Hello wanderer, before you ask me your questions, answer a couple of mine. What comes to your mind when you hear the words “tactical shooter”? Counter-Strike, Rainbow Six: Siege? What if I told you that they have practically nothing left of the word “tactical”?
I don’t really like greetings, so Anton wrote the text and now I will briefly guide you through the origins of tactical shooters and show you where it all came to. Specifically in this piece of text, the concept of a tactical shooter will be considered, as a game about the forces of internal troops and special forces. Games like Ghost Recon and Delta Force will not be covered here.
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six is a 3D shooter developed and published by Red Storm Entertainment in 1998 for PC (we will not consider other versions, because this is not the history of the series, but it can be done if I get at least a little feedback from you). The remarkable game was not the graphics (although for 98 it was not so bad), but the gameplay, which consisted of several stages:
Briefing
Planning
Well, the action itself
Who is this briefing of yours, I think there is no need to explain, but we will analyze the planning stage in as much detail as it will be necessary to reveal the topic.
The planning stage follows immediately after the briefing (in fact, the same menu).
First you need to choose the operatives you will take on the mission. They are divided by specialization, have their own stats, biography, and nationality (only stats and specialization are important). We will not focus our attention on specializations, but it is worth pointing out that you need to take them depending on the type of assignments, because there are several types of them: elimination, rescue operation and disposal of bombs and other devices.
Next comes the distribution of operatives into four teams, four people each.
And finally, the most important stage for a successfully completed mission is laying the route. This is one of the most important things for a tactical shooter, what is the point of a tactical shooter in which there is no stage for developing tactics and strategy?
In the planning menu, you can specify the route, goal, type of behavior, speed with which the group will go, for each team that we have assembled earlier. The card is made well, and its control is made quite conveniently, you can immediately understand how to use it, you can see it in the screenshot above.
After the planning comes the gameplay itself, which is, in general, an ordinary shooter. But the most interesting thing is how the game, already during the gameplay, makes its own adjustments to your seemingly ideal plan, because the opponents are not simple dummies and can move and change positions, in the second part of the game they could already surrender if they saw, that the advantage is not on their side.
It is useless to do a more detailed analysis, we still have the SWAT series and their legacy ahead.
Developers 3 were Sierra, and SWAT 4 was made by Irrational Games …
“Stop, where are the first and second parts, why only 3 and 4?” – someone will ask. The fact is that initially the SWAT series was just an offshoot of the Police Quest series, which was developed by Sierra. Hopefully the name “Police Quest” speaks for itself, but if it’s not very clear, then here’s the gameplay.
SWAT 3 was released in 1999 and (like SWAT 4) offered, instead of large-scale operations, local missions to rescue hostages and neutralize criminals in small locations (usually a small building with a large number of rooms). It is important to note that unlike R6, the player is a police officer and his main goal is to arrest, not destroy, the main target. Illegal use of force is punished in the game. Because Since the location is small, then the number of teams from 4, as it was in R6, decreased to 1, only the number of people increased to 5, where the 5th is the player. In this regard, the planning stage was abolished: only the building plan and equipment settings remained. Commands should be given to subordinates already during the game.
