I was gonna write a post about how a lot of FPSes from the 90s, regardless of what their engines supported, ended up being "walk forward through dark, earth-toned tunnel" and how depressing it was. Lost steam for that post, required too much effort to compile evidence and then try and make the premise stick (it's probably not a good one)
It is true that there were several FPSes that fell prey to this. Defiance (1997) is a good example - the last screenshot above is from that game, and it illustrates what most of it looks like. There are outdoor areas, but you spend most of your time in these claustrophobic tunnels with very little to look at. It's depressing.
I was going to use Chasm: The Rift as another example, because I've tried to play it a half dozen times and all it seems to be is "walk forward through dark, earth-toned tunnel." All I remembered was rooms consisting of six walls and a low ceiling, with mild elaboration.
But I pulled up a youtube video to get screenshots and found that this seems to be mostly constrained to the earlier levels (see pic 1 above.) Later on there are expansive outdoor areas and a lot of interesting geometry (pics 2 and 3.) There's even 3D trees! In 1997! Quake didn't even have that.
Unfortunately, it seems to suffer from the other universal problem of the time: it's boring. I flipped through footage of a half dozen levels and, while the setting is surprisingly beautiful for the era, with diegetically meaningful geometry, identifiable structures and spaces, and legible textures, all you seem to do in it is plug away at unremarkable zomboids and shitmonsters. It looks like 30 seconds of gameplay stretched to 8 hours, where the only verb is "fire double barrel shot gun."
This is, frankly, much of what I dislike about the resurgence in boomer shooters. I have bought and played several, and they just don't seem to be able to figure out how to crack this nut. The most ambitious one I've ever played devolved into a "gameplay loop" after maybe two hours, with plenty of game ahead of me. Sure, there was a narrative of some kind attached, but there was just so little variation in what I was doing to progress through it that I lost all interest.
For context, I should add that I didn't really enjoy Doom or Duke Nukem 3D when they were new, and I really didn't enjoy the Quake series. Oh, I played them. They were all I had, and I got something out of the first two, but they got old after a few levels, and Quake bored me to tears from the get go. I don't love the boomer shooters now because I didn't love them when they were new and state of the art.
It took years for me to realize that I wanted more out of games than FPSes really offered. In the 2010s there was sort of a revolution in FPS design that added a lot of things I can actually engage with (I think that 'person telling you the story over a radio while you do unrelated things' was a monumental achievement that fixed most of what was wrong with the genre) but it's still a tough row to hoe.
I actually consider it incredibly depressing that we finally got a reaction to the creative bankruptcy of the modern corridor shooter, and it was just to make different corridor shooters where everything's more pixelated and slightly faster.
It feels like the worst kind of nostalgia, assuming if we just reach back into our childhoods, everything will be better again, and whoo boy is that going well for the world about now, eh?
Like FPS games have gotten incredibly depressing, and there are good things that we've lost about older shooters. But speaking personally, I would rather see that realization manifest as more Black Mesas than yet another "oh we rediscovered how quick it is to pop out a Quake clone when the engines are all OSS".
But maybe that's always been the problem?
Once the engine tech is made, it is cheap to make "another X clone". What's not cheap is to make "a new Y", especially when the genre hitched itself so thoroughly to the pursuit of ever more polygons as the one true path. The last "big engine" was Crysis, and some have literally blamed it for killing the genre, for being the final step too far for "FPS as bleeding edge tech demo".
So few FPS games actually took the tack of trying to innovate on gameplay that many of the games that by all rights should count, got reassigned to other genres, because "actually trying" becomes unrecognizable to the criteria. "Immersive sims" aren't real, they're just FPS games with more fiddly bits and a flow that isn't just Time Crisis with manual movement. We called Deus Ex an "FPS RPG" in my day, because that's what it is. It reminds me how fighting games aren't allowed to exist and be taken seriously unless they're just Street Fighter II with a fresh coat of paint, indistinguishably from anyone outside the FGC.
It's depressing as shit too because on paper it used to be my favorite genre, and I basically gave it up but for a stint in Overwatch that couldn't sustain itself in the face of Blizzard design philosophy (and moral turpitude ...).
