I absolutely loved Carmageddon. My PC couldn’t really handle it so it would turn into a slide show eith every crash, but I just loved it and didn’t care.

It absolutely did because I own it

If you’re going non-fantasy (in which case you can put in whatever), I think that one factor is also that in, say, the Napoleonic era, using soldiers in formation in warfare was an important multiplier, and that’s not super-friendly to FPSes. I mean, a lot of the game would be following orders to move into a formation or move in formation.

As for weapons, you could do archery, I suppose. There have been a number of games (Thief, Skyrim, etc), that have an archer running around on their lonesome, though that probably wasn’t historically all that accurate. Well, not that having a solo character going Rambo on a World War II-and-post battlefield was necessarily all that common. If it did, it was pretty unusual:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hooper_(Medal_of_Honor)

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. Staff Sergeant (then Sgt.) Hooper, U.S. Army, distinguished himself while serving as squad leader with Company D. Company D was assaulting a heavily defended enemy position along a river bank when it encountered a withering hail of fire from rockets, machine guns and automatic weapons. S/Sgt. Hooper rallied several men and stormed across the river, overrunning several bunkers on the opposite shore. Thus inspired, the rest of the company moved to the attack. With utter disregard for his own safety, he moved out under the intense fire again and pulled back the wounded, moving them to safety. During this act S/Sgt. Hooper was seriously wounded, but he refused medical aid and returned to his men. With the relentless enemy fire disrupting the attack, he single-handedly stormed 3 enemy bunkers, destroying them with hand grenade and rifle fire, and shot 2 enemy soldiers who had attacked and wounded the Chaplain. Leading his men forward in a sweep of the area, S/Sgt. Hooper destroyed 3 buildings housing enemy riflemen. At this point he was attacked by a North Vietnamese officer whom he fatally wounded with his bayonet. Finding his men under heavy fire from a house to the front, he proceeded alone to the building, killing its occupants with rifle fire and grenades. By now his initial body wound had been compounded by grenade fragments, yet despite the multiple wounds and loss of blood, he continued to lead his men against the intense enemy fire. As his squad reached the final line of enemy resistance, it received devastating fire from 4 bunkers in line on its left flank. S/Sgt. Hooper gathered several hand grenades and raced down a small trench which ran the length of the bunker line, tossing grenades into each bunker as he passed by, killing all but 2 of the occupants. With these positions destroyed, he concentrated on the last bunkers facing his men, destroying the first with an incendiary grenade and neutralizing 2 more by rifle fire. He then raced across an open field, still under enemy fire, to rescue a wounded man who was trapped in a trench. Upon reaching the man, he was faced by an armed enemy soldier whom he killed with a pistol. Moving his comrade to safety and returning to his men, he neutralized the final pocket of enemy resistance by fatally wounding 3 North Vietnamese officers with rifle fire. S/Sgt. Hooper then established a final line and reorganized his men, not accepting treatment until this was accomplished and not consenting to evacuation until the following morning. His supreme valor, inspiring leadership and heroic self-sacrifice were directly responsible for the company’s success and provided a lasting example in personal courage for every man on the field. S/Sgt. Hooper’s actions were in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself and the U.S. Army.[4]

That’s a pretty unusual MoH citation out of Vietnam, and that’d probably be about par for the course for a single – maybe part of – a WW2 FPS level. I mean, if you want realistic World Wars fighting, the largest chunk of characters would probably just be killed by random artillery fire, not pulling off 100:1+ kill ratios in infantry combat, which…isn’t all that much fun as a first-person game.

But, as to archery:

https://www.tastesofhistory.co.uk/post/dispelling-some-myths-archers-shooting-twelve-arrows-a-minute

A skilled longbowman could shoot about 12 shots per minute. This rate of fire was far superior to competing weapons like the crossbow or early gunpowder weapons…

So, as to the hail of arrows, archers shooting heavy warbows confirm that releasing twelve arrows in one minute is possible, but that such a rate cannot be maintained subsequently. Practical experience argues for a shooting rate of about 5 to 6 arrows per minute being feasible over a period up to 10 minutes.

