Hero shooter

Ahero shooteris asub-genreofshooter gamewhich emphasizes "hero" characters that have distinctive abilities and/or weapons that are specific to them. A hero shooter can be afirst-person shooteror athird-person shooter.

Game design

Hero shooters are a variation of multiplayer first- or third-person shooters, where players form into two or more teams and select from pre-designed "hero" characters that each possess distinctive attributes, skills, weapons, and other passive and active abilities. Hero shooters strongly encourage teamwork between players on a team, guiding players to select effective combinations of hero characters and coordinate the use of hero abilities during a match.

Hero shooters take many of their design elements from older class-based shooter,multiplayer online battle arena(MOBA) andfighting games.Some incorporate therole-playing elementsfrom MOBAs, where as a match progresses, the player can opt to buy or improve predefined skills for their selected hero, adapting these to the dynamics of the match. In other hero shooters, players have freedom to change to a new hero at respawn points as to alter team composition to better challenge their opponents.

Because of the focus on heroes as distinctive characters, hero shooters will often feature more narrative elements than traditional team-based shooters, providing backstories for each character and an emphasis on the story and world in which the games are set.

History

Origins

The origins of hero shooters can be traced back to earlytactical shootersthat featured class-based playable characters in multiplayer modes. Games likeBattlefield 1942andTeam Fortress Classicfeatured specific roles that a player could select that would come with their own unique abilities and sometimes specific weapons that were not available to the other classes. While the majority of tactical shooters were the main games that featured some form of class based mechanics, other shooters also featured the same gameplay style and had their own take on the system such asStar Wars: Battlefront&Conker: Live & Reloaded.

Valve'sTeam Fortress 2in 2007 created the main framework and inspiration for the subgenre. WhileTeam Fortress 2featured the same class-based system as its predecessor, each specific class was now its own unique "character," which came with a specific personality and appearance. This made the roles more fleshed out and feel more like a real person rather than just a nameless playable character.As Valve continued to expand the game, the company released additional media, including a line of "Meet the Team" videos that helped to build out each character class and their backstory.These "Meet the Team" videos established the use of cinematic narrative videos used in future hero shooters to introduce new hero characters.

Mainstream popularity: 2016–present

The subgenre had a substantial rise in popularity with the announcement ofBattlebornandOverwatchin 2014, with both games later releasing nearly at the same time in 2016.Battleborn,byGearbox Software,was the first game to use "hero shooter" in their press material in September 2014.Gearbox made the comparison ofBattlebornas a hero shooter to how theirBorderlandsgames were "shooter-looters". Gearbox considered a hero shooter, distinct from MOBAs as it was a first-person shooter first and foremost, but similar to "character-centric games [and] fighting games, hence the ‘hero’ in hero-shooter".Overwatch,announced byBlizzard Entertainmenta few months afterBattleborn'sannouncement, was heavily inspired byTeam Fortress 2and MOBAs.Overwatchhad evolved out from Blizzard's cancelledTitan,a class-based team shooter which the team had devised a large number of classes, which had caused scope creep and led Blizzard to cancel the project and cut the team. To save what they could, the remaining developers revised the classes into individual heroes with detailed backstories and personalities to make a team-focused hero shooter.Overwatchproved more popular of the two games, and by January 2021, Gearbox opted to shutterBattleborn'sservers.The rise in popularity ofOverwatchwas followed by a flood of similar games likeLawBreakers(2017) andGigantic(2017).The popularity of hero shooters also caused existing games that had used roles but without specific characterization, such asTom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege,Call of Duty,andBattlefield,to incorporate designed characters and narratives into their games.

Modern popular hero shooters includeTom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege(2015),Apex Legends(2019),Valorant(2020), andOverwatch 2(2022), and the upcomingMarvel Rivals.

See also

• Character class