I think the runaway smash success of Call of Duty changed the direction of FPS games considerably. The focus on advancing AI was replaced with spectacle.
The same stuff that made critics laugh at enemies not seeing you when standing on a 0.5 square meter shadow in the middle of a well-lit room because you're technically "hidden in darkness" is what is now "solved" by removing the mechanics altogether in favor of safe and cool looking scripted sequences.
Basically, this: https://twitter.com/robotduck/status/759529875992698880
For skilled gamers (which I am most definitely not) I can see how this 'cheat' is annoying, but for me, who isn't the best at precision movement in 3D games, I found it helped me immensely during these types of sections to simply turn off the sound.
We might wish that the folks at EA or Activision make shiny cool AI (and I'm sure many of them there want to!) but in reality that doesn't really do a whole lot to benefit their paying customers.
Besides - "AI" in games is really about how to create stage pieces that simulate more complex behavior. Like all software development, it's mostly smoke and mirrors, and it's all about how smart you can set that up to give the user the impression of something magical.
E.g. an enemy coming out of cover at a different position than when they last popped out is cool, but working out that coming out of cover is just a bad idea and waiting in ambush would be more realistic and smarter, but lead to stalemates.
Heck, you hardly ever see even vaguely decent morale implementations ("hey you just effortlessly killed 80% of my unit, so I'll, um, charge you!!!").
Again, in EverQuest some enemies would run away and get help. In World of Warcraft they just mindlessly attack until dead. EverQuest's AIs (lame as they were) were simply too deadly for a truly mainstream MMO.
Charging cavalry would be stupid. Soldiers knew no horse would challenge a bristling shield wall.
The monster would run then find bigger monsters and all of them would come back to kill you. Often killing every low-level player in the area.
For a very incomplete example, you have sentry style mobs which run to activate an alarm and "bring help". You have mobs which run in fear and aggro any additional ones they path too near to.
In general most developers have noted that players hated this type of gameplay because it meant that one idiot could ruin an evening for 40+ other players in the dungeon because the 'train' would then clobber all the other players on the way back to their individual spawn points.
WoW also generally doesn't have zone lines that you can escape out of. The fleeing mechanic isn't something that's all that challenging to advanced players who know how to stun and slow. It actually makes encounters easier because the monsters stop doing damage at 20% health or whatever. Contemporary games have other ways of adding challenge.
That's not to say I don't enjoy playing them, but I do sort of miss the days when games actually had deep single player gameplay.
No idea why I'm getting downvoted. There are literally only a handful of first person shooters that are story-driven given the great majority that aren't: Quake, Doom, Duke Nukem, Sin, Wolfenstein, etc.
Saying that you miss the "old days" when first person shooters had stories makes no sense other than stirring some misguided Southpark-esque "'member when..." nostalgia.
I mean, if "FPS" means "a first-person game where you often shoot things", then Deus Ex, Bioshock, Half-Life, Thief, Fallout 3/4, Skyrim, etc., can all qualify. Hell, throw in Dungeon Master, and maybe even Portal and Minecraft. Of course one can argue where to draw the line based on how much "shooting" takes place.
But people often say "FPS" to mean specifically "games like Quake and whatnot". Under that definition, shallow gameplay is part of what makes a game an FPS.
You can still have deep games that are Quake-like, Half-Life being the canonical example. Deus Ex can be played, like Fallout, in third-person so I'd say it's disqualified.
Why is HN turning into reddit with random downvotes and no discussion? Must be the weird gaming crowd.
Again, you're talking about the definition, not the thing. Half-life is very Quake-like in its mechanics (camera and controls), and not very Quake-like in its gameplay (exploration, puzzles, etc).
As such, saying something like "FPSes aren't deep" is more about terms than games. Whether you agree with it depends on whether you take "FPS" to mean Quake-like mechanics or Quake-like gameplay.
(Incidentally Deus Ex is first person. The newest ones have a hide-behind-cover feature that temporarily shows you in 3rd-person.)
We're talking about the original Deus Ex which is first-person only.
That seems to be unfair to Quake - there's a fair amount of depth and strategy involved, mostly with the hogging of powerups. I thought Quake 3 was just a game about two guys bumblebee dancing while trying to shoot the other, until my mind was expanded by a top Quake 3 player explaining his thought processes in the below video - the vast bulk of the talk is about map control, not reflexes.
An FPS has to be a shooter that's in first-person view, but does that make every game where you shoot something with a first-person camera view an FPS? What if the game has other elements? Which definition wins out? Is Fallout more RPG, or is it more FPS? Or is it a turn-based strategy game? Most people would say it's an RPG that happens to have guns and is played in first-person mode and part of the game mechanics is reminiscent of turn-based games.
When you say "FPS", it's a pretty strict definition, because if it's an RPG that happens to be played in first-person with a gun, it's going to be called an RPG first. Maybe RPG-FPS. But FPS really means "run around with a gun and your main interaction with the world is shooting it". There is an entire world of games that do exactly that, and we call them FPS games. Borderlands is an FPS with hints of MMO, dungeon crawler, and RPG, but since the main interaction with the world is running around with a gun and shooting things, it's an FPS. I don't think that's a bad thing.
(The point being, it doesn't mean much to say that few FPSes have deep stories, because if a game has a deep story then people tend not to consider it an FPS.)
The most interesting part of that game is Rapture itself, the mnechanics and general gunplay just sucked honestly.
If you're saying that these games are shallow, I will fight you irl.
The AI was a joke, though, but that now seems to add to the charm. It goes really well with the campy voice acting and over-the-top characters.
It's a game I'll keep recommending over and over again. The sheer amount of player choice, customization, and environmental openness and interactivity is tough to beat, even today.
>The AI was a joke
I don't understand how I should take your comment here? Are you agreeing that other than half life, there are no good single player AIs?
Once CoD:UO (and 2, and so on) came out, they began killing off the great historical single player experience they had.
Look at the old Rainbow Six games against the new ones, same for Ghost Recon. Hidden and Dangerous was a great game too.
Those games are actually hard, and have gameplay that isn't just "watch explosions, shoot some enemies, get shot, sit behind wall to recover HP".
Just look at Rainbow Six 3 against Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, the second one was about as linear as you could make a game, the first one gave you a lot of options in how you would achieve a mission.
The whole genre of linear single player FPSes is sort of dead. Lots of mixed genre games that tie in RPG elements with big open worlds and character customization though that are doing quite well and could benefit from better AI.
Even with a friend though we can't reliably beat the top level AI in Ghost Recon Wildlands so it can't be that bad.
I personally like the interactive movie feeling, the scripted events and the scenes. I did never enjoy CoD in multiplayer which I find too hectic. The battlefield series with a more slow-paced and strategic gameplay suited me better in multiplayer. However I generally don't enjoy competing in MP that much anymore - too little time and interest to train enough to be competitive with the younger players.
I suspect that there's an element of self-selection going on here; there are lots of people who play the single player, but an onliner can't see them because when that onliner goes online it's 100% people who go online that one sees there.
There could be ten times that many playing it for the single player and they'd remain completely invisible.
The genre seems well and thriving.
Linear single player FPS is definitely not dead, although multiplayer is the current focus. As a quick example, DOOM (2016) has both linear single player and multiplayer sides, but the single player side was much better received.
I did, when I actually bothered to play CoD (the first Modern Warfare was probably the last one I enjoyed) and couldn't stand the multiplayer.
When I had been used to games like Quake, Unreal and Battlefield the multiplayer in CoD always seemed so half-baked.