Very thoughtful post. I'm reminded of a quick scene in School of Rock. Jack Black is teaching his class about the history of rock music in a montage, which traces back through so many other music genres that all build on each other.
Which makes me think that you are correct, naming everything a boomer shooter is not really defining it well. They actually all come from a large history of previous games and genres (even a mixture of many), meaning describing them doesn't have to be so reductive. It should be possible to identify their roots better than FPS, Doom/Build clone or "modern".
Most of these new “boomer shooters” are just bad reskinned Doom wads with one or two brutal doom features. It’s also a gimmick genre because its fan base is relatively niche and relies heavily on YouTubers like Civie 11 or Gman for sales and clout. This leads to a lot of nostalgia baiting and “quirky chungus” type decisions by the devs. Everything is derivative in terms of aesthetic without really understanding game design. Boltgun is the perfect example. It’s Warhammer slop which throws you in a room enemies spawn then repeats that. Honestly, most new titles lack the creativity of the Doom or Blood modding scene. Death Wish and Eviternity 2 blow 90 percent of these slop games out of the water.
(Also I kinda hate the irony posting and millennial writing associated with the genre. I get it Shadow Warrior, Blood, and Duke were tongue in cheek parodies of 90s cinema, but does everything have to be like that.)
I feel like there are some genuinely interesting projects coming out of the scene, but yeah, the majority of the games being put out today feel like they're riding a trend. Boltgun in particular felt like it was much closer to Doom 2016 and Eternal, with it just being a pixelated arena shooter more than anything to do with the '90s classics. Still not a bad game, just not what it's made out to be.
Makes me sad that projects like Ashes 2063 cannot be put up on storefronts, meaning they'll always remain undiscovered by bigger audiences that might be open to this style and design. At least Death Wish was added to that Blood re-re-release; shame it was a cash grab.
Yeah Atari has tragically enslaved Monolith which is a shame as they made Blood and Fear two of my favorite video games. I completely agree with you the term is meaningless now and pretty much is solely a marketing ploy. It’s interesting how definitions work especially as a fan of Immersive Sims which is a term no one can agree on.
I’m a huge fan of the MS-DOS / Windows 9x era FPS games, and I experienced firsthand that transition period when shooters landed on consoles. Inevitably, PC games changed as well, adapting to a new audience and new business models: the main thing that felt off to me, compared to the kind of experience I was used to, was health regeneration. It was something that made a lot of FPS fans raise an eyebrow (especially in my niche, where I was basically living on Counter-Strike 1.6 three times a day). It was often framed as a quality-of-life improvement, but for those of us raised on strafe and bunny hopping, it felt more like a slap in the face.
In hindsight, everything was about to change, and only a few of us really noticed. To be fair, Call of Duty quickly started competing at the top in terms of sales, and within four years, with Modern Warfare, it began to establish the dominance it still holds today: inevitably, the industry gravitates toward whatever drives sales, and there’s no way around it: design philosophies shift. Even Doom, Quake, and other games of that era followed what sold best, but with far more freedom, because experimentation was cheaper (though there were still some painful flops... I’m thinking of SiN and Daikatana...).
Maybe we’re still waiting for the next true new generation of shooters :) In the meantime, I don’t know about you, but I’ve got the urge to do another run of Quake II!
Regenerating health was a super big change, yeah. It’s always been controversial as a design choices, but I think most people still don’t realize how deeply this choice affects design. That goes for both multiplayer dynamics and the pacing in single player campaigns. When it comes to single player, it allows developers to get away with putting little effort into encounter design.
Personally I’ve always been more into single player, so in that regard I’m already happy I’ve played some extremely good single player campaigns (Selaco chapter 1; Ion Fury + Aftershock; the first few chapters of Supplice). I kind of just lost a lot of optimism seeing where the genre has gone since.
I didn't think that regenerating health was such a bad thing, so long as it fits the design. I've only encountered it in Halo, and that was designed entirely around that mechanic. First, it's built into the story/lore (you wear armour with a force field that needs recharging, you're not magic). Then the types of enemies, weapons and encounters encourage you to think tactically and on the fly, judging when to push forward and when to find cover. This fits the theme of the military style game. If it were added to Doom then it wouldn't work at all. So I think it depends on the design of the game
For sure, I couldn't imagine Halo with traditional health pick-ups. Regenerating health works really well for that game and it's woven perfectly into the encounter design. I just think that by itself, regenerating health makes it easier for less ambitious developers (which doesn't apply to peak Bungie of course) to put less thought into encounter design without it immediately sticking out.
