I would make a call, but best to seek out people on here.

I just listened to the Prototype and I think there are two ways to improve the games. I'm not going to say the storyline because military games lately have sucked on story, but are good on online play. But here are the two:

1) Add more than just two sides to play as. I think of Age of Empires when it comes to this. In AoE you can choose to play as numerous different civilizations and each one has their own strengths and weaknesses. Give us a game where you can play as the US, UK, Russia, China, etc.

2) How about instead of trying to focus on the present, the future, or WWI/II, go colonial? Battle as the British, French, Americans, any Kingdom/Empire/Country and use 17th/18th/19th century weapons.

Because joe gamer doesn't want a game where he is forced to play a game as "the bad guy." Despite the fact that gaming is full of GTAs and Infamous style games where you can play evil characters, a game where you suit up in a Nazi uniform or join the Taliban to mow down hundreds of US soldiers would be crossing the line and get a huge backlash.

Developers would have to go the extra mile to show the other side of the conflict and humanize those characters. But having sympathetic characters or showing the horrors of war goes against the "Hoora Go Troops" mindset that most military games go for. So don't expect the video game equivalent to Letters from Iwo Jima anytime soon.

There have been a couple games set in Colonial and Civil War era. Problem is the weaponry isn't that interesting so a shooter game in that setting falls flat. Those eras are much more suited to RTS or tactical style games and only really appeal to military history buffs.

I think the closest thing to what your talking about is the AVP game. You can play as Marine, Alien or Predator. Why not make it jump through time. So single player and Mult player could be from different eras, and you can only use weapons of that era. So you would have to level up several different weapon types. Could expand the universe as well as the ideas that you can use.

The jumping through time part reminds me of Rise of Nations where you start out with guys with clubs and spears and end with the ability to send ICBMs to your enemy's cities. The bad part is that these ideas work really well for RTS, but seem to be either impractical or are not appealing enough for the FPS crowd.

I haven't played any of the Tom Clancy games, but I have played or watched my fair share of Call of Duty to call it overblown and overused. The only FPS I play at the moment is Battlefield 3, which still capitalizes on everything that Call of Duty, SOCOM, and the ilk do so it's nothing new either. All I can say about BF3 is that it's campaign is okay, but I love it's online play, but I wish there was more to play as than the US and RU and even those two aren't different from each other! Doesn't matter which side you play on, you use the same weapons, vehicles, and other tactics. Not much fun when both teams just use the same strategy over and over.

The future of the the FPS game seems to be with combining it with RPG elements that Borderlands has made into a success.

Has the FPS genre run it's course? To me it feels like they are just scraping the last amounts of water from the well.

It hasn't ran its course ... that's like saying third person action oriented games have ran their course. It's just a perspective to be used in games. I think the, what people have labeled the "Military Shooter" has about run its course ... but that's what happens. Things shift. People aren't going to want to play the identically same game 10 years in a row.

As for first person games, there's really nothing saying, oh this is really all you can do with these. And, everything comes and goes with style. Obviously, first person games aren't a prolific as they were in the '00s. Now it seems third person is pretty much back (probably because animation systems have greatly improved).

When we shift to proper vision mapping and have screens that actually take up peripheral vision, the first person perspective will be back in style. It's just how these things work.

As for military type games. There's a lot of ways they could be different. So far, most of these games take the Michael Bay approach which is, make the military look awesome and have lots of explosions. Which is fine ... but it'd be nice to see some of these games take the Apocalypse Now approach and maybe do what most war literature and media does and purely use it as a backdrop to talk about something important or to explore ideas.

I think, however, people's definition of, "Military Games" is really loose. Like, Call of Duty post 2 is a Military Game, but Call of Duty 1 isn't? Metal Gear Solids aren't considered military games even though ... that's who your character is fighting or working with.

So, the way people sort of segment these things doesn't make sense. It's not even a real vs fake military thing, because the forces you're fighting, for example, in Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare are fake.

I think there is some room for military games more like what they tried to do with the 2010 Medal of Honor. Which is, maybe give a more realistic depiction of what goes on when you have to do these things (not that the game is crazy realistic). There's a lot you can do with that kind of idea, showing insight into what our conflict adversaries are doing would undoubtedly help.

But maybe that's more a remnant of how America handles it's self in war-times. We generally refuse to allow any sympathy until the event is somewhat forgotten.
Not that I think there should be a game that's just like Call of Duty except you're in the Taliban or something. But it would be an interesting thing to explore from a narrative perspective and it might give people some pause to think about how the status of their lives affect everyone around the planet ... which, you know, that's what media is suppose to do. It's suppose to make you think about something as well as entertain.

Because there isn't really anything like this ... the audience remains that adolescent sort of group who just think war is cool in this sense and unless they're not buying it anymore, it's not going to change.

That's a good point! I think you are right because I was mainly generalizing FPS as pure Military games when I should not have done so, but at this point it feels like that is all that is being promoted to the gaming consumers. For me, it feels like every recent FPS, primarily the Military First Person Shooters, are just all the same to me with some minute differences.