What Happened To The Basic Team Shooter?

Currently it is safe to say that the three most popular shooters that are not battle royale on PC are CS:GO, RS6:Siege & Valorant. These games are all 5v5 team based shooters. However, they all feature little gimmicks.

CS:GO is the closest to what I envision as a basic team shooter. A simple 5v5 game where two teams compete over a bomb. Then there is all the stuff on top of that. The economy, spray patterns and utility. When I compare this to shooters like COD4 where everyone is on even ground every round and the only thing that really seperates players is their aim.

The same can be said for Valorant which again is a 5v5 shooter at its basic core. Then there's all of the abilities and the economy. Which adds so many layers of depth to the game. Again comparing this to shooters 10 years ago. It is an insane comparison.

Siege finally is CS:GO on steroids with abilities. Not the same kind of abilites as Valorant but there's still extra things to consider depending on what character the enemy team picks. For example if the enemy team picks Bandit you have to consider different ways to entry onto a site. Not only that but large parts of the map are destructible, meaning that a lot of map knowledge is required.

I have gained fairly high ranks on all of these games except for Siege. I suck ass at Siege my points on it can probably be disregarded. I enjoy these games for what they are. They are competitive shooters that require team coordination, a plethora of knowledge and good aim to succeed at. What happened to games that did not need the coordination and the knowledge though?

The games where there are no economies to worry about, no immense coordination and no recoil patterns to memorise and compensate for. Games like the old Call of Duties and Medal of Honours. I have been watching footage of Call of Duty 4 pro mod recently and it got me thinking that playing a game like that would be fun again. I checked Call of Duty 4 on steam charts and it has a peak of like 800 players this month. It is obviously as an old game would be, fairly close to dead. So I went for the final COD that I enjoyed, Black Ops 2. Same story, almost exact same player count.

After that I tried searching for new games that try and scratch that run and gun, boots on the ground feeling. I found Battalion 1944. I had bought it years ago and it was sitting in my steam library. It peaked this month at 17 active players. If the older CODs are dead this game has turned to ash and blown away. I could not find any other games that released in recent years that have a decent player base that cater to that old style of gameplay.

What caused this colossal shift? I understand that shooters have fads and those fads die out. Arena shooters clearly are not as popular as they once were and I suppose that every sub-genre has a time where it has to go. Yet arena shooters at least have Quake Champions.

Recently I have been playing Hell Let Loose which gives me that everyone is equal everytime they spawn. There's no economy only the gun that I have and that everyone else also has access to. However this game is a large scale war and requires that communication.

What happened to just the simple, mindless games that were, everyone is armed at spawn and they just run around a map like aimless ding dongs shooting each other. I have fun with all the games I listed above but I feel I would have so much more fun with just these simple dumb games that I do not have to overthink constantly, what is my next move? What is the next strategy? I just want to run in die, spawn and die again. I feel that newer CODs have changed too, to the point where they do not even satisfy this. Battalion really looked like the game that would give me that experience but it is beyond dead.

This post does not really have a point to drive home. It is more of a 3AM sad nostalgic person post. I just wanna know what caused the shift and where did the games I loved so much go? 🙁