I've been meaning to write an article like this for some time: I still may yet do it but this is a brilliant and well thought out piece; I share many of your frustrations and am generally starting to despise genres like 'boomer shooter' which have devolved into nothing more than an aesthetic rather than a set of design principles.
Thanks! Yeah, the idea for this article has been with me for many months so I finally had to get it out there. I feel there are a lot of upcoming titles that this article will be relevant for... perhaps for the worse.
completely misses the effect of goldeneye 64 and Halo on the genre though; FPS were very niche before then because they were mostly a pc genre. Those two added cinematic aspects as did xbox's breakdown by namco, which was first game to do all cinematics in game and fp view.
Goldeneye and Halo indeed did a lot to gain the genre mainstream credibility; the former is mentioned in the article, albeit in passing.
Still, from a design point of view, Goldeneye represents a sort of side-track - an important proof-of-concept of the direction the genre could take next, yet without causing this mass craze where every subsequent FPS developer tried to copy it for years. It was created by people who had little experience with first-person shooters and this inadvertently made for a refreshing take on the genre. Possibly without even knowing it, they built on older games like Star Wars: Dark Forces which already pivoted towards a mission-based structure for their levels. Apart from proving the genre's worth on consoles, Goldeneye's biggest legacy is probably the inspiration of Medal of Honor, itself the forerunner of Call of Duty. But by the time Half-Life came out, Goldeneye was already mostly outdated in its approach to a cinematic FPS game.
Half-Life is generally the definitive turning point by which every FPS that came after just couldn't get away with copying Doom anymore. Speaking of which, calling FPS games niche before Goldeneye and Halo really undersells how big Doom was and how big of an impact Half-Life had on the maturing of video games as a whole from a presentation point of view.
Very thoughtful post. I'm reminded of a quick scene in School of Rock. Jack Black is teaching his class about the history of rock music in a montage, which traces back through so many other music genres that all build on each other.
Which makes me think that you are correct, naming everything a boomer shooter is not really defining it well. They actually all come from a large history of previous games and genres (even a mixture of many), meaning describing them doesn't have to be so reductive. It should be possible to identify their roots better than FPS, Doom/Build clone or "modern".
Most of these new “boomer shooters” are just bad reskinned Doom wads with one or two brutal doom features. It’s also a gimmick genre because its fan base is relatively niche and relies heavily on YouTubers like Civie 11 or Gman for sales and clout. This leads to a lot of nostalgia baiting and “quirky chungus” type decisions by the devs. Everything is derivative in terms of aesthetic without really understanding game design. Boltgun is the perfect example. It’s Warhammer slop which throws you in a room enemies spawn then repeats that. Honestly, most new titles lack the creativity of the Doom or Blood modding scene. Death Wish and Eviternity 2 blow 90 percent of these slop games out of the water.
(Also I kinda hate the irony posting and millennial writing associated with the genre. I get it Shadow Warrior, Blood, and Duke were tongue in cheek parodies of 90s cinema, but does everything have to be like that.)
I feel like there are some genuinely interesting projects coming out of the scene, but yeah, the majority of the games being put out today feel like they're riding a trend. Boltgun in particular felt like it was much closer to Doom 2016 and Eternal, with it just being a pixelated arena shooter more than anything to do with the '90s classics. Still not a bad game, just not what it's made out to be.
Makes me sad that projects like Ashes 2063 cannot be put up on storefronts, meaning they'll always remain undiscovered by bigger audiences that might be open to this style and design. At least Death Wish was added to that Blood re-re-release; shame it was a cash grab.
Yeah Atari has tragically enslaved Monolith which is a shame as they made Blood and Fear two of my favorite video games. I completely agree with you the term is meaningless now and pretty much is solely a marketing ploy. It’s interesting how definitions work especially as a fan of Immersive Sims which is a term no one can agree on.
