Every year we have the same batch of modern-military shooters, all of them with the same campaign mode and multiplayer mode with many modes to break boredom. However, they're still pretty much the same. As a thought exercise, how would you guys approach a twist, a spin, making those generic FPS's more appealing and innovative?

Old shooters like Unreal and Halo allowed some room for improvement and innovation, the same for TF2 for example, but it seems that the modern-military theme cripples every bit of creativity in designers.

It's not the theme that cripples them so much as the studio's desire to pump out sequels to milk their cash cow to death. Why take a risk on a new IP when you have one that's already successful?

There have been some innovative new IPs in the FPS genre in the last few years. Perhaps the most innovative change to the genre has been in games where shooting is no longer the player's primary method of interacting with the world around them.

Sort of agree with what is being said, you need a sort of focus, as believe it or not there is still plenty you can do with the FPS genre but as Mr Moore says, no one is going to bother while CoD continues to break sales records.

Now, we are starting to see some "twists" as you put it with the survival games (DayZ and Rust), and even a couple of AAA are trying something new like TitanFall and Evolve - these will certainly be interesting to watch.

With so many titles there are also other things that need to be improved a lot still. Someone else spoke about AI and in all honesty we havent seen much improvement for close to 15years with the last examples of truly good AI being the commandos from Half Life, most the Halo stuff and the bots designed at the end of CS. It still makes me cringe to see the enemies in games like Crysis 3, which quite frankly makes the game unplayable for me.

But you asked for some twists. For me some easy ones to implement would be like a 3 way capture the flag/team death match in a smaller CoD/BF arena, so a much smaller scale than Planet side hopefully meaning some actual 3 way battles. Was also thinking of a game in which real players take the places of AIs in a story driven single player game. My biggest problem here is to get real people to stay/do things in the correct area and not bore them to death (may start this is a separate discussion). Introducing some different game mechanics can totally change the way a game is played so like the max payne bullet time, nothing springs to mind atm.