[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".