A defination of Boomer Shooter that's been bouncing around my brain for a while

[Captain red pants]

Boomer Shooter: A First Person Shooters where you make no decisions about inventory management beyond 'what weapon/tool do I use now'. Example being: in Doom, you will never be in a situation where you can only carry weapon X or weapon Y, if you can find it, you can use it (as long as you have the ammo obviously) where as you take something like FEAR where you can carry 4 weapons, you will be choosing one gun over another, probably more then once.
It sounds simple, but decisions the player do or do not get to make are pretty core to game design.

Now, there are some interesting edge cases. for example: Soldier of Fortune on Easy and Normal difficulty would qualify as a Boomer Shooter, but not on the harder difficulties.
Bioshock is an interesting one: It's always felt more like a boomer shooter then an 'immersive sim', mostly because You can carry all the weapons you like, but your Plasmids slots are limited and you're going to be swapping them out at ADAM stations.

But can you think of a game that is widely agreed to be a boomer shooter that would be disqualified be this definition?

 

Could this be a useful definition? If not, why not ect?

[Azuris]

Dunke Nukem and Heretic have Inventory Systems.

 

But thats one of the Things why i like them less.

 

Boomer Shooters have a big Focus on fast Shooting Action and Exploration of the Level.

They are in that Formula more in common with Super Mario World than Uncharted.

 

The Story is mostly telled in short Scenes and the Level Design itself.

 

You nearly never get interrupted for Cutscenes or else in Levels, as said it has a Focus on Gameplay.

 

[Rudolph]

I swear, the whole conversation about the definition of boomer shooter would give even Diogenes a headache... XD

[Biodegradable]

Why do Doomworlders keep missing the joke?

Edited August 19, 2023 by Biodegradable

[Mr Masker]

A modern "Boomer Shooter" means whatever the company behind it wants it to be.

 

In some cases it means the game is IDENTICAL to 90s doom clones to the point where it lacks any soul or identity, and in others the publishers are just like, "just bitcrush and pixelate the shit out of everything, the kids are really into the retro stuff nowadays"

 

For the record I actually like some retro-inspired shooters, Ultrakill is probably my favourite. However, the genre is super oversaturated and annoying now.

Edited August 19, 2023 by Mr Masker

[Jayextee]

37 minutes ago, Biodegradable said:

Why do Doomworlders keep missing the joke?

Because on the Internet in 2023 you can't make an offhand comment in jest without people thinking This Is A Thing Now. It must be codified, defined, made into a new genre, and because it's a thing we now have rules for what it can and can't be, etc.

 

Probably the same kind of people who absolutely ruined The Backrooms as a concept and decided, hey, this idea needs more floors and loot drops and lore and

Eh, I am so tired.

[Captain red pants]

22 minutes ago, Azuris said:

Dunke Nukem and Heretic have Inventory Systems.

But there is no inventory *management* if you find a halo duke and some steroids, you don't have choose one or the other. There's no weight limit or inventory tetris, it just goes into hammer space for later. It seems to be a common enough that I can't think of an example of a boomer shooter that... oh... wait nevermind

 

 

7 minutes ago, Biodegradable said:

Why do Doomworlders keep missing the joke?

It's a meme and a joke and it's also a name that stuck. I'm not so insecure about my favorite game genre that I'm going to stop using a useful identifier just because of that.

Anyway, I just remembered Rise of the Triad exists and that pretty torpedoed my theory. lol

So yeah, boomer shooter is just a vibe and now my favorite boomer shooter is now MechWarrior 2.

[openroadracer]

I personally mark the cutoff for "Boomer Shooter" - or as I prefer to call it, "Throwback Shooter" - as being games like the original Half-Life or GoldenEye 007: sure, they let you carry the entire armory all at once, but they had more complex objectives than simply "survive this arena", "kill everything that moves" and "find the exit". They were more cinematic and narrative driven, with less focus on the raw gameplay and more on the story.

Contrast that against DooM and Quake and Wolfenstein: in those games, the story is largely confined to the manuals, with some small snippets of it appearing in text screens, and the player ends up largely having to piece the plot together from these small snippets combined with elements of environmental storytelling. The gameplay takes a greater focus over the narrative, and the player isn't missing much if they skip the story.

[Captain red pants]

17 minutes ago, Jayextee said:

Eh, I am so tired.

Uh, sorry our ape brains like to notice patterns in things. It's come in handy a few times though, so it probably going to keep happening.

