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This question was posited by Animarchy History:

He points out that over the recent years, there has been a pretty long drought of Shooter games that were set in World War II. And most of the WW2 games that came out (at least in the AAA space), particularly from the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchise turning out to be hot messes (Calling BFV a "colorful cartoony mess" is putting it nicely to say the least). What's interesting to me was that he mentioned that people started clamoring for more WW2 shooter games cause they eventually got sick and tired of modern and/or futuristic shooter game oversaturation at the time (who remembers the backlash to Infinite Warfare?) but before that, people were also sick and tired of WW2 shooter oversaturation.

Well anyways, here's my thoughts: I think there's a still huge demand for historically accurate/authentic single-player WW2 shooters, though the supply currently (at least as of this posting) isn't really there. But I also think that there's also a cautionary tale for Game companies to not let a single genre oversaturate the market. Ideally, there should be a diversity of options for gamers so they can play a game in whatever genre they want.

I still have my old cardboard box copies of Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, along with the multiple expansions packs, with a plethora of other WW2 games from the 2000's.

Honestly, I don't think there's a huge demand for them specifically, but rather something new. Like you said, it's a bad idea to focus on any one genre for too long and I don't think revisiting WW2 is the answer, especially considering how much the industry has changed now. Doubly so given the recent outing by AAA giants have been extremely polarizing & commercial stinkers to put it lightly. Even among smaller studios, WW2 games are relegated to mostly mil-sims and strategy to varying degrees of popularity. For every mildly popular title like say Hell Let Loose, you have half a dozen failures nobody ever talks about.

I'm a huge history nerd so I wouldn't mind seeing a big return of WW2 games, but I would stress to please do other fronts of the war for change. I'd always love to see the Aleutian Islands campaign for example.

I think there just isnt anything left that can be done with ww2 shooters that hasnt been done before, so the inability to add a new twist to the formula has pushed game developers from doing new ww2 shooters as you often need a "hook" to entice buyers.

I think if VR becomes common place (up to you if that is a good thing or bad thing) ww2 shooters might return as there would be a massive new innovation/gimmick to them but for now I dont see them coming back, game developers just dont know how to mix up the formula.

I wouldn't really say that there isn't anything new that can be done with WW2 shooters. As Wilm mentioned, they could perhaps explore different battles, different fronts, and even the battles that popularly get displayed have different aspects that don't get shown off that often (Like, in all the WW2 games that show off D-Day, how many of those games showed off Sword or Juno Beach instead of the usual like Omaha beach? Multiplayer and Game Mods don't count).

Additionally, WW2 games could have a certain amount of educational value them if done right. Or they can just be fun. Either way, they gotta be historically authentic, they gotta "feel" like World War II, and don't make a "Colorful cartoony mess".

There are some indie WW2 shooters that aim to either do their own thing or at least try and be kinda close to classic Battlefield or CoD. Enlisted is a free-to-play WW2 that focuses more on small scale battles, while Hell Let Loose is a $40 game that focuses on large scale 50v50 battles (I actually got the game free on PS5 thanks to it being released immediately to PSN as one of the free monthly games when it launched). And it's not WW2, rather WW1, but there is an indie survival-horror game coming out in the near future called "Conscripted" which looks really neat as while it sounds like a neat idea for a game (a survival-horror set during war where it's a lone soldier trying to get to safety while surrounded by the enemy) I'm shocked no one's attempted it before (or at least not in this way, which is it's aiming to be a more realistic sort of game, even going so far as to DROP the more overtly supernatural elements early alpha versions used to have like fictional monsters). I bet if Conscripted is successful someone might attempt "survival horror WW2" next.

As of right now the only shooter series I know that still sets itself purely in WW2 is Sniper Elite, but that's more of a stealth-action franchise like Metal Gear or Splinter Cell rather than an old school CoD or Medal of Honor.

As you said though it's kinda clear oversaturation of WW2 in shooters is what lead to people becoming sick of it for a good while, and it's only once the setting has been gone for an extended period that people start to miss it. Same happened with modern military shooters, people got sick of them around the early 2010s so you had CoD go more sci-fi and Battlefield opted to go back further in time to WW1 for one game. But THEN people got sick of CoD going too sci-fi so they went back to WW2 for one year and then back to modern military with the Modern Warfare reboot series (and then a small detour to the Cold War with the latest Black Ops, and then WW2 one more time with Vanguard which is considered a mixed bag) and it looks like CoD is once again the king of military shooters.

I don't think you'll see a return to the "glory days" of WW2 shooters, at least not with triple-A games. Enlisted, Post-Scriptum, Sniper Elite 3-5, and some others have popped up in recent years and have done really well but are still more niche compared to the triple-A stuff.

I feel like if you want a "core" ww2 experience, one where the goal is to emulate the conditions of WW2, that will not live up to the demands of a triple-A mass-media FPS game in modern times. This is due to things like accessibility in game design conflicting with attempting to simulate the clunkier aspects of WW2 combat, ethical difficulties in attempting to portray the Nazis as a playable faction nowadays, and trying to make a "spectacle" out of history when a lot of the more spectacular battles have been done to death.

If you REALLY want a return to WW2 glory days of triple-A shooters, we need to go alt history. Sniper Elite's been dabbling with it for their plots, but we need to go deeper. I'm talking Valkyria Chronicles levels of magic and floating iceberg ships. Sterilize the factions Ace Combat-style so everyone can play what they want on either side, use the same weapons (or more if you want), and then you can have more sturmgewehrs in 194X a lot easier. I flat out don't trust a company like Activision or EA to deliver an authentic WW2 experience anymore so we might as well just not try. Let WW2, WW1, and others become the domain of double-A devs that want to passionately recreate history while triple-A becomes the domain of alt-history spectacle.

Ever since Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: WWII came out, I've had this idea that if game devs really want to make a WW2 game that stands out from the rest, it should explore alternate history elements. In the same vain to how Battlefield 1's prologue mission threw the player into the western front in the height of a brutal battle, imagine a prologue mission of an alt-history FPS game (let's call it "Battlefield: Downfall") where you're an American marine landing on the shores of the Japanese home island Kyushu on November 1, 1945 – X-Day. It would be interested to explore the carnage of a hypothetical invasion of Japan through the lenses of a video game, so I agree with the idea of branching out into alternate history.

I guess you could have either the nazis, the japanese empire or anotther axis power winning and the atory is about stopping them, like wolfestein but its not a one man army but an army in a battle that could repel the winning threat.

Something like that maybe, maybe the nazis got to create those flying saucers or some other technology

If I were to create a ww2 shooter (god willing I will someday) I would have it set a couple years later ie like the war starts in 1942 so that we can see early jet fighters and assualt rifles

It was overstatured, but with that said, I'd like to see early world war 2 shootings regarding the French and British, before the Americans joined and sent troops, or even the Italians in Africa, or more ww1 shooters.