Mine is OOO for Out Of Office. I always misread it in my head like a ghost and it takes me a few seconds to process. It also doesn’t translate to speech—you have to say the whole thing.
Interested to see if others have similar acronyms they beef with.
The second one not only has a campaign, it’s one of, possibly the single best campaign to be included in a first person shooter, ever. Short, but extremely memorable.
I don’t remember it. BUT I do remember the feelings of being amazed by it.
Titanfall 2’s campaign is very good… I’m not sure if I would call it the “single best campaign to be included in a first person shooter ever” and I feel like that might be overselling it a little bit, but maybe not? I think the main thing that gives me pause is that while it’s great, it still feels a little weirdly like it’s tacked onto a multiplayer game (I think it’s the fact that there’s kind of a huge selection of weapons to the point that it’s a little hard to keep track of and stuff), and I didn’t think the story was all that interesting.
That said… If I’m being perfectly honest, I’m not really sure what campaign I would consider to be better, and Titanfall 2 has at least one very high point! The story isn’t particularly amazing, but I’m not sure if any first person shooter has a particularly fantastic story… Hell, the more I think about it lately the less sure I am that any game has a particularly good story (though maybe “video game story” is just kind of its own category and can’t really be compared to novels or anything else).
I think Half-Life 2 and its episodes are what I think of most immediately when I think of “best single player FPS campaign” and I feel like the lore in Half-Life has a bit of a more interesting mysterious vibe to it… But there’s sort of not much to the story either (kind of intentionally, I guess). I’d also be unsurprised if somebody thought Titanfall 2 was better than Half-Life 2.
In sum… HMMMM. Food for thought! Saying Titanfall 2 has the best single player campaign in a FPS feels wrong to me… but I’m actually not sure I disagree with that take. I think lately I’ve also been having a hard time enjoying first person shooters too. I like them, but I guess the violence is starting to seem kind of dull these days :/.
The one I had in mind as the exception to the rule when I posted that was maybe Doom Eternal. I really, really liked that game. But the more I think about it… Doom isn’t really there for the story. John Romero, though no longer at id, is famously quoted as saying that video game stories are akin to the plot of a porno - it’s expected to be there, but it isn’t expected to be good and it isn’t expected to get in the way of the game itself. New Doom takes itself seriously enough to have lore - pretty good lore, in fact, in my opinion! But I wouldn’t call it… inspired. It is, truly, just the necessary set dressing required in order to orient oneself to the ripping and the tearing. They put a little more effort into it than old doom did but the overall result pretty much plays out exactly like you expect it to. There’s no big twists or turns. There are bad guys, Doomguy arrives to delete the bad guys, and gets a lead on the next bad guys. Rinse repeat until out of funding. And it’s fine, it works. Doom is a game more about the moment to moment gameplay anyway.
So, not Doom. What then? Dusk maybe? Dusk was a fucking good game. Doesn’t hold a candle to Effect & Cause or The Fold Weapon though, in my opinion. Dusk didn’t have characters I could get invested in.
Bioshock is a good contender, but Titanfall is a better game overall imo and therefore takes the W.
The last big ones that come to mind to me personally are Half-Life, like you’ve said, which is an extremely strong contender for this title, and then Fallout New Vegas (yes I am one of those people but believe me when I say it’s a really fucking good game and you should try it)
But even given those challengers TF|2 can sit very comfortably within the top 5 ranking of ‘objectively’ best single player FPS campaigns. It is an absolute banger of a game and I’m eternally disappointed that the series basically got absorbed into Apex Legends. I’d sell my left nut for a Titanfall 3. In the meantime I’m making do with Armored Core.
I think this is a Carmack quote? I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if Romero felt similarly at the time, but it seems a little less their style.
