Stinkels, would love your thoughts on this:
What I'm about to say refers only to competitive FPS games:
The issue with game design these days is that unless the game is built from the ground up as a competitive balanced title, by nature it will fail and become boring.
I use Titanfall as an example. It's a recent popular FPS that was being marketed as the next best pvp FPS, but competitively speaking, it's a horrible game. The game isn't built from the ground up to be a competitive pvp title, it's purely a casual title at best.
The AI in the game act intentionally as fodder to support casual players to give them a psychological stimulation that they're doing good in the game. Just like a well known gamer in the Halo community by the name of Chaos Theory recently said in an interview, COD makes you feel super strong. Well, TF does the same thing. A casual doesn't care about killing actual players, they care only about total kill count, so killing AI left and right with such ease gives the notion of power.
Respawn themselves have been quoted saying the AI is there to provide fun. There's a fine line to walk when you start thinking about making things intentionally stupid for fun's sake, that's not proper game design. I can't imagine if when chess was being designed, they said...well the game is just too hard, this isn't going to be fun, lets make the game more like checkers.
John Carmack, formerly of id software, was quoted saying this about competitive Quake 3:
http://en.wikipedia....e_ProMode_Arena
The Challenge ProMode project was created by Richard "Hoony" Sandlant in May 1999, following the release of Q3Test, the beta version of Quake III Arena. Its goals were to make a more exciting and challenging game in the hope that this would help advance Q3A as a professional sport.[5]John Carmack, lead programmer of Q3A, suggested a more challenging version of the game might be better for professional gamers:
	
	
		
		
			If there were a small set of professional rules that I agree with in theory but have chosen not to pursue because they conflict with more common play, then an official "pro mode" might make sense.
—John Carmack, October 2, 1999
		
		
	 
Read that, and read it again. Look at what Carmack said, "because they conflict with more common play." Now granted, you can easily play Quake 3 without playing Pro Mode and still have a damn good competitive game in my opinion, but besides that point, Carmack basically did not go into Quake 3 with the notion of creating a super balanced competitive game, it was simply a fun pvp multiplayer deathmatch game.
Only recently we've seen a few developers actually designing games in general that from the very start, their game's core is competitive balance, ie., Riot Game's League of Legends; Blizzard's Starcraft II; Valve's Counter-strike, etc.
On the consoles, we have yet to have a game built purely on competitive balance, I'm not sure that will ever end either because the publishers are too per-occupied with generating sales that rival COD4 Modern Warfare.
In my opinion, 343i has a real chance here to recognize there's a legitimate audience for competitive balanced games, i.e., look at DOTA 2 and LOL. They have the chance to create a truly competitively balanced FPS that can attract everyone to come play the game and allow professionals to compete at a very advanced level for money, and at the end of the day, the game would still be fun and entertaining for everyone, pro or scrub