That’s definitely a lot slower-paced than a modern FPS, but it’s still a lot faster than nearly all 18th century firearms.

Skyrim kind of ignored fatigue and let you lug around a huge store of arrows and blast them without regard for your arms getting tired, so it’s not hard realism, but I think that people enjoyed the archery aspect.

And yet Verdun, Tannenberg, and Isonzo are some of the most fun multiplayer FPS games around.

Cultist simulator, even

Yeah I got it, exactly what I wanted.

I guess I didn’t elaborate but I specifically am not looking for deckbuilding rogue likes. Think more like Inscryption act 2 where you get to collect cards and build your own deck. Something like Magic the Gathering but it’s all single player campaign.

I really wish Blur actually did well back when it was around. By far the coolest take on a Mario Kart-like game I’ve ever played.

Goddamnit this is exact what I think EVERY TIME I see Embracer in the news…

“Oh no fuck…Deus Ex is now even further away…”

Valorant I can’t speak to, since I can’t play it on Linux.

CS I’ve played a lot of and it’s fantastic just a bit too slow paced/tactical for me. Your right though that it’s a fantastically designed game and a really good shout.

Overwatch I strongly disagree with. The maps have clean lines, but with the character design, abilities, and UI they clearly prioritise being flashy over anything else. It’s really visually loud for the sake of it and too much for me.

Yeah, I kind of intentionally avoided saying AFPS because unfortunately these days that tends to mean (like with diabotical) games which are desperate to be the most hypercompetitive aspects of quake. Duels or FFA aren’t really my thing, give me teams and objectives!

Perhaps unsurprisingly UT2k4 is one of my favorite of all time

As long as it’s closer to Crysis 1 and 3 and less like Crysis 2. And even though 3 was good, the story was already sent off the rails in 2.

Only a handful sneak through. Half-Life: Alyx, Cyberpunk, Titanfall 2, there’s one Wolfenstein game I haven’t played yet; but options dry up fast.

Mount & Blade: Warband certainly has got some similarities, and it was one of two games that I thought of when trying to think of games that are at least a little similar (the other being the X series from Egosoft, though there the sci-fi theme is pretty different), but it’s also got a lot of differences.

The similar:

• You start out as one person.

• It’s not especially easy, particularly at the start.

• You can control multiple characters in different places in the world, and the companions and yourself are on the order of the number of characters in Kenshi.

• You can form military groups – much larger than squads, normally – that are out and about.

• There is a base-building (well, capturing) aspect.

• There is an economic aspect.

• The game world is dynamic, and factions take control of different portions to the map and can be wiped out.

But there are also some pretty substantial differences:

• While you start out with small units, M&B focuses on considerably larger armies, and while the battlefields normally have armies enter at a limited rate to keep load on the engine workable (looks like 150 cap by default, increasable to 500), you’re still working with considerably larger groups of units. Larger armies are just generally better, and the end game is hundreds are thousands of units. Kenshi has you working with a squad-level size, and you’re going to know and equip each character.

• You’re generally working with formations, not individual units.

• Kenshi is about wandering around in a world and discovering what’s there. Unlocking tech blueprints, which are important, really requires traveling the world. There’s a very minimal exploration aspect to M&B – you’re mostly looking at the strategic map, and get dropped into pre-created battlefields when two forced run into each other.

• Most of the M&B fighting is between, nameless, expendable soldiers that die in battles. A lot of what you do in the game is to recruit and train them to maintain your supply. Companions are immortal. In Kenshi, characters can die, but you’re aiming to keep all the members of your squad alive.

• The economic and military envioronments in Kenshi are unified. You have characters that might be running around in a squad or producing things. M&B has a black-box economy that is pretty disconnected from individual characters. In M&B, most of what you’d do with your companions, if they aren’t in your main army, is to have them run around with their own smaller armies defending territory you hold.

