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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?"
No matter how good it is, it's not going to sell. A certain degree of conformity is necessary. That said, I'm sure there are people out there who are clearly smart enough to be able to combine A Good Time (TM) with Something New (TM) that Everyone Can Enjoy (SM).
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
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.
Done in by not enough money to push a continuous marketting campaign. It had the games, Soul Caliber, Tony Hawk, Worms, come to mind, as well as the chance for online gaming.
I'll always love my dreamcast. The amount of extras that people made for this thing were immense. I have CD's with NES emulators and every NES game out there, as well as Sega's Master System. I believe there was even a VCD player.
-- taking over the world, we are.
Where you have to build bombs with sticks of chewing gum, and solve problems with your head rather than a gun.
You tell the story, not in the story itself. The works of Shakespeare have been re-imagined for hundreds of years now. Hollywood has been retelling the same stories for a century.
The originality comes in your setting, your imagination and adding your own flavor to the game. While the rare original book, movie, tv show, play or story comes out...mostly they are all just different takes on a common theme.
The Magnificent Seven and the Seven Samurai are the same movie, but both are considered classics.
So, is there originality in new games? Yes, but maybe you are not looking for it in the right place...
I'm always wary about comments that seem to reflect the "why aren't things better?" mold of thought. Obviously, there are impediments to producing a novel game concept, but if someone came up with a really catchy idea, I think game execs would sign on.
What if Miramax had told filmmaker Kevin Smith that no one would watch "Clerks" and suggested he develop a marketable teen sex comedy instead?
This is a red herring. Clerks pushed boundaries in several directions. If game designers have not done so, perhaps it's simply because there aren't enough people out there pushing the envelope. Time and patience will result in more games. Complaining won't.
The longer we go, the more things that will be done, the more games will have been done before. It's like the Southpark episode where Butters tries to come up with a scheme for chaos. "Simpsons did it!" The conclusion: Of course the Simpsons did it. They've been around forever. And as Chef points out, the Simpsons stole some of their stuff from others before them. It's not necessarily about doing new things. It's about applying your (hopefully good and sensible) take on those "tired" ways of doing things to put them into new light.
Derivative isn't bad. There are games that are derivative, but a hell of a lot of fun (Civ 2, for example). Games that are derivative crap would have been crap even if they were the first in their fields.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
For anyone who laments "Why do companies continue to pump out this sludge?", the answer is pretty simple: because consumers continue to buy.
<speculation> Perhaps in these times of economic recession, people are more likely to go with the "sure thing" (guns, explosions, sequels, etc) with their entertainment dollar than with "riskier" purchases.</speculation>
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
The Dreamcast didnt die because gamers dont like innovative games. Some chalk it up to its easy no-mod-needed piracy, though I doubt even that had much of an effect, being prohibitave to the mainstream non-techie gamer.
The Dreamcast died because Sega chalked up a laundry list of abandoned systems (32x, SegaCD, Saturn), and customers didnt want anything to do with it. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
I bought a Dreamcast on release day (9-9-99), and was an idiot for doing so. Sega wasnt in any position to back up another console, and to weather the financial drought before it turned profitable. EA's refusal to create titles for it didnt help either.
It was dead before it hit store shelves. And 85% of its library was indeed mainstream boring crap.
Everyone rants about the unoriginality in gameplay. But what do we hype up and get all excited over? Doom 3. Yay now we run around and shoot prettier monsters.
Fun innovative games do come out, and will continue to. And the bulk of the shelves will always be mainstream type stuff.
Thats the way it always has been - just look at the line up for your favorite nostalgia system (c64, NES, atari, genesis). For every standout there were 100 crapfests.
Nothing new here. Just nerd elitism. Sometimes those mainstream trigger finger games are just plain fun.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Games now are any of: 1) jump around to collect coins/stars/whatever 2) pretend to kick box/karate/judo something in an arena 3) FPS 4) hack and slash.
BORING
The good thing about Atari in the day was one of the basic requirements: A new game had to look like nothing else that had come before it.
If only more companies would do that today...
I think a big part of this is that we may never have as much fun with games as we did when we started way back then.
We can then start looking at the games and argue that they are not as original as they used to.
But then again, my younger brother seems to be amazed and thrilled by all new computer games.
Tor
> What if Miramax had told filmmaker Kevin Smith
> that no one would watch "Clerks" and suggested
> he develop a marketable teen sex comedy instead?
