The History of First-Person Shooters: Part 4

Brothers in Arms saw Ubisoft again exploring the finer points of NPC squads.

The launch of Microsoft’s Xbox Live service in late 2002 was also to prove incredibly significant in the shift in attitudes towards console gaming, building on some of the promise SEGA had displayed with its Dreamcast-based DreamArena a couple of years before.

It wasn’t all bad news for the PC crowd. There were several exciting headline releases and technological or gameplay innovations in store to justify upgrade costs. Critical acclaim greeted the arrival of Monolith’s excellent Tron 2.0, while controversy raged over whether Deus Ex: Invisible War was as brilliant as the original.

Tron 2.0 launched to negligible sales, despite many a critical thumbs-up.

Meanwhile, Infinity Ward declared its existence with the release of Call of Duty, but few could have foreseen the commercial significance of this brand back in October 2003 – a time when EA was scoring massive worldwide success with the embarrassingly awful console-specific Medal of Honor: Rising Sun.

Techland’s Chrome was less celebrated, but it marked the Polish team out as a developer to watch. A few months later in March 2004, another FPS powerhouse made berth in the form of Crytek, who gave us arguably the first “next gen” FPS engine in the form of Far Cry. CryENGINE gave us lush jungle environments, massive draw distances and AI techniques even more dynamic than those of Halo, which made combat a real cat and mouse affair.

Far Cry. Still lush.

2004 was to prove the most exciting year for the FPS scene since the late ’90s, as id Software released the long-awaited Doom 3 in August. Although critics were divided on the franchise’s newfound taste for moody survival horror, as a cinematic spectacle it was a stunning leap.

Four months later there was even more excitement among the FPS fraternity, as Valve Software finally shipped the long-delayed sequel to Half-Life. Unanimously lauded, it took players on an epic journey through a rich dystopian world. Riddled with advances in narrative technique and physics-based gameplay, it also impressed as a piece of visual art, and won numerous awards.