Is the mainstream games Industry running out of ideas?

[Good morning blues]

It's not that there aren't any new ideas, it's that publishers aren't willing to take risks on new, untested game ideas when development costs are so high.

The reason that the indie game circles are so much more exciting and characterized by a much higher degree of originality is because they only have shoestring budgets to risk; they're a lot more agile, and a lot more willing to stray away from the standard formulas.

Sure, there are one or two mainstream releases every few months that are original or interesting, but for every Mirror's Edge there's six Maddens, two Halo clones, and three wholly unremarkable RTS games.

 

[perfectimo]

Look around there is no such thing as "NEW" in gaming, there hasn't been or a while. What we have done is mix and match genres and try to refine the very things that draw us to each genre, isn't that good enough?

Since people are saying games are art well let's look at it from this angle: What is new in the art world?

 

[rossatdi]

I'm just going to chime in here with the same stuff everyone else is saying.

Mirror's Edge
Left 4 Dead
Little Big Planet

No offense to the game, but what does it actually do thats so very new? Isn't it just a survival FPS?

Left 4 Dead? Well name all the other survival FPSs for a start. Then those that are designed from the ground up to be an online cooperative game. Especially one with a map play through that can take as long as two hours on expert (if you can complete it at all). The creation of a 'director' that will alter the play through every time based on how the groups doing.

Well except for those, yeah I guess it's just treading old ground.

 

[Kirosilence]

Answer: Yes the games market is growing stale and beginning to cannibalize it's old titles, nothing wrong with this of course, so long as you keep fresh innovation present along with it, which the modern games industry seems to be doing.

Then again, what entertainment industry ISN'T digging up it's graves to re-release their dead.

 

[rossatdi]

Wasn't there a Zombie mod for Counterstrike made years ago that was exactly that?

I'm not sure what you're referring to. There was a god awful zombie mod for CSS. And a single player zombie/undead themed mod called They Hunger. But I'm not aware of a lot of those in Left 4 Dead.

 

[rossatdi]

Well, if you're going to be like that, I call Call of Duty 5's Zombie Nazis.

Yeah but Left 4 Dead isn't innovative because of the subject matter (zombies) but what it does with it. Like the knock down mechanism that basically forces cooperation but in an organic manner. And the unusual enemies (being snagged by a smoker and hung up to dry while a dozen zombies claw at you groin is certainly innovative).

From my understanding the Zombie Nazis in CoD5 simply attach as amusingly skinned generic monsters that attack wave after wave (like that UT2003 mod). That's not innovation.

 

[Bakery]

you don't need to reinvent the wheel whenever you make a new game.

But wouldn't a new wheel be nice?

 

[scnj]

I think more innovation would be nice, but devs have to be careful. I'd rather a derivative fun game than an innovative game that's nigh unplayable.

 

[742]

not wanting to take risk(with acceptable reasons i suppose) is what its all about, the people in the board room dont play video games, so they just go with what the idiots already buy, and if anything sounds too horribly different they check to see how many people have bought it already... 0? ok then, sorry, FPS#999999 instead!

 

[whyarecarrots]

Wasn't there a Zombie mod for Counterstrike made years ago that was exactly that?

I'm not sure what you're referring to. There was a god awful zombie mod for CSS. And a single player zombie/undead themed mod called They Hunger. But I'm not aware of a lot of those in Left 4 Dead.

There;s also Garry's Mod Zombie survival, which is pretty good fun.
1 person gets randomly picked to be the first zombie on a map (normally a house in the wilderness) with plenty of barricadable points, and has to kill 4 survivors to redeem himself to a human. Every survivor killed becomes a zombie, and the survivors get better weapons as they kill more. It's a bit slow paced to start with, as the zombie struggles to get past the barricades, but as people are gradually zombified it gets more and more frantic. There's a lot of tactical thinking required in finding the right place to barricade yourself and making sure the barricade works. THere are also multiple types of zombie (from HL2)

There's also zombie panic, which is a mod designed from the ground up, that's a lot more complicated than gmod zombie survival, and the few times I've played it I haven't got into it at all.

(I'm sure there was a point to this post somewhere...)

 

[Burld]

Mainstream games have to be better than their contemporaries in order to survive. That means that games might not be shockingly original, but improvements on tried and tested genre conventions. As long as I enjoy the game, I don't care that it isn't a music-based panda fighting first-person beat-em-up using textures that were originally oil paintings.