I’d also suggest it’s also slightly off the mark for the same reason – people are still buying achingly derivative games and reading witless copy. I’m one of many who’d love for developers to stop churning out cookie-cutter dreck that does nothing to advance the form, but we’re outnumbered by the hordes who would buy Medal of Honor tomorrow no matter what.

I hate Halo. There, I’ve said it. I have told the guys that I work with for years that Halo is a mediocre shooter at best, and if they want us to play an FPS we might as well play Quake or Unreal, as they have made few improvements on the feeling of the game for me since then. I think that you hit the nail on the head for me when you said it was about the experience. I don’t think Halo created an experience for me that was any different than shooters I had previously played, and because I am not a huge fan of the genre it was cast to the side for me.

I did love Bioshock. I was drawn in, and forgot for a bit that I was playing a shooter. I loved Portal as well, and have enjoyed the Half-Life games. Honestly, if it wasn’t for Valve I would have played a lot less FPS games.

The comments above work for much more than FPSes though. I was immediately reminded of World of Warcraft when reading the original post. Why has that game succeeded so monumentally farther than other MMORPGs? I originally thought it was the name, as I am an RTS fan and thought everyone else knew Blizzard as quality products as well. That is most definitely not the case. So many people that I know that are WoW heads become so without ever experiencing Warcraft III or StarCraft. Is WoW creating an experience that previous MMOs have not?

However, I think you’ve nailed for me why I’m not one of those people who pick up every shooter that comes out like some people I know. I won Battlefield: Bad Company in a raffle and played through the single player campaign. The writing was funny, but actually playing it was a chore. There was nothing interesting about the shooting or the enemies I killed. I never would have bought the game myself. I’ll never touch Frontlines, Soldier of Fortune, or any of the other second tier shooters for this very same reason. Honestly, even Halo feels boring for this reason. At least the environments are varied and interesting, but as good and balanced as the gameplay supposedly is, it’s never really captured my loyalty like it has everyone else.

I have just started enjoying Multiwinia. It is an interesting example of where simplicity and focused design go alot further than making my hardware cry and I am having a blast

I think we are on the verge of a leap into a new style of game design where the experience is key. The shooting games from a first person perspective that will stand out in peoples minds will be the ones that have all the elements done well but have a vision and a way of connecting with the player on something more than a basic narrative based protagonist level.