6 Best Forgotten Features Of FPS Games

Horde FPS Modes

With a few cases like Treyarch’s Call of Duty games and Doom Eternal, the bonus horde mode seems to have gone away from shooters. Even Halo has given up on the idea. The last game to have its own Firefight mode was Halo: Reach in 2010.

Instead, the idea of crowd mode has become its own kind of first-person shooter, where that’s pretty much the whole game. It’s a shame, because swarm modes really added to the value of games at a time when games seem to offer less and less over time even though their prices keep going up.

Interactive Map Elements

Players used to be able to load into a game and change something about it with the press of a button. Halo 2 and 3 were especially good at this because the maps Zanzibar and High Ground both had gates that players could open whenever they wanted. Call of Duty: Ghosts also played around with this idea at one point, but sometimes the way it was done left a lot to be desired.

This idea made the games it was used in more fun and remembered by adding a new level of complexity. It’s too bad that most current multiplayer FPS games don’t have this cool feature any more.

Parkour Mechanics

For a while, it seemed like every shooter had to have some kind of advanced movement system that featured a lot of parkour moves. Titanfall is the best example of this trend because it started it. However, it doesn’t look like there will be a new Titanfall anytime soon, and most, if not all, of the first-person shooters that tried to copy it have gone back to their “boots on the ground” roots.

You could say that it just got too famous, so gamers got tired of it. However, there’s no reason why shooters can’t have some cool parkour moves every now and then.

Alternative Fire Modes

Anyone who has played any of the Half-Life games knows what “alternative fire” or “alt-fire” is. One button is for the weapon’s main shooting mode, and the other is for something completely different. In Half-Life 2, the SMG can both fire in full auto and throw grenades, which is a great example.

Backrooms Game is probably the only current shooter that tries out this idea, though it’s less of a “alternate fire” and more of a way to switch between two different ways to shoot. Aside from things like this, however, shooters don’t really have alt-fire anymore, which is a shame because it gives some guns more personality and uses outside of their main purpose.

A.I Squad Commands

It’s not as common as it used to be to be able to take charge of a squad and give different kinds of orders to A.I. partners in real time. Star Wars: Republic Commando is a good example. It puts the player in charge of a squad of clone soldiers, each of whom has a different job and can be told to do different things.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, which puts a lot of stress on tactical squad-based movement, is another great example. If this idea shows up at all in more modern Tom Clancy games, it is usually in a much simpler form.

Multi-Character Campaigns

This is when a game lets the player play as different characters, either as part of a single-player campaign or as part of a split or episodic campaign. This is a great way to describe the game Aliens vs. Predator Classic 2000, in which the player can choose to play as a xenomorph, a predator, or a colonial marine. Each character has different skills, weapons, movement, and levels. In the old Call of Duty games, there were also separate missions for each country.

Other games have toyed with the idea, like Halo 5, which had both a Master Chief side and a Locke side to the main story, with Locke’s side taking up the vast majority of missions. However, this idea has become less popular as FPS games have either gone for simple campaigns or gotten rid of them altogether in favor of online multiplayer.