The Stagnancy of First Person Shooters

Through out the gaming community, there are people who love first person shooters and how there are so many to choose from. It's like going to a buffet, so many options to choose what you want to eat. All the stuff you eat is food. However, sometimes a buffet might lack balance. What if you aren't a meat eater and you're a vegetarian? From my experience, it seems like "normal" buffets generally don't care about that type of stuff. This can be said the same for the first person shooter genre.

There are so many of them and it seems like developers are more interested in making first person shooters than making real time strategy or survival horror games. Is it wrong for developers to not "challenge themselves" and try to do something that's not a shooter?

Without a doubt, first person shooters have been so popular in the last 10 years or so. It's always been a competitive market and there could be many reasons why it is. It could be the fact that most first person shooters are easy for people to get into and learn the basics. It could be the gargantuan success of Call of Duty whether it's breaking record sales on launch day or being one of the most played games. There are so many reasons to list. Why would developers not make them if they've been so successful for many years?

With that said, I personally think first person shooters in this day and age don't seem to push the boundaries. Even John Romero, one of the pioneers of the genre, admits we haven't scratched the surface of the genre. Click here.

Many shooters to this day just seem to play it safe rather than really taking some risks to breathe a new sense of life to the genre. Perhaps it's done for a business related decision, but that's also another issue at the same time. Why not try to do something that people aren't expecting your everyday first person shooter is doing? I still believe there's room for a first person shooter to mess around in a cyberpunk setting. What about co-op? We've got some successful co-op shooters, but there's still room to experiment and create new experiences to the genre.
Aim Down Sight. I'm sure you've seen this a lot in current first person shooters.

I always loved how Quake was an unorthodox game. It takes place in the medieval ages and you have guns..Yes, you read that clearly. It's a ridiculous setting, but it's something different and it's also something that the genre hasn't experimented enough. Speaking of unorthodox games, that's one of the main reasons why I love Bungie.

The original Marathon was released during the early days of first person shooters. Basically, when the genre was an infant and developers were still figuring out what they can do with this genre and push it to its fullest potential. Marathon was inspired by Doom which is basically the first game that popularized the genre and pushed the standards even higher after Wolfenstein 3D. Doom mostly followed the same formula from Wolfenstein 3D and basically perfected it. Marathon started taking cues from Doom, but added it's own unique characteristic to it. It included duel-wielding, story, secondary functions to the weapons, and included techniques that'll be a stable feature for future first person shooters like rocket jumping. All of these features were nearly or nonexistent at the time! Not only that, the game didn't play anything similar despite of having influences.

Halo is no different. I remember when first person shooters were considered more of a PC platform and it was generally the favorable platform for gamers to play on and developers to create on. Halo: Combat Evolved completely changed it all. I was mostly a PC gamer due to my love for first person shooters, but I definitely started playing more consoles games because of the original Halo. What made me love the original Halo was how different the game was from what I was playing before or the games it was competing at the time. It had a different weapon system which allowed you to have two weapons only and you had to scavenge for weapons which added a new sense of strategy. It's famous for standardizing health regeneration which wasn't a common feature for shooters at that time and an emphasis on story which was still not a common feature for shooters back in the late '90s to early 2000s. I literally might go off topic if I start focus on the things that makes Halo different from shooters before Halo existed.

To keep things brief, Halo followed the same footsteps of Marathon. It didn't play anything similar around other games at its time, but it had a lot of influences from other games that were out before its inception like Doom or Marathon. Basically, these two games from Bungie are prime examples of what I feel the first person shooter genre needs to do to keep itself from being stagnant. It's a shame I can't speak the same for Bungie's recent Destiny, but if there is a time where a revolution needs to happen for the first person shooter genre, the time is now.