Anonymous User asked: why hitscan?
I like the old id Software shooters a lot (Doom, Quake, etc) and I've played my fair share of contemporary retro FPSes too. Often the most notable difference between them is the lack of hitscanners.
I think a lot of retro FPSes get very self-conscious about forcing the player to stay moving, and eschew anything that could be perceived as 'forcing them into cover' (understandable, given that hunkering behind cover was the combat paradigm of choice for like a fuckin' decade), but it comes at the expense of some of the more interesting ways that hitscanners can add to the retro FPS formula.
Like, a chaingunner in Doom II is still forcing you to move, it's just focused movement—you gotta duck behind something, anything, just long enough to interrupt their line of sight and get them to revert to their wandering state. Even other monsters will do. If you can't prioritise them in a fight, you've got to work around the parts of the space that they have vision over. Movement in an old-school shooter isn't just about circle-strafing past a hundred projectiles. Sometimes what makes these games interesting is how they squeeze you, force you into difficult positions, create no-go zones and—in the case of a lot of id Software hitscanners—present an aggressor that either needs to be removed ASAP, or endured for as long as it takes to whittle it down.
An absolutely classic encounter setup in these games is to drop the player into a room with a Shambler (or an Arch-Vile) and present them with some small central obstacle that they need to keep between them while they handle some other threat (e.g. a pack of weaker enemies). That's an interesting challenge! It's also very much "taking cover from a hitscanner"!
Like, I get it. I also love to bunnyhop freely around a room with fifty projectile-slinging guys who all want my ass. But it gets stale fast, and hitscanners are one of the best ways to add an element that can't just be solved by holding the strafe buttons down for five minutes. The more distinct tools in your enemy toolkit, the more interesting distinct scenarios your level designers can make. I don't think it's a good idea to shut yourself off from them just because we're all still digesting the trauma of the late 2000s.