They did, it was the unwatchable "Mallrats."
> Or if Artisan had told the creators of "The
> Blair Witch Project" to drop the film in favor
> of directing a Friday the 13th sequel?
Well, they were pressured to make the even-more-unwatchable "Blair Witch II". Innovation comes in first-generation movies and games, poor sequels are just to be expected.
modern choral music...
Oddly enough, I could swear people were making the same complaint in the '80s and early and mid '90s, and the games mentioned still came out. There will always be novelty and it will always stand out against the background of knockoff blackjack / deer hunting / FPS games.
Incidentally, I tried, really tried, to give Shenmue a chance, and it's certailnly beautifully executed, but waiting all day for it to get dark so I could look for sailors again ("Sailors? Not here. I'd try looking in bars.") just wore me out. Of course, I still play Doom because Quake is just too sluggish, so...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Good grief, I never thought I'd see someone work the poor quality of video games into The Conspiracy.
Is there anything that isn't the direct result of whoever it is with the 260 IQ (because it would take nothing less to run The Conspiracy) running The Conspiracy?
No, wait, this post must be part of The Conspiracy, too, trying to throw you off the track! Keep digging and you'll find the truth! (Or is this a double-cross attempt by The Conspiracy? All I can tell you is no matter what you decide, The Conspiracy will render your body down for the oil it contains as soon as it gets around to you.)
I think the writers of this article took into consideration only the games they personally play, and possibly what their paticular culture plays, without looking at some of the other large gaming cultures (Japan, Korea, etc.).
"Powers. I have them."
And most of them are a result of the target audience that you're designing the game for.
Look at The Sims, for example, one of the first games to be massively popular with females 12-34. It can be, for all intents and purposes, a virtual doll house where your dolls interact on their own. One of the reasons the Sims Online has had difficulties is that most of the customizability that made the game so popular has been stripped out of the game in favor of anti-cheating and multi-player capabilities.
There is very little to do with violence in The Sims and a lot to do with role-playing, dress-up, and relationship management. I once heard a female cooworker describing how much better the game would be if the dolls could be made to be more customizable or if you could change clothes, jewelry or hair in-game.
For that matter, look at relationship and dating sims, which are very popular in Asia. These games range from tame and cutsey to pornographic. While it may be pretty lame and pathetic to interact with a virtual girl instead of a real one, that doesn't change the fact that these games are *very* popular and simply haven't been widely unleashed on NA audiences yet.
Another kind of game that is gaining more wide-spread acceptance in N.A. are the various profession sims or management sims. Most of these are builders, like the popular 'Roller-Coaster Tycoon' variants. Some are more detailed. I can't remember the title off-hand (Was it '911 Paramedic'), but there was a game recently in which the player took the role of a medical professional and had to make decisions on what kind of treatment a patient needed.
The different genres are out there, they just have to be explored more fully.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Some games that did rather well despite the lack of violence:
- Thief and Thief 2
- The Longest Journey
- Syberia
- Myst
- just about any Sim game
While 85% of the games out there might feature violence, I sincerely doubt that 85% of the *purchases* are of violence-oriented games.
Of course, if you're a college kid whose life revolves around Counterstrike and who uses terms like 'd00d!' then your perception of the matter is probably seriously warped by your personal experience.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
What happens when every game follows a tried and true formula? Where do the new ideas go
I, for one, would recommend getting in touch with designers and programmers from the computer gaming giants of the '80s: Broderbund, Sirius, Atarisoft, Spectravision, First Star, HES, Epyx, subLOGIC, Spinnaker, MECC, Synapse... those guys put out some of the most original, on-crack, and wildly entertaining games possible.
Anyone remember Sammy Lightfoot? Crisis Mountain? Boulder Dash? Frenzy? GATO? Paipec? That was a true era of creativity. Imagine if that were applied now.
The coolest voice ever.
Clerks and BWP are 2 horrible examples. IIRC, both were made, and then pitched to the studios. There was no real risk to the studios, other than advertising, which was kept to a minimum. BWP was the first, and still best probably, at using the internet community as its major word of mouth platform. A true independent film (IMO) is something made for a few thousand dollars (maybe 50 max), that might make it into the college campus theater scene, makes a few buck more than it cost, and everyone moves onto the next. Not everything is going to be BWP or Desperado.
Video games are now big business. They are becoming the same as the music, TV, and the movie industries. Big budget, bland, built to the lowest common denominator.
