I definitely do think of it as an FPS. It is in the first-person perspective (obviously) and the game is split between combat and puzzle solving, with "shooting" being the primary mode of achieving both. Heck, you even need to shoot to open doors. There are brief respites from shooting-as-puzzle-solutions, such as the morph ball sections, but that doesn't really change anything. It's still an FPS with an additional feature. Bioshock featured plumbing sequences to hack terminals, but that doesn't change the fact that the game itself is an FPS.
I think the "first person adventure" thing is marketing more than anything. Playing Fallout 3 now, I see that THAT is a real first person adventure, because you don't actually need to combat anything at all, unless you choose to. You can chart your own course through the game and accomplish quite a lot just by playing the game, exploring, talking to people, running errands. You can't do EVERYTHING, of course, but you can't do everything by attacking and killing either. You get the choice of what type of game you're going to play.
Metroid Prime doesn't give you the choice. You have to fight, and you have to fight a lot. There is only one real objective in the game, and it involves shooting everything (in the first-person perspective) that stands between you and it. Which, when boiled down to that fact, doesn't really separate it from most other FPS's.
The Zelda Hack'n'slash example is decent, as I know what you're getting at, PM, but the fact is that there's so much else to do and accomplish in Zelda that doesn't require hacking or slashing at all. (You can even get through most of the combat without using your sword.) In MP, there's almost nothing that doesn't involve shooting. So...yeah. Can't side with the "first person adventure" crowd on this one.
Now Morrowwind: The Elder Scrolls, now I'd definatly think that qualified as a FPA( Did it have rpg elements? Been a LOONG while since I played it. Don't you think?
What's with niggling over which pigeon hole it fits in, ew! It's a first person shooter/adventure, as it has shooting and adventuring/re-traversal. It deserves a pigeon hole of it's own it's that good.
EDIT: The first & best FPA ever in my mind was Deus Ex, and it's a lot more fun to play than Fallout3, which I think is broken in places, and cheats!
Now Morrowwind: The Elder Scrolls, now I'd definatly think that qualified as a FPA( Did it have rpg elements? Been a LOONG while since I played it. Don't you think?
From what I understand, yeah, but I've never played Morrowwind. I HAVE played Oblivion though, briefly, and I plan on picking up a copy for my shiny new XBox to dig in. Oblivion is CERTAINLY an FPA, as proven by this hilarious (and now sadly idle) blog about one man's attempt to spend his entire time playing the game as an NPC.
@Chicken Brutus- Yeah, I loved that The Elder Scrolls. Think I put in somewhere around a hundred hours(unless I'm mistaken). I never finished it though. I got to a part where I needed to do something and this man wanted me to give him a kiss for his help. So I tried to see if there was another way to do it, but while traveling, the game froze up(guess I'd been leaving too many items laying around the world). It was a sweet game though.
*Edit- I wish I could play that new one, but I don't have a 360.
I definitely do think of it as an FPS. It is in the first-person perspective (obviously) and the game is split between combat and puzzle solving, with "shooting" being the primary mode of achieving both. Heck, you even need to shoot to open doors. There are brief respites from shooting-as-puzzle-solutions, such as the morph ball sections, but that doesn't really change anything. It's still an FPS with an additional feature. Bioshock featured plumbing sequences to hack terminals, but that doesn't change the fact that the game itself is an FPS.
I think the "first person adventure" thing is marketing more than anything. Playing Fallout 3 now, I see that THAT is a real first person adventure, because you don't actually need to combat anything at all, unless you choose to. You can chart your own course through the game and accomplish quite a lot just by playing the game, exploring, talking to people, running errands. You can't do EVERYTHING, of course, but you can't do everything by attacking and killing either. You get the choice of what type of game you're going to play.
Metroid Prime doesn't give you the choice. You have to fight, and you have to fight a lot. There is only one real objective in the game, and it involves shooting everything (in the first-person perspective) that stands between you and it. Which, when boiled down to that fact, doesn't really separate it from most other FPS's.
The Zelda Hack'n'slash example is decent, as I know what you're getting at, PM, but the fact is that there's so much else to do and accomplish in Zelda that doesn't require hacking or slashing at all. (You can even get through most of the combat without using your sword.) In MP, there's almost nothing that doesn't involve shooting. So...yeah. Can't side with the "first person adventure" crowd on this one.
Points well made. Still, those same points can be made for Super Metroid - would you call that game a run n' gun? I really wouldn't call either of these games shooters. Yes you shoot, and you shoot a lot, but the primary focus in both games is adventuring and exploration.
You can avoid enemies in Prime just as you can in Zelda - I do it quite a bit. If Zelda forced you to swing at doors to open them, would you call it a hack n slash? To be honest, I view the arm cannon as more of a tool than a weapon in the Prime series. You use the different beams to trigger various objects in the environment, just as Zelda used weapons (the hookshot, bow, boomerang, etc.) to solve puzzles. I will admit that there's far more combat in Prime than in Zelda.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Fallout 3 was considered a first person RPG?
Edit: I think I'd call it more of a First Person Action-Adventure game, based on the points both Chicken and I made.
