Has any good first-person shooters even been released recently?
AAA devs certainly have abandoned it in favor of third-person faux-MMOs and battle royale games now that the military shooter fad has run completely try. People said Titanfall 2 and nuDoom might have reignited interest, but then Respawn died and nuDoom was pretty fucking boring, while no big promising FPS releases have been planned either. Yet even on the indie side the supply for singleplayer first-person shooter has been, to put it mildly, fucking embarrassing, when there's more fucking roguelite first-person shooters being pumped out trying to replace actual level design with randomly reordered rooms, meta-progression systems, and being heavily luck-driven.
Arena shooters are also fucking dead because the shmucks who keep making new ones only get stillborn games on their hands because every single one of them is unmistakably a Q3A clone. When Q3A is slightly better and a slightly bigger playerbase, why should you bother with this indie knock-off? All these new arena shooters add are a bunch of techs only ultra-nerds care about, but how the arena shooter fundamentally plays never gets changed up. There's more of a difference between two fighting games than two randomly picked arena shooters. There's Quake Champions, but that one is shit not because lolabilities, but just because those abilities (and cooldown abilities in particular) are often just shit.
You know it's a completely sad state of affairs when the only promising upcoming first-person shooters people are looking forward to are 'retro throwbacks', or 'Doom clones' in other words. It's been 25 years since Doom came out and people still can't think of any better way to make a good first-person shooter other than to copy Doom again. That's just fucking pathetic.
It's equally fucking pathetic that the only significant shake-ups to the FPS formula were in fact Titanfall 2's SP campaign which played like a first-person classic Sonic the Hedgehog with mechs unlike everything else (the factory level has you running around at the speed of sound while platforming, and the levels even have multiple paths for you to run through), and nuDoom seeking to tackle Unreal's approach to combat using highly mobile AI-intensive enemies by increasing the verticality and number of enemy types present at once, but lacking the vision and consistency needed to make it actually work on top of a bunch of other shit like Glory Kills ruining it. Did you know that nuDoom has the least worst boss fights in the entire first-person shooter genre? No seriously, think about it, there really is that little competition. nuDoom is like the only FPS which presents you with hazards you are forced to jump over as opposed to strafing or hiding behind cover like 99% of all first-person shooters. Yet the only time that happens is with the boss fights.
I think the problem is that the Japanese never bothered with this gay genre. You don't really have the FPS equivalent of Vanquish either, or some kind of example which injected a healthy dose of arcade levels of pacing and simple but hard to master mechanics. Fundamentally first-person shooters are often based off the exploratory Apogee platformer style of level design (what with id making Commander Keen), focusing on exploration and resource management instead of pure assault courses like Japanese action-platformers. There's no real Japanese action-platformer equivalent for first-person shooters yet, which in my eyes is greatly unexplored territory, and the first one to set foot there would be greatly remembered for time to come.
You've got Devil Daggers, which appeals to a super-small niche only (the fact that it got so successful is surprising), and DESYNC, whose mechanics were greatly lost on everyone because the game decided to be obtuse on purpose, and even then the game suffered from a lot of balance issues and wasted potential. Though at least the developers are working to make a sort of giant redux patch for it. Doom Eternal almost looks appealing because from the looks of it I can't imagine it being much worse than nuDoom, anyways.