What single player FPS campaign are you playing?

[Xeogred]

I am thinking of starting up Halo 2's campaign. Should I give it s shot?

Yes. While it was cool to hate on the single player for years after release, it's actually really good... that's why people hated on it for being short. It feels like the first game for the most part, except the graphics are better and you can dual-wield.

Halo 2 was the first bro-game IMO. Kind of interesting to look back on it now that it's old, same with the first Gears of War. Where they once seemed cool and hardcore they're now silly, but in a fun way.

It's solid, but still my least favorite campaign (edit way better than Halo 4 though). I wasn't a fan of the Arbiter so that sums it up. Beyond that it's obvious Halo 2 lacks some polish, but if you know about its history of being canned and a bit rushed, it's understandable. It'll always be interesting to imagine what it could have been like.

Which... a lot of people expected that out of ODST, but that's my least favorite Halo by far. Maybe it's just me?

3 is solid, but short as heck.

4 was just utterly forgettable.

To this day though, the original Halo remains to be one of my favorites and I'm glad it kind of feels conclusive enough within itself. I don't care about the backtracking or the massive empty repeating hallways, I just love that campaign. Great pacing and it's nowhere near as convoluted as the rest of the series gets. I liked that the entire game took place on one Halo. Definitely felt like an adventure.

I could probably give the nod to Reach as my second favorite. Bungie went out with a bang there, I also loved the Elites in the original, whom were kind of throwaway in the rest of the series. But... Reach made them amazing again. Every Elite encounter was always badass. And the music is just insane.

[emwearz]

Doesn't R1 regen but only partially or something?

It is similar to Halo 2's system. The health bar is decided into 4 pieces, if you loose enough health to go below a piece you lose that piece, otherwise it will regen to the nearest quarter.

[Sload Soap]

Perhaps it's a matter of what you label a "core" FPS experience then. If the slight RPG elements of those games would pull them away from being FPS games, then perhaps what CoD is doing would similarly disqualify it. Admittedly, I've only played CoD4, and while I didn't dig what it was trying to do all that much either, I felt like it was almost leaning more towards being a rail shooter with more freedom than an FPS with less.

No Deus Ex game is a "slight" RPG. They're RPG's first and FPS second. Depending on how you play Human Revolution most combat can be done from third person as in Gears of War. Dishonored has only one ranged weapon and a few grenade types for the player to use. The enemies tend to be armed with swords or very slow firing pistols so there isn't much shooting. The onus is on stealth and precision strikes. It plays closer to Thief or a stealth build in an Elder Scrolls game. That is why I discount these games as traditional FPS. COD on the other hand is all about combat with projectile weapons. I think saying it's on-rails is an exaggeration. It's just designed in such a way that you cannot miss its set pieces. This is fine for the experience it is trying to create but is antithesis to Battlefield's core design.

On topic, I've started up Metro 2033 and gotten about halfway into it. It's pretty good so far and quite tense. I've set the spoken dialogue to Russian for authenticity and it feels like playing a good Timur Bekmambetov film. My only major complaints are that it's a bit rough around the edges.

[dsheinem]

It's solid, but still my least favorite campaign

In terms of campaigns, I'd rank them:

1) Halo 2
2) Halo Reach
3) Halo
4) Halo 3
5) Halo 4
6) Halo ODST

[BoringSupreez]

It's solid, but still my least favorite campaign

In terms of campaigns, I'd rank them:

1) Halo 2
2) Halo Reach
3) Halo
4) Halo 3
5) Halo 4
6) Halo ODST

I knew you shared your love of Reach with me, but I had no idea you held 2 in such high regards.

[isiolia]

No Deus Ex game is a "slight" RPG. They're RPG's first and FPS second. Depending on how you play Human Revolution most combat can be done from third person as in Gears of War. Dishonored has only one ranged weapon and a few grenade types for the player to use. The enemies tend to be armed with swords or very slow firing pistols so there isn't much shooting. The onus is on stealth and precision strikes. It plays closer to Thief or a stealth build in an Elder Scrolls game. That is why I discount these games as traditional FPS. COD on the other hand is all about combat with projectile weapons. I think saying it's on-rails is an exaggeration. It's just designed in such a way that you cannot miss its set pieces. This is fine for the experience it is trying to create but is antithesis to Battlefield's core design.

Compared to Fallout 3/NV or Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines though, the Deus Ex games stand up a lot better as FPS games. Beyond that, the kind of objective oriented gameplay that is being lamented as "missing" in modern games is present. They might wind up being more like stealth titles if that's how the player plays, but that flexibility is something you specifically mentioned about Perfect Dark and Goldeneye.

Either way, whether they're labeled as FPS or RPG games first, they are out there.

I didn't mean to say that COD is on rails per se, but more to consider the influences of the currently popular blend of elements. Like you've said, it's about the experience the game is trying to create. The more linear or scripted encounters in some games might be the evolution of rail shooters, light gun games, and so on. In that respect, they'd be a marked improvement in player freedom.

[Ack]

I know the argument is that Battlefield and COD are bought for their respective online experiences but something like Halo manages to have both. Just something that's been bugging me for a while.

To go back to an older point, I think there are some considerations to make:

1. Battlefield was always built for multiplayer, from the first iteration. A single player experience will always be tacked on because that was never the focus of the series.

2. COD and Halo both originally offered a mixture of singleplayer and multiplayer. The original Call of Duty's singleplayer is one of the most interesting in all of singleplayer FPS, because it gave views of different battles throughout WW2 from the differing perspectives of US, UK, and USSR soldiers. It combined this with a large variety of multiplayer levels with differing weapons options based on what militaries would have battled in those areas, thus enabling a German perspective as well. The difference between the two would have been their release format: online multiplayer was already popular on PC when Call of Duty released, but could still be considered in infancy on consoles. By the first iterations, COD and BF were already playing with the limited weapon sets that Halo helped popularize.

3. Inspiration should also be considered. Battlefield was the first of the major WWII titles to turn to modern warfare with the release of BF2(though it did attempt a Vietnam-based game the year before), which did extremely well. Call of Duty stayed a WWII-based series(when everyone was complaining about WWII FPS) before making the switch to modern military combat in a move that combined inspiration from both Battlefield 2 and Halo(such as a focus on console-based multiplayer, the already mentioned limited weapon carry, and regenerating health, all things Halo helped popularize in 2000s FPS). We have COD:MWs now because of Battlefield, but also because of Halo(which admittedly was inspired by the likes of games like Marathon, Unreal, and Half-Life).

[Stark]

It's solid, but still my least favorite campaign

In terms of campaigns, I'd rank them:

1) Halo 2
2) Halo Reach
3) Halo
4) Halo 3
5) Halo 4
6) Halo ODST

Drop Halo 3 to the bottom for me and that's my list. I really didn't care for 3 all that much. Still a Halo game though so I enjoyed it, just it's the least of the pack.

[Xeogred]

I had to rethink it a bit haha... I guess I'll admit I would probably put 2 above 3 as well at this point. 2 kind of messes up the story and does some weird stuff, but 3 was just straight up PG to me and cheesy. Dunno if that makes sense. 2 is probably twice as long at least.

[TheRev]

I rebought Bulletstorm for PS3 Last week and that's what I'm playing.