[Decay]

Guns go boom, boomer louder shootgun shooter more masculine deep sounds COD gunz pew pew little pee pee

[Kwisior]

It's a bizarre definition for a nebulous term. Why do inventory limits or a narrative focus (as someone else said) disqualify something from being a "boomer shooter"? What about System Shock from 1994?

Hell, does it mean old shooter, throwback shooter or both at the same time?

[openroadracer]

1 hour ago, Kwisior said:

It's a bizarre definition for a nebulous term. Why do inventory limits or a narrative focus (as someone else said) disqualify something from being a "boomer shooter"? What about System Shock from 1994?

Hell, does it mean old shooter, throwback shooter or both at the same time?

To me, it means a shooter that focuses on fast-paced gunplay with rapid movement and relying on evasion instead of cover.

Health pickups instead of regeneration, lack of direct storytelling in favor of environmental storytelling and story in the manual, focus on speed and aggression, these are what make a "Throwback Shooter". And it's the fact that the narrative plays so much more of a role in Half-Life and GoldenEye when they're compared to games like DooM, Duke Nukem, Quake, and the like that marks them as a bit of a cutoff for me.

[Herr Dethnout]

Boomer Shooter is a shooter made by boomers.

 

Your welcome.

[Captain red pants]

7 minutes ago, Kwisior said:

It's a bizarre definition for a nebulous term. Why do inventory limits or a narrative focus (as someone else said) disqualify something from being a "boomer shooter"? What about System Shock from 1994?

Hell, does it mean old shooter, throwback shooter or both at the same time?

I'm not going to call it a strict definition (as I said, RotT forces the player to choose one explosive weapon rather then carrying all the one they can find) But I do think that simplifying inventory management to near non existence is what separates your classic/retro throwbacks from the post halo era. It's a pretty dramatic difference as they both have very different map and encounter design priorities.

as for System Shock, I think it's pretty uncontroversial to call it a dungeon crawl, which was an established genre even at the time albeit with a sci-fi theme. It's been a while since I've read up on in, but thiiink Wolf 3D was en rout to be something similar (or at least, more like the original game that inspired it).

[dasho]

It's a trash term because unlike other relatively newer classifications like "Looter Shooter", it tells you absolutely nothing of value. At least with "Looter Shooter", I can presume that there is an importance in finding unusual or rare drops and that there is some degree of variance in weapon attributes versus a fixed stable of weaponry like Doom.

[indigotyrian]

There's no direct line separating a classic FPS (I refuse to use the term "boomer shooter") from a modern FPS as modern FPS conventions all come from classic FPS and the modern FPS feel indeed evolved over time. However I'd say that if you were to implement a simple litmus test, the best you could do would be to ask whether the game features ADS (aim-down sights, i.e. a function where a weapon zoom may be applied, weapon shot spread is tightened, and movement speed is reduced) as a mechanic. In other words, does the game force you to trade movement for accuracy?

 

ADS as a mechanic is the single most impactful feature when it comes to a game's "feel" between classic and modern, as it changes so much about how combat is played out. With a modern FPS, emphasis is placed on player positioning, good twitch aim, and careful management of stop-and-pop momentum. Because movement is so free in a classic FPS, emphasis is now placed on player tracking, good follow aim (and in the case of projectile weapons that have travel time, leading targets), and maneuvering around the environment while engaging in a firefight. For this reason, you can see how a game like Counter-Strike has much more to do with a modern FPS feel than, say, Halo does, which for all its two-weapon limit and regenerating shields so bemoaned by PC FPS fans back in the day still had gunplay and maneuvering much closer to Quake or Unreal.

Edited August 19, 2023 by indigotyrian

[Captain red pants]

3 hours ago, Decay said:

Guns go boom, boomer louder shootgun shooter more masculine deep sounds COD gunz pew pew little pee pee

I'm sorry the kids called your favorite video games a funny name

 

19 minutes ago, indigotyrian said:

For this reason, you can see how a game like Counter-Strike has much more to do with a modern FPS feel than, say, Halo does, which for all its two-weapon limit and regenerating shields so bemoaned by PC FPS fans back in the day still had gunplay and maneuvering much closer to Quake or Unreal.

