For gamers who have experienced the many decades of video games, today’s changes to the hobby and the industry are more different than ever before.

Gone are the days of 8-bit graphics and watching a 2-D Super Mario hop across his pixelated castles. Even gamers who didn’t get their hands on a controller until the ’90s have seen a drastic change from what they grew up with to what they have in front of them now.

For the first person shooter the change has seen a rollercoaster of events since it first came about.

First-person-shooter games today carry the basic traits of their forefathers, but with implemented features that only modern technology can handle. Comparing “Doom” to “Call of Duty,” the underlying gameplay mechanics remain the same: a weapon of some sort is held to the left or right side of the screen, and the weapon can be fired at whoever is in front of it.

Early games like the aforementioned “Doom” and the genre-defining “Halo: Combat Evolved” have all followed the concept of putting the player in a first-person point of view and handing them a weapon to kill with.

In the last decade of gaming, the first person shooter has seen itself rise near the top of the sales charts, surpassing adventure games, third-person games and platformers, according to an article on Gameinformer. The lead franchise for this genre domination is one that many people have heard of “Call of Duty.”

“Call of Duty” became a blockbuster success in its early days when it re-imagined what a World War II shooter could be. After the 2003 launch of the first of the series, six more WWII-themed titles and expansions were released with the “Call of Duty” branding. The 1940s theater of war was not one that gamers were unfamiliar with. Many other competitors like “Medal of Honor” fought head to head with “Call of Duty,” and it took years for the genre to move out of WWII as a whole.

The disturbance that shook the industry happened in 2007 when Infinity Ward released “Call of Duty’s” first iteration into modern combat, aptly named “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.”

When “Call of Duty 4” introduced its perk and class systems with its multiplayer, and combined it with the new, modern setting for the series’ single player, Infinity Ward and Activision struck gold with the gaming community, apparently filling some sort of gap.

By 2009, the game had sold more than 13 million copies, according to Joystiq, and had established a fanbase that would persuade Activision to continue the series on a yearly-release schedule.

Nowadays, with a total of around 20 “Call of Duty” titles, nearly 10 “Battlefield” games and eight “Halo” games, the genre is saturated with different play styles and settings for fans. However, a recent stagnation in the innovation found with these franchises has sparked uproar in Internet communities everywhere.

With the immense popularity of “Call of Duty,” games like “Crysis,” “Far Cry” and others have borrowed the class and loadout system, undoubtedly after seeing how popular it was with “Call of Duty” fans.

In a 2011 Cracked.com article, some satirical requirements for a modern first person shooter are laid out. The article even opens stating that “…the makers of modern war [first-person-shooter] games are fresh out of ideas.”

It then goes on to list the necessary components of a first person shooter that is sure to sell millions: it must have a cover of a soldier with a gun, it must have terrorist enemies, it must have scripted vehicle sequences and it must conclude with going up against the antagonist.

On trailers for most new games, comment sections are filled with opinions like “Oh look, they copy-pasted the game and re-released it again!” Given that a variety of forms of this comment can be found on nearly every trailer video, something the industry is doing must have sparked gamers’ attention. Of course, there are always games like Borderlands that break outside the box and refuse to be labeled as military shooters like “Call of Duty.” Games like these enjoy their own success due to their uniqueness from the rest of the genre, a uniqueness that is usually found in graphics and play style.

Some of the blame for the lack of innovation in modern titles is attributed to the seven-year-old hardware that developers are being forced to work with. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are showing their age for the developers who want to move on and work with more powerful systems, thus limiting their ability to innovate further in this generation.

A popular YouTuber named TotalHalibut, or TotalBiscuit, made a video last year detailing what is “wrong” with modern first person shooters. In the video, he describes the genre as no longer first person shooter, but instead as modern military shooter. The modern military shooter, according to TotalBiscuit, has “hijacked” the first-person-shooter genre.

He goes on to state that “what these games tend to involve is an incredibly linear campaign.” “I play games and first person shooters because I want to have an interesting, interactive and adrenaline-filled experience.” “This [referring to the gameplay onscreen] is not fun for me,” he said.

TotalBiscuit concluded his video asking the community to quit buying modern military shooter games like the one he was playing (called “Medal of Honor: Warfighter”).

“Call of Duty,” “Battlefield” and “Halo” games are released every few years, if not every year on the dot. Time will tell if the similarities between modern military shooters and most first person shooters are a result of hardware issues or perhaps something else. Either way, innovation is a topic frequently brought up on comment pages and Internet forums, one which may eventually lead to the next evolution of the genre that hasn’t seen many changes for years.