Most FPS games were literally consolized. Until Halo came around, no one could make a FPS work because a controller was too slow and imprecise. Halo's trick was to sloooow the action down.
The chunky thing was why making levels for DooM was so easy. Prodeus (early access) also has easy to use level editor, but currently the game has some design problems - such as dumb and slow monsters. Those in DooM were also dumb, but their AI was functional. They could swarm and surround you well enough. I honestly think Prodeus looks better than Doom Eternal, the art direction especially. But I don't need as much ketchup.
I think games like these (Dusk, Graven, Ion Fury etc...) will sell in part because players' expectations have changed. Players have also realized that if they want action reminiscent of old FPS games, they can't look towards AAA games because no AAA game will imitate the experience. It's too much risk. You need to give smaller studios a chance, and the only way smaller studios can make it work is by limiting visual detail.
I agree that the action was slower, however, Halo's real trick was designing a set of weapons that were fun to use, but were mostly horribly inaccurate. The sniper was the clear exception.
I did a controller VS mouse/keyboard competition with Halo 1 on PC vs the best console Halo player in my Battalion when we were deployed to Kuwait. We would both use the same weapons at the same time for most of the games to make it fair and objective since we were doing it out of curiosity. We were mostly even with the majority of the weapons. With the shotgun the console player had a clear advantage although I don't know why because I would have assumed a mouse would still be faster (maybe it was just me). When we were using sniper rifles, however, with my mouse and keyboard vs a controller it was like playing against someone that had never played Halo before. The mouse was just too quick and accurate and at that point Halo hadn't developed a really egregious form of aim assist yet. The funny thing about this last observation was that I was the one that had barely ever played Halo.
Note: I don't look down on people that prefer gaming on a console and I have enjoyed my Switch/PS4 immensely. For some genres an analog controller is objectively superior without purposefully implementing a software advantage to balance things out like many games choose to do with aim assist. I do tend to agree with Shroud's opinion that when it comes to competitive play at a certain level of MM rank they should just have separate queues for each controller type. Ultimately its a tradeoff though because if queues for a game like COD:Warzone were forcibly separated the game's community on PC would have died completely after a month or two like previous games did.
It does, and some of the later Halos had more accurate weapons (I recall a 3 or 4 shot burst rifle being the new starting weapon?).
The pistol actually seemed popular among players with better accuracy than myself, specifically because it was one of the few weapons accurate enough to reliably land headshots.
I tried some of the later Halo games, and it felt very non-Halo, and I think this pins it down. In the original Halo, it was relatively difficult to die instantly. Grenades, sniper rifles, the bazooka, and the hand sword were the only weapons that could do it, and each of them had substantial tradeoffs (grenades were limited, the bazooka traveled rather slowly and only killed on direct hits or very close hits, etc). Now there are tons of weapons that can kill in one hit. I think the starting rifle can't one shot, but two bursts to the head is death. And they've turned up the aim assist to the point where players are fairly good at getting headshots.
It misses all those "if I hide behind this rock and let my shields regen, I might survive" moments. There's no tension to the game as you struggle to survive; in a flash you're either the conqueror or the conquered. There's no cat and mouse as you chase someone through their base, hoping they don't hide behind a corner and stick you with a plasma grenade.
Maybe the tension is what I miss more than the slower speed of play. After all, fast playing games can still be fun (like Sonic) because they keep that tension that you could die at any second. That kind of tension that keeps you on the edge of your seat, so when you finally make it through you get the level you lean back and pat yourself on the shoulder. Modern AAA games seem to want to get directly to the dopamine hit, so they crushed the combat sequence into a very small number of actions so that you can do it over and over again faster. It just doesn't do as much for me.
I can't speak for Turok (I only played it once, and don't remember anything about it other than something something dinosaurs), but Goldeneye probably doesn't have much of a word here; its controls were clunky as shit. And sure, that was part of the fun, and it's still an iconic game, but I'm very much glad that modern FPS games have adopted more sane control schemes.
Goldeneye had a Turok-style control option that I largely used: move with the arrow keys, aim with the stick, trigger to shoot, shoulder to aim. Circle strafing is simple, as is aiming up or down. Goldeneye's shoulder aim allowed players more precision, at a cost of mobility, which has a certain logic to it.
Overall it's fairly similar to Halo, without the extra buttons for crouch, jump, grenade, or melee. Halo's golden triangle would be functionally dead without them. But... the pro controllers exist for a reason -- you can't use a fleet of thumb buttons on the controller face if your left and right thumbs are dedicated to moving and looking.
Which games imitate Goldeneye and Turok? I mean I guess you have a point that these games work, but the fact they've been ignored by game designers is telling something.
Goldeneye wasn't ignored, the thief designers have talked about the difficulty vs mission structure coming from straight from Goldeneye.
Edit: timesplitters, that was David doak and his goldeneye mates when they left rare and set up free radical. I think that franchise lost its way on the third one when they ditched the Goldeneye style controls.
Honestly, the difference over time is just the addition of a second analog stick. The Turok move with one thumb, aim with the other style closely mimics mouse+keyboard.
And of course, LAN play really helps vs split screen matches, but thats mostly a function of the era rather than game design philosophy.
It was subtle, but it was there. I remember getting frustrated with the fact that it dragged the target reticule towards center of mass, which made headshots trickier.
This is from memory of fifteen years ago, so I might be mistaken. I did play the original on Xbox obsessively, FWIW.
The chunky thing was why making levels for DooM was so easy. Prodeus (early access) also has easy to use level editor, but currently the game has some design problems - such as dumb and slow monsters. Those in DooM were also dumb, but their AI was functional. They could swarm and surround you well enough. I honestly think Prodeus looks better than Doom Eternal, the art direction especially. But I don't need as much ketchup.
I think games like these (Dusk, Graven, Ion Fury etc...) will sell in part because players' expectations have changed. Players have also realized that if they want action reminiscent of old FPS games, they can't look towards AAA games because no AAA game will imitate the experience. It's too much risk. You need to give smaller studios a chance, and the only way smaller studios can make it work is by limiting visual detail.