Waiter, waiter! There’s an RPG in my FPS!
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on “Western” role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. It would be easy to say that many of today’s first-person shooters are more RPG-like than ever before. Between the Borderlands franchise, Dead Island and the recent Far Cry 3, several high-profile FPS games have included quests, experience points, and skill trees. The mix seems like a great match – first-person shooters are built around perspective and interface, whereas role-playing games rely more on mechanics and statistics. Nothing says they can’t go together.
Indeed, they traditionally have gone together. Many RPGs during the 1980s and into the 1990s used the first-person perspective for dungeons or the entire game, although it was usually tile-based (you moved forward, sideways, or backward one large step at a time). In the early 1990s, there was a race between the shooter Wolfenstein 3D and the RPG Ultima Underworld to become the first free-movement first-person game. As the FPS genre became increasingly popular, deviations from simple shooting became more common, like Strife, a game that used the Doom engine but added non-player characters and branching quest lines involving player choice, or Jedi Knight, which included Force skills to develop.
At the end of the 1990s, the superb Deus Ex managed to fuse both role-playing games and first-person shooters into a coherent whole. This wasn’t an RPG with shooter bits, nor was it a shooter with RPG elements; it was both genres, in their totality, together at once. This was a neat trick, and one that hasn’t really been duplicated, not even by Deus Ex’s sequels.Continue reading Waiter, waiter! There’s an RPG in my FPS!Waiter, waiter! There’s an RPG in my FPS! originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 14 Dec 2012 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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