5 Things That Will Make A First-Person Shooter ‘Perfect’

Everyone who games has played at least one First-Person Shooter in their life. Good or bad, each FPS game has flaws. Therefore, I’ve come up with 5 things that will make a bland shooter explode with sheer awesomeness.

#5 Have a decent amount of time to develop it.

Every developer has a set amount of time to create a game, test it, and have their publisher release the game for the market. One developer could take a year to create a game, while the other could take up to say 3 years. It all matters that you have enough time to create a solid title for the potential buyers. Development for games should be 2 years minimum. The amount of time is critical for a miss to a hit game for the market.

A team of testers finding bugs in a Pre-Release of a game.

#4 Have a Beta Release Before the Final Product.

Beta testing is the process in which the developers release a game thats passed the ‘Alpha’ stage of production to users for software testing before its official release. This is used to find bugs, glitches, exploits, and ect. that the testing team couldn’t find. If a team skips a beta phase in their stages for the advancement of their game, then there could be possibility of negative comments and feedback to the developers for creating such a uncompleted product. You wouldn’t spend your hard earned cash on a buggy product. So simply it’s put like this, ‘unfinished’ game = Less potential buyers = Less Money for the companies.

A Beta image for Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet™ Beta.

#3 Everything Needs to Be Balanced

Every serious First-Person Shooter fanatic takes the art of balancing the content from the guns, ‘boosters’, perks (via giantbomb.com), equipment, and ect. very passionately. No one enjoys being constantly battered by a opposing member of a team with a unfair under-advantage. Creating everything to be uniform with each other constitutes to a fun and entertaining video game. If the developer makes something in the multiplayer or single player game unbalanced, then they should go back make it so that it is and release a patch for it.

A well known unbalanced 'perk' from the best selling Call of Duty franchise.

#2 A Great Multiplayer

If you’re planning on making an FPS title, then you can’t make one without Multiplayer. Multiplayer is the bloodline behind any shooter title. Great titles like Call of Duty (series), Halo 3, Battlefield (series), and Gears of War 2 all made themselves known for having outstanding multiplayer. Establishing a game with only a single player mode will have people leaving the title under their game stack. Replay value is fundamental for a successful game. There are some games that do great without a multiplayer aspect as for say Bioshock, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Fallout 3, and the well-known Final Fantasy, but it is rare for single player only games to have a ton of replay value.

Halo 3™--released in Fall of 2007--is still the most played multiplayer game on Xbox Live.

#1 Excellent Gameplay

Who wants a game that’s all beautiful graphics wise but has horrible gameplay? Sure, some people wouldn’t buy a game that looks like it’s a last generation game, but a game really matters from the gameplay side of things. A perfect FPS needs admirable gameplay that would make people scream for more of that in other games. Gameplay that will push the limits of games for the future; something that has never been done before. For example, MAG from Zipper Interactive, is the first First-Person shooter to have 256-players in one match at the same time on the consoles. That to me shrieks insane gameplay that will have me hooked on for years.

A Gameplay screen of the upcoming Q1 2010 game, MAG from the studios of Zipper Interactive.