Irritant wrote:Innovation. Skill. Immersion.
Look, we've all played the hell out of UT and Quake, there is no point in making a clone of these games without some updates in both game play and visual appeal. That seems to be the pitfall I see looking at most arena FPS games. We already have these games, so do something that takes it to a new level in some way. Major studios aren't going to give you what you want because they are catering to today's generation of gamers who are quite frankly, lazy. They are catering to the "everyone gets a trophy" crowd. UT3 failed, and every single arena FPS since has had no traction whatsoever. Some have tried to be innovative, but all have "dumbed down" the experience. That's been nearly 10 years now...
Health regeneration, auto bunny hop, no strafe jumping, etc, is just plain stupid. I get the whole "but newbs get pwned" thing, but when you dumb down a game, people eventually get bored and the game dies. Skill is an important part of the addiction process. Newbs who are cut out for it wil stick around, and become loyal fans/players.
You know, you pointed something important here.
What's the most successful FPS out there ? Counter-Strike. For like, 15 years. I personally don't like it, but I have no problems to admit its success. Requiring a fair ammount of skill doesn't prevent it from having a respectable community even today.
Team Fortress 2 was for a long time the faster and twitchy FPS you could get, and I got literally THOUSANDS of fun playing it before it became more "casual-player-who-wants-to-spend-money-in-hats-and-taunts" focused. Different from CS though, the community started to dwindle exactly when the focus on skill and gameplay shifted to monetization and easy access to the casual player.
And TF2 is a good example for an important lesson: every concession you make to the casual player usually is something that will weakens the experience for the rest of your audience. So, you should ask yourself: are you doing a fad to be consumed by a lot of casual players until they are lured by the next shiny thing in the horizont (*cough*Destiny,Titanfall*cough*), or are you creating a game aiming a longer life span, focused in a smaller but more focused community ?
Answering this question will help to decide between some of the items above mentioned.