FPS,TPS etc war shooter best and worst campaigns -

[Naamaleipuri]

What makes a great campaign? Good gameplay? Riveting story? Fair Challenge? The ability to play it couch co-op!?
Let's hear it.

Best for me would be Ratchet: Gladiator/Deadlocked for the gameplay mostly, but you can't hate the story either.
Halo: Combat Evolved is a close second, on co-op specifically, why on co-op specifically?
Two Spartans. If you're playing co-op, there's always another spartan covering Master Chief's flank, and that's something I miss from current FPSs; A reason for the other player to be there.

Worst for me is probably Call of Duty: MW (2019)
Where do I begin... Romanticizing terrorism, making Russians a saturday cartoon villains who are completely evil and incompetent, trying to make the Russians look worse claiming they did the "Highway of Death" and only killed civilians when in real life.. It was the Americans that killed retreating soldiers. So basically they wanted to make Comrades make look extra foul in the face of kids.

Then there's the completely insane plot of Aliens: Colonial Marines. Somehow that one chick that got facefucked lasted until the end. And that's not even the worst of it.
And apparently it's canon in the movies now!

 

[Dick Justice]

Best: STALKER series. Sells immersion better than any shooter by virtue of its atmosphere and gives the player enough agency that they're rarely pulled out of the experience. The fact that the game is completely playable with minimal to almost no hud helps as well. Games are fundamentally an interactive experience so it doesn't matter if your story's the vidya answer to Citizen Kane, if the player doesn't feel like an active participant in the second world throughout the experience your game's no better than old reruns of Seinfeld. Honorable mention to Cold As Hell for managing to pull this off even in DOOM.

Worst: Modern Warfare 2. Most modern shooters are terrible at immersion with all the intrusive hud elements, pop-up notifications, and hamfisted dialogue, but MW2 went above and beyond the pun-that-I-don't-want-to-make by doing it with an utterly absurd plot and characters that had me eye-rolling the entire game. If Jack Bauer looks at your script and says "it's a bit excessive, innit?" you've got problems.

 

[Naamaleipuri]

Best: STALKER series. Sells immersion better than any shooter by virtue of its atmosphere and gives the player enough agency that they're rarely pulled out of the experience. The fact that the game is completely playable with minimal to almost no hud helps as well. Games are fundamentally an interactive experience so it doesn't matter if your story's the vidya answer to Citizen Kane, if the player doesn't feel like an active participant in the second world throughout the experience your game's no better than old reruns of Seinfeld. Honorable mention to Cold As Hell for managing to pull this off even in DOOM.

Worst: Modern Warfare 2. Most modern shooters are terrible at immersion with all the intrusive hud elements, pop-up notifications, and hamfisted dialogue, but MW2 went above and beyond the pun-that-I-don't-want-to-make by doing it with an utterly absurd plot and characters that had me eye-rolling the entire game. If Jack Bauer looks at your script and says "it's a bit excessive, innit?" you've got problems.

Should I get all of the STALKER? I enjoyed Metro, and they say it's kind of like it, but better?

OH! I loved SPEC OPS the line. The single campaign was... Well got me thinking how we as westerners should just band together and kill the lesser species. The game was way whead its time.

 

[Miller]

I enjoyed Titanfall 2 for the gameplay and the set pieces but I didn't care for BT or the story.
Infinite Warfare was pretty good but they should have spent a bit more time fleshing out the bad guy and the situation in the solar system.
MW 2019 was really bad but the night time missions were well done (it can be really hard in co-op).

SPEC OPS the line

"muh hwite phosphorus! Y-you had a choice, you could have stopped playing the game!"
I think Spec Ops The Line might be one of the most pretentious and overrated games ever made.

 

[millais]

*sips* yep, Half-Life 1 was a good game, spends much of the campaign killing US Marines and glow-in-the-dark Black Ops.

 

[Naamaleipuri]

*sips* yep, Half-Life 1 was a good game, spends much of the campaign killing US Marines and glow-in-the-dark Black Ops.
[/QUOTE]
I played the shit off of HF1 I'm happy that someone remembers the co op campaign! Semper Fidelis

 

[Overcast]

Should I get all of the STALKER? I enjoyed Metro, and they say it's kind of like it, but better?

OH! I loved SPEC OPS the line. The single campaign was... Well got me thinking how we as westerners should just band together and kill the lesser species. The game was way whead its time.

I've heard a lot of mixed things about Clear Sky myself. It's a prequel to the first game, so you probably won't miss too much if you skip it.

Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat are great games though. They also have a fantastic modding community allowing for a lot of replayability.

When you're done with those games, you'll want to try Call of Chernobyl, a mod that contains all the areas throughout the trilogy in one package and allows you to play as any member of the game's factions. It's more so a giant sandbox than the regular games, but I still find myself coming back to it now and again.

Then there's the Misery mods. As the name suggests, they make the games much more brutal and unforgiving. As if you are just a lonely STALKER barely scraping by with what little you have.

 

[Dick Justice]

Should I get all of the STALKER? I enjoyed Metro, and they say it's kind of like it, but better?

OH! I loved SPEC OPS the line. The single campaign was... Well got me thinking how we as westerners should just band together and kill the lesser species. The game was way whead its time.

I tried Metro 2033 and gave up on it after just a few hours. Super linear, enemies seemed deaf, dumb, and blind, no sidequests or exploration, and every enemy encounter was hollywood as hell. Not a single organic moment in the entire game. I don't remember the shooting being that exciting either.

I've heard a lot of mixed things about Clear Sky myself. It's a prequel to the first game, so you probably won't miss too much if you skip it.

Shadow of Chernobyl and Call of Pripyat are great games though. They also have a fantastic modding community allowing for a lot of replayability.

When you're done with those games, you'll want to try Call of Chernobyl, a mod that contains all the areas throughout the trilogy in one package and allows you to play as any member of the game's factions. It's more so a giant sandbox than the regular games, but I still find myself coming back to it now and again.

Then there's the Misery mods. As the name suggests, they make the games much more brutal and unforgiving. As if you are just a lonely STALKER barely scraping by with what little you have.

Clear Sky is fine but definitely not as good as either of the others. It tries to force a faction war mechanic into a game that's not really made for it and the results are weird. It's kind of like GSC spent all their time and effort trying to shore up a weakness that didn't really exist rather than capitalizing on their strengths. It was also the buggiest release and still is the most technically demanding of the games, the main culprit being the fucking godrays at dawn and dusk. The shooting was also made more gamey which I hate enough to quit at almost the beginning, but there's mods now that replace the airsoft and paintball guns with real firearms. It's worth playing, but unless you really want more of SOC it's fine to save it for after COP.

Misery is undoubtedly the single most overrated thing in all of stalker, even more than Lost Alpha. It has a few neat gameplay mechanics that extend the hobo phase longer than normal but comes at the cost of an atrocious art overhaul, writing so edgy you need to wear a stab vest, and balance even worse than fucking SGM. I don't care how much armor you're wearing, 7,62x39 is still a fucking bullet that still fucking kills. If you can't get passed just how fucking miserable everything looks then balance mods for Misery like Les Miserables can make the experience tolerable, even fun if you just want to enjoy the hobomode as long as possible but it's definitely not something to be tried any earlier than perhaps your 3rd playthrough of COP. I've also gotta give a shoutout to coding so bad that it turns a vanilla quest into such bad stuttering that I thought my GPU was failing. This Yandy-dev tier scripting managed to drag me down from triple digit average fps down to <60.

Spoiler: what passes for art on the misery dev team