games

Yeah the whole FPS genre is cooked. The entire spectrum from "war is good, actually" to "war is bad, actually" is saturated with titles. Zombies? Saturated. Post-apocalypse? Saturated. Space fantasy? Saturated. Supervillian private island? Saturated. Stealth? Saturated. Cyberpunk? Saturated Gangster shit? Saturated. Horror? Saturated. Every single cultural trope has been applied in one way or another, dozens of times over. Every FPS game is basically like Madden at this point. It's the same game that got published last year.

There was a (relatively) long time period where advances in technology promised new and exciting developments in the genre. Games were able to do things which were literally impossible only a few years earlier. Over this period of time we went from Wolfenstein to Halo. We got some very large online battles out of things like Starwars Battlefront. We got enourmous open world environments like the GTA series. But advancing technology hasn't brought any new breakthroughs in quite a while. Ray tracing and hair effects don't offer anything groundbreaking. More sophisticated and advanced physics and audio simulations don't offer any novel gameplay that didn't already exist at the release of Half Life 2. The open worlds have gotten bigger and more detailed, but the gameplay is still largely the same as GTA San Andreas. There is nothing for new games to stand on but the quality of their story telling and their aesthetics, but there are other genres well suited for this, which don't require their plot to be hamfisted into a pretext for mowing down hordes of whatever the bad guy is.