I'm nominating Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1,2, and 3.
I'm definitely with you on 1 and 2. Having your "main" playable characters actually die was certainly memorable and a "new" twist" in the genre. In fact, splitting between two main characters was novel. I personally exclude 3 as I found the series gameplay was stale by then and merely relied on big cutscenes and NPC scripting was essentially the same. BFC2 was fun. BF3 and BF4 were not. (SP campaign here - not MP)
And there is such a thing as having "too many" guns. If you've got 50 to choose from, yet you stick to three because the rest are just "meh" - there's not much point in having a huge arsenal if you only end up sticking with "the worthwhile" ones. Give me one "fun, well animated,
satisfying gun vs a whole lot of meh any day)
It may make sense in a MP level up system, but for SP only - it's a waste. Tbh, some of the guns in metro were meh - but most were enjoyable in their own way. Air compressed pellet headshot? Nice. Sticking enemies to walls silently with a bolt (like the gun from FEAR) Nice. Blasting a pack of mutants with an auto shotgun? Again, nice
Pulling a trigger on a loud and ineffectual gun? Yawn. Yet so many games continue to include to "dull" guns. Shooting an unarmored person in the face point blank with a single pistol shot is supposed to kill. That is satisfying. Taking 3-4 shots to erode AI hit points is not satisfying.
Metro was a brilliant game which I enjoyed but I found its replay-ability lacking against other FPS games such as Fallout.
Admittedly the replay value of both Metro Games is limited. At least when it comes to "Just finished, let's do it again with a different way of playing" right away. Then again, most story driven games are mostly "once through" games for most people. Collectibles etc does help here, but admittedly it's not for everyone. However reading Metro 2033 and the "redux" versions did have a huge sway over my choice of replay interest.
Lately though I feel FPS losing its foothold, with games like Watchdogs and GTAV taking a high spot in the 3rd person genre with huge worlds and much deeper story than most fps can dish out.
Realistically, the standard FPS genre is stale. See thing - shoot thing on way from A to B.
GTA and Watchdogs, or the whole "sandbox" genre is a good recipe because you can make your own fun when not doing missions. 1st vs 3rd perspective is largely irrelevant. 3rd person simply lends itself to those open worlds.
There have been many great games mentioned in this thread. Most of which I've played and very much enjoyed. However I neglected mentioning many since they are either over the arbitrary "5 years old" limit, or aren't '"technically" a FPS, which is a game played solely from a 1st person perspective.
I'm old school when it comes to labels. FPS is basically look at hands/gun while going from A to B, often shooting stuff.
By my own contradiction, adding stealth elements to Metro actually excludes it from being a "true" fps. But still - it's linear and can be run n gun or stealth. Wolfenstein:NO is probably more to the point than Metro. Yet even Wolf can be played stealthily to a degree.
I quite like the addition of RPG elements of skill trees etc - but that's one thing that also hurts re-playability for me in these cross over genres.
If I've just spent 100-400+ hours in a game leveling up; the last thing I want to do is go back to zero and start from scratch. There really should be an initial "fast track" level up / one off bonus point system option once the game acknowledges you've completed it. A straight off 25% character points to at least let you unlock the first level/rounds of skills trees just so you aren't starting from the bottom again. From there you can at least try a different path/trait etc.
Fallout, Oblivion, Skyrim, Watchdogs etc . Starting from scratch feels like a punishment rather than a reward for completing the game in a certain way. At least allow the option of "fast track" or "from scratch". As much as I have loved and suck countless hours into games like these, I rarely replay them twice for that very reason.
Bioshock and the FarCry series, even Deus EX are other examples. Great games, but it sucks going from hard earned power to weak again.
On the plus side, at least the FPS genre has evolved overall.