- Matrix 2
- X-Men 2
- Hulk (comic book)?
- Freddy vs Jason (god!)
- Dumb and Dumberer
- Rugrats Go Wild (tv cartoon)
- Charlie's Angels (sequel to a movie after a tv show... as if that wasn't enough)
- Bad Boys 2
- Tomb Raider 2
- Legally Blond 2
- Jeeps Creepers 2
- Spy Kids 3-D (aka Spy Kids 2)
- Terminator 3
Note: These are just the hideously obvious onesOMG IT'S THE SUMMER OF THE SEQUELS.... RUN... RUN FAR, FAR AWAY... SAVE YOURSELVES!!!
It seems to me that a lot of the games I find myself most into get attacked for being different.
One easy example is in fact a very popular game, but one that has endured some of the stupidest arguments in the history of video games: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind-Waker.
It's cell shaded; it frequently looks like a hand drawn cartoon. It recaptures the art direction of the classic SNES era Zelda game, seamlessly into a 3-d environment.
And it was attacked without mercy for being "kiddie".
Just yesterday I was at a Gamestop, playing through the demo of Viewtiful Joe. If you don't know, it's a 2.5-D beat 'em up, similar to Capcom's Strider 2 (for the playstation 1), except with bright colors and a unique take on the cell shading trend. It really stands out among the endless stream of tactical, deadly-serious games that are flooding the market.
And while one of the staff was really into it, the other guy working there couldn't accept that there was a helicopter flying around inside of a large cathedral, and that as Joe, I was jumping high into the air and punching said helicoptor in slow-mo to blow it up. As if the idea that a game could possibly be amusing and light-hearted was alien to him.
Viewtiful Joe is definitely my most looked forward to game of this year; I payed $10 for a Gamecube demo disc, solely for the 15 minute demo, which is really a ridiculous sum. It was worth it. I've played through this demo 5 or 6 times already and if the rest of the game lives up to this potential, it will likely be the best game of the year. (Like last year's Ikaruga).
I am a die hard Dreamcast enthusiast, and yes, most of the best games on the DC are unusual and edgy. Typing of the Dead, Rez, Samba De Amigo, Sega Bass Fishing, Bangai-O!, Shenmue, Chu Chu Rocket, Space Channel 5. Really, who knew a fishing game could actually be FUN.
In fact, the DC also hurt in the market for catering to old school gamers as well. Classic gaming styles such as 2-D fighters and top down, vertical scrolling shooters (like Mars Matrix, Giga Wing 2, and Ikaruga) just aren't as popular as they once were.
Perhaps Sega would have done better to cater to current trends instead of trying to invent their own, but I'll take innovative and intuitive gameplay over the trends of the week any day.
Special mention to the development teams at Sega, Treasure, Capcom, and Nintendo for making awesome, innovative games, at least now and then.
.
Personally, I thought Ico for the PS2 was a great game that didn't resort to inane violence or scantily clad women to get attention.
:)
I don't think it was the most original game made, but fairly innovative in that you have to drag the girl around with you all the time, and try and figure out ways to get her places. Had to use my brain there for a bit. Fun stuff.
And have been for about 5 years now.
Think about it: Atari (or Infogrames, whatever) paid over $20 million to make and over $60 million just for the LICENSE to create Enter The Matrix. It features lame gameplay, bad design, and a boringness that is almost unparalelled (sure its fun for five minutes, but c'mon).
Any game venture nowadays takes a gargantuan undertaking, tens of millions of dollars.
Why?
Well, of course you have to release it on every platform imaginable. This means, to me, that at least one of those platforms is going to get shafted. Normally its the PC version(s). Why? Too many configurations. Even if you do release a PC version, you have to continue to bugfix it as old/new bugs pop up with old/new equipment.
Plus there's the raw talent. Finding a programming team to develop for up to 4 or 5 platforms (can't forget the GBA) is tough. Getting a GOOD team is even tougher.
Plus there's the actors/voice talent. You don't necessarily have to invest a lot here, but hey, it doesn't hurt to get a "big name" on the box. (I know Wolverine's Revenge isn't touting Mark Hammill, but it sure is mentioned a lot on the game/Star Wars Geek sites)
Plus there's the development cycle. Another reason that most games lack originality is that you have to take that original idea, put it on all of these platforms AND make sure its still original and current a few years down the road. When an idea is created for a game, its not fleshed out in any matter (generally) for many moons. This means that any second guessing, or, god forbid, realization that it's never going to work won't come until months down the road. And just think of all the cash already spent!
