[Sarafan]

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/04/09/canceled-mega-man-fps-maverick-hunter-unearthed

Could have been great, man, it could have been great...

[MatthTheGeek]

Looks like Yet Another FPS. We have enough Call of Battlefield: Modern Honor of Halo, as far as I'm concerned.

[The E]

If it had been as successful at translating the Megaman gameplay into 3D as the Metroid Prime series, it really could have been great.

Matthegeek: There's nothing wrong with making games using an FPS perspective. It's only the combination of storytelling and gameplay tropes embodied in the modern warshooter genre that's getting stale, not the basic premise of FPSes as a whole.

[Phantom Hoover]

nobody tell matth that fs2 is by definition an fps, it might break him

[TrashMan]

Pssst, matth....FS2 is a FPS.

[MatthTheGeek]

I think you guys' definition of FPS is broken.

[Ghostavo]

So what do you disagree with? That FreeSpace isn't a shooter or that it isn't played in first person?

[General Battuta]

FreeSpace isn't an FPS in any meaningful sense - it's formally and mechanically dissimilar in that it involves the management of kinetic energy through open spaces. Even if you were a dude in a suit with a gun (and sometimes you are, thanks to the magic of modding!) the basic gameplay mechanics are quite dissimilar from the most comparable FPS cousin, Tribes. Orientation and vector changes are too costly to really fit the FPS mold.

[Ghostavo]

I disagree.

Firstly, let's take care of the notion that in FPS the role of the player is one of a person. The person part in the label refers to the perspective. If you replace every character model in Quake with the model of a rock, it's still an FPS.

Then let's take care of the shooter part, since I assume it's the easiest and least troubling part of the definition. The main thing that distinguishes FS in this part from any token FPS is the key mapping. Instead of having to switch "guns", you have a dedicated key for missiles, as other FPS have for instance for grenades.

Finally, what may be more troubling, from what I sense in Battuta's post, the movement of the player. FS has from what I can tell two things that differ from standard FPS's in this regard.

The player occupies a true 3D space, that is, the battlefield can be regarded as a 3D space, unlike most FPS's where while it's a 3D space, we occupy a limited, almost 2D portion of it. We can argue against this doing a mental modification of another mentioned game, Tribes. Let's suppose that jetpacks have infinite fuel and that while maintaining gravity, we remove the environment, specifically the floor. Is it still an FPS? In my mind, it is, and from here to removing the gravity and altering the jetpacks controls is a very short leap.

The second is that the player's speed is controlled by a gauge that doesn't change instantaneously. This differs from the instantaneous WASD standard that the industry has settled with. We can divide this issue in two parts, the gauge and the time lag between the player input and the desired output. The time lag is easily settled in that there are FPS that implement that kind of time lag to simulate a person stopping to run. The gauge, is a design limitation that some early FPS's share.

To be honest, the entire discussion can be summed up with the phrase, "Descent is a shooter".

P.S.
Genres overlap, I'm not implying that all games that employ a first-person perspective and that are shooters are just FPS. A game can have many genres.

[General Battuta]

I think the key difference is the way kinetic energy is managed in the gameplay space. I think there's a difference of kind, not degree, between movement physics in an FPS and a space shooter.

[Lorric]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_flight_simulator_game

[Ghostavo]

I think the key difference is the way kinetic energy is managed in the gameplay space. I think there's a difference of kind, not degree, between movement physics in an FPS and a space shooter.

What do you mean by kinetic energy? The inertia?

[General Battuta]

Yeah. Vector modification - the difficulties and characteristics thereof, the talent in accomplishing the aforementioned -  is a core mechanic in a space shooter to a degree I don't think is really present in FPS games or even 6DOF shooters like Descent. You can't struggle to get from lag to lead pursuit in an FPS, whereas a significant chunk of FreeSpace gameplay involves spending energy and surviving the time required to spend that energy, whether you're trying to get in range, trying to bear on a target turning with you, or trying to outdistance an enemy's weapons.

Of course then you get stuff like Diaspora, which complicates the picture a bit, but hey 

[Ghostavo]

But the FPS label doesn't really answer anything regarding movement mechanics.

Regarding struggle of dealing with lag, I remember having some with both Tribes and especially Battlezone 2.

[General Battuta]

Yep, that's why I mentioned Tribes as the closest cousin earlier in the thread. It also involves a lot of energy management, but it's generally movement vector focused, not orientation focused. Your ability to point isn't constrained by your flight vector.

[MP-Ryan]

Normally I hate semantic debate, but this needs to be said:

FPS = First-Person Shooter.

If:
1.  It is in a first person perspective, and
2.  You shoot things

Then:
The game is an FPS.

Now - there are a large variety of games that fit within the FPS model, among them battlefield-oriented games, tactical shooters, fantasy games (arrows, *****es! ), space simulators, flight simulators, MMOs, etc etc etc.... but on a very basic level, if it's first-person and you shoot stuff, it's an FPS.

...which is why "FPS" is a stupid category to assign to anything and base opinions on.  Matth would have been much better to omit the FPS reference and simply criticize the Call of Battlefield: Modern Honour of Halo stupidity (or as Yahtzee calls it, spunkgargleweewee) which deserves denigration anyway.

[Phantom Hoover]

tbh i agree with most of the things battuta has said, but i feel we shouldn't let the kernel of "**** matth and **** his opinions" get lost amidst a fairly interesting discussion

[General Battuta]

I think looking up the dictionary meaning of 'first person shooter' is about as useful as most algorithmic, rules-based definitions.  We all know what FPS means in common parlance, we all know Falcon 4.0 isn't an FPS.

[BloodEagle]

I think the key here is to distinguish the type 'FPS' from the sub-types 'Bro-shooter' and 'Space / Flight Combat Simulator'.

[Phantom Hoover]

also i kind of resent this weird obsession with lumping halo in with CoD etc., mechanically it's very different