- Reverse it? Instead of shooting things into things, pull things out of things.
I’m seeing monsters/creatures with pieces that have to be pulled out and placed in different parts of them to kill them.
People play shooting games for power trip fantasy reasons (feeling like an action star/badass) and for adrenaline fixes (suspense/release). Feedback (tactile, audio, and visual) and pacing are absolutely paramount for both. Those two things (feedback/pacing) separate a good shooter from a bad one.
Bioshock, Stalker, Doom, CoD, etc. are all functionally (more or less) the same exact game. They are also very distinguishable based on their pacing and style more than any core feature.
Their iterations are distinctly similar to their previous versions because they seldom, if ever, vary from the concept of pacing they developed in their first success…developing pacing is incredibly more difficult than getting mechanics correct (although they are related).
My advise would be to find soemthing that hasn’t been done before. Pick which shooter aspect you want to focus on (power fantasy (COD) or suspense/adrenaline (STALKER)) and make up a mechanic that hits that specific point home in a way that few, if any other games do.
Build the rest of your FPS mechanics only as needed. Seriously. The genre hasn’t changed all that much since Wolfenstein3D. Then spend most of your time developing pacing, feedback mechanisms, and AI (AI is very important!).