Anyone remember Prey? Or Duke Nukem Forever? An old joke, but its still viable in context. They either had a terrible idea, or the technology outran them.
I remember a few years ago John Carmack shooting for the most high-end system imaginable (at the time) as his minimum sys requirements for Doom3. This was something along the lines of an 800Mhz PIII and a Geforce2. Everyone thought he was out of his mind. Nobody is going to have something that downright uber in a few years, nobody!
But its that kind of brave thinking that makes good games age well and others turn to vinegar.
When I heard that Railroad Tycoon 3 (a fav series of mine) was going to be playable on a TNT2, you could tell instantly that its development cycle was either a long time coming, or the project manager just didn't have the balls to say "We're going to require a DX8 compliant card to continue." Sure its nice to play it on old machines, but eye candy coupled with great gameplay makes games that last, and aren't stifled by old standards its desperately trying to make pliable with its codebase.
Getting back on target, games are now million dollar "projects" and "ventures" and this means that a LOT of people who control that cash want to have their say, and want to have their approval on it. Just imagine if GTA3 didn't have its two predecessors, and the big boss executive didn't like the idea of stealing cars and running over people for fun (granted there's still Carmaggedon, et al, but work with me).
New gameplay concepts are generally taken in small steps. GTA had two top-down perspective predecessors, the FPS world was born with Wolfenstein 3d on a shoe-string budget, using a character that already had an established fanbase.
Any new, brazen concept is going to get killed at that stage. Concepts don't make executives happy, they want to hear about market forcasts and demographics and marketing strategies. There is too much bullshit involved in a big budget game to really introduce something groundbreaking.
I'm afraid that the GTA series will suffer the same fate of More of the Same. I mean, seriously, GTA: Vice City was little more than a bug fix release, with a larger playing area, newer vehicles, nicer engine, and some (slightly) improved AI. I'm sure GTA: Whatever will be the same way. A
When films first appeared, the very idea of editing was radical; to cut the film into chunks that somehow approximated a jilted eye-movement that had narrative power. Then the rules about editing -- breaking the axis, 90-degree flips, screen-facing, etc. Once we had a credible language for the format, there was a period of stagnation, when we thought this is how films would be... lots of locked-off tripods, static shots, clearly framed heads speaking to the camera, etc. Sound, a technological innovation, pushed the format in new directions ("Who on earth wants to hear actors talk?). Now, look at what we do in films: swooping cameras, crazy filters, surround-sound, virtual cinematography... not to mention the arsenal of tricks given to us by the Leans, Hitchcocks, Spielbergs, etc. of the world.
Video games will go forward once we begin to truly master the art of nonlinear storytelling. I often suspect that our film past, while necessary to arrive where we are now, hamstrings us a bit in terms of expectations. People like to just turn their brains off and be entertained, and any sort of interactive medium is bound to be more work than that.
I once had an idea for a DVD 'film' that would just be scraps of video, selected at the user's whim, constructed in just such a way that you could do your own sleuthing and piece together the film in your own way. That's much more amorphous than what people are willing to go through. It smacks of work to many people.
Don't worry. We'll get there eventually. I do agree with the poster in terms of lamenting the current period, though. The video game industry now makes more money than the film industry and sequels to hit games will sell. It's a given. However, sooner or later, someone will come up with the video game equivalent of something like Memento or 2001, and things will shuffle again.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
The following is a broad generalization of gaming. I ignore lots in the interest of getting back to work ASAP. Please look at the point and not what I failed to mention.
First there was 2D with a few colors. This let us do lots of basically animated board games. There were good ideas because people had been making board games for centuries.
Then we got to the scroller era and every game was the same. Run around, collect stuff. Some were better than others, but within a few years, the genre had run its course and most were just bad coppies of the few innovative ones.
Then we hit the 3D era. Everything now looks like Doom with a gimmic. Some of the gimmics are good, but most are just copies. These games always have lots of guns and flash because the other part of the game can't stand on its own.
What's the problem? There is no shortage of good ideas, the problem is that we can't code those ideas. Any game that doesn't rely on running around and blowing stuff up needs another goal. That goal always revolves around the need for some good AI. The only other successful major genre that I have ommited so far is the RTS game. These work because they are from a macro perspective. The individual AI sucks, but the whole scene behaves mostly ok. Anything that needs an artificial person to behave in a strategic or clever manner just can't be done yet.