You can avoid enemies in Prime just as you can in Zelda - I do it quite a bit. If Zelda forced you to swing at doors to open them, would you call it a hack n slash? To be honest, I view the arm cannon as more of a tool than a weapon in the Prime series. You use the different beams to trigger various objects in the environment, just as Zelda used weapons (the hookshot, bow, boomerang, etc.) to solve puzzles. I will admit that there's far more combat in Prime than in Zelda.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought Fallout 3 was considered a first person RPG?
Edit: I think I'd call it more of a First Person Action-Adventure game, based on the points both Chicken and I made.
You can indeed avoid enemies in Prime, but you can avoid enemies in all FPS games. Or, hey, all games that don't require each screen to be cleared of enemies before you advance.
Your point about viewing the gun as a "tool" is kind of why I'm classifying it as an FPS. In an FPS, the gun is your main tool. You have a certain number of things to accomplish, and firing the gun accomplishes all or most of them. Whereas in Zelda, the sword is arguably your main tool, but you hardly have to use it, and it's not a factor in most of the puzzles. The games don't revolve around sword use, whereas I'll argue that the MP games DO revolve around the arm cannon.
Your point about Fallout 3 being considered a first person RPG gets to the crux of the issue, I think; things are what you perceive them to be. We apply labels to things so that we can simply them in conversation, but with the rare exception in today's gaming climate, nothing actually fits into rigid classifications anymore. (Look at games like Portal, or Henry Hatsworth for other examples of genre-destruction.) So I may well see an FPS in MP (for reasons I've listed) and you see an FPA (for reasons you've mentioned), and we're both playing the game, and we're both enjoying it, and neither of us are really wrong. Heck, somebody could look at it and call it Tool-Collection Platform Explorer, and that would be fine too.
The tags are pretty much meaningless. I don't see nearly enough reason to separate MP from the rest of the FPS canon, but if others do, then that's okay. I think I'm just opposed to subdividing genres in the first place. I like genres best when they act like mirages; from a distance you know what to expect, but examine any of them more closely and God knows what you'll actually get. If we're trying to get much more specific than that, we should take a page from Adam's book, and just refer to them by game titles.
...that was long. I'm not disagreeing with you, if that's not clear yet, but I'm pretty interested in the discussion.
Yes, the gun is the main item in an FPS, but its only function is to destroy - which is why I wouldn't necessarily call it a tool, but a weapon. In Prime, it works more as a tool would. It has multiple non-destructive functions that work to solve puzzles and such.
In a shooter, your main goal is to fight and destroy. There's almost never any puzzle-solving or adventuring. However, in Prime, you sometimes go for long periods without fighting at all. There's a large emphasis on puzzle solving, platforming, and exploration, which is why I'd classify it as a First Person Action-Adventure game, rather than a shooter.
But I think Adam hit the nail on the head - its true genre is "Metroid".
In a shooter, your main goal is to fight and destroy. There's almost never any puzzle-solving or adventuring. However, in Prime, you sometimes go for long periods without fighting at all. There's a large emphasis on puzzle solving, platforming, and exploration, which is why I'd classify it as a First Person Action-Adventure game, rather than a shooter.
Not to drag it out, as we've reached consensus more or less, but games like Bioshock, Half-Life 2 and others place a large emphasis on puzzle solving and exploration as well, and they use the whole "learn the story obliquely as you go" thing, too.
I think my problem with wanting to give MP its own genre is that it's somewhat of an insult to the other FPS games that do the same things as well, or even better. FPS isn't a limited genre, and the implication that it can't handle puzzle solving or exploration without morphing into something else entirely is kind of unfair. The FPS genre is growing up, that's all. It's learning how to broaden its horizons.
I think that's a good thing, and obviously you do, too. (We've come a long way from Wolfenstein, baby.) But the implication is either that FPS can't include complex problem solving, or that games like Half-Life and Bioshock DON'T involve complex problem solving, and neither of those sits comfortably with me.
I haven't played BioShock or Half-Life, so I can't respond directly to your points.
However, Metroid, no matter what the camera view, is Metroid (so far, at least). I think all of the games have more or less the same gameplay - Prime introduced the series to 3D, and they decided to put it into the first person view, but they didn't really change the gameplay. And if I'm not mistaken, Super Metroid is generally classified as an Action/Adventure game (I mean, come on, if you compare Super Metroid to Contra III the differences are more than clear).
In short, I don't think that the changing of the camera view from 2D to the first person is enough to say that the Metroid genre has changed from Action/Adventure to Shooter, when nearly all of the gameplay elements have remained intact.
@Adam: I actually do agree with you about 3, though I think Prime 1 stays pretty close to its roots. The Prime games are a bit more linear than the 2D ones, though the basic gameplay remains the same.
Prime 1 told you where to go in those (usually) unnecessary transmissions just like Zero Mission. Secrets are all much more obvious than in the 2D games. All the areas you can bomb have noticeable cracks and look similar to other bombable areas. (Oh, and I almost forgot the atrocious platforming, but I hear that is much easier in the Trilogy edition thanks to being able to look while moving.)
Don't get me wrong. I loved Prime 1, and I loved Fusion and Zero Mission, but I don't think the series has stayed the same since Super. No series has survived the 2D to 3D jump unchanged in some fundamental way, though Metroid is perhaps one of the closest there is, certainly for Nintendo's action series.
And I may not have felt Super Metroid vibes while playing Prime, but I definitely did while watching Other M. Vibrant colors; smaller, closed rooms; third-person action... Mmmmm...
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