I am a simpleton, so unsurprisingly, the games I tend to play the most are shooter games. Be it first-person or third-person (third-person does get some extra points since you can often dress your character in silly outfits), it’s safe to say more than 40% of my physical game collection consists of shooter games.
I am also an enthusiast of real-world firearms (and yes, I am aware of the excessive gun violence in the U.S and do support measures to combat that, just wanted to point that out), and I tend to favor games that use weapons based on real guns. There are exceptions like Halo and Resistance, though the guns in those games do tend to feature reflections of real guns. As such, games with outlandish gun designs often don’t appeal to me, so I am frequently drawn to a genre that has fluctuated a lot in recent years: the Modern Military Shooter, games like Call of Duty, Ghost Recon, and some others.
There are many games that make use of real firearms that aren’t Modern Military shooters, though the Modern Military Shooter genre is something I keep wanting to explore. Since I’ve been advancing in Game Design myself, I’ve wondered if I myself should make a project in the genre.
Of course there is something I’m concerned with, and many others share the same feeling, are Modern Military Shooters too boring?
To explain this, let’s compare. Take Timesplitters Future Perfect. You go through several different time periods, including fictional ones, using a wide variety of both real and scifi weapons (like grenades that slow down time and a dart gun that makes mutants explode), and combating robots (including steam powered 1920s robots), zombies, mutants, and aliens.
Now let’s look at Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the most influential Modern Military Shooter. It’s a solid game, especially in the multiplayer department, however, while I do enjoy the weapon selection, it does lack any fiction imaginative weapons. The enemies are also lacking in variety, just being basic soldiers of different nations and some helicopters and tanks.
Again, it’s a perfectly solid game, but when it’s trying to take a realistic approach to the setting, it can be difficult to create interesting enemies or levels if they’re just ordinary. A majority of games attempted to emulate COD 4’s style due to it’s excess, generating a mountain of Modern Military Shooters that mostly lacked the same enjoyment of COD 4 and featured bland levels with bland enemies, this was known by many gamers as the “Brown Age”.
For a time, Modern Military Shooters fizzled out and boomer shooters resembling games like Doom became dominant for a time. Eventually, however, Modern Military Shooters began to make a comeback. It thankfully wasn’t as bad as the brown age, as some of these new games did and are performing well.
However, I’ve now shared my issue with creating a Modern Military shooter. One of my ideas was a shooter game that explored several conflicts from the Cold War era, such as the First Indochina War. If I wanted to keep it in a realistic setting though, I couldn’t just add zombies, aliens or mutants, so how would I add some variety among the regular soldiers you fight?
Some shooter games have tried to fix this. Some of the most common enemy types are enemies with bulletproof shields and heavily armored enemies who can only be killed with headshots after their helmet is blown off. Games like Ghost Recon Breakpoint have also used military drones as enemies. While these enemies do require the player to change up their strategy, they still seem rather generic, especially with how much they’re used in numerous games.
One potential way to add some fun to a Modern Military Shooter may be gameplay features. A good example of this is the highly underrated Freedom Fighters (which I’m still waiting for a sequel, stop being lazy I-O Interactive!). At it’s core, it features basic 3rd Person Shooter fundamentals, however the game does shake things up a bit with it’s design.
First off, you have the ability to recruit other Freedom Fighters you find on the streets. You start with only 2 team member slots, but this can later be upgraded to a whopping 12! So you can basically travel with a small army and command them in battle.
Another neat feature of the game was how the missions were played. You are usually given the choice of several areas to attempt to liberate, with the option of jumping between them or returning to base to resupply. This is important, as each sector often has one or more points of interest that can help turn the tide. For example, if you destroy the heliports in the area, Helicopters will no longer appear to attack you in the collection of sectors, or destroying bridges will prevent enemy transports from reinforcing enemy positions in the sectors.
You can also sometimes find prison camps, where you can rescue prisoners to gain Charisma to increase your squad count. Also, early in the game, you don’t have explosives at your base, so you have to raid a supply depot to obtain some. In the last group of missions, you’re attacking the enemy’s island base. You and only a handful of Freedom Fighters manage to invade by boat, so to get more, you need to find explosives and blow open the ventilation tower, which allows reinforcements to enter the island.
These features add some strategic planning to a normally basic game without being too complicated. Metal Gear Solid 3, despite being geared more for stealth, also features a similar system, where the player is able to destroy structures like Food Storage to cause enemies to become hungry and slower to react.
Another game I’d like to mention is Medal of Honor Airborne, where each mission is essentially a very small open world where you can parachute to a destination of your choice. Of course, the game doesn’t feature much aside from just endless shooting of Generic soldiers, so it does falter a bit.
Do you know of any Modern Military Shooters in Realistic settings that are somehow fun, even when you’re just fighting normal dudes? Do you know ways to improve them? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Also, when I say Realistic Settings, I meant like the place setting, not Realistic Gameplay, not a big fan of that...
