I don’t think big companies know how to make a good FPS campaign anymore, let alone hone in on classic deathmatch multiplayer. The last FPS I bought was Half-Life: Alyx four years ago, and the first one to come along and interest me since then was Phantom Fury, but I’m letting that one iron out bugs for a few weeks before I pick it up. Even former TimeSplitters devs, given the opportunity to make a new TimeSplitters, made another Fortnite instead. Likely this new Perfect Dark was built to turn it into a live service that keeps players playing it forever rather than just making a fun deathmatch to play with your friends a handful of times, which would be missing the point. And all this is to say nothing about how those devs must be feeling when even a great game that sells well won’t save you from Microsoft laying you off.
Writers these days just seem to not know how to write an enjoyable story period. So much bad writing in the entertainment sector now, its not like back in the 80s and 90s where movie theaters were showing slapper after slapper, you’ll be lucky to find maybe one or two that match up to the likes of Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, or Titanic.
Its similar with games, but shifted forward a decade to the 90s and 00s. Games these days have a very hard time matching up to games like Ocarina of Time, Chrono Trigger, Silent Hill, or Metal Gear Solid. While games like Silent Hill 1 have laughably poor quality voice acting by todays standards in terms of sound quality, the story was well written and kept the player’s interest. Of games from my recent memory, the only one that matches up is Elden Ring, which has gone the direction of basically removing all the writing from the game.
It’s easy to remember just the successes of the past and ignore the fact that the vast majority of media then was shit too… we’ve simply forgotten about the things that ended up being mediocre. Survivorship bias is really really strong.
It’s like nostalgia blinders.
An example a lot of people here can relate to is thinking about game consoles and handhelds they played growing up like the GBA.
There were likely some great games produced for it but there was also a lot of shovelware movie tie-ins and horrendous ports that were misrepresented in advertisements.
