My open letter to all FPS developers.

Dear FPS Developers,

My name is Kirk and I am the lead author of Gametrash.com, a up and coming gaming website run completely by gamers. We don't get paid, and we don't have ads, so we can say essentially what we want. In that vein, I've decided to send this list of 10 things you could do to stop making Mediocre shooting games.

Now, I know to yourself you're thinking "Well, this kid is a looney, we're selling tons of games!". Yes, that is true. For some reason, the market is apt to soak up anything you put out, be it worth playing or not. However, think about it for a second. At some point, people are going to get sick of the same old FPS games the market presents to them. The amount of sheer hours spent on your WW2 clones is coming dangerously close to exceeding the amount of hours WW2 actually lasted. Come on.

So, let me get started. These are 10 pointers to take into account when you make your next big old shooter game. Of course, you don't have to obey them and you probably won't, but I guarantee by following them you will make a lot of gamers happier.

10. Become innovative with the weapons (The shotgun is old).

When I load up a shooter game nowadays, I can pretty much expect the same old weapons- the pistol you start with, an automatic, and a shotgun. If you don't have those weapons, it's almost as if you broke some sort of FPS developer fraternity rule. Don't forget, too, that only one type of weapon is allowed, because again, the Fraternity will dress up in black robes and beat you.

That's not how it works. I could go to a pacifist convention and see a better collection of weaponry than what I see in even the "Big Seller" shooters. The real world does not have one brand, model, and style of weapon each, and neither should your game. This would make the game a lot more intuitive- think about it: Just create a different 3D model and adjust the damage it deals or the distance/speed of the bullet. A few keystrokes and some copied code, and you now have yourself another weapon. This could go on ad infinitum, because no gamer will legitimately complain about having a variety.

The advantage to this system is obvious. Instead of profiting on the fact the player has little weaponry to make the game "Hard", you could load him up like Rambo and have him fight through, but since he'll have weaker weapons, it will be a different kind of challenge. Look at the Counter Strike community for this, guys who play that game know all the guns like the backs of their hands.

9. The controls should be as simple and responsive as possible.

Okay, the FPS industry finally figured out that WASD is the best mode to go and to not mess with it, thank god. Now let's go a step further and try to make the game as simple on the wrists as possible. Sticking the "Use" key on L in a WASD format game is not the way to make the game easy. Forcing me to use the numeric keys, be they the standard Alphanumerical keys or on the numpad, should be punishable by death.

Why not think logically and actually look at your hands? Okay, my left hand is on WASD (Or my right hand on IJKL, depending on my primary hand). What are the most accessible keys? Why are you forcing me to hit 0 to whip out a melee weapon when I'm probably going to get the most use out of it at 1? Why not drop the whole "Turning" theory with Q and E and let me use those to hotswap weapons? I know most of the industry's games have interchangeable keys, but the first thing I do when I boot up a game is not change the control layout.

This also applies to the mouse. I play a shooter game to enjoy myself, not feel the "Weight" of my weapon. If you intend to make my character a weakling, I'll just go outside and enjoy that for myself. I want someone who eats small animals and compacts them in his stomach like a trash compactor. If he has a hard time holding a M4A1, then he's no hero. That being said, my mouse should be responsive and not require 300 movements to do a 180.

8. Actually get someone who can write a story to do a story.

1. Introduce badass.
2. Bad thing.
3. Badass deals with bad thing.
4. One liners that makes likes from "The Evil Dead" look intelligent.
5. End!

The following layout above is OLD AND SHOULD NOT BE USED ANYMORE, EVER. If you even get anywhere close to that, then you should call up the FPS Developer frat and beat him soundly. While I said above I wanted someone strong and able to handle his gun, I do not want the hardcore-marine-that-says-one-liners-and-fights-off-generic-enemy-scum. You come up with an alternative.

7. Endlessly repeating hallways is not the way to make a longer level.

Bungie, I'm looking at you. The way to make a good level is to not come up with one room that looks good and continue it until the gamer is convinced it's an endless dungeon. How exactly in the hell does a small room your character enters turn into 3,000 perfectly square equal rooms? It doesn't in real life, and it shouldn't here. The concept is to make an interesting level, not one that lasts a long time.

For example, games like Grand Theft Auto pride themselves on being huge, but they might as well have used a copy and paste brush to apply all of the cityscape. It gets monotonous. At some point, I want to see snow, I want to see rain, I just want to see SOMETHING different.

What would be interesting is to do more European cities like Half Life 2, except don't barricade them up like it's the 30's and you're hiding from the black section of town. Hell, nothing would be wrong with doing a kind of Dawn of the Dead style mall. It certainly would be confining, but add that kind of thing to a zombie game and you have instant fun.

