Are you sure Goldeneye didn't do anything at all for the FPS genre? I'm not sure why you're always so adamant about downplaying Goldeneye's importance. The game actually had many little things that became the standard for shooters afterwards. Obviously the controls didn't transfer over to future shooters, but there was a lot of stuff that Goldeneye did first in the single player campaign that became normal for shooters to have afterwards.
For example, the fact that the enemies actually reacted to wherever you shot them specifically was crazy at the time. And the fact that if you were to shoot a loud gun somewhere in a level, enemies would actually hear the shots and come running after you from nearby rooms. Also, the death animations were pretty realistic for their time. The enemy AI was just insane. The whole game had this sense of realism to it that even PC shooters at the time didn't have. The levels gave you this sense of freedom where you could beat the level any way you want. You could just go through a level guns blazing, or you can actually sneak through the level stealthily by not alerting any guards. Little things like this made Goldeneye stand out from other shooters at the time, and these things basically became the norm for shooters afterwards. You could even argue that Goldeneye still does some of these things better than many modern shooters.....
It was also the first FPS on consoles to bring the multiplayer scene to the masses. Of course games like Halo and COD took things to a whole new level afterwards, but Goldeneye marks the first time a console FPS had millions of people playing it just for the multiplayer. The multiplayer was probably the biggest reason for Goldeneye's popularity.
It's always frustrating to see people downplay Goldeneye's importance for FPSs because "lol the controls suck". People seem to have forgotten about all the things the game did for the genre, and I'm not just talking about the multiplayer. It's no wonder why many shooters tried to imitate and outdo Goldeneye for years afterwards, even Rare's own Perfect Dark. Every new shooter that was released (at least on consoles) was always being compared with Goldeneye. For example, when EA picked up the Bond license after Goldeneye, they desperately tried to cash in on Goldeneye's popularity in the late 90s and early-mid 2000s with little to no success.
I'll admit that I may have undersold GoldenEye a little in my previous post. Pretty much anything that achieves that level of success will have some form of impact on the market, whether huge and lasting or not. However, I don't think anything in my post undersold GoldenEye to anywhere near the extent that some people (including yourself) oversell it's influence. To state something like "no GoldenEye, no Halo/COD" imo completely ridiculous considering the number of FPS games that were arriving on console from the moment Doom hit the SNES, and how GoldenEye didn't shape the mechanics of console FPS post-release. The consoles instead branched themselves off from the PC scene when the Dreamcast hit, and continued to be clumsy and ineffectual without a m+kb up until the release of Halo. Halo's solutions for making a console FPS work, was then embedded into pretty much every FPS to hit console from that point onwards, with Call of Duty later iterating upon the model slightly with ADS to produce what we have as the standard today.
Reactions to being shot different places is actually something I do think GoldenEye deserves some credit for popularizing in the FPS genre. It's not where I'd dump the primary credit however, which would very clearly be Virtua Cop that predates it by an entire 2 years, with nearly the exact same solution, and just so happens to be the type of game GoldenEye was initially planned to be. But in the realm of a free moving FPS, yes GoldenEye is the first notable example of this I can think of... excluding to an extent Team Fortress.
Enemies hearing sounds and responding to them wasn't actually uncommon by the time GoldenEye hit. Hell, you can probably recall enemies in Wolfenstein 3D exclaiming "what's that sound" (or something to that effect) when you make an audible noise in an adjacent room. AI really isn't anything unusual in GoldenEye, enemies pathfind their way to you (omnisciently) and unload shots, much in the way every other FPS game would. I can't help but think that you're accrediting the game having good animations with the enemies actually being intelligent.
First-person shooters were already evolving past Doom's maze and keys template. System Shock was already a thing in 1994, and PowerSlave/Exhumed was pretty much Metroid Prime back in 1996, and then there's the Marathon series... which I could get into for quite a long time... but as a quick summary, basically invalidates the idea that Halo was dependant on the existence of GoldenEye almost singlehandedly. On the PC side of the genre, there is a clear path of evolution from Wolf3D, through Doom, through various stuff like Marathon, System Shock and Quake, through to Unreal and Half-Life, without the requirement for GoldenEye ever happening on console. And as I said before the console market effectively branched off from the PC FPS market with the arrival of Quake III Arena, Hal-Life and the like the following generation, eschewing anything console-specific that had come up to that point. The problem then was that these PC focused FPS games didn't work well at all with a joypad, which was still a prominent issue years after GoldenEye (which also happens to actually play like ass with a joypad, and is the primary criticism for it today).
Split-screen multiplayer was brought to the masses by the N64, across every genre. That isn't something you credit either any individual game for, or split into any individual genre. Halo 2 for example gets a ton of credit for introducing the current matchmaking systems, progressing us from the standard server browsers of today... it's not simply because it was online, and games in all other genres aren't lauded for being the first of their genre to then use Halo 2's style of matchmaking. As I've mentioned numerous times before, Duke Nukem 64 was being developed simultaneously with splitscreen deathmatch
and co-op campaign. This is unique to the N64 port of the game, and is absent from both the Saturn and PlayStation versions, owing to the N64's hardware facilitating this in a manner the other two console didn't... but this was very much the console, and not the game that brought this.
I'm not adamant about downplaying GoldenEye's influence... I just simply don't see it's popularity being directly related to its influence. If you can honestly look at what Bungie did with the Marathon games... with their complex story, dual-wielding weapons, friendly AI that helps in combat, general setting and plot, and aesthetics, and then seriously tell me "nah, Halo wasn't happening unless GoldenEye", then I really don't know what to tell you. GoldenEye was the biggest FPS on consoles (however it was NOT the first FPS to demonstrate consoles as a viable market... not even close)., but there's very little it actually introduced that has affected the genre today. Halo is a different matter, not because it was huge and popular, but because the things it did for playing an FPS with a gamepad, are actually things that everything else is using to make playing various FPS games with a gamepad work universally. Street Fighter 2 similarly isn't so influential simply for being a huge craze in the past... it's because today, you're still basically playing games directly deriving Street Fighter 2's template. GoldenEye's template died with Timesplitters, and wasn't used by basically anything else even before that.
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