Martin Hollis, director of the classic N64 shooter GoldenEye, thinks that console shooters have lost their way, and any innovation in the genre is happening on the PC.
GoldenEye made such a splash when it was released, that more than a decade later it is still held up as an example of a movie tie-in that didn’t suck, not to mention one of the games that defined the modern console shooter. But Hollis doesn’t think that modern console shooters are really trying to do anything new anymore and instead are just rehashing the same old ideas.
He said that he always went into FPS games hoping to see something new, but felt that most of the interesting developments were happening in PC shooters, which had different cultures and different gameplay mechanics. He didn’t think that console shooters were moving backwards necessarily, but he didn’t think that they were moving forwards and that a lot of what he saw wasn’t really very new.
He did acknowledge that console shooters had brought about one very big change however, although he didn’t think it was a positive one. He felt that playing a shooter on a console had become a solitary activity, whereas when he was making them in the nineties, they had had a much greater social element. Even playing online was still essentially a solitary activity, he said, which was a lot more convenient, but lacked the emotional appeal of gathering with friends to play.
Hollis does have a point that console shooters aren’t pushing the envelope with every release, but without some specific examples, it’s impossible to know what PC shooters he thinks are doing it so much better.
Source: Games Industry
