6. Boring Art
Save for Killzone, all shooters are so boring to look at. There's the greys and greys of Modern Warfare 3, the brown everything of Resistance 3 and washed out "colours" of Battlefield 3. Nothing makes us more visually bored than an FPS. Sure, Crysis and Battlefield 3 have revolutionary graphics, but an engine only carries you so far when your art is boring, and it invariably is. The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series is a particular culprit: every map is one colour and one colour only, leaving much to be desired as I realised I just ran through ten colourless rooms looking for something to shoot. Some shooters try. One of my personal most memorable attempts is in EA's Battlefield 3, launched in 2011; the art here wasn't half bad, and the trailers were all bright and clean. Then DICE ruined it all with a blue filter smacked over everything. Suddenly, white's were grey and blue, reds were pale pink and everything became ugly to look at. Sure, Battlefield 3 is one of the most technically accomplished looking shooters around, but all the maps look the same and it's hard to overlook this. The only maps with visual identity are the new Armoured Kill and Close Quarters maps, all designed to be striking - and they are - but the Back to Karkand and plain BF3 maps are just plain ugly and boring to be in. And then there's Resistance 3. I'm not a fan in the slightest, but I will leave my fanboy rage out of this. I remember playing the Resistance 1 demo and being unimpressed with the level of colour in the environment; everything was grey and bleak. I skipped Resisteance 2, but I did play the R3 demo and found that my problems were solved: the grey was gone... except it had been replaced with boring browns that made my eyes vomit. There have been some good attempts here, however. Bodycount and Brink looked quite nice with shiny visuals weeping sci-fi glory, but the games themselves flopped. I did enjoy Brink, but no one plays it anymore so I find myself skipping over it when selecting something to play. Halo is also the most notable attempt, and it succeeds greatly as the only shooter that is somewhat nice to look at and which is pretty much the only shooter to have a strong visual identity.