As an RPG fan and author, my main deal has always been the story. I actually turn down games with 'state-of-the-art graphics' unless the story's good enough that I can overlook the bling that the producers were going for; vice-versawise, a game that's somewhat lacking in the graphics department can own anything on the market if it has a brilliant story behind it (Metroid Prime anyone?). My brother is the exact opposite; FPS games are his favorite style because he doesn't have to deal with as long of a 'boring' sequence as my RPGs tend to take.
Having said that, most FPS gimmicks where a story is involved are very overused.
The evil corporate zombies angle? How many times has that honestly been used?
Space alien shooters? At least when Duke Nukem did it, the game parodied Doom enough to make things interesting. You can't tell me a game that has a radio station called KTIT was taking itself seriously.
World War II? I know the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are still new, but couldn't we try focusing on Vietnam, Korea, or, God forbid, World War I? Nazis may have been bad, but they're not the only Stormtrooper-type army that's existed in the last hundred years.
And don't even get me started on the non-zombie mutant horror shooters. Some stories, like Legend of Zelda or any one single Final Fantasy installment, are in-depth enough to warrant a video game instead of a movie; typically, horror is NOT one of those kinds of stories.
So what's an independent one-man game maker team to do?
This might get me a few looks, but go in the vein of early-90s games. Have one developed scene at the start of the game, giving you the background information as to what's going on. From there, if you HAVE to develop a story (and let's face it, this is one area where the open-world and RPG genres have it all over FPS games), use in-game elements like text or voice-overs to do the job. If you need more than two videos to tell a story for a first-person shooter, you might be better off making a feature-length movie instead.
And for those of you going "Oh, my mic stinks like Alan Rickman's career since
Die Hard, I can't do a good V.O," USB microphones are notorious for having crystal-clear tones and have an average cost of about US$30. I have a ten-American-buck regular-jack microphone that I currently use for my podcast, and with that one mic you can pick up every nuance in my voice AND my co-host's. It gets creepy sometimes, the amount of things I can hear when I'm recording.
You want evidence that story's not always the best idea? I point you in the direction of the movie trailer for "Zombie Strippers" starring Jenna Jameson and (sadly) Robert Eungland. That movie looks so bad, my opinion of it's going straight to DVD next month! I'd rather have seen a game developed around it just to shoot Jenna's head off instead of a feature film. Unlike the motion-picture industry, games can actually get away with not having an in-depth storyline if the concept's appealing enough, and let's face it--who HASN'T wanted to waste a barely-qualified-as-shapely stripper for a bad dance?
The beauty of the FPS style is that it's one of the few genres that everyone, regardless of their nationality or background, can pick up on the functions of very quickly. The last thing we want to do is bog down people with five minutes of video between each level. You may want to tell a great story, but let's not forget that we're not exactly Electronic Arts or Activision, who have the resources to pull those kinds of games off. It may be 'primitive', but if you're using one of the story arcs I mentioned above, the gameplay's good enough. If you're that concerned with telling a good story that you need cutscenes between every level, then maybe you need to consider a different genre of game to develop.
Gemstone Games is now Cornett Media
