What Happened to First-Person Shooters?

The first-person shooter, or better known as the FPS, is probably the most popular genre in the gaming industry today.   I could stop in any game store right now, and a third of the games are first person shooters.  Personally, I used to be a huge fan of the FPS genre.  I played a lot of Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, and GoldenEye when I was younger.  I absolutely loved those games, because it was something different at the time.  Each one of those games, although can be put into the FPS genre, is very different from the other in terms of game play and story.  Today, the FPS genre has become a shell of its former self, and I blame on one particular event in history. WORLD WAR EFFIN’ II.

I’ve gained one more reason to despise Nazis. Seriously, I believe that there are more games that were made about WWII than actual deaths in WWII.  I mean, when the first Call of Duty and Medal of Honor games came out it was awesome.  I thought it was amazing to experience storming the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, but then each game after that had me doing that over and over again. The market is saturated, and we are well beyond overkill.

After awhile, as much fun as it is killing Nazis, it starts to get old. We killed Nazis in Wolfenstein 3d back in 1992.  We all know what happened in WWII and everyone knows how it ends, so you’re not going to be fooling anyone with the story.  Yet here we are, with companies still making these games expecting us to believe that somehow their game is going to be different.  It never is different.  It’s time to move on.

Storming the beaches of Normandy! I wonder who’s gonna win this time!

More recently, the big craze is the “Modern Warfare“ type of game.  Everyone has hopped on this money train.   It’s the same crap as the WWII games only with modern weapons.  Big deal. Where’s the innovation?  What will make the next first-person shooter stand out from the rest?  Aren’t the creators of these games remotely interested in taking the genre to the next level?  From the looks of things, they are not.

In Unreal, I was able to blast someone’s face off with a giant laser rocket.  I could jump 50 feet in the air and then shoot a rocket killing a bunch of people.  In Modern Warfare and these other regurgitated WWII games, I shoot 3 bullets and the other guy is dead. The only difference varying from game to game being how the blood splatters and the noise the enemy makes when terminated.

Sweep your audience off their feet already!  Remind us why so many have dumped dollar after dollar into the genre.  I have no idea why these games are still popular considering the lack of evolution in the series (and I say this, not from the view of a hater, but from view of a concerned fan), but if you gave me a choice between jumping in the air and killing 10 people with rockets in the face or shooting at guy 3 times in the back, you’d better give me that damn rocket launcher.

Share on Facebook