I've played Goldenye 64 recently, just out of curiousity and after that I switched to Earth Defence Force and came to the conclusion that both of 'em are among my favourite shooters on any systems. I've thought about why they work so well and then it stroke me, they're quite similar in many fundamental ways!
But let me explain..
I've always thought that Goldeneye 64 was and still is a splendid example of a shooter, not because its audiovisual splendor (which is long gone), nor its excellent controls for a console FPS, but because of how the game has been structured.
Up until Goldeneye, all the other shooters before it followed the formula established by Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, namely traversing through a series of levels in a rather linear fashion. After you've completed a level, you were just send to the next one and while there were secret rooms and different difficulty settings, that tried to raise the replay value, the latter still required you to start the game all over again and the secrets areas weren't that motivating, cause uncovering them wasn't substantially rewarding (in terms of truly unique stuff that altered the gaming experience in a meaningful way).
When we take a look at Goldenye instead, it fundamentally altered the principle of the more linear structure through subtitle additions. The first one was to break with the predetermined succession of levels and give the user the possibility to replay any completed level at any given point.
The next addition was to introduce not only difficulty settings that are differentiated by the strength of your enemies, but also by different sub-goals that required you to develope entirely different tactics for how to tackle the levels.
This would be meaningless, if the levels themselves wouldn't encourage you to try different approaches, but thankfully both the macro (the whole level) and micro (specific rooms/ enemy encounters) situations in the game were explicitly designed with this goal in mind. There's generally more than one solution to a given problem and of course, also the order in which to tackle the sub-goals is mostly up to the player.
Rare didn't even stop here, although those things alone would increase the replay value siginificantly, they also added rewards, that could be gathered through the completion of certain levels (on certain difficulties) in a given amount of time (those "time trial" times were shown at the end of such a level). Most important of all, those rewards offered significant and therefore meaningful alterations to the core gameplay experience, in form of "cheats", that could be activated and combined to play through already completed levels, just for the fun of it.
Some of those cheats made the game more difficult (like lightning fast movements) or easier (like enormous heads for easy headshots), but most of them could really change the game and made those already completed levels seem fresh and like joyfull playgrounds all over again. It was similar to a "sandbox style" experience.
It's really sad but understandable, that I've not seen other games following this example, cause the influence of Goldenye on the shooter genre has been nearly nonexistent in this regard, mainly cause of the dominance of PC titles.
Except Perfect Dark & Perfect Dark Zero I've encountered only one other series of shooters (albeit not first, but third person ones) that resemble Goldeneye in terms of their game structure, namely Chikyuu Boueigun 1-3, of which the third installment has been released here as Earth Defence Force 2017 for the XBox 360.
Exactly as with Goldeneye, you're offered the possibility to revisit completed levels anytime and encouraged to replay them on higher difficulties and you're rewarded with meaningful things, such as new weapons, that can completely alter the way you're able to tackle a mission and while the differences between the difficulties aren't as pronounced as in Goldeneye (enemies get tougher and some of 'em get new attacks), there's a certain RPG-like addictivness to it, thx to the armor pickups, that increase your health over time.
There's another similarity between both games and this is something that imo Perfect Dark didn't quite manage to get right. I'm speaking about the length of the levels, cause most of them are relatively short (like the my favourite levels in Goldeneye) but jam-packed full of non-stop action, which increases the urge of getting "only one more go" at them to try another tactic or weapon combination.
So, while those two games may not have much in common on the first sight (and you might've thought "WTF?" as you read the threads title), I think they share similarities that are deeply rooted in their overall design and I'd love to see other shooters following these principles, cause that's something that really works quite well in my book and other games could learn from it.
What do you think, do you agree/ disagree with my assumptions, or able to name other shooters that emlpoy the same structure?
But let me explain..
I've always thought that Goldeneye 64 was and still is a splendid example of a shooter, not because its audiovisual splendor (which is long gone), nor its excellent controls for a console FPS, but because of how the game has been structured.
Up until Goldeneye, all the other shooters before it followed the formula established by Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, namely traversing through a series of levels in a rather linear fashion. After you've completed a level, you were just send to the next one and while there were secret rooms and different difficulty settings, that tried to raise the replay value, the latter still required you to start the game all over again and the secrets areas weren't that motivating, cause uncovering them wasn't substantially rewarding (in terms of truly unique stuff that altered the gaming experience in a meaningful way).
When we take a look at Goldenye instead, it fundamentally altered the principle of the more linear structure through subtitle additions. The first one was to break with the predetermined succession of levels and give the user the possibility to replay any completed level at any given point.
The next addition was to introduce not only difficulty settings that are differentiated by the strength of your enemies, but also by different sub-goals that required you to develope entirely different tactics for how to tackle the levels.
This would be meaningless, if the levels themselves wouldn't encourage you to try different approaches, but thankfully both the macro (the whole level) and micro (specific rooms/ enemy encounters) situations in the game were explicitly designed with this goal in mind. There's generally more than one solution to a given problem and of course, also the order in which to tackle the sub-goals is mostly up to the player.
Rare didn't even stop here, although those things alone would increase the replay value siginificantly, they also added rewards, that could be gathered through the completion of certain levels (on certain difficulties) in a given amount of time (those "time trial" times were shown at the end of such a level). Most important of all, those rewards offered significant and therefore meaningful alterations to the core gameplay experience, in form of "cheats", that could be activated and combined to play through already completed levels, just for the fun of it.
Some of those cheats made the game more difficult (like lightning fast movements) or easier (like enormous heads for easy headshots), but most of them could really change the game and made those already completed levels seem fresh and like joyfull playgrounds all over again. It was similar to a "sandbox style" experience.
It's really sad but understandable, that I've not seen other games following this example, cause the influence of Goldenye on the shooter genre has been nearly nonexistent in this regard, mainly cause of the dominance of PC titles.
Except Perfect Dark & Perfect Dark Zero I've encountered only one other series of shooters (albeit not first, but third person ones) that resemble Goldeneye in terms of their game structure, namely Chikyuu Boueigun 1-3, of which the third installment has been released here as Earth Defence Force 2017 for the XBox 360.
Exactly as with Goldeneye, you're offered the possibility to revisit completed levels anytime and encouraged to replay them on higher difficulties and you're rewarded with meaningful things, such as new weapons, that can completely alter the way you're able to tackle a mission and while the differences between the difficulties aren't as pronounced as in Goldeneye (enemies get tougher and some of 'em get new attacks), there's a certain RPG-like addictivness to it, thx to the armor pickups, that increase your health over time.
There's another similarity between both games and this is something that imo Perfect Dark didn't quite manage to get right. I'm speaking about the length of the levels, cause most of them are relatively short (like the my favourite levels in Goldeneye) but jam-packed full of non-stop action, which increases the urge of getting "only one more go" at them to try another tactic or weapon combination.
So, while those two games may not have much in common on the first sight (and you might've thought "WTF?" as you read the threads title), I think they share similarities that are deeply rooted in their overall design and I'd love to see other shooters following these principles, cause that's something that really works quite well in my book and other games could learn from it.
What do you think, do you agree/ disagree with my assumptions, or able to name other shooters that emlpoy the same structure?
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