I’m a huge fan of the MS-DOS / Windows 9x era FPS games, and I experienced firsthand that transition period when shooters landed on consoles. Inevitably, PC games changed as well, adapting to a new audience and new business models: the main thing that felt off to me, compared to the kind of experience I was used to, was health regeneration. It was something that made a lot of FPS fans raise an eyebrow (especially in my niche, where I was basically living on Counter-Strike 1.6 three times a day). It was often framed as a quality-of-life improvement, but for those of us raised on strafe and bunny hopping, it felt more like a slap in the face.
In hindsight, everything was about to change, and only a few of us really noticed. To be fair, Call of Duty quickly started competing at the top in terms of sales, and within four years, with Modern Warfare, it began to establish the dominance it still holds today: inevitably, the industry gravitates toward whatever drives sales, and there’s no way around it: design philosophies shift. Even Doom, Quake, and other games of that era followed what sold best, but with far more freedom, because experimentation was cheaper (though there were still some painful flops... I’m thinking of SiN and Daikatana...).
Maybe we’re still waiting for the next true new generation of shooters :) In the meantime, I don’t know about you, but I’ve got the urge to do another run of Quake II!
Regenerating health was a super big change, yeah. It’s always been controversial as a design choices, but I think most people still don’t realize how deeply this choice affects design. That goes for both multiplayer dynamics and the pacing in single player campaigns. When it comes to single player, it allows developers to get away with putting little effort into encounter design.
Personally I’ve always been more into single player, so in that regard I’m already happy I’ve played some extremely good single player campaigns (Selaco chapter 1; Ion Fury + Aftershock; the first few chapters of Supplice). I kind of just lost a lot of optimism seeing where the genre has gone since.
I didn't think that regenerating health was such a bad thing, so long as it fits the design. I've only encountered it in Halo, and that was designed entirely around that mechanic. First, it's built into the story/lore (you wear armour with a force field that needs recharging, you're not magic). Then the types of enemies, weapons and encounters encourage you to think tactically and on the fly, judging when to push forward and when to find cover. This fits the theme of the military style game. If it were added to Doom then it wouldn't work at all. So I think it depends on the design of the game
For sure, I couldn't imagine Halo with traditional health pick-ups. Regenerating health works really well for that game and it's woven perfectly into the encounter design. I just think that by itself, regenerating health makes it easier for less ambitious developers (which doesn't apply to peak Bungie of course) to put less thought into encounter design without it immediately sticking out.
I've been meaning to write an article like this for some time: I still may yet do it but this is a brilliant and well thought out piece; I share many of your frustrations and am generally starting to despise genres like 'boomer shooter' which have devolved into nothing more than an aesthetic rather than a set of design principles.
Thanks! Yeah, the idea for this article has been with me for many months so I finally had to get it out there. I feel there are a lot of upcoming titles that this article will be relevant for... perhaps for the worse.
completely misses the effect of goldeneye 64 and Halo on the genre though; FPS were very niche before then because they were mostly a pc genre. Those two added cinematic aspects as did xbox's breakdown by namco, which was first game to do all cinematics in game and fp view.
Goldeneye and Halo indeed did a lot to gain the genre mainstream credibility; the former is mentioned in the article, albeit in passing.
Still, from a design point of view, Goldeneye represents a sort of side-track - an important proof-of-concept of the direction the genre could take next, yet without causing this mass craze where every subsequent FPS developer tried to copy it for years. It was created by people who had little experience with first-person shooters and this inadvertently made for a refreshing take on the genre. Possibly without even knowing it, they built on older games like Star Wars: Dark Forces which already pivoted towards a mission-based structure for their levels. Apart from proving the genre's worth on consoles, Goldeneye's biggest legacy is probably the inspiration of Medal of Honor, itself the forerunner of Call of Duty. But by the time Half-Life came out, Goldeneye was already mostly outdated in its approach to a cinematic FPS game.
Half-Life is generally the definitive turning point by which every FPS that came after just couldn't get away with copying Doom anymore. Speaking of which, calling FPS games niche before Goldeneye and Halo really undersells how big Doom was and how big of an impact Half-Life had on the maturing of video games as a whole from a presentation point of view.