When we can do an game where harder doesn't just mean bigger and faster but smarter, the market will explode with "I've always wanted to do this" ideas.
I remember back in the day (back when NES was king and gas was just under a buck a gallon here in CO) when game publishers were not huge media conglamerates, but programmers who loved the games they created. Final Fantasy, Crystalis, Star Tropics, etc. all came from relatively small companies (at the time).
This is important, because it means that the resources required to make the game were in the best place they could be, in the hands of the people making the game. All the super-popular games of that time (even to date, occasionally) came from environments like this.
It's not that the creativity and innovation is gone (look at ICO, Fatal Frame), it's that the resources needed to afford such aren't where they're supposed to be.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
really should make true gamers think about the future of videogames, with Sony and Microsoft wanting to create entertainment hubs, and Nintendo's demise looming, I guess we're not very far from a Holywood Syndrome. Once Nintendo is out of the picture, the "true games" part of the equation will sucumb to more "interesting" business models such as "In-game advertising", more FMV, more pop music soundtracks, more movie-game translations, more "let's do what's in..." a.k.a "Bullet time on every production" etc.... it's the Industry's second death, and there will be no NES to save us....
I know, for video-game funs it sounds weird, but old guys who played adventure games on old TTY mainframe terminals will understand what I mean.
Less is more !
Even at the cost of being a bit off-topic, I found one exceptionally insightful part in that editorial.
[John Carmack] believes it won't always be necessary for programmers to pump out new engines for each successive generation of releases. This could mean that it might not be long until technical innovation is no longer a driving force in interactive entertainment - at least provisionally.
I am personally eagerly waiting for this to happen in games. It has already happened in the niche area of computer demos. Just marching eye-candy and stunning visual effects on screen no longer gets the group nothing more than a few yawns. The real works of art with concept and possibly even *gasp* plot get all the appraising - and for a reason. There was a time when computer demos pushed the limits and showed what quite rudimentary setups were capable of. I really, really wish the trend saw a comeback.
Originality is, however, dangerous. It takes a certain kind of genius to design and device game with new ideas and working plot. They are far and wide apart, which means that 99% of all the games will, for the forseeable future, remain sequels of sequels and rehashes of the lowest common nominator.
There is no such thing as good luck. There is only misfortune and its occasional absence.
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 have to agree with you... there really isn't that much inovation out there. The only things I could think of that are truly groundbreaking are: 1) Dance Dance Revolution (Yeah.... it's just for the kids... but you have to admit that it's quite different from anything out there) and 2) The Typing Of The Dead. I'm not sure if too many people know about The Type of the Dead but basically they took The House of the Dead and instead of shooting zombies with a gun, you have a keyboard and each zombie has a word you have to type in order to kill it. Surprisingly, it is very addictive and the first I've ever seen of anything like this. I think we need more of this type of thinking in the gaming industry.
The only thing that will stop you from fulfilling your dreams is you. - Tom Bradley
I have felt the exact same way about DC and PS2. When the DC came out, it seemed that every week, some completely original game would be released. Remember Seaman? Where you spoke to the artificial fish through a special microphone? Or the way Space Channel 5 gave a new spin on the memory type games (no, it was very different than Parappa). Or Soul Calibur, the best fighting game ever released (yes, it pwns Tekken). The list goes on and on - the mentioned Shenmue and Jet Set Radio... some memorable RPG's, great multiplayer games, sports games that quickly rivaled anything that the lame EA franchises have come up with, Crazy Taxi, the innovative Samba de Amigo with REAL maracas (yes I have a pair, and it's fun)... Virtual Tennis, the best tennis game EVER made, Phantasy Star Online, one of my favorite online RPG's (not massively-multiplayer), which had FULL support for ethernet connections, including a great port of Quake 3 Arena, with an easy to use DC mouse and keyboard to go with it! The accessories were also as innovative as the games.
Hopefully that covered almost everything. I own GC, PS2, and X-Box, and they mostly gather dust, except for using my X-Box as a media player. Since the demise of the DC, there have been nothing but sequels, and it seems that even Sega has lost its flair for video game perfection. Hopefully there will be another era in video games that isn't driven by profit margins, movie licenses, and sequels. This hasn't just been related to Sega, even Nintendo's proven franchises are becoming more and more lackluster. Please people, stop buying Wrestlemania games and try something new for once. The DC proved that innovation is still possible in a crowded market.
