Not that I care about either, but I think you might be conflating "looter shooters" and "extraction games", which aren't necessarily the same thing. They're both chasing trends in a similar way though. I think that where loot games have been driven into the ground at this point, with the Suicide Squad reaction and Assassin's Creed going back to the original formula, the chase for the "extraction game" market has just started and there's room for a game to become "the extraction shooter" before publishers eventually run that into the ground like everything else.
EDIT: Also... like... hey, the original Marathon was a Doom clone. The series isn't exactly some bastion of original ideas of story-focused, single-player narrative or something. It's a bunch of guys in a hallway to shoot, chasing the popular trend at the time.
Marathon's gameplay is, largely, pretty much what you say. They're Doom clones, essentially. They have some gameplay innovations - for instance, they rely on save points instead of saving anywhere, they included mouse-look (which wasn't as common at the time as you might think), they included dual-wielding, some of their guns had secondary fire functions, and they had a reload mechanic. These all change up the pace of gameplay and differentiate Marathon's mechanics enough from Doom to make it a little more than a Doom clone, but if you're talking about pure gameplay I'd agree there isn't much there to really build on that hasn't already been built on (reloading) or discarded because it was a bad idea (save points).
But the thing that got me excited was the story. The Marathon games tell their stories entirely through terminals where various different AIs, all of whom have gone rogue in some way and all of whom oppose each other, give your character different goals to achieve throughout those games. The actual narrative happening here gets kind of crazy in a really good way, culminating in a bunch of dimension/timeline-hopping shenanigans in Marathon Infinity - but it's all told through words on a black background, sometimes with an accompanying vague image, in between bouts of first person shooter mayhem and maze-like levels populated with environmental puzzles that maybe aren't so great.
I first got a Discord message saying "they're remaking Marathon!" and it was about twenty minutes before I was in a position to go look into this myself. And I had myself pretty hyped up that this story is what they were going to attempt to work with, only with modern technology and AAA budgets. Which could have done a lot for that story. Instead, when I finally looked into it, I found out that Bungie is using the name to prop up another extraction shooter/live service thing, as if those weren't being mercilessly killed all over the place earlier this year. I found that very disappointing.
Oh well. At least that System Shock remake is actually, maybe, supposedly coming out at the very end of this month and I'll have that to satisfy my far-future space-station rogue-AI FPS appetite. Right? They haven't delayed it again yet.
In case anyone's interested, Bungie made the Marathon engine and the associated games open source projects a long time ago. You can download the community-maintained engine and all three games here, for free, if you're interested in playing the originals. Marathon Durandal was also made into an XBLA game, but none of the others were. If you just want video summaries of what all three of these games are about, a Youtuber called "MandaloreGaming" made a pretty good series on all three games. Frankly, that's what I'm pulling a lot of my interest from - I've played all three games and actually finished Marathon Durandal before, but honestly the actual gameplay of these games isn't really a huge draw for me. Now that I'm thinking about the franchise again, though, I might just go play all three and actually finish them this time.
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