I don’t think this attitude is wrong necessarily, but it really depends! I think it’s fine to just have fun gameplay and no story, and it’s also fine to focus on story too. I feel like lately, though, when I’ve been trying to think of “games with good stories” I’ve kind of had a hard time thinking of any, or maybe I’m just being too critical? It’s certainly true that stories should be different in different mediums, so maybe what it means to be a good story in a game is very different… Maybe they’re shorter and less complex than novels and part of the story is in how the gameplay makes you feel in conjunction with the plot so maybe thinking of the plot in isolation isn’t very fair to it either…
To be honest I’m real turned around on this stuff lately. I’ve always really liked video games, but a combination of getting older and having more responsibilities and having my values change is making me think a bit more critically about them lately and I’m having more meta thoughts about why I like them (which is maybe a bad thing because it can kind of spoil a thing you love a bit, haha, but I think it’s also good to think about these things on some level). Part of this is because my partner doesn’t really like video games, which is fair… They also don’t really like the violence and stuff, which makes me question this a bit too. To be clear, they’re actually super supportive and encourage me to play more games and stuff… But it still makes me think a bit and it makes me think about what they would like and why I like the games that I like (or why I have enjoyed them in the past). I’ve never been particularly scared of video game violence or anything, but I will admit that upon reflection… I kind of don’t want to shoot a bunch of people? And it kind of makes sense that it’s a popular genre because it’s really well suited to the input methods we have and it’s something that ends up being satisfying… But I don’t like war, and I don’t like violence, so it’s kind of weird to have this be a thing that I do all of the time? Not sure how I feel yet.
Dusk is fucking great, but yeah, story wise it’s kind of nothing, other than some kind of x-filesy weird mystery kind of stuff I guess. But yeah, it doesn’t need a great story.
Honestly… I don’t think Bioshock holds up very well these days. I like it and have enjoyed it, but I think it’s mostly a cool setting and idea and falls really flat if you take that away. The story has some interesting stuff but it’s pretty clunky and just feels a bit clumsy. I still like it, of course, but I’m not sure I’d show it to somebody in order to demonstrate how games have great stories, you know? Also Bioshock Infinite really doesn’t hold up in my opinion.
I thought about New Vegas too. It’s arguably more of an RPG and the open world stuff maybe puts it in a different category altogether. It’s a very interesting way to tell a story, though, especially with the links between the DLCs and stuff. I go back and forth between thinking it’s really well done and kind of overrated, haha. I think the world and factions are interesting, but any individual peace of dialogue or quest isn’t amazing, it’s more how everything fits together in aggregate that makes it interesting. It feels like it’s a somewhat innovative way to tell a story, but not fully perfected and polished yet? And Fallout gameplay is certainly far from perfect, haha. I do keep coming back to it, though… Literally started a new run a few days ago.
Anyway, I feel like I’m coming off too negatively :). These are all great games in their own ways! I’m just putting too much scrutiny on things to my own detriment, haha.
Yeah that’s a fair point and I think I feel similarly, re: getting older and shifting perspectives. Much of my own perspective comes from not having played a ton of shooters in the past few years. The ones I do play, I tend to enjoy shooting at monsters more than people these days, but a lot of the ones I enjoy don’t really have a compelling story or campaign to go alongside them. I have in the past reflected on the fact that the overwhelming majority of games I own, play and enjoy are games about violence. It makes you think. But I think that I grew up on a steady diet of fantasy novels of great knights slaying monsters and powerful wizards turning the tides of fate. That culture shaped my personality and as a mild mannered introvert in real life it lets me engage in that hero fantasy without harm to others or myself. I enjoy it and I’ve come to accept it for being that. If you stop to look at it a overwhelming amount of entertainment in general frequently features violence, and I think it’s just baked into our universal human experience. Violence has been a mainstay in human history, and art reflects reality. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel about that. In order to maintain my sanity I choose to accept it as a fact of the human condition and, though maybe not revel in it, I will engage that instinct in a safe manner. The safe manner of my choosing is frequently by firing a big fuck-off gun at some ungodly creature that is threatening to impose its place in the food chain upon me, in some video game.
Good talk, internet stranger. I just wanted more people to enjoy Titanfall, I didn’t expect an impromptu therapy session, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this.