I have not played a single 3rd person shooter. Can you please list some of your favourites?

Indeed, I have not played any of those games. I also remember now that there is Gears of War.

Have you tried The Last of Us Part 2? My buddy swears that it's the best game ever.

Well, the biggest difference is that you have to work like a movie director when you have a free camera like that?

There's like, trampolines in this game called Klonoa 2 for PS2, and when you do a jump off of it, the camera moves wayyy up higher, It's stomach churning. LOL

Uncharted, GTA and Max Payne pulls off smooth movement, but I always feel it will never be as responsive as an FPS.

This is likely due to the fact that animations and rotation of the player might look odd on top of all the carefully timed animations, but it's also due to camera relative movement being difficult to implement nicely, IMO.

Then there's the targeting; aim assist is very prominent. Cam offset allows crosshair to be placed on top of target, but sometimes other object get in the way. With an FPS i (often) view in a direction similar to that of my projectiles, making it much easier to grasp what I might hit.

AndyPett said:
So, I began to wonder - am I just the only weird guy wishing things were different or are there others?

The people i'm in touch with all agree we are in a crisis phase of lacking innovation in games. We've had this before, and the last time it happened the introduction of 3D shooters resolved the issue.
But now single player FPS is pretty much dead.
We need something new…

AndyPett said:
What would you like to see or experience in a 3rd person shooter that you currently have not?

If only i knew.
I want more physics. I want to replace character animation with simulation to get rid of dumb / simplified behavior. I want realistic graphics.
But even with all that, a FPS would be still just the same game, just a bit better.
We need something really new. New mechanics, new options of interactions beyond ‘just shoot at everything that moves’. But we face limitations of both restricted input devices and dumb AI behavior.

AndyPett said:
Or what feature/gameplay mechanic/other issue seems to be in EVERY 3rd person shooter you have played, but only makes the game worse?

To me, early 3D shooters were perfect. Then they added crap like reloading weapons, cover mechanics, skill trees, special abilities, imitation of movie alike story telling.
And ofc. 3rd person camera to work better with console controls and large view distance to screen.
But nothing of all this adds anything to the game, IMO. You can remove all of those modern features.

By far the best FPS of recent years for me is Amid Evil. It's a pure retro FPS, they even kept the mechanic of ‘you need the blue key to open this door’. But i love it. It's a perfect game.

I also liked Doom Eternal. It has many modern mechanics i dislike. Although the game design is good and those new features work pretty well, they feel like unnecessary complexity to me.
What i liked was the ecstatic feeling of being a killer machine during some fights. I wonder how they did this. Part of it seems the music that adapts to gameplay, which is great.

So yeah… FPS is till my favorite genre, but it really feels dead and i do not expect much from upcoming games.
The modern game kept the look / move mechanics, but they tried to add some more than just shooting. We got the standard recipe of open world action adventure with some story telling and some more depth using skill trees, special abilities etc.
The open problems seem:
Story telling does not work well if all you can do is shooting, and all the enemies can do is shooting and limited path finding / tactics. Cutscenes interrupt the game and are no solution because they are not interactive.
New mechanics like skill trees / abilities do not work either because the added complexity often limits accessibility ('damn - what was the button combo for that special attack?'), while adding little to the game itself.

We are in a very bad and difficult situation currently.

AndyPett said:
A good point about the aiming though - you do want to feel like you're in control of your aiming and what you hit.

I think that's something we have to sacrifice to some degree.
Assume your game protagonist can do more complex actions: Kissing the girl, using tools, really complex interaction with dynamic environment, etc.
That's what we want the most to get new games i think.
But to get there, we need intelligent player controllers that do things on their own. Using a gamepad, you can not open a door a bit, hold your gun through and shoot blindly.You can only press a button to perform such actions if the game proposes them to you in a certain situation. That's very limited.
VR tries to solve this with true 3D input and motion tracking, but it has its own problems like missing haptic feedback.
So the easiest solution would be intelligent game characters which you control only indirectly, less precisely. They perform a rich set of actions, but the gameplay is no longer super responsive. (Example: RDR2 where people complain about laggy movement because the character needs to perform realistic animation which takes time.)

I think that's a promising direction, but we need to design different challenges for the player then.
So let's assume even aiming and shooting becomes somewhat automated. That's extreme. Can such a game still be fun?
I think so!
I once made a prototype for a mobile racing game. Because controls suck on mobiles i made the speed automatic and the player only controls direction but not speed. And it worked really well.

I personally also like third person games. With a few exceptions, much better than first person games. I see third person games more like a movie, but with the difference that I can control an actor. In a first person game, on the other hand, it seems to me as if I am the actor myself and somehow I can't get used to the idea. To see what the character is doing, that he is also suffering or interacting with others, like in a third person game, in my opinion also builds a greater emotional bond with the character. Will be the reason why I wanted to build a third person game myself. :-)