First-person shooters (or FPS for you grandchildren of boomers) is one of my favorite genres in gaming. I grew up playing games such as Doom, Quake III Arena, Unreal Tournament 2004, and others.
I am one of those people that truly believed that FPS games were meant to be played on PC, too. I remember when Halo came out on the Xbox, I felt lost playing it with a controller. As soon as Microsoft released a PC version of the game, I was all over it and I noticed just how much better of an experience I had.
Then… something happened.
Almost everything became an FPS game.
This editorial became a thing when I was in The Outerhaven Discord and someone linked a synopsis from Steam for a game called In Sound Mind. The game’s synopsis read as follows:
As you awake in the corridors of an inexplicable building, you find the environment takes on a life of its own and leads you to discover a series of victims, all exposed to the same experimental chemical. In your search for answers, bizarre visions emerge and introduce a host of imposing horrors…and a cat named Tonia.
From the sound of it, I thought that this was going to be some sort of sci-fi game about exploration, information gathering, etc. With my curiosity piqued, I clicked on the gameplay trailer and instantly saw that it was, yet another, FPS game and I ended up throwing my hands into the air and instantly lost interest.
So, why would someone like me… who regards FPS as one of their favorite genres get so disgusted when a new FPS game comes out?
Because the market has become oversaturated with FPS games and it’s to the point where almost every new game that comes out is some form of an FPS.
We saw it at the Xbox panel around E3. I remember watching it with some of the staff members and about 80% of the games showcased were an FPS. I just wanted something new and different but I never got it.
I’m also an RPG buff so I was hoping for SOME news on Fable but there was none. It was an FPS game here, an FPS game there, and very little variety given to anything else. Even today, almost all of the trailers and games that get posted in our Discord are some form of an FPS. Add in that battle royale games are just a new form of FPS that keeps growing and growing and it doesn’t seem to have an end in sight.
Now, don’t get me wrong.
I’m not an idiot!
Well… at least I don’t think I am.
I do know that the reason why there are just so many FPS games is because that’s what sells. A huge portion of the eSports market is in FPS games. It’s a very popular genre, it’s what prints money. As a business in a capitalist environment, if something prints money then why the hell aren’t you getting a slice of the pie?
As long as games like that are popular, companies are going to keep making them and they have zero reasons as to why they should stop doing so. There will be more Call of Duty, Battlefield, The Outer Worlds, Overwatch (shudders), Doom, and Half-Life 3 games getting pumped out!
Well… except for that last one. Gabe only has two fingers and, therefore, can’t count to three.
And what’s more to that… there will be companies pumping out more and more games in and out of that genre. Games like Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, Apex Legends, Fortnite, etc. Mobile games are getting in on the action, too, and it’s continuing to grow and grow.
I mean, from a business standpoint, it’s a good thing.
However, the detrimental side of it is that it can kill your interest in the FPS genre.
Why?
Because of a simple slogan that you probably have heard of before: “Too much of a good thing.”
One of the big reasons I fell out of love with AAA games is due to the mediocre quality that most of them exhibit. They promise you the world and then deliver a fraction of it. A good example of this was Watch_Dogs. While not an FPS, it presented a high-tech open-world game that really tantalized nerds such as myself… until you get in there and realize that the bulk of the side missions are just copy/pastes from a limited pool with different NPCs. The objectives are the same for that group of missions but the location and the people have just switched around. This caused one to get bored really quickly.
If you do want an FPS example, look no further than Destiny 2. Every patch cycle, it’s do the story campaign, go do some missions to level your faction, grind to get your light level up, and maybe engage in some PvP. It got stale, boring, and redundant doing the same thing over and over again on a shiny new map.
I’ve been let down by so many AAA games that I just fell out of love with them and I’ve been looking for a way to enjoy a big title again… but that gets even harder to do so when the bulk of every new title coming out is another FPS game.
Like, let’s take a look at some upcoming titles.
Far Cry 6, Halo Infinite, Deathloop, Tom Clancy’s Rainbox Six: Extraction, Shadow Warrior 3, Bright Memory: Infinite, ExoMecha, Lennis Gate, Metal: Hellsinger, After the Fall, Boundary…
Those are eleven games I just named coming out in 2021-2022.
ELEVEN… And I didn’t even name them all! I remember when we were lucky to get 2-3 FPS games in a year. Hell, there’s even a video on YouTube called the Top 20 NEW FPS Games of 2021.
It’s hard to get excited about a genre you once loved when there are just way too many options to pick and choose from. Again, I fully know the reasons behind why there are so many but for fans like me… this is a major turnoff.
I don’t hate the FPS genre… I don’t hate FPS games.
I’m just sick of almost every new game being an FPS. It reminds me a lot of different booms in different mediums. Like the big video game boom in the 70s which was followed by a crash… or the big anime boom in the 90s when it was, once again, followed by a crash. They all followed the same pattern that everyone was trying to get a piece of a popular pie and it caused a huge oversaturation within the market. While FPS games are just 1 genre in a sea of many, you have to admit that some genres in and of themselves have become their own cultures… their own ecosystems. Therefore, it’s not a case of “there are too many games in general,” it’s now a case of “there are too many games within this genre.” That can (and probably will) lead to a collapse of a specific genre while the rest of them continue on instead of the entire game industry crumbling as a whole.
I guess that’s a testament to just how big gaming has gotten but this genre that I once loved has become, dare I say, too mainstream. I often wonder when everyone will end up like me and just get sick of the abundance of FPS titles coming out?
Meanwhile… I’m just going to sit here and watch it from the outside. Until then… can we just get something different?
Please?
Agree? Don’t agree? Let me know in the comments below. Either way, I had to get this off my chest. Thanks for listening to the rant!
