Too Much Of The Same Old Stuff?

[Tonimata]

As my last post proved (Why are FPS falling into categories (and which, may I remind you, not many answered the real question, just rebutted my arguments ) , not only FPS are falling into categories, but also aevery other gametype, that meaning RPGs, Strategy games, puzzlers, etc. Even our beloved rock fantasy simulators are starting to look frighteningly similar to each other .What I'd like to reflect on is the fact that for every innovative gameplay game, or at least one with an interesting story that can keep me through to the end, there's at least one billion other ty games in which I charitateively spend my hardly earned money, all for the sake of finding that I'm going to despise myself for committing such a grievance. The other day I thought it right to buy Braid from XBLA, and may I tell you, I fraked out badly at a game I thought would not meet my expectations (maybe I had too much FPS overdose and couldn't think properly at the moment.), but thank God it did after I managed to grasp the games' puzzling nature. But it could've sucked, and that's what I'd like to discuss. Why should developers make games that suck?

 

[Kelbear]

Because you define suck to be something you recognize.

Innovation doesn't make a good game. Being a /good game/ makes it a good game. If a game tries something crazy and new but executes it in an awkward and annoying fashion, it shouldn't be included in the game. A game doesn't have to be genre-breaking to have high quality standards. The goal of a game is to be fun and innovation isn't necessarily fun.

Portal could easily have been terrible. Imagine if the quality level was only as high as the alpha tech demo: Narbacular Drop. No plot, quake1-era graphics, floaty gameplay and nonsense map design. What makes Portal so memorable was a distinctive art design, a memorable setting stretched over the puzzles, and a memorable and entertaining antagonist. A gimmick is not enough. Run through the developer commentary and see how much work went into the design and how many things they did wrong before they did it right. Polish is critical.

Other examples:
Geometry wars is a piece of "retro-gaming" with a few new twists, but they nailed the core gameplay and it became a success. CoD4, it's main change was adding levels to online gameplay while leaving the possibility of level-1s to compete with level-capped players. CoD 4 didn't pioneer a new genre, but it polished what it offered to the hilt. You can easily boil a game down into core elements, but the product is taken as a whole. Beyond Good and Evil is "action-platformer", but it wasn't generic. Planescape: Torment, an RPG based on ANCIENT gameplay(A pen&paper game!) on an engine that already had 2-3 similar RPG games done. You can write off fallout 1 and 2 in a similar train of thought. Half-life? You can hand-wave the whole thing and call it a rehash of Doom...and even Doom still boils down to Wolfenstein3D.

In a sea of MMOs, WoW rose to the top. Criticize it as much as you like(Personally, I was bored before the 30-day trial was up), but it has a massive following while everyone else fails to even register on the same scale of success that WoW uses. WoW relies heavily on the Everquest formula, but apparently nobody else is able to do it as well as Blizzard, not even Everquest 2 could touch it. I'm not going to say WoW sucks, I'll just say that /I/ don't like it. I'm still cognizant of the fact that there are millions upon millions of people who find it to be a good game.

 

[Varchld]

Because they make money?

What you consider "suck" might be someone elses fanboy game or an improved clone of it.

 

[Sion_Barzahd]

Games will always be improved upon, but to improve something you have to mimick most of it, to build upon it.
They don't "suck" cause you've seen it done before, they're familiar.
Yes you will have some who will attempt to break the norm and open up a whole new direction for game developers to follow. Portal and Mirrors Edge are two examples.
But that doesn't mean they're any better than Cod5 cause its similar to its predecessor.

 

[Leeathal]

Look at Mario, each game chnages but has some of the same aspects as the last, but its still fun and different

 

[Chilango2]

I mean, doesn't everything in the history of man fall into catagories? We tend to sort things to organize them. Just for example, try defining 'RPG' in a way that actually encompasses the game play of the following games:

1) Morrowind
2) Fallout
3) Persona 3

And yet, these are all unquestionably RPG's, one 'catagory', but three *very* different games.

 

[Tonimata]

Not really. I think that by suck i obviously mean something very bad. And why would developers make something that is overall considered very bad?

 

[Sion_Barzahd]

Not really. I think that by suck i obviously mean something very bad. And why would developers make something that is overall considered very bad?

Since when have developers made something overall bad?
There have been games liked by less people than others. But just because its not topping the charts doesn't mean its not a great game.

