Saw this a while back. While I liked games like CoD4, which had some interesting things to do, I didn't really notice the "Modern Shooter" problem until Battlefield 3. That was one of the horrible single-player campaigns I've ever played. The game rarely trusted you to even play it. You're too stupid to fly this plane, you need to just control the camera and press buttons when we tell you to. You're too dumb to handle this stealth section if we don't railroad you. Yes, you're in a fleet of Abrams tanks, but you need to call in an air strike because you suck too bad to assault this base. It was the first time I ever felt insulted by a video game of all things. I heard the new Medal of Honor is even worse.

There's some hope, though. Hard Reset, Serious Sam 3, and Bulletstorm did some fun things with the action front, and Dishonored, Deus Ex, Metro 2033, and Far Cry 3, among many others, are doing cool stuff as far as stealthy/brainy FPS games go. We even shooters like Spec Ops leading the industry in story-telling over many RPGs. It's pretty cool to see the kind of rebellion going on with it, now. We're getting a wide variety of game types we didn't even get 10-15 years ago.

Side bit, I think Doom and Quake and many older FPS games get kind of a different rap than they should these days. Everyone now says they're all about the action and killing. Anyone who remembers their first Doom experience back in the day will tell you that there was a lot of backtracking through previously cleared rooms looking for secret walls, switches, shootable walls, timed elevators (pre-mouse-and-keyboard days). Hell, I don't even remember seeing more than 2 or 3 monsters per room in Duke Nukem 3D.

Now, everyone has the fastest routes and secret rooms memorized, so it's pretty much a room-to-room killfest, and I think that's kind of where the perception comes from. There's nothing wrong with that. Having big, mazelike levels was creepy and unnerving, since you didn't know if you had enough health/armor/ammo to make it through the next room, which made action sequences even more exciting. Hearing 20 imps snorkeling in another room while the Doom Guy's face looked more like chicken parmesan than a space hero really made you focus on the game. It speaks to things they did well.

Didn't really say my whole piece, since I could be typing until the heat death of the fucking universe, but that's what discussion is for.