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Game Originality: Any Left?
Kamalot writes "In a world where 85% of games are solved with a gun, where are the original and innovative ideas? Adrenaline Vault has a telling editorial about the state of creativity in the game industry, the constant re-hashing of sequels, and a look into the future when technical achievements are no longer the driving force. What happens when every game follows a tried and true formula? Where do the new ideas go if we can't have games like Viewtiful Joe, Shenmue, and Jet Grind Radio? Did innovative, rather than mainstream, games send the Dreamcast to an early grave rather than the PS2's more bland, yet conforming, lineup of titles?"
Come on, lets not leave out Frequency and Amplitude, one of the most original, and best PS2 games.
The "Insert Quote Here" line is almost as predictable as inserting an actual quote.
I always thought the Myst trilogy was pretty creative, although it wasn't the first puzzle game.
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Metroid Prime is new for other reasons... However, FPAs (non-shooting) include the Journeyman Project, Myst (including the one that was free-walk rather than jump from view to view), System Shock (which had a little shooting, like Metroid Prime, but was primarily more puzzle solving), etc.
First Person Adventure games have been around for a while.
-T
The original GTA has a bit in common with Clerks if you want to compare video games to movies. Both were done on a small budget and pushed the envelope. Also, is it just me or did Kevin Smith shoot clerks before he was with Mirimax, much like GTA 1 was done without a publisher iirc?
There is always room for new ideas. The problem is, a lot of new ideas are bad ones. For every new idea that might be the next Street Fighter, GTA, Everquest, Ultima, Quake 2 there are plenty of poor games.
What it all comes down to, is most people play games for fun. Appealing to what is fun for most people is how to sell a game. To me, it's not fun to go online and role play a troll and chop wood for 90 hours a week or whatever it is you do in everquest (I got bored pretty quickly with it). I enjoy games where I can play with other people and out think them. Where I like a game of chess, a game of counter strike is much more fun since I get to solve my problems in a way I can't in real life without reprocussions. (ie, VIOLENCE)
The games that appeal to people as "fun" are the ones that will always be successful.
A very, VERY good point!
Remember, many of us are getting older and "have seen it all." Being jaded is an understandable reaction.
But remember: to a kid, everything is fresh and new. I think that's what people miss most about childhood.
Your grandkids are going to be just as thrilled with UT 2035, as you were with the original Castle Wolfenstein.
...
The Official Playstation Magazine recently ran a cover story called Seven Games That Will Change Everything. All SEVEN of the games predicted to "change everything" were SEQUELS. Innovative games, I think, have always been the exception not the norm, but the industry is firmly gripped by sequelitis to a much greater extent than ever before....
The Dreamcast was probably also done in by piracy. It was just too easy to play copied games, you didn't even need to mod your DC. At least on the Saturn you had to have a modchip. (Sega CD games have no copy protection, either, but not everyone had a CD burner then.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Black and White was an extremely innovative game but it had one huge flaw: it was boring as heck to play. Also it might have been too ambitious for it's own good. The AI left a lot to be desired. Planescape Torment was indeed a great game and I was very happy to find it for $10 in the bargain bin at the local computer store.
In the case of Shenmue, hopefully into the garbage. Someone at Sega seems to have confused "innovative" with "boring," "pointless," "repetative," "plot-free," and "wildly unrealistic."
Anyway... back on topic...
The editorial is off base. As any creative industry grows the core of the industry becomes conservative, unwilling to take the risks necessary to create truly innovative work. But just because the core does doesn't mean that everyone will. Some companies will realize that you don't need to sell millions of copies to be successful and will happily make modest profits with smaller markets making truly innovative games. The original Counterstrike was just such a case, it popularized the modern SWAT style game and refined into the basis of many multi-player games. Pop Cap Games has done phenominally well with their little games, most notably Bejeweled Something genuinely original? How about surprisingly addictive game about building bridges, Chronic Logic's Pontifex . How about a hard to explain that can only be inaccurately described as action puzzle play matched with turn based stategy, Moonbase Commander . Check out the Independent Games Festival for bunches more of genuinely new and interesting games.
