Playing 'Call of Duty 4' (and other games in the latest wave - like 'Crysis'), you have to think that computer Tactical First Person Shooters (TFPS) have reached a whole new level of sophistication and realism. The eye-candy has reached the point where many of the scenes are near televisual in quality - mimicking closely, as the do, the real events that we see on our news casts from Iraq and Afghanistan.

So I thought, as it's coming up to the New Year, I would take stock of my path to this point, looking back over the last ten years (or more). Let's see how things have changed, and ask 'has it all been for the good'?

In the beginning...(1994)

Well, not right at the beginning - I don't think my experiences playing 'Knight Lore' on the 48k Spectrum are quite relevant. No, our interests lie in TFPS, and for this I would have to start my potted history in 1994 with two games that I can truthful say changed the way I played games altogether - Bungie's 'Marathon' and ID's 'Doom'

The twist in this tale is that I started my gaming not on a Windows PC, but on an Apple Macintosh Performa 630! And this has a particular relevance with regards to the history of computer gaming, because it was Bungie's 'Marathon' - a game designed for and only available (initially) on the Apple Mac that made the games industry sit up and take notice.

Left: Marathon action! Click on picture for larger image. 

 Both games - Marathon and Doom - introduced me to something new and exciting - multiplayer networked gaming. Oh my lord!

It also introduced me to that other gaming phenomenon, the 'LAN party'. Which in those days literally were parties, when a group of us totted our humongous Windows computers to some unfortunates house, along with huge amounts of beer and wine and spent 3 hours un-knotting BNC cable in order to play for an hour before we were too drunk to see our screens! 

Oh, but it get's better...(1999)

And just when I thought nothing could be better than playing three or four friends in a tiny bedsit (with never enough electrical sockets - or potato chips), along came the new object of my obsession - 'Unreal Tournament'.

Now, aside from the fact that 'UT' got me into playing online for the first time, it's place in this story is special because it additionally introduced me to the concept of game 'mods' (game expansions and conversions). Here it was that I got into a mod called 'Tactical Ops: Assault on Terror' - a 'UT' version of some game called 'Counter Strike' that apparently a few people were raving about! The real draw, though, was that the mod used 'real' weapons - 'just like the ones real soldiers use!' - and some very rudimentary tactics.

This is where Tactical First Person Shooters really arrived for me.

When the going get's tough, the tough get Ghost Recon...(2001)

The problem with 'TO' (and Counter Strike for that matter) was that it was little more than dressed up 'UT' or - by that time - 'Quake'. It was primarily 'run & gun', and while there were game tactics, they were little to do with real military or SWAT tactics and as such were not subversive - not allowing the gamer to believe he was taking part in a military operation.

For this level of submersion - or simulation - we had to wait until Red Storm Entertainment released 'Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon'. Now I will hold up my hand and admit that I have never read one of Mr. Clancy's novels, but I am told they contain a nitro mixed cocktail of action and convincing military detail - and for me this is exactly what 'GhR' was, excitement and realism.

Ghost Recon gobbled up my spare time for the next FIVE YEARS! It is a huge testimonial to Red Storm and the game that so many people were happily playing this game for quite so long. To this day there are hardened 'Ghost Recon Classic' fans out there who are still regularly filling server spaces.

When the virtual team became the real team, 'Joint Operations'...(2004)

Since 'Tactical Ops' I had been enjoying the feeling of being a part of virtual team, and I had even dabbled in a short lived membership of a Mac based 'GhR' clan called 'ENS' (Elite Navy Seals). But it was in 2004, when I changed jobs that I became involved in my first taste of real 'clan' membership, when I joined [BIG] - 'Bastards in Gaming'.

This small clan were then playing a game called 'Joint Operations' by Novalogic, a massive battlefield TFPS which, once again, raised the bar for multiplayer military computer games. This game introduced so many new aspects to the game play for me - including many on a 'wish list' I had developed while playing Ghost Recon. For a start - there were vehicles and aircraft you could actually control - oh boy! 

But chief attraction of this amazing game was the fact that you could play with and against up to 150 players online at one time!

Left: 'I'm flying, I'm flying!' Joint Ops had the double whammy of being able to control both land vehicles and aircraft!  And boy did you need them, the maps in this game were some of the biggest I have ever played on. (Which proved a pain at respawn time!)
Picture: GameSpy JO review

The other important innovation this brought was the use of voice comms - specifically 'Ventrillo'. Imagine, no more pushing 'T' to 'talk' - well, type actually! - and no more reliance on pre-defined key macros for tactical orders. Orders and communications now became more instinctive and precise - you could now really start to co-ordinate tactics.

And the hit just keep coming - 'Battlefield 2'...(2005)

The game industry - and computer hardware manufacturers, especially graphics card developers - consistently improved the speed at which they would jump ahead with monumental improvements to the game genre. No sooner had I honed my skill in 'JO' that rumours of 'the next big thing' started to circulate on the game forums. That 'new thing' was DICE's 'Battlefield 2'. 

 But above anything else it was the sheer hype that BF2's launch will be remembered for (along with the huge outcry about the massive upgrade that had to be undertake to your PC just to play the darn thing)!

