What Call of Duty has done for FPS

By: Ian Florez
source: http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/13/call-of-duty-red-orchestra-2-interview/2/

Lets take a trip to 1999. The big First Person Shooters (FPS) at the
time were: Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Counter Strike. There were
more but these are the ones I want to look at quickly. Quake and
Unreal were the first two games to make it big in the FPS world. You'd
be running around the map, picking up weapons as they spawned. Trying
to hunt down your opponent, to only blast them away with the rocket
launcher. The game play was super fast, and the learning curve for the
game was quite steep. Only the most dedicated of players would play
this game professionally.

Then we had Counter Strike. A much slower game, but this game was
focusing more on the tactical side of FPS games. You could blind your
enemies with a flash bang grenade, or shoot your enemies down with a
crazy powerful sniper rifle. The catch to this game is, you must
manage your money to keep buying these powerful weapons. This game
lead the competitive scene for years, due to it's high demand for
innovative strategies and it's steep learning curve game play.

Now lets fast forwards to today, the FPS is riddled with Call of Duty
(CoD) games. You have a new CoD game coming out every year for the
pass seven years. The game play is very streamline, you kill enemies
and receive experience points. More experience points you get, the
closer you become to unlocking new items for your player. Now with
these items you can make "kits" or "load outs" which is just a set up
of weapons, perks, etc that you can take into combat.

Now a majority of FPS players play the hell out of this game series.
They love it for how fast the action is in this game, a bit slower
than Quake or Unreal, but still fast. They enjoy how the game is very
easy to pick up and understand; run around, point gun at enemy, pull
trigger, receive experience. They enjoy that the game never looses
pace, it's always high energy, no boring build up. They just gobble
down this death match style game play, to the point where they won't
touch any other type of FPS game.

Tactical shooters are finding it very hard to break into, or back into
the market. Their major problem is trying to make their game be
appealing to CoD players, but most of the CoD players want nothing
more but more CoD. Another problem they are running into with these
players is, they don't want to take the time to learn the mechanics of
a game. They want everything to be straight forwards. They don't want
to think about how to play, or in depth strategies. They just want to
run and gun, then hide while they use their kill-streak.

Over all I feel that CoD has place a cap on FPS games. You have to
have something so easy to learn and play or you'll lose all interest
in the FPS market. CoD was made in a way that it is so easy to learn
and so addictive, that it will make it almost impossible for any FPS
to have a following like CoD does. These players don't want a game
that take time to be good at. They want instant gratification when
they play their games.