[randomacct44]

I think it's broader than just "designed for easy control on a console". There were other factors at play.

I think what actually set this type of design in motion can be traced back to that point in time when Half-Life came out and all of a sudden everybody seemed to criticize Quake (and indeed id Software in general) because their shooters lacked a story (actually, my recollection is a little fuzzy - games like Thief and System Shock were certainly exploring the 'story' space as well, I'm just not sure off the top of my head in what order the games arrived on the scene).

The realistic movement (head-bobbing, slowness, inertia, etc) seems like it's meant to convey a vague sense of what the physical impact of running would be, in the same way that camera shake is used to accentuate punches in a fighting game or a movie with fighting scenes. It's something that conveys momentum and mass.

It's an element to convey story and immersion. I feel like there's probably an axis here, where you have pure arcade games like Geometry Wars on one end and ultra-cinematic shooters like Battlefield 4 on the other. I'm really guessing here but I imagine Battlefield 4 (or let's say even the original Call of Duty, though I've only heard/read about it and never actually sat down to play it) wants you to actually feel the things that the soldier in the story is feeling. In some sense, it wants to be an interactive movie experience. As opposed to Geometry Wars and Doom, where the gameplay comes first and the story is nearly non-existent or very secondary.

I remember one of the biggest praises given to Call of Duty (EDIT: actually, reading further down, I think it was Soldier of Fortune that I was thinking of!) that it felt like you were in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. I can't help but think that must have been a huge contributor to the tone of console shooters that came afterwards.

[pvg]

actually, my recollection is a little fuzzy - games like Thief and System Shock

I think it might be, Ultima Underworld, Dark Forces, Marathon, many others were story-driven well before Half Life. So I don't think it's story that did it. The console aspect is something several designers have written about, including Romero, I just couldn't google my way back to the references.

I remember one of the biggest praises given to Call of Duty (EDIT: actually, reading further down, I think it was Soldier of Fortune that I was thinking of!)

MOHAA, I think not COD or SoF.

[abritinthebay]

CoD got MASSIVE praise for it's first 2 games though. They were genuinely atmospheric WW2 shooting games (and, IMO, a whole lot better than the dreck that followed).

So it could be both (MoH was also praised a LOT).

Soldier of Fortune was praised mostly for it's "gritty" story and the "realistic" bullet damage (shooting different areas of a character had different visual wound results and reactions).

[pvg]

Pretty sure the OP was talking about the Normandy beach landing bit. That was in MoHAA.

[randomacct44]

Yep, it was a long time ago now :)

Dark Forces is one I haven't thought of in awhile - such a great story-based FPS.

I probably didn't make it as clear as I meant to - I wasn't so much referring to "when story-based first-person games started being made" as much as I was meaning to refer to "that point in time when people started criticizing games like Quake for not having a story".