CaitSeith said:
Lightknight said:
Sequels are fine and fun. We still get new IPs at roughly the same rate as we did in the 90's so I'm really not concerned. That's without counting the well established indie market too.
Sequels have their place, new IPs have theirs too.
Besides, you didn't really know what was in the world of Fallout 4. The enemies may have been similar but the world was really different. And there were new enemies and surprises. Each environment still has all the elements of exploration and the settlement mechanic alone warranted a new game.
So I'm simply not going to cry a river over some components of a game being the same as a predecessor.
I'm doubtful of the first part. Probably some numbers would help there. For the rest, I think is a case by case scenario. Some developers are better at making sequels with reused assets, and others on making new stories like in the Final Fantasy series. I think it can get monotonous to being introduced to the same characters and mechanics in the third sequel (because that may be the first time for several people); but that's a fail in the execution. Heck, it doesn't even need to be an old IP to feel stale. For example, a lot of people like The Evil Within. But people who have played lots of games since mid-2000s (specially those who play every major release) probably will tell you that it felt like an amalgam of game cliches. "Been there, done that, and it was better the first time"
The evolution of the market to support Indie developers alone would make my statement true. Especially with titles like Limbo, Stanley Parable, Minecraft, Banner Saga and such. But I'm assuming that we'll want to address AAA games only even though some indie games have absolutely rocked the market as though they were AAA.
Are you under the impression that there were a ton of new IPs created in the 90's? There weren't. Nintendo was in full Mario milking mode with a ton of spinoffs but not new Ips. Pokemon via a 2nd party and Kirby would be the shining exceptions and Smash Bros could be an example if you ignored it being a spinoff of multiple IPs. But even being generous we're not even talking one for every year for the undisputed heavyweight champion of that console generation and the second place studio that is Sega wasn't producing anything that could rightly be called "IPs" so much as just games centered around things. It's why except for Sonic they have such horrible brand recognition despite having produced a lot of fun games. Keep in mind that this is slightly unfair to Nintendo because they preferred to innovate with new gameplay mechanics rather than new IPs. Even so, my "less than a game per year" was being generous enough to include those drastically new mechanic games.
When Sony showed up in 97' we did see some nice new IPs but overall the decade fared worse than we fare now in five year periods. It's because the market is hugely profitable now with a lot more major development studios.
So just think, what are the big name new IPs of the last ten years compared to the big name NEW IPs of the 90's? I mean, we still have Bioshock, Portal, Assassin's Creed, Mirror's Edge, The Last of Us, Gears of War, Red Dead Redemption, Watchdogs, Destiny, Borderlands, Splatoon, God of War (2005), Ni No Kuni, Dead Space, Little Big Planet, Heavy Rain, L.A. Noire, Dark Souls, inFamous, Batman Arkham Series (Questionable about it being a new IP so feel free to disregard like you would the drastic reboot that Fallout 3 represented), Uncharted, Resistance, Dead Island, Dishonored, Rage, Deadspace, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, The Witcher, Metro 2033, and so many others. These are just the first titles that came to my brain jellies that I've actually played and have sold millions of copies. I literally am just stopping my list because I just went to VGCharts to look at the top games from 2005 forward that were original IPs and realized I would be here for a much longer time. I mean, the list of tremendously popular AAA games is increasing dramatically. We're entering an age in which gaming is becoming like movies to the point where we can't play all the major games that come out in a given year. Were you a gamer in the 90's? There was solid time between the release of good games. Now we can't keep up and people now complain about their backlog of great games for goodness sake. I can't keep up either and I now have more time than ever to do so. None of this go to school and then go to work to pay for games nonsense. Just big-boy work and then games.
This isn't even getting into iOS gaming. The Apple iPhone (1st generation) came out in 2007. Every title developed for smartphones is well within ten years of us now and more than likely in the last five years.
The proliferation of sequels in the market isn't a sign of a failure to produce new IPs, it's a sign of success at having produced so many successful new IPs recently.