So ambitious was this project - and so rabid were the demands from the gaming public for it's release - that DICE probably released the game way too early, with the result that some of the promised features (notably destructible buildings, and shooting through certain materials) were not included. What was included, however, were a ream of bugs that took patch after patch to resolve - with some patches actually creating more bugs than they fixed!

But still, Battlefield 2 was a major hit, with huge numbers of player signing up to play the game. It also marked my first entry into competition gaming, as part of my new clan, [OBC] - 'Old Bastards Clan'! (There seems to be a pattern in the names of the clans I join!) 

Oooops, a wrong turning - 'GRAW/GRAW2'... (2006)

Game bugs aside, BF2 had it's problems. In pandering to the broader gaming community it sacrificed realism for ease of play. Nothing wrong with that really, except that a certain proportion of players - myself included - occasionally found the believability of this battlefield 'sim' not quite 'sim' enough. There was still a little too much 'Unreal Tournament' and not enough tactics about what determined who won or lost in a team tournament.

One one very memorable occasion, for example, our team was soundly beaten in a league ladder competition by a team full of players who had perfected a most heinous of game tactics called 'dolphin diving' - a technique which had them 'break dancing' their way around the field completely bamboozling our players. Hardly 'subversive stuff'.

But the alternatives to BF2, when they do come along, had just as many problems - they were either over-complicated and under-developed, like 'Armed Assault', or graphically over-ambitious and lacking the persistence of gamer's profile that had made BF2 such a hit - in the case of  either 'Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter' games.

Left: The superb graphics of GRAW came at a heavy price to the end user. Picture: Ghostrecon.com

GRAW and GRAW2 - the follow-ons from my great favourite 'Ghost recon' - were particularly disappointing, in that they did little more than add eye-candy in abundance, with little acknowledgement that the gaming world had moved on, and that users wanted some sort of in-game 'career record' to mark their success in a game.

GRAWs passing nod to this fact, by allowing upgraded weapons to successful multiplayers (a non-persistant feature which disappeared between milti-player game sessions), simply served to highlight it's deficiencies.

Which brings us back to 'Du-Oh!' - 'Call of Duty 4'...(2007)

The games industry has come a long way - technology wise - in the last ten years of so, and this is plainly evident in how progressively more real looking TFPS games have become. But it is perhaps less evident just how the actual game play has improved over that time. 

Game play improvement can be seen as those areas which have generally lifted the gamers immersive experience and their ability to interact with either other players or the game characters or environment itself.

Above: Street fighting, Call of Duty 4 style. Immersive graphics, storyline and environments were - sadly - not accompanied by a expansive and 'open' game world.

Certainly game developers have progressively allowed us to interact with more and more of our fellow players and successfully improved NPC AI to the point where you can expect a decent enough game in single player mode. But it's in the area of the developing of a player character's career, and that of his team mates, that I think has been the greatest achievement in recent years.

In this DICE and Battlefield 2 must be given greatest acclaim for creating a TFPS world that preserves a players career in a very interesting and submersive manner. By creating ranks, awards and linking these to in game upgrades - albeit in a limited manner - they have created drive and purpose that goes beyond the immediate mission.

Call of Duty 4 - the very latest multiplayer battlefield shooter - should be the pinnacle of this player character immersion. Activision has long experience in the creation of superbly thought out and detailed military SP/MP games, and has continently improved the sense of atmosphere and realism with every episode of it's Call of Duty series.

Above: 'You can see for miles and miles!' - Unfortunately, this lovely big world is a lot smaller 'in game', CoD4 promises so much, but when the chips are down it;s the same old CoD linear 'walk through'. Multiplayer maps are even more restricting.

Yet they have chosen to stay close to a tried and tested single player with mulitplayer death match format that cries 'playing safe', and ultimately disappoints. They have made, as with GRAW, cursory forays into the area of player character career development - again by linking player success in the multiplayer game to equipment upgrades, which they call 'perks'. But, what little progress they have made in realism, career development and quality of graphics they have squandered by not daring to provide TFPS gamers with what they really want - a open game world with which to campaign across far and wide.

Multiplayer maps in CoD4 - while beautiful - are little more than stage sets when compared to the rolling playing areas of BF2, JO or ArmA. So, we seem to have come so far, and yet have been really only been walking in circles. What progress games like BF2 pointed to seems to have melted away once again, and we can only envy our RPG friends whose immersive worlds seem to be expanding ever larger year by year. 

Whether the limits to the TFPS is physical - the resources needed to support such a huge and complex playing area - or the limitations of the collective imagination of the developers I do not know. But certainly all those I know who play TFPS and have been involved with BF2 and the like are now very unsatisfied with the cramped and restrictive game areas of old, and want to burst out into less restrictive spaces...

Maybe 2008 will bring us a game that meets the demands of the players imaginations, and not merely characterizes the limited and linear imaginations of the game creators.

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Promising things to come:

Battlefield 3 | Armed Assault 2 | Operation Flashpoint 2 |

And what else would we like?

'GRAW 3' with a bigger more immersive world and persistent player career, and a 'Joint Operations 2' - JO with the player database fixed, better spawn system and a campaign is somewhere else but the Middle East please!