I absolutely cannot stand it when people talk about how FPS have not evolved.
You look at what they are doing on the various fronts it is pretty impressive if taken on a year-by-year basis. If you compare, say, a turn based RPG and how the system has developed and then look at an FPS which has grown from Wolfenstien and Doom to games that include full free look, physics and semi-destroyable worlds, voice and gesture acting, both linear and divergent/open gameplay, vehicular based gameplay, coop, online single and teambased (with a ton of robust modes from DM, elimination, conquest, CTF, objective, and so on), the ability to interact more robustly in the world (take cover, lean, crouch, crawl, jump, climb, grab items and manipulate them) and so forth. The problem is there are so many FPS titles in general and they are very popular. Yet compared to many genres (sports, racing, etc) FPS have evolved significantly.
What makes a good FPS is not reinventing the complete wheel each time, but instead (a) building on the ideas that work and (b) building a solid base for the game with excellent balance and (c) introducing a couple new gameplay mechanics, that are well thought out and work within your game design, and making them intuitive while further immersing the gamer.
As my post history will say I have been pretty cynical about GOW. Epic has been hit and miss IMO, and their SP FPS have not been very great IMO. But having now seen footage of the nearly complete game and seeing, for myself (not IGN, Gamespot opinions etc) how the mechanics work I think they did a great job. The controls look tight and work great with the limits of a gamepad. Further, the over the shoulder view is very well done. Not the first FPS to do so, but there are not a lot who have done so and GOW looks to be one of the best, if not best, so far at using it. The view angle and sense of motion are great, and it matches the cover system well. Epic also has taken a step the opposite way in balance by going with a method that requires more bullets per enemy to take them down (FPS have been tending more toward realism in recent years). That puts more pressure on tactics, taking effective cover, and in MP work as a team. The balance between cover-and-shoot and walk-and-shoot and rody-run and roll looks to be a really solid foundation. PDZ tried cover (nice try but some issues) and GRAW seem to be a nice effort in the realism arena, but GOW seems to be pushing the other way. And we haven't seen much yet--bosses, vehicles, etc are all in there, but we haven't seen much of them yet.
So yeah, GOW could be done from a User gameplay perspective on the PS2, maybe even N64/PS1 (cannot say much about the AI, and of course the graphics themselves and scope/vision of the game would have to be completely altered), but from a game mechanics perspective that doesn't say much as most games can be done on older hardware with some tweaks and downgrades.
But that is more of an area of design: Are you designing your game around a gameplay concept OR are you designing gameplay around a technology. The former need not be inferior compared to the later, and indeed, in many cases technology based gameplay can be quite shallow and redundant.
Just like last fall, these forums are gonna explode with the typical bickering about what looks good, what is innovative, what is better, etc. But obviously Gears of War is a new twist on the FPS genre and doing some new things and going a direction very different from, say, UT2007. You will be hard pressed come November 2006 to find a FPS that puts many of the things GOW together in a single box at the quality level and balance they seem to have achieved. Of course it has some rough spots (Arnuld based voice acting is poor design IMO, and 12 hours is too short for me, although solid MP is where longevity is at imo) but so far it is looking good and has come together as a package with a solid framerate too boot. Of course the finished product has yet to be played so it could still be better/worse than we expect. Epic has been hiding a lot (we hope) to prevent overload, so hopefully there are some surprises.
about the "bad textures" in GOW.