More examples? Real life things. Go outside. Yes, there is a ball of fire in the sky, it scares me to peices. Now, see everything around you? That is your new landscape. Government buildings? Sure! Neighborhoods? Why not? Skyscrapers? Go for it. Nothing could beat a firefight in a neighborhood with huge houses to enter and hide in, especially if it was a CTF style game. Just think about it. The stereotypical Alien Lab or Military Complex is older than god.

6. The answer to "How do I make a game scary?" is not "Let's make it dark!"

Almost every "Serious" FPS I've played does this at one point or another. I don't know if this is your way of not having to draw stuff on the screen, or what. But regardless, don't make me crawl around in the dark for hours. Give me a flashlight. Hell, why not actually set it up where you can turn on lightswitches inside of buildings that will give away your position?

The issue here is again realism. Would a complex laboratory mysteriously "Forget" to install independent circuit safety lights? Hell no. If they're willing to drop millions on fancy emblems and apparently half the world's ammo supply, they can afford emergency lights.

5. Stop that platforming crap right now.

Unless you let me in third person or somehow make this simple, STOP IT. Forcing me to go from hardcore speed action to trying to jump on top of a bookcase is stupid. Making me do it while shooting my gun is even worse. I'll be glad to multitask, but killing me because I can't make it to your one-pixel-by-one-pixel platform in the middle nowhere is a pain.

Again, I must stress realism. Real people cannot jump 5 feet in the air. Nor do they commonly retain a perfect grip on a weapon and hop from stone to stone across a river. Now, that can happen, but do they commonly fall into a pit that instantly kills them? No. If I fall into a river, the worst that will happen is I'll get nasty wet socks. So if you're going to do it, stop the heavy penalization.

4. Mods, mods, mods.

Let people modify your engine to their liking. Look at what Half Life has done- probably the most modded engine in the history of gaming, and it has only benifitted from it. Zombie Panic, Brain Bread, The Specialists, you name it. Hundreds of mods. So when YOU stop playing the game, someone else can. Great, huh! It's taking half the load off of you.

(PS: And if the mod community HAS to fix something in your engine, like Doom 3 and the duct tape mod, that is a serious problem, but it's a lot better than constant bitching from reviewers.)

3. One intelligently coded enemy is better than 30,000 poorly coded ones.

(This has a collary: If you are making a horror/zombie game, 30,000 poorly coded zombies tend to be a little scarier than one "Fast zombie".)

The big principle of this lesson is to stop throwing random enemies at people. Just because you CAN generate 300 spiders that will screw up the player does not mean you should. I personally get tired of enemies. It is MUCH scarier and harder for me to go up against something I don't know what to do with then to see "Just another alien" and know the exact moves to kill it with little to no lost heath on my part.

Oh yeah: For those of you cool enough to develop a good zombie game, do remember that it's much funner to play multiplayer, ESPECIALLY if you let some players be zombies and have a "team". In general, spend much less time on the AI of zombies and much more on the ability to load hundreds of them at once. Obviously, this is cheap, but if you exploit this correctly, you will notice how much effort has to be taken for even the simplest of enemies when they hit you in huge numbers.

2. Multiplayer should be SIMPLE AND FAST

I know technology is getting more advanced, but multiplayer should be quick and simple. When I play a game that has rounds that can last less than a minute, I don't want to take 10 minutes to load it. Simply put, have a second .exe for Multiplayer, or just generally make it lighter. Let it run in a window. Let it run on the low end graphically. In general, just let me play and not download.

The same thing should apply to the games themselves. Add more game modes, but for god sakes, don't make them needlessly complex. All I and my friends want to do is get in and blast each other, not wait for the pimple texture on my character's face to load.

1. Absolutely no more Sci Fi or WW2 shooters.

N-O. This is an absolute. These are overdone and old. EVERYONE is sick of them. Get that new story writer you have that doesnt suck and tell him to do something original or interesting. Historical shooters are not interesting, especially when they become so obsessed with the history they forget that we're all going to make fun of it. It doesn't matter if you get the design of the stiching on a Nazi uniform right when all we'll do in it is voice chat spam Hitler speeches.

"Extreme" gaming is synonymous with stupid cliches, so don't do that either. Hardcore rock? Meh. XTREME GAMING? No. How about making a shooter game based on your ability to cleanly and quickly kill the enemy? How about a zombie survival shooter where you have extremely limited ammo and play with friends? Even better, how about a game that recreates gang warfare and allows players to build a Family/Yakuza empire and run a city? In all three examples, the Single Player and Multiplayer modes could be seriously enjoyable.

But no. You FPS developers continue to develop Historical Shooters that make most of the industry want to vomit. Come on. There's so much more than that. Just try it- I promise you that you will get a much better response to your game (So long as you don't mess it up, of course).