the “everyone gun is yours to keep” mindset, it has definitely become less and less common over the year.
 
Doctor Says I Need A….Health Pack?
Yes, what ARE those primitive things? Health Packs? This is just another feature that most modern FPS games do without. Since this is something that probably isn’t too alien to most gamers, it’s easy to explain. In the game, when you are shot, you lose health. When you lose health, you get closer to death. When you die, you lose. The health pack is designed to refill your health before you have none left. I know it might sound strange, because we are all used to regenerating health in our games now. It was an act more or less popularized with Halo 2, which was intended to create more seamless gameplay by not interrupting action too much by having players search out a health pack. Both had their pros and cons. Some gamers feel that having health pack based gameplay really added an extra challenge to the game. The issue with that is the possibility of being stuck with low health while you take 10 minutes to find a health pack before you jump into the next battle. Other gamers enjoy the regenerating health factor because of, well, what it was intended for in the first place. It keeps things going without having to take out too much time to find health. The downside is that it can take away from feeling an imminent danger when your health is low, as you need only hide behind cover for a few seconds. Whether that makes a game better or worse is your call.
 

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