The Sims, Wolfenstein 3D, Unreal Tournament, Mario Kart, Pokemon, Myst, Parappa the Rapper, Super Mario 3d, Ninja Gaiden, The Legend of Zelda...
Each of these sold better than "Legends of Wrestling" _BECAUSE_ of their originality, because they appealed to a new crowd. The Sims is the best example of this.
Of course, some ideas just don't cut it. Sewer Shark. The Sims Online. Anything for the Jaguar. It's not always because the game sucked -- sleepers like Jet Grind Radio, Star Control 2, Shadow of the Beast, Radiant Silvergun and Panzer Dragoon Saga happen all the time and either miss their audience or are otherwise stutter started into obscurity.
The Dreamcast was killed by speculation and nothing else. Everybody who played Crazy Taxi with me when it first came out loved it. Most of them waited for the PS2 anyway -- because the PS1 had a huge library and Sony was making promises to shake the very earth. It's not ORIGINALITY that killed the DC. That's just stupid. ORIGINALITY was the only think that prevented it from doing a complete "Saturn fail."
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I have two friends that I know back from the university. We are always in discussion of our next gaming project. Well, we have not been able to make anything!!! anytime we started, we found out that someone else has done the same before us!!!
3d Shooters ? done to death.
Online rpgs ? too much work for 3 bedroom coders.
Puzzle games ? done to death. We even tried 3d battleship!!!
Adventure games ? well, no one had the talent of storytelling. But this is a field that shows more promise than any other. Basically, you can do whatever you like.
So, what you can really do ? even big companies don't have the resources to pull cinematic experiences. It's not that the hardware does not allow it. It's time and resources. The current market simply does not justify too high costs.
Even if you think about any other type of game, its been done to death. The only real innovation is combining formerly separate categories.
About the Dreamcast, all I have to say is that I love it. Today I read about the PowerVR tile engine: super pretty smart architecture for 3d rendering. It's a pity SEGA did not have the marketing hype. Because it's the PS2 hype that killed the Dreamcast: the big anticipation of the uber console that could do emotional experiences in 75 million polygons per second...damn lies by the Sony PR department. But it worked.
The setting is in a movie theater during the days of silent films. The film itself is, of course, black and white but everything else is normal. There is a piano player on stage in the corner and a movie audience. The movie playing is a serialized "Perils of Pauline" kind of thing. You control what happens on the movie screen and how well you do effects how the audience reacts. The tempo of the piano player's music will warn you when things are about to get hairy and the text-screens during the movie (It's not a "talkie" remember) will provide clues as to what to do.
You get points for not only rescuing the "damsel in distress" but doing so in the "nick of time" using the most outlandish means possible. Your audience responds by remaining focused on the screen and coming back next week to see what adventures our hero gets into next.
On the other hand if say, she's tied to a railroad track and you rescue her before the train is even on camera, the audience will be bored and start throwing peanuts at each other and some will even get up and leave.
Also, if you fail and the damsel dies, then the audience is horrified and storms out the the theater in mass never to return.
anyway, that's the basic jist, I just wish I knew how to code it.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
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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You know how in a rpg battle ( I am thinking Final Fantasy X here where you have the guys waiting to get thier turn to fight just kinda waddling/dancing from side to side looking kinda stupid ) well wouldn't it be kewl if the whole party came to real life! They could talk to some gang bangers, opening thier mouths silently while a floating blue 'window' with some text appeared, the bewildered crack dealers would say something about how they were going to bust a cap in their arses and then out of nowhere the battle theme music would start playing 'dunt dun dun dunna na dunna na dunna..' and the characters would all start dancing from side to side. The bewildered gang-bangers would be like 'what the f*ck?' and start shooting. The bullets would bounce off someone's armor and maybe hit the little ORCO looking dude in the shoulder the white digits '399' to come up. Then maybe one of the girl chars would magic some green sparkles to give Orco back 567 life ( green digits ) Then the fighters - the main char,
and that armored up guy would take out six or seven of those bad guys each on their turns and then Orco could summin Ifirt to crispy fry the rest.
Soon all this ruckus would get the cops attention and another battle would ensue. The chick would summon a 'shield' spell and the moogle would send a pack of hundreds of chocobos to peck the heads of the cops trying to shoot the dancing characters. The main character would use 'mug' to dispatch the police chief ( a boss ) and get the gun mana to add to his sword. Now each slice hit also shoots a bullet!
