FPSes have always been the best way to test the PC's graphical limits, and no other game genre puts you into the action like an FPS. That being said, although the graphics and sound of FPSes have evolved greatly in the last 10 years, the core gameplay of the genre has barely changed.
Don't get me wrong: I prefer my FPSes simple, and I think the formula generally works. But there are a few things about FPSes that bug me. They might seem like minor annoyances, but in the realm of the first-person shooter, you're supposed to be the protagonist, and anything that pulls you out of that mindset is a weakness in the game's design.
Here is a list of ten suggestions I'd make to future FPS developers.
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No cutscenes.
The problem with cutscenes is that they pull you out of the protagonist's head. You spend most of the game seeing through the eyes of the hero, and all of a sudden you're watching a cinematic video from someone else's perspective. The genius of the FPS genre is that you really are the protagonist, and anything that makes you forget that is bad.
Half-Life and Half-Life 2 were both brilliant in this respect. In both games, the entire experience was through the eyes of Gordon Freeman, the protagonist. Not once does the game pull you out of his head.
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Simplify controls and minimize the number of buttons required.
This is a suggestion that should be applied to any game, actually.
Minimize the number of buttons needed to play the game. Just because my keyboard has over 100 buttons doesn't mean your game needs to use every one of them. If a game requires too many different buttons, I'll be thinking less about the wonderful environment you've created, and more about which button I mapped "slow-mo" to. And that brings me to my next suggestion.
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No slow motion.
Slow-mo (being able to slow down time) is an idea that sounds really good in theory. Games have been using slow-mo liberally ever since The Matrix (or, depending on how you look at it, since Max Payne). It's a neat effect, but as I learned in F.E.A.R., it tends to introduce some gameplay problems.
The main one is that slow-mo makes an FPS less frantic. I know that technically an FPS doesn't need to be frantic, but that's where most of the excitement comes from. Having godly powers such as the ability to slow down time (a la F.E.A.R.) really takes the edge off the game and makes it less exciting.
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No HUD.
In real life, I don't have a tiny little green box floating in the corner of my vision that tells me how much health and armour I have. Nor I see a crosshair. If the purpose of an FPS is to put me inside the protagonist's head, having all sorts of numbers and gauges floating around my field of vision is not going to help me suspend disbelief.
These floating statistics that you see in FPSes are normally called the head-up display (HUD). Over the years, HUDs have been getting smaller and smaller, and in some games they're barely noticeable. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth took the bold step of eliminating the HUD completely, to great success.
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No menus that pause the game.
When you're in the middle of a firefight and you need to change weapons, there should be a way to do it without stopping the action. If you have to go into a menu that pauses the game when changing weapons, it breaks the flow of action and pulls you out of the protagonist's head. In other words, it causes the same problem that cutscenes do, except it can be more annoying.
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Show me my feet!
Why is it that in almost every FPS game, if you look down you can't see your feet? This is one of those little things that just bothers me.
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No talking.
FPSes are most immersive when you feel like you really are the protagonist. So when you hear someone else's voice coming out of your mouth, it breaks the illusion. Most FPSes have gravitated towards a silent hero, such as Doom 3, Half-Life 1 and 2, and F.E.A.R.
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Don't let the protagonist carry too many weapons and items.
FPSes are much more tense when you need to ration your ammunition. Also, if you can carry lots of weapons and items, the game usually needs a far more complex inventory management system. Half-Life 2, for instance, allows you to carry dozens of weapons, and has a somewhat convoluted menu for selecting them. This can be irritating when you want to pull out a grenade in a hurry.
Besides, it's kind of hard to believe that a single person could carry a half-ton of munitions.
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The protagonist should react to punishment.
In a lot of FPSes, if you get shot, a red indicator appears on the screen and your health goes down a bit. That's it. Call me crazy, but if you get nailed by a shotgun, shouldn't it send you flying back? If someone whacks you across the head, shouldn't it send you reeling?
Making your player more responsive to damage results in a much more immersive experience, and makes you hesitate before doing something stupid. Both Doom 3 and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay have great reactions when you get hit.
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No squad controls.
I don't think being able to control a squad of computer-controlled characters is necessarily a bad thing, but most games manage to screw it up. Most of the time, squad AI is so bad and squad controls are so clumsy that you have to focus on micro-managing your teammates, which ruins the game.
Star Wars: Republic Commando is the only game I can think of where the squad controls actually enhanced the game. Most other games with squad controls, such as Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, have such clumsy implementations that they ruin the game.
So although squad controls aren't inherently bad, I'd discourage developers from making such games unless they're sure they know what they're doing.