Of course, certain genres are completely unreasonable for small publishers, like massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Or are they? How about a MMORPG without any combat? A Tale in the Desert . A puzzle based MMORPG? Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates .
Thanks to internet distribution, it's becoming more and more economical for a smaller company to reach out to a global audience.
So, there is lots of great new game ideas. Sometimes they even escape from big, conservative companies. So why don't we see them? Why aren't more people aware of them? The problem isn't that a lack of new ideas, the problem is the journalists themselves! By focusing on the big budget rehash games, spending time giving us pointless "preview" coverage over and over ("We still haven't actually played the game, but boy, it sure does look neat. We look forward to its release in forty-eight months") instead of seeking out and publicizing great stuff from small companies. It wouldn't take much to get the general public looking for these games, helping to encourage further innovation. Because the journalists hype them so, the game industry is still stuck in the idiot "Big budget, big payoff" gamble that the movie industry is. With a few small budge success stories we could see big companies realizing that quarter or half million dollar risks don't have huge rewards, but they also lack the possibility of becoming catastrophic failures.
If you're worried about the lack of innovative games, go looking for them, they exist. Point them out to your friends. And if you're a journalist, don't just bitch, tell your readers about what gems you do find!
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I'll field this one. Originally, I had a "the DC rox" post lined up but it seemed too obvious. Anybody who's familiar with videogames as a genre knows that the DC had some brilliant titles.
I was watching some pre-awards show for the G-phoria Awards (game awards given out by G4TV) last week. The show was basically 4 industry people plus a moderator sitting down roundtable style and kicking around all the different games that were up for different awards. One of the guys, maybe it was Seamus Blackley, said that the future of gaming is a continuation of the blending of genres.
Which is probably the most intelligent thing you're going to read in this thread.
Games, due to their nature, can't be simply lumped together as innovative or derivative. Parts of all games will be derivative. There are a set of standards that all games must follow - from the way the packaging looks, to the price point, to how the save option works - it's all according to a predefined specification. This gives gamers a sense of familiarity with the environment across all games on the same system. The A button will always be forward and the B button will always be backwards when navigating menus on the Xbox. It's a spec.
Beyond that, games have developed into the genres that we're commenting/lamenting about here. The problem with these genres is that they're pretty specific. A FPS has a certain number of qualities about it that you know you can expect in your game. The extent to which a new title is considered innovative or derivative is partially a judgement on whether the game used the genre to its advantage or became limited by it.
Oftentimes, games that are lauded for their innovation tend to innovate in one of two areas: technical ability or gameplay mechanic.
Splinter Cell was innovative in its technical abilities. It showed lighting techniques and fabric movement in ways that we've never seen before on a home console. Some would argue that the graphical innovation was so huge as to change the fundamental gameplay mechanic. This isn't true. Splinter Cell is part of the stealth genre of action games. And even at that - it's pretty lame. The trial and error nature of the game reduced it to a series of puzzles to solve. Couple that with a so-so storyline, and in my eyes, you have a very over-hyped game.
Grand Theft Auto III (or Vice City) is a game that blends the genre lines. It's an action game, a racing game, a shooter, a stunt game, etc. But the graphics were still ordinary. Nobody would claim that GTA innovates graphically. However, most everybody agrees that this is a genre busting game that's fun to play.
Then lastly, games are defined by our expectations. The Matrix Reloaded videogame has some cool moments and there's no doubt that it's fun to play scenes from the movie. But other than that, it's your run of the mill Max Payne, Dead to Rights knock off. Sure, they've sold a million of them in the past week - but how many of those people bought the game for the added movie footage and how many bought it for the cool gameplay? And before people start talking about the quality of the graphics, please realize that the wheels on the cars were octagons. Talk to me when they get to be circles.