As the characters continued to search for the way home, breaking into random people's houses to steal anything in a foot-locker, vase, bookshelf or cabinet they would eventually draw the Army's ire who would position themselves blocking a bridge that would of course be the only way to get across the calm and easily swimmable stream. The intrepid characters needing to get home through the interdimensional portal hidden in a ps2 which was on the other side of the bridge would challenge the host of 'ArmyGuys' and 'MechaTanks' and 'FighterJets' ahead.
The battle music would begin and they would switch the moogle for the Ninja guy, then a bullet would bounce off the main character's 'KevlarArmr' causing his limit to break. He - being the fastest aside from the ninja who has lost his turn by being switched in would go first and kill most of the weaker 'ArmyGuys' at once moving so fast that it looked like there were hundereds of him. The 'MechaTanks' would be mostlu uneffected. One of the 'MechaTanks' would shoot a shell blowing Orco's head clean off, but the chick would through some stuff out of a pillow on him and he would magically come back to life. Then the 'TroopCarriers' would do their 'more troops' move and replenish the entire supply of 'ArmyGuys' the Knight/Armor dude would step forward and hit a 'MechaTank' with all his might for a measily 1 damage. Then the Ninja, knowing the battle was shaping up to be fierce would eschew throwing the stars built for throwing that they picked up at the last town and start throwing obsolete weapons at
military. A fire claw - for the cat dude that never gets played and has no experience goes flying and hits one of the 'TroopCarriers' setting it ablase.
Hmm that fireclaw had magic in it thinks the party. The troop carrier was taken ou easily. So Orco summons Ramuh the lightning god to zap some of these machines. Bzzzzz every ArmyGuy and Major standing is wiped and three of the four MechaTanks are disabled. The ArmyGuys inside them pour out and run for their lives. But the last MechaTank does a 'radio for backup' and four TroopCarriers full of ArmyGuys come to replace the fallen.
In the distance the roar of 'BomberJets' is heard and a floating digit clock showing 3 minutes starts ticking backwards. The FighterJets have now taken off and are circling back to fire missiles at the party but just in
Eat at Joe's.
Game publishers want to move volumes of product, and games that help this tend to be if not disposable than at least shorter rather than longer-lived. That means quick, linear scenarios - the kind best suited, of course, to the 12-year old target demographic. Despite their evolutionary polygonal distance from their forerunner in the old Atari Berserk, these are still only simple mazes for going zap! in. And a consequence of that aesthetic choice is that complexity goes out the window, along with ambiguiety, variety in problem-solving, and other open-ended criteria that most of us equate with "originality."
That said, three major games suggest a countervailing force: the Sims and the GTA3 franchises, and Morrowind. These are major commercial successes that flout the platform-hopping, find-key-open-door rattrap of most games, and point to a more dynamic and nuanced form of gameplay. If this continues, good things will follow.
Ironically enough for a form that traffics in sensation rather than ideas, another tendency to consider is political. Apart from horror and sci fi, there has long been a social and political context in video games. At the risk of simplifying, lots of games through the 70s and 80s reflected utopian leftist values - big bad corporations were always either releasing giant robots or leaving a scorched earth in which vigilante players had to set things to right (with a gun, naturally). Looking over gaming history you see this trend start to level off as gaming moves out of the garage and into the boardroom. Today, in many games, the enemy has been humanized (some would say dehumanized) as a projection of grim right wing urges: Arab or Vietnamese soldiers who must be eradicated in the service of "freedom" or "justice". (How congenial a trend this is to our rulers can be seen in the US Army even deploying its own game.) So our values - or at least as construed by those who control big-money game publishing - can also drive a lot of me-too game making.
I have thought about this a lot, being horribly addicted to video games and having woken up at the end of many a fourteen hour binge feeling empty like I had wasted precious life. Boy wouldn't it be great to become completely immersed in a game at the end of which you wound up speaking fluent Chinese or having acquired some other skill useful in the real world? I know that there are plenty of kids' learning games out there to teach phonics and stuff like that, but that's not what I'm talking about. Those are too pedantic.
What I had in mind was something more in the direction of Cyberchase, were the skill being learned was important, but almost incidental to the game play. For example, take all those Everquest-y RPG-y games out there where you're an ancient Greek warrior or a spy or something, and gradually require the player to understand what the characters are saying in their native tongue in order to advance, and after that require the player to speak back in the language. Presto at the end of the game you come out with basic understanding of French grammar and a vocabulary of 1000 words.
