Generic modern military shooter genre
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The Modern Military Shooter (MMS) is a video game subgenre that was largely created by the runaway success of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and the relative simplicity of the gameplay template it established. A majority of these games were released during the 7th Video Game Console Generation (2005-2017) and often encompass both first-person CoD knockoffs and third-person Gears of War knockoffs set in the modern era, the recent past (I.E. post-WW2), or the near-to-distant future, using similar level design and gameplay conceits.
It should be noted that not every modern Shooter is an example of this, some modern FPS are good and aren't a generic military shooter. Such as the Wolfenstein reboot series (except for Youngblood), DOOM (2016), Bulletstorm, The Darkness, Hard Reset, Shadow Warrior 1 & 2, Titanfall 2, "Boomer" Shooters, and many others. For what it's worth though, this genre has seen a very steady decline in this day of age, and it is highly unlikely we won't be seeing any more newer shooter titles outside of Call of Duty and Battlefield following this curriculum.
Why It Sucks Now
- The over-saturation of this genre led to other popular genres like RPGs and Platforms becoming significantly less prominent & slightly falling to obscurity.
- The multiplayer tended to die out quickly because players move on to the newer game in the series (or possibly any newer shooter game) that keeps coming out too quickly.
- Many of these games either prioritize high-quality visuals over gameplay or lack both. However, this wasn't always true as the first generation of these games and overall, a lot of games from the seventh generation console era hid their somewhat shoddy textures by using a washed-out palette of greys, or made heavy use of earthy browns (aka yellow or brown filter), and also used excessive amounts of HDR bloom. While this worked for some games as a stylistic choice (eg Resistance: Fall of Man, which was supposed to look like degraded WW2-era film stock) it was copied to the point of near meaninglessness. Early examples were cross-platform developed for the PS2 and Wii, leading to very limited graphics (usually just higher-res textures on PS2 level geometry), and often had entirely pointless motion sensor gimmicks either mapped to the PS3's Sixaxis motion control or mapped to buttons on the Xbox 360. Often these were either QTEs or timewasting minigames like painstakingly screwing a detonator into a block of explosives in Call of Duty 3. A second generation then tried to use oversaturated colors to make up for this and looked just as bad. Now we are (thankfully) largely back to something resembling reality.
- Bad, linear level design: The campaigns for most of these games are a straight line from A to B, instead of a maze in which you are forced to find things to survive, like classic first-person shooters used to. While a linear design isn't inherently bad since many shooters have done a linear design philosophy before, players are often penned in by invisible walls, sometimes indicated by ridiculous objects such as waist-high fences, or surrounded by kill barriers. Any actual encounter is often overdesigned with only one practical way to deal with each.
- Because of how linear most of these games are, there are hardly any collectibles or rewards and what is there is so the levels don't feel barren. Take the Intel collectibles from Call of Duty, which despite being called "Intel" does not have any actual intel when picked up
- Slow access speeds on last-gen consoles (caused by low RAM and Microsoft's spec requiring no mandatory hard drive use for 360 games, to allow compatibility with cheap 360 variants that didn't have one) meant that levels had to be broken up with loading pauses, meaning routine unskippable cutscenes or drawn-out minigames to open doors.
- Unengaging stories that usually involve the U.S. stomping & attacking all over other countries, mostly Russia or the Middle East. The alternative is fighting a "shadow unit" or similar who wear black uniforms and use whatever guns the designers thought looked cool when they were on Future Weapons.
- The characters are also not anything special, especially the player character who was usually a silent protagonist with no characterization who simply did whatever the objective box said to do and followed the actual characters around.
- The ally NPCs constantly bark orders at the player to "get over here and do this thing", often repeating the same one or two barks every few seconds. The NPCs are almost useless as well since most enemies they hit won't die until the player shoots them.
- Many of these games are filled with QTEs, in particular often using them to replace a final boss fight with the bad guy with a cutscene where you pressed the right buttons to beat him up.