When it comes to sports games, we don't want gaming innovation. We want something entirely different. We want to make it realistic. We want better graphics and a more true to like AI opponent. We don't want to change the rules of the sport we're playing. But that doesn't stop us, the gaming press, or the developers themselves from claiming startling feats of innovation with each new Madden game.
So innovation is all what you make of it.
Is Planetside innovative for being a FPS MMORG? Is The Matrix Reloaded innovative for meshing with the movie and including 60 minutes of additional movie footage? The answer is probably yes. But the extent to which being innovative makes a good game experience differs greatly.
Sounds a lot like Space Hulk. So much for that :P
=Smidge=
If you liked DDR, then you'll probably like to check out pyDDR, a DDR clone written in Python and PyGame. It's got a buttload of dependencies but other than that it looks beautiful.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
Kinda...but the gameplay is very different. As is the presentation, the speed, lack of freezetime, multiplayer aspect. Still, it does kinda somewhere resemble Space Hulk ;)
:) I wish I still had all of the original disks :(
But, man, that does take me back
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Amazing levels of freedom and detailed world (Morrowind)
Thrill of sneaking up and tricking the enemies rather than killing them (Hitman 1 & 2)
Really challenging AI (announced in Halflife 2)
Atmosphere of real fear (Silent Hill 2)
Amazing plotline (Final Fantasy, since 4 or 5)
Easily extendable "create your own world" without quality loss. (Morrowind again, compare to average user-made levels in other FPP games)
These are but a few relatively new tricks that will not get old&boring anytime soon, and before they do, people will come up with new ones.
We're far beyond the times where everything could've been turned into a game: Brushing teeth, riding elevators, catching sheep, eating hamburgers... Nowadays all games need to have a plotline (not only some "intro legend" written in a paper manual), some 3D gfx, good music&fx, several hours of gameplay, more or less "closed ending" (at least a "main quest") - these are a must, and they make all games very similar to each other. But there's a whole big layer behind that, which evolves slowly but constantly and it's NOT just the looks.
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Just another metion for a proffesion-sim game that's apparently hugely popular in Japan, but virtually unheard of in North America:
Harvest Moon 2
You're a farmer, you need to raise chickens/cows/weed the garden etc etc
Very very fun game
"maybe Warcraft. THAT was original."
;)
As original as a clone of Dune 2 could be.
Either is fine. In the first instance of 'correct' is an adjective describing English, and the second is an adverb that modifies the verb speak.
I find it funny that most of this discussion is happening anonymously - I was going to do the same because I don't want to be labelled a gramar nazi. .Unless, I'm mistaken, in Simon you're presented with a series of flashing buttons, and then have to replicate the pattern from memory.
In DDR, you see a pattern of arrows on the screen and move your feet to hit the correct pad on the floor (while trying not to look like a putz). Hardcore players may memorize the arrow pattern to improve their game, but it's not a requirement for playing. Otherwise, you only have to remember an arrow long enough to stomp your foot in the right place, and then you can forget it.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
most if not all games aren't built on a 'from scratch' game engine. See the thing is, it would be too risky and very time consuming to build a new engine for each game. Actually if i remember right, game engines are hot items these days, and alot of older engines are being updated and improved and they are making thier way into today's games.
good example of this was that 'Alice' game, it used the quake 3 graphics engine in it, but had a completely different style of game play (and no, i didnt find the controls difficult, i felt the gameplay was in sync with the game) but anyway, my point is that with out the reusability of game engines, games would be cost prohibitive for anyone, even the big companys, to produce any games at all
sig is broken try again tomorrow
However, that's gonna change. At the moment it's still quite complex to modify games to any real extent. I'm not saying it's gonna get easier per se, but it is gonna get easier to get more done.
Then that slack taken up will be used to innovate even more, making the individual difficulty about as much as a person can handle, yet again. New slack? New expectations.