• M&B locations are all pretty much similar. There’s the type of soldiers you can recruit and the type of factions that might be nearby, and a few locations that are more-advantageous for different types of industry (which themselves are basically drop-in replacements for each other). In Kenshi, if you’re setting up an outpost in an area that is taxed or has environmental hazards, different power generation capacity, different agricultural or mining potential, or significantly-different monster attacks, it plays out rather differently.

• M&B does have a limited form of base-building to the extent that you can capture fixed, pre-designed locations and purchase some upgrades for them, but Kenshi lets you put outposts anywhere on the map, and structures and fortifications anywhere in the outpost.

• M&B has a limited ability to affect an economy in that building an upgrade will tend to result in more of whatever that produces, but Kenshi’s modeling the whole shebang; what’s being produced matters a lot more.

Honestly, Starfield has a more-similar outpost-building and economic model to Kenshi. No random traders, but the arbitrary placement of outposts, layout of those, and modeling production is more similar. And the environment affects what you can produce. Though there production is automated, not done by in-game characters. It’s just that in Starfield – at least vanilla; we’ll have to see where mods take the thing – there isn’t a lot of reason to build outposts other than for the purpose of accumulating resources to build more outposts. Fallout 4 (vanilla, at least) was kind of similar. My guess is that Bethesda wants to cater to people who don’t want any base-building too, but it really makes the bases less-interesting.

In Kenshi (and M&B, come to think of it), you really do want to ultimately get outposts to support the upkeep of your characters in the field, and it’s a first-class part of the game.

Don’t get me wrong. I like M&B too. It’s just that in practice, I don’t think that it plays all that similarly to Kenshi. You spend a lot more time traveling and exploring with Kenshi. You have bands of characters that you individually equip and know. The characters chatter with each other and in response to different areas. Expanding the tech tree by exploring the world is important. Characters can change drastically, become much tougher, lose limbs and have them replaced with robotic ones. M&B has one mostly fighting large battles on fixed battle maps, and once you’ve picked up the companions you want around the world, you can mostly settle down. You capture fixed outposts rather than building them and laying them out. Companions don’t individually change things that much militarily (realistic, but less RPGish); their major perk is that unlike regular troops, they are immortal, aren’t killed in battles, so having them fight in each battle constantly saves soldiers. You don’t really see the game world off the strategic map other than on the fixed battle maps. In battle, you control formations, not individual characters (aside from yourself). There’s a black-box economy. A lot of what you deal with is replenishing and training new troops, which isn’t really a thing in Kenshi. A lot of what you do in Kenshi is exploring and traveling, which isn’t much of a thing in M&B. In Kenshi, you have a starting character, but they are otherwise unimportant; you can switch to any other character. In M&B, you can only follow the main character in the game world – that’s what the camera follows on the strategic map.

Not the guy you were replying to, but Everspace 1 and 2 are both great, arcade-y space shooters. I like 1 better than 2, but I’ve played both a bunch

The Homeworld Series (1+2 at least) comes Info mind in general.

OP ist right though. A masterpiecish RTS ist nowwhere to ne found. I think, it has something To Do for other genres innovating out of the RTS Framework (DotA, LoL, even Pikmin).

All can be played without the mechanical sweatfest traditional RTS turn Into, but instead focussing in Player knowledge and engagement.

However, there ist the new Company of Heroes Game, though…

Tbf, deserts of kharrak had a cool mp mode, too, and it’s a shame it died out immediately. It is a fairly novel and unique rts in a lot of ways, and very pretty to boot, so not sure what happened. I guess the maps are all very samey

Eh, not very well - there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that these games capture, revolving around skill allocation and character development that Skyrim doesn’t have. It’s exciting to become a water master in MM6 because it means being able to teleport freely between towns, or expert level spirit being able to bless the whole party at once.

Oh don’t worry, I’ve played a shit ton of gw2. I just don’t think it’s a direct sequel mechanically.

Sort of, but it has so many things that make it what it is. The deck building skill system, the instanced open world with social hubs to form parties in, the way the combat so heavily emphasizes countering and interrupting your opponents… There’s a lot of small details that make the whole I think.