This was something I started wondering about when I was reading a thread about Star Citizen, and about how space combat flight games were much less-common than they had been at one point, how fans of the genre were hungry for new entrants.
Looking at this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_flight_simulation_games#Space_combat_games
…there really were far more games in the genre being released in the late 1990s and early 2000s than there have been recently.
A similar sort of phenomenon occurred for World War II first-person shooters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_video_games
Back around the same time period, there was a glut of games in the genre, and they really have fallen off quite a bit.
Whether it’s a genre like these two, that hasn’t seen many new entrants recently, or a genre that just never grew as much as you’d like, what genre would you like to see more of?
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I think that if we’re doing real-history FPS games, I would like to see other conflicts. Give me a War of 1812 game or let me play as a Chinese soldier during Japan’s mid-1900s occupation or something.
People brought this up at the time, and the go-to problem with it is if you go too far back, like your 1812 example, you have to deal with reloading a gun being one of the most time-consuming actions you can perform. WWI was taboo for a while due to chemical and trench warfare, and for the most part, devs still shy away from it.
If you’re going non-fantasy (in which case you can put in whatever), I think that one factor is also that in, say, the Napoleonic era, using soldiers in formation in warfare was an important multiplier, and that’s not super-friendly to FPSes. I mean, a lot of the game would be following orders to move into a formation or move in formation.
As for weapons, you could do archery, I suppose. There have been a number of games (Thief, Skyrim, etc), that have an archer running around on their lonesome, though that probably wasn’t historically all that accurate. Well, not that having a solo character going Rambo on a World War II-and-post battlefield was necessarily all that common. If it did, it was pretty unusual:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hooper_(Medal_of_Honor)
That’s a pretty unusual MoH citation out of Vietnam, and that’d probably be about par for the course for a single – maybe part of – a WW2 FPS level. I mean, if you want realistic World Wars fighting, the largest chunk of characters would probably just be killed by random artillery fire, not pulling off 100:1+ kill ratios in infantry combat, which…isn’t all that much fun as a first-person game.
But, as to archery:
https://www.tastesofhistory.co.uk/post/dispelling-some-myths-archers-shooting-twelve-arrows-a-minute
That’s definitely a lot slower-paced than a modern FPS, but it’s still a lot faster than nearly all 18th century firearms.
Skyrim kind of ignored fatigue and let you lug around a huge store of arrows and blast them without regard for your arms getting tired, so it’s not hard realism, but I think that people enjoyed the archery aspect.
And yet Verdun, Tannenberg, and Isonzo are some of the most fun multiplayer FPS games around.