The year was 1994, and one of the most memorable first person shooter titles in the history of video games had just been released: Doom. It was gritty, it was gory, but most of all it was fun. Running around with a shotgun in your hands and every demon in hell coming after you, exploring complex levels, discovering secrets and finding the coveted chain saw.
At the time, the game was shocking, revolutionary, and controversial. For years first person shooter video games where innovative and exciting genre with new elements being introduced to the genre constantly. In the year 2007, this changed.
The biggest Call of Duty yet they called it, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It was revolutionary and beautiful, a great addition to the FPS genre, little did players know of what was to come. The fact of the matter is, when something is popular and successful, people copy it.
Ever since 2007 the video game market has been flooded with brown, bloomed up games where you shoot guns at people from the first person perspective, aim down your sights, go prone, call air strikes and kill people with accents that are usually just unidentifiable enough to not aggravate any particular group of people. The fun, fast game play and complex level design of games like Doom, Half-life and Painkiller are gone and replaced with ultra linear levels with few to no secret areas, and the same boring guns that all work in the same manner and provide no actual variety of play style.
In older games, each weapon made you play differently, and you could spend hours exploring levels finding secret areas you may have not noticed the first time. What happened? Why have we exchanged complex and diverse game play for a bland boring repetitive product that is re-released every six months for the full price of $60?
The bottom line is money and passion. In the past, game developers budgets were low, but they were passionate about their jobs. They made the games they wanted to make and made them the best they could in hopes of being the next big hit and gaining immortality in the gaming community. Now large corporations have came in and industrialized everything, made video games all simple and marketable, and they slap their little sticker on it and sell it year after year.
Perpetuating the never-ending waterfall of mediocrity by marketing the exact same game to 12 year old kids every six months. It makes me sick to see nice things ruined by people who are only out to make a quick buck and don’t actually care about the effects of what they’re doing.
In conclusion, if you’re one of the people who continuously buys the newest Call of Duty game every six months, stop. You’re hurting the progression of games, and the people who actually care are not happy, at all. Lets be honest, what has actually changed between the release of Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3? Honestly, I can’t easily tell the difference between the games and neither can many other people.