Destructoid Checkpoint: The battle for the soul of FPS games

The modern FPS landscape is in an odd space. Splitgate 2 boss Ian Proulx proudly declared that he intended to “make FPS great again” before releasing a pretty half-baked game with super-expensive skins that very quickly burned through the goodwill and hype before crashing to a “Mixed” review status on Steam.

After refusing to apologize for invoking Donald Trump with his cheeky chappy statement, Proulx did eventually apologize, but by then it was too late, and it’s largely unknown if the apology would have had any positive impact for him had it come sooner. The game, ultimately, wasn’t good enough to keep the early adopters invested, and it wasn’t attractive enough of an option to get new people on board. The end result was Splitgate 2 going back in the oven after releasing too early into Early Access, Proulx and his fellow founder Nick Bagamian opting not to take salaries for a while, and, of course, layoffs. 

Sounds…great?

Truthfully, though, Proulx wasn’t wrong; he was just silly. He was, by and large, producing a game that offered almost exactly the same thing as every other game out there, including aggressive and manipulative monetization and more hype than substance. 

If anything, the story of Splitgate to date shows just how difficult it is to launch something into a highly competitive space with a number of absolute titans at the top of the market, including two that are shaping up for their annual showdown in just a couple of months.

Battlefield vs Call of Duty

Battlefield Vs Call of Duty is a tale as old as time. Well, not really, but it does go back roughly 15 years or so. It was around 2010, with the release of Bad Company 2 and Black Ops, that a real sense of tribalism started to break out between these groups of shooter fans. I do want to point out that this odd sense of competition was always more about the players than the developers, the inevitable results of console war branding and marketing training consumers to need an “other” to contrast their purchases against. 

Bad Company 2 was good, really good. Fun multiplayer and a best-in-series (to this day, frankly) campaign marked it out as a great way to spend time, but Black Ops pushed the Call of Duty franchise to its best-ever sales at that point, and they were well clear of Battlefield’s apparent ceiling. 

Both games had a niche, with CoD sitting in its three lanes as an arcade shooter and Battlefield deciding to go full-on, large-scale war with tanks, helicopters, and dozens of soldiers, along with tremendous levels of destruction on the map. The tone had been set in the earliest iterations of the franchise, and the developers rightly didn’t want to leave that behind.

Despite both being in the same genre, they were dramatically different games, yet people talked about them as if you needed to make a choice between them. This concept grew even more heated, largely pushed by the rise of various YouTubers around the release of Battlefield 3, which absolutely blew the lid off that franchise, and Modern Warfare 3, which had sales that matched Black Ops, but that many felt was a weak entry, especially when compared to the majesty of Black Ops and Modern Warfare 2 before it. The famously caustic CoD scene on YouTube had been growing for some time, and tired of devouring each other, they had a new enemy.

I’d argue that the turf wars between fans did nothing but raise the profile of both games, offering free advertising and little enclave communities for impressionable teams making new friends online to find. The internet was filled with montages from both games, with weird ripples from After Effects, heavy color grading, and the very worst that Brostep producers had to offer. It was, frankly, fun times. ‘

Now, 15 years later, both series are still going strong. They are still tentpole titles for EA and Activision; they are experimenting as much as they can with setting, format, game modes, and they are doing everything they can to stay relevant. 

They do differ in one important way, however, and something about that feels important.

Skinner box

If I told you that you might die to a player dressed as Nicki Minaj, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, or Beavis and Butthead, you may think I was talking about Fortnite, but no. The game in question is Call of Duty, and recently, iterations have really been going all in on the, frankly, terrible skin ideas.

I have no issue with fun and goofy skins; I actually love them, depending on the game. I will happily play League of Legends as Meowkai, I just don’t really vibe with them in CoD. Sadly, the era of the weird skins is not going to end any time soon, as leaks from Black Ops 7 revealed good robots, an energy army, and some guy with an engine in his chest.

Fortnite has shown that crossover events and third-party IP in your games can get people to break out their wallets, and it seems that Activision has seen that money pile and they want in, carrying the trend forward into the next game right from the jump.

The response to this online was interesting, as people complained, and Battlefield devs made it clear that skins for their game would remain thematically in line with the idea of soldiers shooting each other in the face. No dayglow violence here, thankfully. Just raw, gritty realism. 

And so, the first-person shooter genre enters a new era and a new battle. Do you want to die to a pop star, or a cartoon of some kind, or do you want to die to Captain Chad Killington? It pains me to say it, but at this point in my life, I just want my military shooters to be somewhat straight-laced, so Chad Killington is looking awfully attractive right now. 

I am expecting the vast differences between how both games look to really reignite the war, based on how hyped people seem for Battlefield 6. Every time a game gets close to stealing the CoD crown, those players get rowdy, after all. 

The good news for Proulx, at least, is that it seems unlikely that either will make the genre truly great again. Battlefield 6 is fun, based on the beta, but it has all the flaws that Battlefield games usually have, while CoD will be CoD, for better or worse.

While these two are duking it out, we can hope that someone on the sidelines is readying the FPS genre for its next major seismic shift, a stone in the pond that sends those ripples flowing outward, impacting the image of every other game they meet.

We can live in hope, I guess.

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Over on the mothership, Andrej Barovic is impressed with Titan Quest 2, as well he should be. - “Titan Quest 2 is the second entry in a two-decade-old series, and the original is recognized by ARPG fans as a gem of the genre. The sequel seeks to reinvigorate this old diamond through a wide array of improvements, but its approach to leveling stands out over most.”

Dota Underlords might be dead, but Bhernardo Viana has found something within the abandoned remains that appeals. - “Still, for some reason, over 1,000 players are in Dota Underlords on Steam at all times, not counting mobile players. So, what happened here? Why are people still playing a game that Valve discarded and probably just kept afloat because they already have the servers to keep the game running?”

Scott Duwe, like most of us, loves dogs very much. He would like to talk to you about these wonderful ‘puter puppers. “I’ll be honest, I’m writing this because I just dropped my dog off at the vet. He has pancreatitis, so he’s staying overnight for some treatment and will hopefully come back home tomorrow. His name is Yogi, he’s a cardigan welsh corgi, and he’s been my best friend for all 10 years of his life.”

And that’s it for this week, folks. Stay gold.