I'm not sure if you've watched the more competitive CoD scene, but they're basically abusing the game engine so much that it pretty much becomes a movement based arena shooter to the point where a lot of old heads where muttering about why quake champions never takes off if that's what they're doing (which is super funny if you know about the early quake days)

Edited August 19, 2023 by Captain red pants

[Xaser]

I'm tempted to just repeat my last post on the topic, but the best answer to "what is a Boomer shooter" will always be JPL's Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom article, since the ingredients described within were absent from FPS games for years until "boomer shooters" became a thing again.

 

That said, "genres" are really just collections of attributes that can be mixed and matched at will. It's far more interesting to discuss what elements from a genre make up a certain game (e.g. "hey Half-Life does a lot of things that Doom does despite clearly doing its own thing", etc.) than to try and waste time debating whether or not something is or isn't "in" a genre. Let's talk about how things are like a genre instead, since that's way more fun.

[Jayextee]

Thought about it a bit IMO boomer shooters are a lives system short of being an arcade game. Fast-paced, punchy, simple, and often on the shorter side.

[G19Doom]

Pooper Scooper is more like it.

Edited August 19, 2023 by G19Doom

[Kwisior]

3 hours ago, Captain red pants said:

I'm not going to call it a strict definition (as I said, RotT forces the player to choose one explosive weapon rather then carrying all the one they can find) But I do think that simplifying inventory management to near non existence is what separates your classic/retro throwbacks from the post halo era. It's a pretty dramatic difference as they both have very different map and encounter design priorities.

as for System Shock, I think it's pretty uncontroversial to call it a dungeon crawl, which was an established genre even at the time albeit with a sci-fi theme. It's been a while since I've read up on in, but thiiink Wolf 3D was en rout to be something similar (or at least, more like the original game that inspired it).

System Shock is a mix of genres, one of which is undoubtedly FPS.

If "boomer shooter" means the same thing as throwback shooter, like Biodegradable said, then your definition contradicts it.

No matter how you slice it, "boomer shooter" will never be a real genre, since everyone has their own definition, and they often contradict each other. We already have fast-paced FPS, classic FPS and throwback FPS, so there's no need for another term, especially as unfocused as this one.

 

Edited August 19, 2023 by Kwisior

[St. Mildly Annoyed]

5 hours ago, Jayextee said:

Because on the Internet in 2023 you can't make an offhand comment in jest without people thinking This Is A Thing Now. It must be codified, defined, made into a new genre, and because it's a thing we now have rules for what it can and can't be, etc.

 

Probably the same kind of people who absolutely ruined The Backrooms as a concept and decided, hey, this idea needs more floors and loot drops and lore and

Eh, I am so tired.

Yeah, a lot of stuff that goes mainstream can also be tainted by an audience it was never intended for and begins to suffer as the original concept ends up being butchered, shoved, or mashed up with niches that completely ruin it's purpose and intent. Adding lore to shitposts can be good, but it usually ends up becoming infested with either young children or weirdos after a month or two.

Edited August 19, 2023 by St. Mildly Annoyed

[St. Mildly Annoyed]

At a minimum, classic fps games are basically first person shmups in a freely explorable map. After that, it gets hard to define what represents the end between classic and the start of modern varieties.

[Noiser]

Here's the Boomer Shooter:
 

[TheCaneOfTheTophat]

The real Boomer Shooter is the friends we made along the way.
 

4 hours ago, Herr Dethnout said:

Boomer Shooter is a shooter made by boomers.

 

Your welcome.

Made for boomers, by boomers... with boomers.

[heliumlamb]

1 hour ago, Noiser said:

Here's the Boomer Shooter:
 

BEEN SAYING THIS!!!!

[Herr Dethnout]

5 hours ago, dasho said:

It's a trash term because unlike other relatively newer classifications like "Looter Shooter", it tells you absolutely nothing of value. At least with "Looter Shooter", I can presume that there is an importance in finding unusual or rare drops and that there is some degree of variance in weapon attributes versus a fixed stable of weaponry like Doom.

Is even worse than other trash terms like Metroidvania and Roguelike... And that's saying a lot.

[indigotyrian]

43 minutes ago, Herr Dethnout said:

Is even worse than other trash terms like Metroidvania and Roguelike... And that's saying a lot.

 

The Japanese call metroidvanias "Search Action" which I think is a way better term.

[Herr Dethnout]

1 hour ago, indigotyrian said:

 

The Japanese call metroidvanias "Search Action" which I think is a way better term.

Is better than Metroidvania, but I prefer calling it just an "Adventure/Exploration Game"

[D4NUK1]

If the game have a shotgun and double shotgun it's a boomer Shooter no more exceptions as 2023 standards