Sit in.trench for 2 years advance 5 yards. Wait for enemy to die off cold or starvation. Sounds like a good game lol

Well, during the ps2 era, we were getting ww2 shooters all the time, during the ps3 era we moved to modern warfare, now with the ps4 it seems that all we get is futuristic shooters.Lets hope that going back to the past is closer than we think.

Well, there is a lot of cool stories from WW1 that can work, the problems is to know where to look and how to put it all together. you don't have to play as just one character, but different character from different parts of the war. A lot of spies, Trenches under canon fire, Overtaking certain amount of trenches. Kidnapping leaders or officers for information, sabotage ( even though sabotage was better developed by Groups that later became SAS, MJK etc ) but it did happen.  You have different missions. the problem is that a game like a WW1 can't be tackled as a standard FPS shooter, but if you mix it with story, drama, Action, Horror, Mass dying, Sabotage, and the stuff i mentioned earlier, and make the game more free to more options. It doesn't have to be a dead one real story, but alternative story based on real stories, with a twist. It all depends on how they chose to be creative about it. To look at it with a different view then how we usually look at Standard games.  There are more to it then just waiting in trenches, there was action sequals where the fighting was brutal and people was running towards the enemies line as dumb as they was and got shot down by gatling guns.  As Nuvendil said: the MP can turn into something amazing based on team tactics and offensives.  It's just that people know more about WW2 then WW1, it makes it hard to imagin anything else then the stuff we already know.

What if it was an online game? that you can chose which team you can play on, and we are all fighting each other like a giant RPG FPS strategy game. and we can lay our own strategies based on their available resources to defeat the enemy or take ground. that we can send other players to gather food and ammo. etc etc. make it a realistic players vs players WW1 game. Then the time depends on how well we play the game, and how bad the enemy team play. one single gameplay can last for hours if the team is great. and due for the trenches and the mud, we can't rambo, adding a difficulty to it. Old canons we have to transport around on our own, like we did on TLOU if we needed to move a piano? and they can easily become a living target?. don't tell me this idea was bad :P

Hmm maybe. I would probably prefer a decent rts in fairness

What if it is an RTS, RPG, FPS game?
That the leader ( Commander ) can go into a RTS mode, and command the troops by giving them orders what to do.
Troops are divided into different platoons runned by a officer, so when you click on that platoon and gives them a order, it will work like it does in BF games, that your team gets an order to attack this objective. And the troops ( Players in FPS Mode ) Attacks.  It will be the most realistic War Game Co-op ever.
It could even be better then ARMA. and still have the FPS experience and the RTS experience. The commanders got the RTS controls and the map, the troops follows order, and the troops officers makes the order, and the officer is the one that will report back to CP ( Control post, the RTS mode ) and whatever he reports will appear on your map, if that spot was taken or not.

It's allowed to think outside the box, and this isn't something that is impossibe and it have never been done before.

And mixing genres can work if the build is done properly as well. Thanks for the RTS idea btw. it's an good way for a leader to control the army and keep and good strategic observation

World war One is a underused setting, that's for sure. However, I don't think it would really work as a shooter considering how the fighting and tactics worked back then. A Strategy game would be more fitting imo (I'm still waiting for a sucessor to History Line: 1914 - 1918. Yeah, I know, it's been 25 years now)

I'd rather have a squad based TPS based on the Sharpe series, or at least set in that era.

I've also been thinking a long time about a WW1 game.
It should be a very story driven game that captures the horror of living in a drowned trench.
The only thing nowadays publishers is stopping this from happening is that they can't add cool gadgets to it for the regular gamer. When you watch an FPS now it's basically all (science)-fiction kinda stuff. I'm afraid most of the people can't go back to the basics.

What if the WW1 game was an RTS, RPG FPS game?

The commander gives order to troops through RTS mode, but he can chose to join the war directly if he wants.

The soldiers follows order and fights it in FPS mode ( Like Bf4 team orders, attack this objective=

and the interactions with each other will be RPG, such as communication, etc etc etc=

And we fight the other team, and the only way a team can win, depends on how good the strategy, and how well the soldiers execute and follows these orders.

And this can work with all different settings, but the trench experience might be very dramatic.

The commander can even give orders to a team, to release the gas when the wind blows in the right direction towards the enemy.
If the enemy is attacking us with Gas, it's up to our leader to order us to put on Gas masks.

I think this can work if it's perfectly builded.