Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 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.'"
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!
Search 2010 Gen Con events
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.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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.