There are some good and innovative shooters nowadays (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) has been mentioned, but for the mainstream, I feel in the last decade or so, they have been declining. This feeling comes mostly whenever I compare the features of past shooters to the features of newer ones. For instance, take Perfect Dark.
Perfect Dark's singleplayer was excellent. It was not on rails. It was split into a series of missions, and each mission had objectives that you had to actively carry out, such as hacking, escort, setting a bomb, assassination, etc. When you changed the difficulty level (there were I think four options), not only did the enemies become tougher and better at killing you, but the mission objectives changed. What game does that today? Plus, there was co-op. Nowadays, it everybody makes a big fuss whenever co-op is available, but it should be standard. An N64 game had it!
Perfect Dark's multiplayer is also more or less unparalleled to this day (features-wise, and of course, discounting online functionality, given the time period). The players had total control over every aspect of the game. There were multiple game types, every rule of the game could be tweaked, the map chosen by the player, the music chosen by the player, the exact weapons available and their locations chosen by the player, and bots. The bots' behavior and skill level was customizable, as well as appearance. Players could make themselves appear as any skin in the game, and switch the heads of the skins as well.
I can't think of any shooter, mainstream or otherwise, with single and multiplayer, that matches Perfect Dark to this day. What happened?
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