DICE: Modern FPS setting is "stale"

The general manager of Battlefield developer DICE has warned that fans will begin to abandon the FPS if developers don’t move to revolutionise” the increasingly stale” modern war setting.

Gamers aren’t exactly short of modern military shooters. In the last 12 months alone the market has welcomed the likes of Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, Spec Ops: The Line and Homefront to name but a few.

And the two big-hitters this Christmas? Medal of Honor and Call of Duty.

"The FPS is a very hardcore genre, and the hardcore crowd of the FPS is probably bigger than some other genres," Karl Magnus Troedsson told Edge.

"And that crowd has extremely high demands on what the games are and how they develop.If they don’t see some kind of new, if not revolutionary then at least evolutionary, step of rendering in every game they will start to lose interest. And I think that is what’s happening.

"I think we’re going to start seeing people moving away from the modern setting, because every now and again settings or themes start to get stale and then everyone jumps over.

Y’know, at some point dinosaurs are the hottest thing and everyone is making games with dinosaurs, but there are trends. It used to be WWII, and recently it’s been the modern era and people are now moving towards near future.

"But it’s a bit cheap to just say, ‘Okay, we’re going to switch and go back in time or into the future and that will be innovation’. It will definitely drive the franchise forward for whatever game, but it’s not true innovation, it’s more a thematic change that has a perceived value to the gamers out there.

But as a developer you can only make so many games in one particular era, and then you personally start to get a bit bored with it."