Did consoles kill level design?

Recently, out of a desperate need to play proper PC FPS games, I have been raking through my steam catalog, looking for a buzz to pump the endorphins.

Upon replaying Dark Forces II and Quake - I came to the logical conclusion any sane young man would adopt, that these have the best maps ever designed in a FPS single player game.

This was a positive experience, however, this also highlighted another important soul searching dilemma, maps are no longer the star of the show. The craft of designing a map, no longer exists. You simply walk in a line, and shoot people. No exploration, no traps, no puzzles, nothing.

Are consoles primarily to blame for this? Specifically, the Xbox with the franchise "Halo", which popularized the genre on consoles, making FPS - predominantly a console genre since the 2000's?

Is this game -

And this console -

Responsible for the standardization of mediocrity?

Consoles are to blame for almost every aspect of a game which is unnaturally held back...

P.S. Why are you using the Xbox and Halo as your example? Did Red Faction and Time Splitters not exist?

The video games you listed young man, did not popularize the genre.

Red Faction and Time Splitters didn't popularize FPS games on consoles?

Uninspired STAAAAAAAAAAPH.

Halo? Halo CE is a fucking maze compare to recent games.

If anything Call of Duty 1 did. And that was PC exclusive. Which people seem to forget nowadays.

False. Medal Of Honor came out before Call Of Duty. Neither of these titles popularized simplstic level design.

Modern Warfare was the igniting Call Of Duty game, this was console focused.

Modern Warfare exists, because of Halo.

ergo - something.

Nope.

Halo ce had open level design and corridors in between so how the hell did it destroy level design, You make no sense BOI!!

Don't feed the village idiot guys.

MoHAA maybe proto-CoD, but it still had some pathfinding stuff.

So did Halo.

So yes.

Stahp.

Please.

I think your just trying to hate on consoles.

Not really...

The degradation of gaming as a whole...not just level design...is a result of people like these:

Trying to appeal and squeeze money from people like these:

The Second culprit that has probably hurt gaming as whole than it has helped it is:

But that's just my opinion.

Neither of these games encouraged developers on mass to jump ship to consoles.

As an older gamer, with extensive experience and knowledge, looking back to another time, the golden days, good days, full of joy,, a young man playing FPS designed for pc platform, Halo had a catastrophic effect akin to that of the Black Plague engulfing Europe. Many started decrying it the end, repetitively asking "is pc gaming dying?" Halo was a paladin wedding the claymore that struck the first significant blow.

Why make complicated games for a small audience when one can quite easily make simple games for a large audience? These last 14 years have been trying times.

While many unjustly blame Call Of Duty, Halo laid the foundation.

Xmen: First Class. Better Call Saul. Star Trek 2009. Lost flashbacks.

Those games where the map is "a" star are still there. The Farcry series has huge maps that aren't mindless. Crysis was a "make your own way to the end of the map" game.

And I agree that many FPS games are quite simple when it comes to level design, but Halo didn't do that. It was COD.

The one everyone loves, COD:MW, is awful. Theres multiple times in that game where you literally stay in the same area and enemies respawn in the same windows, alleys or whatever. Then it kept going where in MW2 you're chasing down a bad guy through alleys between small buildings. It doesn't get more linear and simple as that.

The new Wolfenstein was the same. Most of that game was on rails and there wasn't much diversity to it. I remember one of the more difficult points in the game was not having a lot of fire power and 2 heavy type enemies were advancing. What did that part of the map consist of? A small round room with a pillar in the middle.

Yeah.....even games that those that say they are purist or whatever love fall victim to it.

But nonetheless....Halo didn't do that. Each level in Halo made it so that you could tackle the enemies in multiple ways.

It was COD that did this.

The video games "Crysis" and "Far Cry" feature large flat surfaced maps, not complicated, intricately woven maps. They do not fit in the same category as Quake or Dark Forces II.

Level Design isn't dead.

Consoles still revolutionizing gaming with PC along for the ride

If you think Farcry and Crysis are flat surfaced maps.....then I don't know how to respond to that.

Very true, microtransactions for $80 products is now the norm.

Microstransactions from consoles.....they're from F2P PC games and phone games...shit like Candy Crush.

It's a volition of principles set in place. An end product doesn't mean the start product was inherently evil. Hitler was once a child - devoid of hate. Darth Vader, a mostly happy child slave, without a space helmet.

In that same manner, expansions morphed, price increasing, content limiting. Models grafted, contempt, cynicism applied.

Free2play wasn't always a dirty word. Expanding content during the 1990's, was welcomed.

Then consoles. It seems the xbox and all it's attributes in particular, is a catalyst of much of the illness infecting the industry.

There is literally nothing linking the Xbox to what you're saying in any regard except for the fact that you're saying it.

Sadly, Xbox popularized console internet connectivity, network multiplayer.

Due to this, extreme linkage has occurred.

No the Dreamcast did that, and then subsequently the PlayStation 2, the Xbox simply did it better, it didn't popularize it you muppet...

I'll give consoles the debt of DLC....but just like you said...it wasn't evil in the beginning. DLC is essentially just smaller PC expansions. The practice that has come about in recent times has made DLC a bad thing.

So even still...consoles were not the ones that did it.

But again...even still....F2P an architecture that is naturally devised to extort as much money over time as possible saw it's explosion on PC and smart phones.

LOL is not one of the highest grossing games b/c it charged a one time fee.

My friend: popularized and innovation are two separate things.

Even within the post, you (you) appear to not understand what you are saying - making me, even more right.