 

[KrossZer0]

Not really. I think that by suck i obviously mean something very bad. And why would developers make something that is overall considered very bad?

Because game quality, like the quality of all art, is measured subjectively. You might think its bad, but a lot of other people, including the developers, don't.

There a very few works of art out there without some sort of fan base.

 

[BallPtPenTheif]

Why should developers make games that suck?

First off, you have to understand that games are inherently repetitive. The trick to game design is bringing in enough subtle changes to give a sense of variation while at the same time giving the player a slow enough learning curve to adapt to increasing gameplay and said subtle variations.

For example, Super Mario Bros is just you jumping across gaps and bouncing on enemies. Barring the gimmicky water levels, you rinse and repeat with the inclusion of timing variations and enemy changes added to spice things up.

When you look at the subtle evolution of gameplay internally within a title, it would only make sense that good game design would be further subtle game mechanics within the sequel.

So repetition is not inherently bad as long as the veil of variation can be retained. Very difficult to do when a genre is over saturated or if somebody has played the game too long (WoW).

 

[mattaui]

As was stated earlier, innovation does not equal entertainment. The field of electronic gaming failures is littered with as many, if not more, examples of games that changed things up just to be different than examples of games that failed because they were just more of the same. In fact, in attempting to do things different, just to be different, most games just proved why no one had done things that way in the past - it just didn't work.

Most innovative games don't totally change the rules, they just bend them in different ways. GTA, for example, didn't invent the idea of stealing cars, or running people over with them - they just realized that people sure have a heck of a lot of fun doing it, so let's let them do it all they want, among other things. They rewarded behavior (up to a point) that in prior games might have been penalized or ignored altogether.

Shooters are even more derivative - the basics haven't changed much at all since their inception involving a certain German castle. Run around in enclosed spaces and shoot people to get guns and armor to shoot tougher people and get bigger guns until you run out of people to shoot, or you die. Everything else that's been added to that concept has been largely window-dressing, and doesn't change the core game play to a large extent.

I then take a game like Star Wars Galaxies to illustrate my point as to why innovation should not be a means in itself. It was as if they decided to do away with almost everything that traditional MMOs had and replace them with entirely new systems, across the board, and then expected people to dive right in and adapt to these shocking new developments. The utter failure of what should have been a license to print money is case in point in that regard.

Consequently, most of the newer MMOs incorporate the same sorts of things you've been seeing since the Age of DikuMUD dawned, and while they're not all as universally successful as WoW, I'd wager that a large part of their failure is how much they deviate from expected norms, and not because they're too similar to what people expect when they hear the words 'fantasy RPG.'

 

[Tabloid Believer]

Innovation doesn't make a good game. Being a /good game/ makes it a good game.

Yep. Mirror's Edge is a great example of that. :/

However, to add onto that, I'll tell you precisely why many games nowadays seem very similar to each other. In the earlier days of gaming, it didn't cost that much to make a game. So there was very little risk. So the incentive to innovate was great! Why not? Try something different. If it fails, just move onto the next project.

However, games now require massive budgets. So you can innovate, but you take a tremendous risk. If your innovation either doesn't work or catch on, you've just flushed a lot of money down the toilet, caused people to lose jobs, and smudged up your resume.

So, to minimize risk, most developers go with what is familiar.

Also, it's increasingly harder to innovate because games are so much bigger and broader. When designers were working with just 2-bit graphics, it was easy to tinker around with a program and make it dance. Now, however, with massive graphics engines and large programs, you really are limited in what you can innovate and what you cannot.

All that said, I'm pretty impressed with the sorts of innovations I've seen in the past two years. What's happening now is that the innovations are smaller and slipped more under the radar.

Mostly I'm pretty impressed with the development of video games' narrative power. I think great strides have been made with that.

BTW, if you are looking for innovative games, I suggest checking out the many indie games on the 'net. Indie games tend to be working on a smaller scale with smaller budgets, so less is risked. For example, I love, love, love The Last Stand 2 [http://armorgames.com/play/1443/the-last-stand-2] - basically it's Space Invaders with a real plot, gritty action, and a narrative wrapped up in zombie horror. Pillage the Village [http://armorgames.com/play/1426/pillage-the-village] is another one of my faves. So. Ridiculously. Addictive.

There's even a side scroll Portal [http://portal.wecreatestuff.com/] game which is awesome.