- Later MMS games were often riddled with questionably needed, ridiculously overpriced DLC and loot boxes.
- Weapons were often balanced for multiplayer rather than single-player. This, in turn, makes all weapons aside from rocket launchers almost always hit. This made single-player very frustrating.
- Since many of these games were set in the modern day, a lot of them featured the same handful of real-life weapons. Older features like multiple ammo types or alt-fire functions largely vanished from the genre for quite some time.
- Another issue due to setting the game in the modern day was almost no enemy variety. Usually, they were either exclusively humans with guns you could use, or at most would have dogs, sentry guns, jeeps, and perhaps tanks or helicopters which had to be fought with a rocket launcher. Human AI would usually just poke its head out of cover, blind-fire from cover, and repeat this, with the only real variation being the degree to which they spammed hand grenades and how much they were magnetically drawn to machine gun emplacements already surrounded by dead bodies. Very rarely would they do anything intelligent like work together as a unit (something Halo managed), pick up a weapon off the ground if it was better than the one they had, or retreat if they were losing. After it got to the point where even the companies couldn't pretend this wasn't bad, the standard enemy set started to include a Big Guy in an EOD suit who had a machine gun, and sometimes a melee guy or suicide bomber who just rushed at the player.
- Repetitive yearly games with short dev cycles meant little difference between installments: the long console generation with each game using the same hardware and engine as the last also severely limited how much better games could look without sacrificing even more gameplay.
- Regenerating health was used, often as a crutch by developers to get out of proper level design. Instead, the world suddenly filled with incredible amounts of chest-high concrete walls and mysteriously bulletproof wooden fences, leading to very a stop-start gameplay experience.
- Games typically used a movement model based on limited movement speed in any direction but forwards and limited sprint, meaning that the classic run-and-gun gameplay of shooters like Doom and Serious Sam gave way to hiding behind a piece of cover and poking out to shoot.
- Aiming systems where hip-fire accuracy was virtually nonexistent and accuracy penalties for moving excessively high also encouraged this style of poking out and shooting and left many games ruled by camping with sniper rifles.
- The initial success of these games caused countless clones and rip-offs to the point that many gamers started getting sick of First Person Shooters and it arguably nearly killed the genre.
- Some companies like to follow this trend by making some games based on beloved franchises blend into Modern Military Shooters, or something that focuses much more on shooter elements with/without darker, gritty settings, such as Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, Bomberman: Act Zero, Shadow the Hedgehog, Castlevania Lords of Shadow sub-series and even EA's Star Wars Battlefront.
- It's also worth mentioning that this genre caused many beloved classic FPS series to go a modern style, such as Duke Nukem Forever, Battlefield 3, Call of Juarez: The Cartel, Halo 4, and even Medal of Honor (2010).
- Some of the shooter games had less development time and recycled assets from the previous game. Such as animations from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's ending to the intro of Call of Duty: Ghosts.
Redeeming Qualities
- The military shooter genre used to be good, specifically in the 6th generation era and the early/mid 7th generation of consoles days, before the saturation since Modern Warfare 2's release in 2009.
- There are still good first-person shooters to this day, like Titanfall, Overwatch, Paladins: Champions of the Realm, Doom (2016) alongside Doom Eternal, and most Retro-Style FPS games made by indie developers, most notably New Blood Interactive, or even developers that were experienced in that thing such as 3D Realms and Apogee Entertainment. However, none of them are considered MMSs by players.
- This form of FPS has almost all but died out. The only one still popular is Call of Duty with a lot of new FPS games resembling more traditional ones.
Decline
As with many other over-saturated genres before it, Modern Military Shooters have lost significant amounts of popularity over time, with new genres, namely MOBAs, Hero Shooters, open-world sandboxes, and Battle Royale taking its place as the most popular. There has also been a resurgence of more traditional FPS games thanks to the success of the modern Wolfenstein and Doom (2016) games with many Indie FPS games like AMID EVIL, DUSK, ULTRAKILL, and Hrot gaining lots of support.
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