Are you fucking high? The PlayStation 2 had more people playing online than Live ever did on the Xbox, there were more people playing Socom online than the whole of the Xbox Live community... The adoption rate of the console was too low to offset this. Like I said, the Xbox did online better but it was such a short lived system and so sparsely adopted that it never took a massive foothold in the market...

You don't know what in the hell you're talking about...

Again my chumling - I recommend you re-read this post, re-read my own excellent post, then apply objective non emotionally charged logic, devoid of ego.

This, yet again, proves I am right.

The 360 is what popularized online gaming for consoles.

The PS2 and even the original Xbox online was a novelty as best. Halo 2 is given a nod many times....it might have paved the way....but nothing else.

Not nearly as many ppl dove into the online world of the Dreamcast, PS2 or Xbox as the 360.

That doesn't mean it popularized it, learn what popularize means baby brain. If something has more people using it, it is by nature more popular....

This reply was far too fast to have taken in the advice given.

Re-read your nonsense which I just completely refuted? No thank you, notice "re-read" as I have already read it...

im pretty sure TC thinks consoles are to blame for cancer and any world tragedy.

In FPS games? I think yes. Controllers aren't as good for aiming as Mouse and Keyboard. They've to tune down the game to make it work for the controller, which means less enemies on screen, slower paced gameplay and smaller levels. Halo started the tradition but it was Modern Warfare that "perfected" it and made it mainstream.

Because a game like Half Life 1 (and also 2 for that matter) was just so incredibly open. Oh cruel consoles, why did you take this away from us?

Play some open world games if you're so incredibly worried about "corridors" and "lack of level design" (what the **** does that even mean lol). There's plenty of them out there.

This actually has some grounding in reality.

During the Xbox era, a bunch of games did have to be simplified, and their levels shortened dramatically, to accommodate the Xbox's limited hardware.

For example, Thief 3's levels were split into tiny areas separated by loading screens, rather than Thief 2's massive sprawling levels, because the Xbox simply couldn't handle the engine. Similarly, Call of Cthulhu's levels were simplified and loaded with respawning enemies because of the transition to the Xbox.

Nowadays, newer consoles would be able to handle bigger and more complex levels...but I guess the design decisions brought about by limited hardware have stuck around.

I assume you're talking about just FPS games, right? If so, then no. Early console FPS games like GoldenEye 007 had good level design. Even Halo had decent level design. COD is what popularized the linear corridor FPS trend, and that's a PC & console franchise.

@uninspiredcup: I don't think you can really blame Halo for all games taking a dip in depth. I still think Halo has a lot going on as far as hidden stuff and easter eggs in its campaign levels, even little things like NPC chatter. Are there FPS games with more depth and exploration? Sure, even Wolfenstein 3-D and DOOM had more of than than Halo. Half-Life definitely goes above and beyond Halo in that respect. But of the modern, fast-pased FPS games, I'd say Halo still leans more successfully on the sum of its parts than just its multiplayer mode. I think it has a much better campaign than the Killzone games, even though I think their multiplayer is kind of better.

I think this dip in quality is kind of going on across the board, and there are probably a lot of factors involved in this. One thing I'd note is that a lot of game studios have closed down over the last 10 years, so now you've basically got the big AAA publishers and the indie space making console games. The big AAA publishers are going to make less niche games that are a gamble, they want to turn the biggest possible profit on their expensive games. They'll make games that are the safest bet, and games that emphasize online multiplayer because that = more consoles, controllers, games and memberships sold.

What in the hell does that have to do with the Xbox in particular? You people are tying things into this specific console as if they only took place on it... At the time the Xbox was the most powerful console on the market, literally twice as powerful as the PlayStation 2, yes 100% more powerful, and you're blaming it for limited and simplified level design?

Please come back down to reality... The Xbox is the console that actually made broader PC level gaming a possibility in the console space, not limited it...

I honestly blame Call of Duty, not Halo.

@nyadc: The Xbox examples were just the first to come to mind, since I read a lot about it back in the day.

It was definitely the most powerful console at the time, but PC developers really struggled with porting games to its relatively weak hardware. This led to a reduction in level size, enemy placement, etc. for some games.

They still continued to make Dark Forces/Jedi Knight and other excellent Star Wars games after Halo though, and the Halo games aren't what I'd call super linear anyway. I'd put more blame on Id turning into shit, and starting from 2008, LucasArts, for whatever reason, began concentrating on garbage like the Force Unleashed instead. If you do want to blame a game for negatively impacting shooters though, CoD4 is that candidate.

Not really.

Halo CEs level design ia bad and repetitive. However I don't think TC made a strong enough case that level design is bad in general. Sure it's different, but games were much longer then.

More like idiotic game developers and even more idiotic consumers killed level design. If Call of Duty is the only shit we buy, Call of Duty is the only shit they make.

Halo could have somewhere of 12 or so enemies attacking you at one time. If i recall....Return to Castle Wolfenstein didn't have that many and it came out the same year.

Slower gameplay, sure.

But thats like saying you'd rather have a Honda Civic Sport or something over a Yukon just b/c it's faster.

They're just different. Just b/c it's slower doesn't mean they make up for it in different ways. Destiny is not as fast paced as Quake 3 arena, but there are several different types of enemies attacking you in the heat of battle.

That reminds me....DOOM3 came out in 2004 and it was nothing but corridors and linear gameplay with like 3 enemies on screen at one time.

So lets not get all on consoles and point the finger at the real problem....developers and publishers.

WTF do you mean consoles killed level design!

No. Accessibility did.