Steam

I’m thinking more arena shooters like quake and unreal.

A strict definition is hard. The first thing that came to my mind was 'like quake'.

Fps games have come in phases. Most recently looter shooters, before that battle royals, before that hero shooters. And quite early in that chain you had boomer shooters.

Fixed pov would certainly be a step down that path but I wouldn't call it a requirement. If Quake got a faithful remake with all the advancements of 2024 and non of the industry trends that'd be a boomer shooter.

If you made a brand new arena shooter with no classes and an array of ~8 distinct weapons (think one rocketlauncher, one SMG, one pistol etc.) laid across the map focused on something like TDM or KotH, that could be a boomer shooter.

It's kind of like porn, you know it when you see it.

I think it is more just general trends.

Assume all dates are wrong because time has no meaning and what little grasp I had was destroyed by 2020-2022.

DOOM (1994? and especially Quake) era FPSes were very much about running into a room and murdering everything. Health was a resource and it was about combining reflxes with resource management skills. Also, the average game speed was actually really fast. I think someone did rough math and DOOM Guy was sprinting at like 90 MPH? Arena Shooters like Unreal Tournament came out of this where it was about different players seeing who can react fastest while managing those resources and the item spawns. And the level design was generally "a whole level of enemies" as it were.

Then, in the early 00s we started seeing a heavy rise in third person shooters. In large part because it was a way to show off character models and minimize the fine grain details on consoles. This, combined with REALLY shitty AI in FPSes like Iron Fist or whatever the alternate reality WW1 g ame was, very much birthed the "cover shooter" gameplay. Advance to a choke point, snipe enemies and funnel them, then hide. Lather, rinse, repeat. Which, like Half-Life before it, very much turned level design into " a series of rooms".

Which... led to Call of Duty (and, to a lesser extent, Medal of Honor before it) where the gameplay was exactly what. Stop, take out every enemy you can, and advance. Which also was because of greatly shortened time to kill and an emphasis on leaning and going prone. And multiplayer followed suit with generally much slower gameplay and a focus on "pre-firing" and "camping". And level design became "a series of set pieces"

And... that more or less gets us to where we are today. Something like Infinite Warfare or even Titanfall are "fast" relative to Soap waiting in a shitter for the enemy to run past, but they are still REALLY slow relative to the "boomer shooters".

In recent years (I guess since 2016?), we have seen a rise in something "else". I like to think of them as "puzzle shooters" (and Bulletstorm was one but Bulletstorm was shit so let's ignore it) and they are a lot closer to Hotline Miami. You are still treating every room as its own encounter, but those encounters are very frantic and more about adapting your plan depending on RNG and explosions.

Whereas the modern "boomer shooter" are almost exclusively quake-likes masquerading as doom-likes. But they are w hat we remember Quake to be, as opposed to Quake itself. Movement isn't necessarily as fast as it used to be but it is still a LOT faster than a Call of Duty and is more about whole level encounters.

And as an aside, take a look at the Rise of the Triad remake like ten-ish years ago. That is the game which broke me and realized how slow CoD et al had become. That game is fast even compared to DOOM 2016 (and most DOOM Eternal encounters, but not all). Shame ROTT was always a mid game though.

A game like Tarkov stands in drastic comparison to a game like Quake. Compare the weapon selection (many guns for one role vs distinct but limited) or gameplay loop (enter zone->loot->fight to extract vs spawn->kill->die)

Quake, Battlefield 4, Rainbow 6 Siege, PUBG, and Tarkov are all FPS games but they're drastically different in design.