History of Movement In FPS(first-person shooter) Games

FPS games have been around for ages.

Now the first big fps game with a sizable player base was Quake. Quake revolutionized the genre because of the complex movement systems and creator of many concepts such as air strafing bhops(bunny hop) rocket jumps and many more complex tasks that can be performed during combat also the TTK(time to kill)was very low which meant there wasn't a lot of room for error this spiked a meme that “everyone that played quake competitive has 200iq and a phd in physics. The setting was still a somewhat small arena due to hardware limitations.

This was until the game battlefield came out with huge maps never seen before in a multiplayer FPS game. The next generation of games were a little bit different. Since the hardware got better, bigger maps where possible, and also the style of games changed. Devs moved to a more military setting and art style around 2005. With very realistic settings and effects, the devs removed a lot of movement systems. So then you have CS source COD2 BF2. This era made FPS games very popular since the gameplay was very simple and easy.

All you had to do was run and shoot nothing about bunny hops or so. Valve saw this flaw and in 2007. They made TF2 with intent to renew older movement systems such as air strafing and rocket jumps also they added some new ideas such as sticky jumps and c taps and more skillful maneuvers. -TEAMFORTESS 2 2007

After TF2 the COD devs saw there was a great increase in people wanting movement in fps games. So they tried working on it now the problem was that they couldn't copy valve games 1:1 because they were running on a different engine. Valve made Source engine that originated from Quake and COD was running on the W engine which was way better at calculating graphics and effects than movement.

So the cod team tried to implement new simple and straightforward movement-based abilities such as sliding and wall-running, but since these systems were underdeveloped the older communities didn't like them and stayed to their older games but the newer players didn't care and wanted to upgrade to new software anyway. In 2016 a lot more changed. Blizzard made an FPS for the first time in history. This game was very much in the public's eye because it was supposed to be the successor to TF2.

This game was called Overwatch. Overwatch had a lot of similarities to TF2 so the TF2 community got very hyped. Overwatch dumbed down a lot of concepts from TF2, for example, you don't have to press 5 buttons at perfect timing anymore you can just press e.this of course meant that the game died a year later and the competitive scene with it.

-Mirrors Egde 2008

Another thing that happened in 2014 was the release of Titanfall2. Now, Titanfall1 was very good in concept trying to take elements from Mirror's Edge, a first-person parkour game that polished wall running and sliding. This promised well but it was very underdeveloped so it crashed right after release. But in 2016 Titanfall2 came out with a very polished movement system; they also took note of older games like quake and made the ttk very low . This with all the knowledge of older games made a very great movement based fps game.However EA the publisher wanted it to be released in between COD and Battlefield1 so Titanfall 2 never got much attention .

Titanfall 2 -2016

In 2015 a gamemode called battle royale was conceptualized in some gaming communities when a mod in the game h1z1 and rust was made. This however was only a small community mod and not known outside of rust and h1z1 groups. This all changed with the release of PUBG in 2017. The game exploded in popularity and what many people thought of as a trend became one of the biggest catalysts of modern gaming. Later in 2017 more devs and publishers were interested in the whole craze of battle royale.

-Fortnite 2017

The same year the Fortnite came out. Fortnite and PUBG were very simple and similar games with very different art styles. They didn't really focus on the combat or the gameplay and more on the maps and the looting system. Publishers took note that simpler, easier games sold way better so dying developer teams like Respawn , the team that worked on Titanfall2 were interested. In 2019 Apex legends was published. This was one of the best examples that games are becoming simpler and devs are more focused on the mainstream demographic by removing 90% of movement from Titanfall and making a battle royale. This was not the first time this happened tho Activision and EA realized this years ago pumping out the same COD And Fifa game every year with a new price . In 2020 a COD battle royale came out.

- RTX 3090

Now this all might sound bad but a lot of the old communities remain. TF2 Titanfall2 and even Quake still have amazing player bases. This also happened before when hardware got better devs wanted to make bigger games rather than competitive polished ones. Especially with the core i10 being rumored and the RTX3090 coming out, PCs are getting way stronger recently. The difference from then to now is that the player bases are more divided than ever . A COD player will never try Titanfall2 even though they are similar games.

-Timur Jan Klink