Opinion: It's time for FPS games to Go!

The FPS game is one that dominates our current gaming marketplace. I'm not saying that there aren't other successful genre's in gaming - but whenever a new Call of Duty comes out, it's an immediate No. 1. Am I the only one getting tired of this?

Recently people have been growing tired of the FPS genre, but that hasn't stopped the games from selling by the bucketload. So far the total sales of CoD: Black Ops on every platform has reached around 26.25 million copies.
This is a ridiculous amount for a game that not only has been called one of the worst CoD titles, but also for a game that is basically just shooting people again and again and again. Whatever happened to creativity in games? It seems that nowadays you can put a load of guns, blood, and swearing in a game, call it something stupid like Mercenary Bastards and it's bound to shift a few copies!

I know not all shooters are terrible games, but the majority at least, seem to be lacking any story or emotion - instead they consist of shooting generic bad guys in the face. I'm not anti-action. I love a good action title, but in my opinion FPS's have nothing to do with action - they're just killing games. One game which I love that manages to be action packed and have a great story is Enslaved: Odyessy to the West. How much has this game sold? Around 750,000 copies. While this is okay compared to the sales some unknown titles get, when compared to Battlefield: Bad Company 2's 6.09 million copies it looks pretty puny.

It also means that other genre's have now been labelled as lame. I went round a friend's the other night with fighting game, Marvel vs. Capcom 3, they said it looked boring, and we had to play Halo: Reach all evening. Boring? BORING? The one thing a Marvel vs. Capcom game isn't, is boring. If you haven't seen one before I can tell you that the amounts of ridiculously bright-coloured effects make it one of the least boring games on the market.

Boring? Not a chance.

Then there's a load of ignorant people who think playing shooters and having a good kill streak makes them "hardcore". I don't believe in the whole, "hardcore gamer" thing anyway, but I can say that if someone really wants to be hardcore - complete Dark Souls!

At the end of the day, the FPS market is one that is getting flooded. This year alone, nearly 50 FPS games have/or will be released - that's nearly one a week. That's too much, especially when they all consist of the same, basic formula. I can't tell you what you enjoy, no one can. But it seems that FPS's are getting less and less interesting. And for me, and people like me they never were. I'm sure the genre has a lot of life left in it, but one day it will crash.

I know this because it's happened before. It happened in the early noughties when fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat were getting released too frequently for gamers and ended up failing. And more recently with the music genre. Games like Guitar Hero used to be successful ones that filled people's houses with plastic peripheral's - now though, the Guitar and DJ Hero series' have been cancelled, (or at least put aside), and the fate of the genre is in question - the same will happen here.

The real question is how long it will take.

But, what do you think? Comment.

Posted in: Game Features, Games