I'm sure most of you have played a mainstream shooter title at least once in your life. Whether your preference is Counter Strike, HALO, Gears of War, Battlefield, Modern Warfare, or any other popular shooter franchise, you're all familiar with the basics of the genre. Shooters are basically about two things: guns and shooting things with those guns.
Originally, shooters were mostly a single player experience with fairly extensive campaigns. Nowadays, the single player experience is mostly an after thought, and shooters are known for their multiplayer. The rise of e-sports has contributed to the multiplayer focus, but the primary reason that multiplayer exists is because it allows infinite replayability in a competitive online setting. This is what really attracts people to the genre, and it keeps games relevant for much longer than they normally would be. Counter Strike is still played in tournaments across the planet, and that game is 11 years old!
Despite the fact that shooters are still a license to print money, I feel that the genre has been getting pretty stale for a while now. The single player experiences have mostly fallen to the wayside (outside of Bioshock and RAGE, if you count those as pure shooters - which I do not), so each and every shooter is now judged primarily on their multiplayer experience. The Modern Warfare series is mostly to blame here, since it has set the current standard for what FPS multiplayer should be. The problem with this is that no one is really deviating from Modern Warfare's formula. Companies are simply going through iteration after iteration of what is essentially the exact same game with prettier graphics and slightly different multiplayer components (and new single player campaigns, but no one cares). I'm sure people will try to tell me that Battlefield is completely different, but at their core, the two franchises are mostly the same. In fact, the best way to tell the difference between a recent shooter and a shooter that is several years older is by looking at the graphics: because they've been doing the same damn multiplayer for years. What is the main difference between Modern Warfare multiplayer and Battlefield multiplayer? The fact that you can have bigger teams in Battlefield? Big deal.
Now to be fair, there is only so much that can be done with shooters in terms of multiplayer. You have your standard deathmatch, king of the hill and its variations, capture the flag and its variations, you get the idea (because we've been seeing these game modes forever). So, if we can't mess with the game modes, then we can mess with the weapons, right?! Well no, it appears that we can't (or developers just don't see the need to). You get your standard array of weapons in each game and all their sequels, with little to no deviation (outside of weapon add-ons, yawn). The last actual innovation seen by the genre was the experience/unlockables system first implemented in the Modern Warfare series, and that was 4 years ago. Some games also dabble in vehicles, but it's really just more of the same thing. We've been seeing the same basic selection of vehicles for years and years, with a few additions and variations thrown in on occasion.
Maybe I'm just being too hard on the genre, because I understand that there is only so much that can be done these games. With that said, I still wish that people would stop lining up out the door every time one of these titles comes out. I know that they will all continue to sell 5 million copies in their first month despite whatever I write here, but at some point I hope that gamers realize that enough is enough. If we continue to fund cash-ins, then the genre has almost no reason to innovate anything. They will simply continue to churn out products that use the same formula on a yearly basis, with a minimal number of additions (to keep that new game smell). Any game that deviates from this is typically shunned by the entire community, kicked into the gutter and left to die a screaming death, cold and alone. Just because the developer had the balls to do something different from the norm doesn't mean that they should be given a ticket to Failsburg (unless the game in question was poorly executed - in which case it deserves its fate).
All I'm asking for is a little more creativity within the genre as a whole. It's simply too incestuous at the moment, with everyone peering over at the person next to them, too afraid of being too different. I am fully aware that a good recipe for success is to go with what works and that the companies are trying to make money above all else, but sometimes we need to go along the path less traveled. Recycling does not breed ingenuity, no matter how much we wish it would.
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