I know it wouldn't be easy to walk the line between educational and fun, but if someone managed it I'd be a slavishly devoted fan.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Originality in video games is always possible, but then again, the same holds true for TV and all we get is reality TV and sitcoms...
Since the discussion topic at top is somewhat open-ended, I'll just babble on a few points:
If every commercial game is made from a cookie-cutter template, I don't think it'll be that huge a blow. There are always independent shareware and freeware programmers ready to make something original even if it doesn't make a huge profit. If it really shines, it'll even have some viability on the commercial market. Look at Counter-Strike. Sure, it's another team-based fps, but it was so addictive, that now it's one of (if not THE?) most popular multiplayer game on the Internet. It was free when it started, and it's even free now, but you can still buy it in stores packaged with Half-Life (the game it runs as a mod for,) and it's even coming out for the Xbox in a while! I really don't think we're going to see a total death of originality in gaming... ever.
Video games are just like any other form of mass media. When they came out, they were all new and original (you wanna see some unique games? Get an old Intellivision or Atari!) but now that they've been around for a while, they've stabilized to the point where just like TV, movies, music, or any other mass media, they're 90%+ cookie-cutter fodder for the masses, and a few real gems that gather cult followings, or even widespread attention and longlasting recognition.
While it is true that the Dreamcast was a haven for original games with titles like Crazy Taxi, Shenmue, Jet Grind Radio, and a real model of originality, Seaman, I don't think that's what killed it.
[HISTORY CHUNK]
Every time Sega made a system, there was an achilles heel that dragged it down. The Master System competed with the NES and it's myriad of games and already widespread acceptance. The Genesis had few colors and terrible FM-synthesized sound compared to the SNES (and it's leagues of game developers from back in the day of the NES!)
The Game Gear, compared to the GameBoy of the time, had lush color graphics, awesome sound, and some nice titles. The GameBoy was cheap at around $100 (CDN), and as grainy and colorless as the games were, with their bleepy sub-NES (stereo!) sound, they had some exceptional gameplay to them, and some winning developers licensed to make them. It also didn't hurt Nintendo any that while the Gameboy would use 2 batteries for a week, the Game Gear would use 6 batteries for a couple hours! More playing is more fun. 'nuff said. 11 years later, Nintendo finds it can make a color screen that doesn't need a hydroelectric dam to power it, and they OWN the handheld market, competing with truly nonthreatening offerings like the GP32, NeoGeo Pocket (and hastily-released Color version,), and the Bandai WonderSwan, which to my knowledge, didn't even make it to these shores (unlike the first Internet-ready console system, the Bandai/Apple "Pippin.")
The Saturn was a 2D 256 color (?) system that was tweaked at the last minute to compete with the PSX's 3D prowess. Truth told, it probably would have amounted to the greatest 2D system ever, beating out even the Turbographix 16 and the Neo Geo. However, they chose to instead make grainy-looking off-color versions of Playstation titles, and leave all the titles that really showed off the system's strength in Japan.
Wait, where is Nintendo now? Well, with the N64, they pulled a Sega and built in an insurmountable flaw. Being cartridge only, the games could be either low-detail, low-content, or expensive like Neo Geo games. Contrary to what you'd think though, that wasn't what killed them.
You see, they were working on a sort of CD-addon for the SNES to match the SegaCD. This system would include an additional processor to handle the next-generation CD games. However, they got partway though development, and decided it wasn't worth their while. They were working with SONY on this project, and legend has it, it was even going to be called the PLAY
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.
One of the big problems in the hardcore gamer market is that most players demand millions of dollars in art and animation budgets to produce enough eye-candy to outdo the last round of hit games. This cost won't go away even if all the game engines are licensed and bring the programming costs down thereby. I think the real hope for innovation lies more in the mass market - even if a lot of them are out there now just playing online Hearts and Spades. They have a broader range of tastes and interests, and they've made games like Tetris and Minesweeper and Shanghai big hits, even without much of an art budget. Also they've made The Sims the biggest selling PC game of all time - it was expensive to produce, granted, but it certainly represents a developer putting out a new and different form of gameplay, and the market rewarded it. So I think there's hope yet. :X)
Furcadia - A free online game with user created content, DragonSpeak scripting, & more.