A major reason that FPS games are so successful is that they possess a quality that makes them hard to compete with as online games.  You are not "obligated" to the game or the other players when you enter an FPS game online.  You can jump in and play for just 5 minutes and leave, and nobody will even notice let alone be annoyed with you.  Very few games possess this quality, and it is the primary reason that FPS games are the dominant online games.  Any game that has this quality makes for an excellent online game, but very few do.  In most games you are "obligated" to stay and finish the game, unless you want to annoy the other players.  And in a game like that, players will eventually stop trying to play because the can "never get a good game".

Online, at least, this aspect of FPS games is the primary thing that makes them so successful and popular as online games.

It doesn't matter how long you play an FPS game, that is a big part of what makes them so popular online.  It does matter how long you play most other games online, because if you leave you end/ruin the game for the other players in the game.  The most extreme example, the opposite end of the spectrum from FPS games, are long playing strategy games.  Civilization will never be a popular online game because you are "obligated" to remain in the game for 6-8 hours to complete a game.  This is the exact opposite of what makes FPS games so popular online.

Every shooter, since the beginning of the FPS genre, has been about using guns.... WITH a good morality structure behind it. In fact the first fps game was Wolfenstein. A game about killing all of Hitler's men. But we all know that is not the real reason behind the games....

This game had a mass appeal because you finally had a game that shot bullets. At least it made you feel like you were shooting bullets. But what really drew people in was the guns themselves. You started off with a pistol... then upgraded to a sub machine gun. And finally you had rockets. The same thing happened with DOOM. You start off with almost nothing but end up with everything. The idea was to allow the player to slowly try out different guns, then throw in a mix of enemies to make it challenging. While also having the player save ammo for different enemies to quickly progress through a stage.

Eventually this became boring. people would find the biggest gun and use it every time against other players. It was pretty much Find the best gun in the game and just camp on its spawn point.

Well then players started to see that tactic as being cheap. So they tried something else... Each gun does a different amount of damage with varying rates of fire, but the recoil on the guns should be different.

Eventually people stopped hogging the rocket launchers after they only had like 2 rockets instead of 5. It worked. You had Socom do this... But ultimately Counter Strike made this a staple. You must have recoil in a gun. So this became the appeal to gamers... Counter Strike had you play a side game of "economy." But other gamers found this to be a cheap tactic.

In comes Battlefield or Battlefront which introduces a new mode called "Conquest." Gamers flocked to this new way of playing in the maps because now you can not just camp in one area of the game. You now had to defend areas in order for players to even come across that part of a level that you are watching.

This went on for a while. Almost every game had a mode like this but Socom had a mode called "Captive." Where when you "kill" an enemy, you only just down him. but it required you to oust the entire enemy team to win. Which means a player from the opposing side could "revive" a fallen ally and they could team up against the enemy team. Both teams had the ability to down opponents and revive. But until a team was ousted it would go on until the timer ran out.

And lets not forget Halo adding in the floaty jumps, the 3 hit pistol, and sticky grenades.... I still don't find sticky grenades as much fun as the Jumping Bean grenade from Area 51.

Then comes in Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare which introduced not only "prestige" and shooting through walls but "kill streak rewards." Call of Duty pretty much took over the planet of FPS because of this. Rewarding players for getting kill streaks to enable a sort of cheat code into the game? HECK YEAH SIGN ME UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!

This is where it has been for a while....

Uncharted comes around and has players finally doing something different which is CLIMBING ON STUFF! No longer would you have to run around to get to a new are, now you can climb on walls and rocks! But this was only fun for Uncharted 2 (Uncharted 1 had no multiplayer.)

Haze tried to introduce feigning deaths. 

Warhawk was about trying to add in planes to a battlefield type setting instead of helicopters, but allowing sniper shots to travel all the way across the map. As well as shells from tanks and so on.

Then Gears of War had the chainsaw fights and the chest high walls...

They tried to get players interested in other abilities to shoot projectiles by introducing mutated humans. (I forget the name of the game)

Crysis was for the technologically advanced people obsessed with invisibility cloaks.

Resistance was all about alien guns like Duke Nukem had...

The order 1886 had the fabled death ray gun from Nicolai Tesla.

Starhawk had mech's that could transform into planes...

