When the game first came out, I was a giant Overwatch fan. I played that game all the time, whether in solo queue or in a coordinated enviroment. I probably have around 100 hours with Tracer, a character with the ability to dash through and rewind time. When I first played Superhot, I was admitted very confident that my Tracer abilities would carry over.
But it was nearly the exact opposite. As seen in the video below, Overwatch uses time as a method to increase the speed of the game. Check out this clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShnUZs5KF1k (you should get the idea in the first 15 seconds or so)
Tracer's general gameflow is skip time to get to enemies, shot them/place sticky bombs until they die, and then rewind time once you're close to death. And 12 seconds later, you can do it all over again.
In Overwatch, and many other FPS the point of time is to keep you moving at a million miles a second. You zoom all over the place trying to feast on the enemy team.
I think we can observe a similar phenomenon in Fortnite. It's always mind boggling to me that half the lobby jumps out of the bus right at the start, when that clearly leaves at a serious strategic disadvantage. You have to share items and have much more competition to advance towards the next circle, where as if you get off at the end you basically get a free pass to the top 50 or so. Note: I haven't played in about 6 months so I'm not sure if this is still true. But still, the battle bus exists as a mechanic to give the player a choice in time, you can either immediately go into a bloody free for all, one that might feel like playing Tracer, or take a slow approach, that might feel like playing Super Hot.
Super Hot requires extremely thoughtful gun play and movement. I'm certainly not implying these other games do not, but the main strategy revolves around getting a surprise attack on the opponent. The Super Hot AI has no room for surprises. It is all about calculated angles, resource management, and mechanics. They truly subdue our FPS expectations of high paced gameplay.
And it also does not have built in breaks like competitive FPS. You start a level and you immediately move from space to space. There's no death timers or re-queue time. If Overwatch is meant to imitate a sprint, Super Hot is a marathon, and it's incredible how they transferred the genre out of a fast paced enviroment.
I think examining the difference in how Super Hot and Overwatch, especially as Tracer, treat time really highlights how Super Hot differs from most FPS games. Because the pace of gameplay is dramatically slowed down from a typical shooter, Super Hot almost seems like more of a puzzle or strategy game. The player has as much time to consider their surroundings as they want, so they can plan out their moves, much like a game of chess. "Grab the dagger, stab the enemy, pick up their gun, and shoot the other two" can all be decided before any fighting happens, and can be executed as methodically as the player wants. The game also differs from the FPS genre because precise…
Your comments on Super Hot's more thoughtfully oriented gun play and movement got me thinking more about the limitations of VR in an FPS. Although Super Hot is still difficult, it lacks the kind of frenzied energy a typical FPS might have, but is this by the creators' choice or is it because of the difficulty of translating a true FPS into VR? While VR can 'augment' your physical abilities, visuals, etc. it cannot affect players' ability to process information and react to things. In fact, I would argue that it's much harder to process information in a VR game than in a normal console game because of the massive influx of information. To support this theory, Super Hot chooses…
I agree with much of what you said, and I just want to add that it is interesting how Super Hot also manages to slow the game down so incredibly much while still maintaining difficulty. I feel a lot of people believe the faster the game (especially for something such as an FPS) the harder the gameplay feels. Yet even having control of time in Super Hot resulted in plenty of deaths on my part, and a difficult gameplay experience (especially when we had headshots only mode enabled). I wonder if this is a result of a compensation in level difficulty, or a compensation by means of the unfamiliar VR use-your-own-body controls, or lacking a crosshair as many FPS games…