What will shmups be like in 10 years from now?

[FNG83]

^Exactly what I envisioned! LOL!

[ShmupSamurai]

Hahaha! I always wondered how on earth they were able to avoid crashing into stuff with that big-ass force blocking the cockpit.

[Ed Oscuro]

Another of those comics

First Person Shooter Shmup.

Only if it's R-Type, to get a really good look at that giant orange ball.

Can't see shit, captain.

(500 light years in MS paint, etc.)

The future hasn't invented virtual cockpits yet.

[Frederik]

I just saw this thread popping up again and thought of something.

Back in the early days of 2D shooters they weren´t really a dedicated genre - people wanted to pilot space ships and blow stuff up and since polygonal graphics were way off in the distance at that time 2D gameplay was all they could do.

With the advent of 3D graphics (After Burner, Space Harrier, that weird arcade Star Wars game, Star Fox, I´m not really well educated in that regard) developers could realize this concept in a whole other dimension. I´m sure at this time most people thought that this would be the death of 2D shooting games - why go back to the flat birds-eye view when you can have a much more thrilling experience in a first person view?

Except some people really preferred the feeling of the sprite-based 2D games. It´s a bit similar to people preferring vinyl over CDs or mp3 or shooting with real film instead of digital cameras - who would have thought these things would survive even if some "better" versions are around? The point is that just because something new comes along the old thing still will stick around - not for the mass appeal but for a dedicated fanbase that actively seeks the specific elements of the older thing.

Back then Space Invaders was the shit not because it had "charmingly retro, back-to-basics gameplay" (obviously), but because it was an entirely new way of shooting stuff up. It´s only when a new alternative pops up that people start to see clearly what the character of the old thing is. It´s only when you can carry around your entire music collection on a micro SD smaller than your average toenail that you start to think "Well, this old record certainly has a nice artwork and this tender warm sound that you just don´t get with digital media" (I personally love how much music we can carry around, but I totally get the vinyl argument.)

It´s likely I´m being Captain Obvious here, but I´m not sure shmups will (have to) change a lot because people will actively seek these games out - because they prefer this type of experience. They don´t want to level up, they don´t want visuals that throb along with the music, they don´t want gyro controls or online leaderboards and voice chat.

To give a different example, I just got "Richard Burns Rally" for a couple of bucks. Here´s a rally sim from 2004 that should be completely outdated by now. It only has a handful of cars and a handful of tracks, no fancy photo mode, no three thousand variants of Nissan Skylines and no intense level up career mode or livery editor. Yet this game has a absolutely hardcore fanbase that huddles around a game that in their mind hasn´t been topped ever since.

I´m absolutely positive that people will continue to enjoy shmups as they are now and as they have been in 1998 or whenever. Armed Police Batrider is still one of the coolest games I´ve ever played. Some genres just don´t need to revolutionize themselves every 5 years because the "logical" progression of a shmups have been games like Descent or Star Fox, or, in another direction, the hundreds of generic twin-stick shooters.

Oh, and as long as my dream game (Batrider 2 with secret playable ships from every shmup ever, with more routes than Darius, with tons of multi-segment bosses as well as a Detroid techno / D´n´B soundtrack by Garegga-era Namiki and half a dozen little quick challenge modes) hasn´t been made it´s not over for me yet.

[moozooh]

I'm not sure you thought that point through. In mid-late 80s, when these early first person/3D games like the mentioned After Burner and Space Harrier had already appeared, 2D shmups reigned supreme with their simple, crude, utterly basic mechanics; R-Type was perhaps the most well-made game of the time—you could say the holy grail of the genre. Things such as detailed graphics, booming soundtracks different from the usual blip-bloopy "computer music", convoluted scoring systems, secrets, artsy cutscenes and storylines that went above "your homeland is in danger, off you go" may well have been a response to the emerging competition from other genres and visual perspectives. The time when shmups have seen their most significant progress since Xevious was already in the 90s (from around mid-1989 to mid-1999, to be more exact)—most of the gameplay mechanics, conventions and staples of the genre you see and enjoy today were conceived in that decade:

— bullet canceling and shielding as a scoring mechanism;
— bullet slowdown and reflection;
— strategic bombing and suiciding;
— various forms of build-up/cash-in scoring, exponential scoring;
— various forms of time-based chaining;
— grazing for score;
— killer TLBs;
— various forms of milking;
— melee damage (aura mechanics, swordplay, etc.);
— small hitboxes of both the player craft and enemy bullets;
— non-damaging wall collision;
— killer rank.

90s is also the time when most households have become able to afford 3D-capable home consoles, so I'm sure competition was one of the major reasons for shmups as a genre to evolve and adopt new ideas without abandoning its core ideals, hardcore mechanics, and oldschool appeal.

[Obiwanshinobi]

To give a different example, I just got "Richard Burns Rally" for a couple of bucks. Here´s a rally sim from 2004 that should be completely outdated by now. It only has a handful of cars and a handful of tracks, no fancy photo mode, no three thousand variants of Nissan Skylines and no intense level up career mode or livery editor. Yet this game has a absolutely hardcore fanbase that huddles around a game that in their mind hasn´t been topped ever since.

That game was considered "hardcore" when it came out, though, and it's not unusual for a "hardcore" sim to live on for over a decade. Its appeal was very limited even back in the day (when flight sims or submarine sims were nearly extinct).

[Captain]

I'm not sure you thought that point through. In mid-late 80s, when these early first person/3D games like the mentioned After Burner and Space Harrier had already appeared, 2D shmups reigned supreme with their simple, crude, utterly basic mechanics; R-Type was perhaps the most well-made game of the time—you could say the holy grail of the genre. Things such as detailed graphics, booming soundtracks different from the usual blip-bloopy "computer music", convoluted scoring systems, secrets, artsy cutscenes and storylines that went above "your homeland is in danger, off you go" may well have been a response to the emerging competition from other genres and visual perspectives. The time when shmups have seen their most significant progress since Xevious was already in the 90s (from around mid-1989 to mid-1999, to be more exact)—most of the gameplay mechanics, conventions and staples of the genre you see and enjoy today were conceived in that decade:

— bullet canceling and shielding as a scoring mechanism;
— bullet slowdown and reflection;
— strategic bombing and suiciding;
— various forms of build-up/cash-in scoring, exponential scoring;
— various forms of time-based chaining;
— grazing for score;
— killer TLBs;
— various forms of milking;
— melee damage (aura mechanics, swordplay, etc.);
— small hitboxes of both the player craft and enemy bullets;
— non-damaging wall collision;
— killer rank.

90s is also the time when most households have become able to afford 3D-capable home consoles, so I'm sure competition was one of the major reasons for shmups as a genre to evolve and adopt new ideas without abandoning its core ideals, hardcore mechanics, and oldschool appeal.

HELLSINKER!
THE FUTURE IS NOW!