I wouldn't stay stagnant, I'd just say extremely slow at innovating.
Rod is exactly right on every point.
And blah blah blah.
Eventually people will grow tired of the shooter genre and stop buying them, but who knows when that'll be. As much as people want to admit, different series of shooters play differently, even if it's the same war setting. Call Of Duty plays differently than Battlefield. Halo plays differently from.. I don't know many arcade space shooters so forgive me. Like the WWII setting eventually the Modern war setting will feel drab and repetitive. Then it'll move onto another setting like space, which actually, strangely enough hasn't been explored that much at the moment. Halo being the only space type shooter, oh, and Mass Effect. That being said, the staples in the genre are mostly the games people talk about. Games like the newest Wolfenstein, Singularity, Metro 2013 etc are the copy cat ones, and it's pretty obvious. Even though they are of decent quality they are the ones who are whoring out the FPS genre by making average games and introducing very little.
One trend of innovating the genre is by mixing two genres into the game, something like Fallout 3, Borderlands, or Mass Effect is becoming more and more popular. Even if they have been there in the past (System Shock, Deus Ex), they're becoming more popular. They are great games and they are far from the generic run of the mill shooter. Even Rage is mixing racing and FPS, which is kind of neat on it's own but we'll see how that turns out. Portal is also included as it's puzzle and from a first person perspective.
Also besides genre mixing, there's adding new features to games. While these aren't exactly innovative on it's own, it's introducing newer things the genre and more so to games. Halo's brain numbingly easy to use Forge is becoming copied in games besides it's genre (see the newest Lego games), so is it's built in replay feature that uses the game's code to re-render exactly how the game went. CoD's leveling up feature in multiplayer is somewhat unique at the time of CoD4 by adding levels and rankings to multiplayer and having that perk system. While not exactly new (Battlefield 2 had rankings and gaining weapons), but it's one of the best games to incorporates those ideas and make it work well.
Brink is also introducing something that looks like it would work rather well in it's world is by having a narrated story in a multiplayer game. Depending on which team wins the outcome is different and the story becomes different. The success of this depends on the quality of the game. To which, by the way, looks pretty deep and involving.
I think the best and easiest way to innovate the FPS genre is by removing the shooting aspect. Mirror's Edge and Portal are a showcase of this and shows off new tricks involving an old dog (lol shitty metaphor). Even Mass Effect shows a bit of this, having sections about talking to other characters and choosing the outcome of situations through dialogue is something that's utilized well and in my opinion not often enough. The dialogue sections in Mass Effect were my favorite parts of the games and made it great to me. Alpha Protocol takes a step forward in this respect by instead of having the line of text as an option choice, they have it so you choose a set of adjectives based on what the character is going to say, and then adding a time limit in which to choose your dialogue option. Alpha Protocol's actual gameplay sucks but the dialogue choices and the story is easily the best part of it and trumps MANY games in that respect.
Again, saying every shooter plays the same is like saying every sport with a ball plays the same. Or every racing game is the same. Or every rock band sounds the same. It's simply not true.
Although the FPS genre isn't exactly innovating, there's not that many games that are innovative in their own genre. The FPS genre is just an example because it's so immensely popular. Has the racing genre innovated past Burnout 3? Not really. Has American football games innovated? Not really, took a couple steps and then fell on it's face. Has the open world type games innovated since.. GTA3? Not exactly. Has platforming games innovated since Mario 64? Not that I can think of.
Replying to #4
Because the
entire video game industry is stagnant because of first person shooters. ::)
allkratos · #1I wish multiplayer-focused FPS have the same depth.
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory's multiplayer has a pretty stupid amount of depth. Stealh action multiplayer, it's so good even it's sequel fucked it up and they didn't bring it back in the newest one. Also take a look at Brink, it looks pretty cool.
And no, it's not the most innovative genre. I don't think it's the least innovative genre either, that award goes to music games. Imo, the most innovative genre is probably puzzle games. With almost each puzzle series playing differently.
