I read other comments here, and would like to point something.
Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and other early FPS, got the name "FPS", because people saw them as a first person version of shooters, and shooters were those games where you control some vehicle from the top view and would dodge a hail of bullets and shoot back.
Currently, most poeple think the important thing about "first person shooter" and "third person shooter" is the camera, and completely forget why "first person shooter" had that name, the "first person" thing was just an adjective added to the base genre, "shooter".
Most modern games aren't shooters... I am not sure how I would name them, but the focus is not on shooting or avoiding get shot, the focus is something else.
The descriptions I am seeing of Doom 4 single-player and why people are loving it (I am waiting for Vulkan version to try it) are the descriptions of a game that nailed the "shooter" genre correctly, Doom 4 can proudly call itself a FPS, because it is a true FPS.
So some people might wonder, what I am calling here an FPS, why people feel it is so fun and whatnot?
1. Base mechanic, is shooting.
2. Movement is very important, both to aim, and dodge.
3. Stealth should be discouraged.
4. Cover should only be part of the game if you dodge in and out of it, it would be acceptable in a FPS with parkour mechanics for example.
5. No Halo-style health regen, this requires you hide, stop and wait, and when you do that you are not shooting.
6. Weapon variety is important, even one of the shooters known to be "minimalist", Ikaruga, has 4 weapons for 4 different uses (dark bullet, light bullet, dark laser, light laser), the point of shooting games is the shooting, even if the only variety comes from using powerups (1942 for example) it makes shooting in different ways possible and interesting.
7. If game has few weapons, it should nail it REALLY well, and the few weapons should solve any situation, games with "realistic" limit of weapons that result in you picking up a shotgun and a pistol and then having to shoot something 3km away is not a shooter. (maybe it is some other genre, war simulator or something, but it is not a shooter).
8. For the thinking part, the important is tactics, not strategy, the player should only be thinking of immediate decisions while shooting, and not stopping to think what path (in the map, narrative or upgrade) he will have to take several hours on from now (unless he is replaying the game for completionism, then it is fine, but usually he will preplan before starting the playthrough anyway).
> No Halo-style health regen, this requires you hide, stop and wait, and when you do that you are not shooting.
This is now a 10+ year old complain, but I am so glad to hear. I recently played through Alien: Isolation. It was good—had its flaws but I enjoyed it. One of the biggest reasons was the lack of health regeneration. It really made the game much more challenging.
The latest Metal Gear Solids use health regeneration. Still fun, but they reward sneaking around way less than the games before it because you can just go shoot everyone and hide for 20 seconds.
> the "first person" thing was just an adjective added to the base genre, "shooter".
To be fair, calling them first person shooters wasn't really a thing until a couple of years after the release of Doom. By the time it became the dominant term I think this type of game had already diverged far enough from your concept of a first-person SHMUP that I don't think that your theory on the origin of the term is accurate. Genre taxonomy can't easily be reduced to a simple analysis of the particular words used.
> To be fair, calling them first person shooters wasn't really a thing until a couple of years after the release of Doom.
In fact up until that point they were generally referred to as "doom style" games or similar (because while Doom certainly wasn't the first, not even the first out of iD, it was the first that really made it big and caught the general public's consciousness).
Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and other early FPS, got the name "FPS", because people saw them as a first person version of shooters, and shooters were those games where you control some vehicle from the top view and would dodge a hail of bullets and shoot back.
Currently, most poeple think the important thing about "first person shooter" and "third person shooter" is the camera, and completely forget why "first person shooter" had that name, the "first person" thing was just an adjective added to the base genre, "shooter".
Most modern games aren't shooters... I am not sure how I would name them, but the focus is not on shooting or avoiding get shot, the focus is something else.
The descriptions I am seeing of Doom 4 single-player and why people are loving it (I am waiting for Vulkan version to try it) are the descriptions of a game that nailed the "shooter" genre correctly, Doom 4 can proudly call itself a FPS, because it is a true FPS.
So some people might wonder, what I am calling here an FPS, why people feel it is so fun and whatnot?
1. Base mechanic, is shooting.
2. Movement is very important, both to aim, and dodge.
3. Stealth should be discouraged.
4. Cover should only be part of the game if you dodge in and out of it, it would be acceptable in a FPS with parkour mechanics for example.
5. No Halo-style health regen, this requires you hide, stop and wait, and when you do that you are not shooting.
6. Weapon variety is important, even one of the shooters known to be "minimalist", Ikaruga, has 4 weapons for 4 different uses (dark bullet, light bullet, dark laser, light laser), the point of shooting games is the shooting, even if the only variety comes from using powerups (1942 for example) it makes shooting in different ways possible and interesting.
7. If game has few weapons, it should nail it REALLY well, and the few weapons should solve any situation, games with "realistic" limit of weapons that result in you picking up a shotgun and a pistol and then having to shoot something 3km away is not a shooter. (maybe it is some other genre, war simulator or something, but it is not a shooter).
8. For the thinking part, the important is tactics, not strategy, the player should only be thinking of immediate decisions while shooting, and not stopping to think what path (in the map, narrative or upgrade) he will have to take several hours on from now (unless he is replaying the game for completionism, then it is fine, but usually he will preplan before starting the playthrough anyway).