FPS genre ‘must evolve or users will lose interest’

The FPS genre must constantly innovate and evolve or risk losing interest from customers, DICE’s Karl Magnus Troedsson has said.

Speaking to Edge, the studio’s general manager said that not enough developers were taking this seriously with their franchises, despite the high demands placed on them by customers.

He added that developers needed to make sure they not only challenged themselves on gameplay, but on creating an entirely new experience for players.

“The FPS is a very hardcore genre, and the hardcore crowd of the FPS is probably bigger than some other genres," said Troedsson.

"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.

“Because a lot of franchises out there don’t take this seriously; to actually make sure that we don’t just challenge ourselves on the gameplay aspect, or perhaps some other area like distribution method, but also how it feels, how it looks and how it sounds.”

Troedsson also admitted that the modern setting, seen in a number of current shooters on the market, was growing stale, and that developers would begin to jump over to a new theme.

He warned however that it would be cheap for developers to claim just changing a game’s setting was innovation in itself.

"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," he said.

"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."