It would not be until Rainbow Six Siege came out that it shifted gamers in a new direction... being able to change up the playing field with Gadgets and gizmos. Reinforcing walls... windows... having different speeds for each operator.... basically brought the "Hero shooter" into the light of day.

Honestly the reason why "Hero shooters" became popular was because of those MOBA games. Having different abilities to catch your opponent off guard.

You had Drawn to death go into the more cartoonish Mortal Combat special move style of a hero shooter.

Overwatch stole the limelight from siege and had players get interested in hero shooters... This also helped Rainbow Six Siege come into play.

LawBreakers introduced Zero gravity (Which Area 51 did first. But no one cared for it.) and a new idea behind the term "Blitzball." It is not the FFX version of it at all. It is something completely different. Which I am surprised that Squaresoft hasn't filed any actions in court over the name of the mode found in LawBreakers.

And now you have Player Unknown's battlegrounds (PuBG).

Where all of the people screaming for an open sandbox world of competitive shooting can finally come together and GET THE HECK OFF OF GTA V. Killing random people all of the time absolutely everywhere in GTA V online.

PUBG introcuded the idea of having a gigantic level to start with and having random items thrown every where.... But having only 1 player who can take the top spot. (You can thank Sword Art Online for having the idea behind this first.... Or did they have this idea first?) While the level shrinks every so often. (Which in Sword Art Online it would shorten after the death of a certain amount of players.)

And now we are currently here.... Where can we go with shooters?

We can't do space. Forsaken 64 already did that. Deadspace has the horror aspect of it already covered.

The hero based shooters already have mutant abilities.

What more can you do with guns?

You could say prop hunt from Gary's Mod could be a way to go.... but that gets old.

Friday the 13th the game was an awesome idea but it has only a shotgun in it.

Evolve and Dino D-Day, or Primal Carnage already has dinosaurs or the ability to play as some type of animal in the middle of a gun fight. Aliens Vs Predators Vs Humans gets old.

Battleborn and Paragon are already old and boring.

Fortnite PVP is he same as PuBG only you get to create walls and stairs and such on the fly....

What else can you do with a shooter?

Metal gear Online had abilities too... and had an rpg system to it. or at least the element of adding stats to certain areas of a soldier.

I mean what else can you do with a shooter to make it fun when everyone is just fine with skirmish mode? How can you attract them to a new shooter with what we have right now? What can you possibly think of that would appeal to the gigantic crowd of the FPS player?

On 18/12/2017 at 11:42 PM, BBeck said:

That might be a hint that FPS's are not the thing for you. :-)

But I'm not really a huge FPS fan myself. I really liked Mass Effect although it was a lot more than and (...)

But solely as an FPS, Mass Effect had fun game mechanics.

Mass Effect was a shooter, but it wasn't a first person shooter. It's a Third Person Shooter, such as the likes of Tomb Rider, Just Cause, GTA, Hitman, etc. Not quite the same beast.

On 18/12/2017 at 11:42 PM, BBeck said:

So, I think there are a lot of FPS's that really are the same game re-skinned. And it's not even realistic combat. Bullets aren't affected by gravity, air density, wind, temperature. The fly in perfectly straight lines with no bullet drop. And combat tactics that would never in a million years work in the real world win the day. And shooting bullets is pretty much the entire game.

Yup. It's good to point it out because the user base usually takes a great pride in the "realism" from such games (it's the users? the marketing? I don't know), when the reality is that "realism" isn't fun.

Reality means a bullet travelling at super sonic speed you first get hit then hear the sound coming. A fun game means sound is simultaneous with impact so the player knows where the bullet is coming from in order to shoot back.

Some games makes your last bullet kill, so dont reload before you shot the last bullet wich is very powerfull.

Stand around and watch how fast you die, half of the games you dont die, only after they emptying 3 magazines on you.

The biggest point for me is the loading,

if you take rage anargy edition on PS3, it is unplayable because of all the waiting and loading.

Some games are really good, this makes a good game : if you die you dont have to load the whole level again, only when going to next map.

Imagine you play a hard map you dont know yet : you die in 1 second, then you have to load 1 minute again to die in 1 second again.

Maybe on PC it dont matters very much.

I think the developers only play on PC not from CD, so they dont see the horrible loading times.

PC players are a different breed then console players, only not for long since VR is here now.