![]() ![]() There’s no climbing towers and gathering collectibles, mercifully, replacing that repetition with a sprawl of damaged but darkly beautiful outdoor space. Previously a linear shooter oscillating between tight spaces in Russia’s underground metro network and the vast irradiated tundra overground, Exodus saw Metro transition its slow-burning, atmospheric brand of shooter into something like an open world game. All Ghillied Up’s “You take the one on the right” moment is an all-timer, too. A middle-Eastern setting, missions called Shock and Awe, the detachment of killing people and levelling buildings through an AC-130’s thermal camera – it was edgy, uncomfortable, and highly impactful. Before that it was more or less a walk-in Saving Private Ryan with slightly more shouting, but Modern Warfare showed us a disturbing analog of the current events of the day. ![]() But all those tropes began in COD’s first foray into present day combat. ![]() At this point we’ve straight up forgotten how many helicopter crashes we’ve been in. What sights Call of Duty has shown us, what spectacles it’s brought before us and then exploded. The fact that its space opera plotline is genuinely good and its environments were stop-and-stare gorgeous at the time is almost extraneous. This was the blueprint that a generation of shooters used. The combat arenas with space to plan and improvise. Rules that made shooters easy to master with a controller – two primaries and a pistol, swappable with the face buttons, instead of 11 weapons you cycled between using the number keys on a keyboard or your mousewheel. Swap in the later games, or even Destiny and its sequel here if you’d prefer, because what we’re really celebrating is the set of rules Bungie established in Halo. That does mean just one game from each series though – otherwise you’d be about to read a lot of Quake and Half-Life entries. Look, we just chose the best 15 shooters, ok? Get off our backs. So we didn’t – instead we built a vast learning AI, made it play every FPS released since the dawn of time, and provide us an empirical ranking of their quality. That makes picking just 15 of them a hard task. At this point, its library is so rich that it can even parody itself from years past, and to great effect. It’s shapeshifted into something athletes can devote their lives to and fill arenas through their talents, but it’s also been there to ask us uncomfortable questions about what we see on the news. Perhaps more than any other genre, a list of the best shooters tells a story about the medium and what we wanted from it at the time. Whenever the newspapers needed a moral panic, shooters were happy to provide one. When we all got online, shooters were there to show us why that was exciting. Once they were a vehicle for tech innovation, then everyone’s favorite storytelling medium. ![]()
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