Dusk is a 90s style shooter from the mind of a teenager (2016)

>Halo's trick was to sloooow the action down.

I agree that the action was slower, however, Halo's real trick was designing a set of weapons that were fun to use, but were mostly horribly inaccurate. The sniper was the clear exception.

I did a controller VS mouse/keyboard competition with Halo 1 on PC vs the best console Halo player in my Battalion when we were deployed to Kuwait. We would both use the same weapons at the same time for most of the games to make it fair and objective since we were doing it out of curiosity. We were mostly even with the majority of the weapons. With the shotgun the console player had a clear advantage although I don't know why because I would have assumed a mouse would still be faster (maybe it was just me). When we were using sniper rifles, however, with my mouse and keyboard vs a controller it was like playing against someone that had never played Halo before. The mouse was just too quick and accurate and at that point Halo hadn't developed a really egregious form of aim assist yet. The funny thing about this last observation was that I was the one that had barely ever played Halo.

Note: I don't look down on people that prefer gaming on a console and I have enjoyed my Switch/PS4 immensely. For some genres an analog controller is objectively superior without purposefully implementing a software advantage to balance things out like many games choose to do with aim assist. I do tend to agree with Shroud's opinion that when it comes to competitive play at a certain level of MM rank they should just have separate queues for each controller type. Ultimately its a tradeoff though because if queues for a game like COD:Warzone were forcibly separated the game's community on PC would have died completely after a month or two like previous games did.

It’s interesting to think about the constraints that bring about a level of self-narrative in games. Here you point out the graphics, and I think mostly textual games like the Football Manager series also evoke these feelings. But on the flip side I think a lot of modern open world games are a response to the very constrained paths and mazes of the some eras of first person shooter, giving players back the ability to follow their own story to an extent.

I think RPGs especially have paid a big price as fidelity has gone up. The move to voice acting lost us rich, broad textual interactions with every NPC, the waypoints-and-cutscenes that give us almost film-like narratives mean that role play is now largely limited to a small number of paths (good/evil or strong/stealthy). The complexity of these games has really gone down overall, and while they’re often wonderful storytelling experiences you’re right it’s far less _your_ story in many modern games.

When there is a lack of information, our imagination works. It is taken to the extreme with roguelikes (with ASCII graphics) such as ADOM. Even now, Jupiter Hell (the successor of DoomRL) is less attractive for me because of its polished graphics.

But I think that there is another aspect - polishing gameplay & pace. Contemporary shooters often have too many cutscenes, too many things to add to the story (and equipment, and everything) that distract from instead of complement the experience. The minimalism of games like Doom, with a fast, uninterrupted pace, is still a masterpiece. Fine-tuning mechanics is hard.

What I like about 90s shooters is how little fuss there is to get to the action. Doom, you launch it and can be killing things within 15 seconds. With modern shooters, it loading, loading, game selection, lobby, connecting, loading, cutscene, weapon selection, tutorial, realizing you need to grind to get better weapons, pay for better weapons, mission objectives, notified there's an update, enter your credentials, reset your password. Start game. die. wait in the lobby for the next round. maybe then you get your first kill. Mentally taxing. i miss the simplicity of old games.

Which games do you use as reference for "Contemporary shooters", and did you actually play them?

A pattern I see each time there are discussions about games, is to compare games in the past, actually played, with contemporary games, as observed in reviews or youtube videos (which, additionally, biases towards AAA-games, since they have more coverage).

To answer the parent:

> Just the other day I was wondering whether these old games were just so much fun because I was much younger and it was simply something new and exciting to me, or whether there's something else to it.

This is the nostalgia lens, and there are a couple of reasons.

The first is that today the gaming landscape is considerably wider than it was, because the barrier to entry is considerably lower, but one instinctually considers just the AAA games, and additionally, the noisier ones. There has been "one" Doom and Quake for some time, and with reasons - there was one Carmack only. Today there are plenty.

Second, one forgets very easily how games could have poor mechanics. From the article:

> But not everything from the past is being included in Dusk. “I want to avoid unintuitive navigation and overly obscure puzzles,” Szymanski said. Not everything transfers so well into the present day.