For example, I didn’t fall in love with Titanfall 2’s environmental art design—it felt a bit generic to me, like it was meant to be the backdrop for a shooter, as opposed to the Sevastopol in A:I or the station in SOMA that felt like existing locations.
Ditto BioShock: Infinite. The world felt like it was built around the premise of being an arena shooter, not the other way around.
BioShock 1 & 2 are exactly what I’m talking about though.
Even Borderlands 2 has great world-building: the corporate history that can be inferred from the level design, the weapons & the NPCs makes it one of the richer games I’ve played.
Would love to hear others’ thoughts on your favorite FPS environments!
Going to mention F.E.A.R 1 and to some respects F.E.A.R 2, its a first person game that lets you see your feet for one, but seriously they did a really good job with replica AI -even though they are clones they have personality - like making cover from environment, trying to use environment to get away from a bad situation - like crawl under blocked door’s crawl space or shoot and run while getting to cover
Your character has an in-game reason to have slow-mo which is really well done in the I can throw a grenade, go slo-mo, hear the enemy crap its pants and shoot the grenade,see the air around the explosion expand and witness an appropriate blood and gore shower.
They comment on your speed, panick when they run out of ammo when you rush them and try to flank you if they can.
It has some horror elements as well but usually in service to the story as First Encounter Assualt Recon is meant to deal with shady stuff and F.E.A.R 2 had a really cool school level.
Level design for the first 2 also was pretty fluid with reasonable area transistions that made sense how you got where you were at even when it is mostly just a point A to B with some light exploration for secrets or weapons
F.E.A.R 3 is meh, had some fleeting good moments and some answers to questions from the first 2, but overall felt like a lesser game than the two preceding it. It lost a lot of soul and felt more robotic in design