With increased ability comes increased workload. The curve will never really settle in any kind of programming, because if you are a student of history, ALL human systems have a tendency to increase in complexity and capability. In all of history, the more you can do, the more you WILL DO.
Your argument is the same argument you can say about technology that they told my mother in newsreels before movies in the 1950's. It never worked before. (Radio Voice) "With your Westinghouse push button kitchen of the future, You'll have so much time for kids and family!"
She found out that more time or ability just means, once again, increased expectations. Now we all work a 50+ work week. So much for the promised 1950's utopia.
The promises of any future where something is easier or going to help you immmensely or free you up is hard to swallow. That thinking is pie in the sky... mostly predicated on the concept that the future is going to stay the same... that the expectations are going to stay the same, and that technology will not change our culture or behavior.
It will change... however, I guarantee you that human ambition will stay at its roughly breakneck pace, as it has all the way through history.
I, too, think these games would be excellent. Sadly, it's only once in a blue moon that a learning game really hits the mark. Then again, how often are they made by the big companies?
l /bemani.gif) but it does sharpen your ear for music tremendously. Now I can listen to something rich and miltitextured like newer things from Pop Will Eat Itself, where a song may even have 20-30+ layers of sound, and just isolate each instrument, enjoy it, then move on to the next. I can also listen to bizarre and cacaplonous music like Mouse on Mars and very readily find the musical merit and patterns to it, even if it's made up of something like a quacking duck, a squeaky hinge, and a sheet-metal thunking noise. I feel that the game has given me something that, while not terribly useful from a daily survival point of view, is still valuable and allows me greater enjoyment of something I do anyway.
As for the music games though, Konami truly owns the genre at the moment. Most people in America have likely only seen Dance Dance Revolution, but there is also my favorite game, Beatmania, which uses a 5 key/7 key keyboard + a turntable. Music plays, and predermined depending on how the level is written, at different times in the song, you tackle different instrumental parts. From complex winding piano parts, to white knuckled high-speed complex drum parts, to awkward and scarcely audible backup parts. It certainly doesn't teach one to read music, as it's all depicted though falling bars (http://www.telusplanet.net/public/wzrd/incidenta
There is also a game like Beatmania called Keyboardmania which uses a piano keyboard and falling bars. That could probably teach much better than even Beatmania, as Beatmania changes your instrument, and pitch of the buttons pressed. I've never played though, and AFAIK, it would be an ungodly hard game.
What sucks right now in the game industry isn't that you can't make clever games with new ideas, but that you can't get them funded. If you develop an unusual, refreshing game to completion, you can get wonderful deal terms and have surprisingly good odds of turning a buck.
Getting them funded to completion is the trick. Even veteran game companies are finding they need to pitch a sequel or a heavy license, and the deal negotiation still takes 3-6 months, during which time you can't make payroll and lose your employees to the monster first-party developers or in-house megacorp developers.
Angel funding generally doesn't work unless you know someone wealthy who really trusts you. Doing the angel circuit is incredibly challenging, and you still have to wait several months for the deal to sign and cash to flow, during which time your tasty team is disintigrating.
What I recommend to teams trying to do original content is find a way, by hook or by crook, to completely develop, debug, tune, and polish the game to completion, to develop their own ads, their own marketing plan, their own box art and box copy. This forces you to think through where the game can be sold, how, and for how much.
Handing a boxed, shrink-wrapped product to a publisher makes recouping your development costs trivial. Most big publishers have slipping product, and most big publishers, particularly publicly traded ones, need to ship a certain # of titles every quarter. There is a powerful demand for completed, fun games, but there is an over-supply of largely unwanted proposals and demos.
I did exactly this with Abuse and turned a $60k investment into $1.1M in royalties on a game that sold lousy numbers of units (though it was downloaded like crazy). I have friends doing exactly this sort of thing now, generally quietly, content to make money on games that they love making, even if they aren't over-exposed mega-hits.
They don't always have a $5M marketing campaign or a $5M art budget behind them, but good, fresh games are out there.