Removing the “Role-Playing” from Combat in FPSRPGs

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the game on everyone’s lips at the moment. Creating a successor to one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time is quite a difficult feat, and it will of course mean that everyone will nitpick at every detail to the nth degree. But while everyone is screaming bloody murder over the highlighted objects or the cut scene takedowns, what got my attention was the combat. It wasn’t the fancy augmented moves Jensen can perform, or the flashy graphics, what struck me is that this is an FPSRPG that finally shoots like a First Person Shooter.

Deus Ex along with System Shock was one of the first commercially successful games to create this new genre, a hybrid of the behind the screens number game of the RPG and the incessant clicking of the FPS. But for all Deus Ex’s strengths, and there are plenty, it can’t count the combat as one of them. Even diehard Deus Ex fans will tell you to just pick up a rifle and sneak through the whole game, because combat simply isn’t that much fun. Deus Ex can’t shrug off those criticisms by hiding behind its release date either, even games pre-dating it had much better combat on display, Half-Life being a good example.

The weakness of Deus Ex’s combat came from the other half of this new genre, the RPG. Now that stats were put into everything, guns had to adhere to their numbers game, rather than any form of logic. The combat in Deus Ex was burdened by having to invest points into being able to shoot effectively. If you didn’t put enough points into your rifle skill then you had to riddle an enemy full of bullets before he would eventually collapse. While the inclusion of RPG elements obviously offered a lot more depth to Deus Ex than any other pure FPS had brought to the table, in some ways it crippled the game.

The FPS/RPG is now a well known genre, however despite the fact System Shock and Deus ex created this genre over ten years ago, developers have been falling into the same pitfalls over and over again. Bloodlines, Borderlands, Fallout 3 and New Vegas all integrate the RPG part into their combat and they all suffer for it. Bloodlines was fantastic up until the sewers where the combat really kicks in and I’m sick of throwing grenades at enemies in Fallout only to see nothing happen to them because my explosive skill wasn’t high enough.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want pure shooters to take over again. The RPG part in all these games keeps them fresh, it’s no surprise the playtime of Fallout 3 for example is over thirty hours where pure shooters like Modern Warfare or Bulletstorm only reach about six. But the RPG part has to only be used in places where it’s

applicable. To generalise for a moment, FPS’ usually have the better combat and RPG’s will have the better story, characters and dialogue, of course there are examples to prove this rule wrong, but generally it’s true. So why can’t FPSRPG’s take up that model? Instead of merging everything together, use each genre to its strengths. Keep combat purely FPS driven, no gun stats, no behind the screen dice rolls to see if I actually shot my enemy in the head, just keep it pure and simple. Then the RPG parts can be used outside of combat. Skills like lock picking, speech, bartering, hacking, we’ve seen them all before, and we’ve all had to neglect one or two because picking up a skill in how to shoot was, unfortunately, more important.

So far from what we've seen of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it seems as if Eidos have picked up on this. Fighting looks action packed and most importantly fun. Some will baulk at the idea of removing the RPGness from combat, but they’ll eventually get past it when they find that the RPG part of the FPSRPG shines when people aren’t firing guns.