FPS’s are the salt of the earth. A lot of people is in gaming because A) MW clones, B) Fifa, don’t try to analize it further. The average gamer, or most gamers, will only play Fifa, MW and Sims in 12 months.
Technical resources aren’t unlimited. They are in fact constrained by the current console generation. Why would you create an engine or bother to build content that won’t run smoothly on a xbox360?
Mechanical resources are only limited by display and input characteristics, but they leave a ton of room to innovate.
Thank you for posting this. I’m glad I’m not the only one that thinks that when I hear these things.
Well, if you’re going to include everything from RPGs to on-rails-shooters to story-based shooter/RPG hybrids to third-person cover shooters, then yeah, there are lots of shooters.
But I bet with a bit of thought I could name 13 future RPGs, especially if I get to use as wide a definition as yours (ME3, Bioshock Infinite, Deus Ex 3, Witcher 2, Skyrim, Amalur, Diablo 3, and presumably there are Zeldae and JRPGs I don’t pay attention to).
And I bet I could name 13 open-world games, too, although I quit even looking at those after having such a huge glut of them on my to-play list (still haven’t gotten to AC2, ACB, RFG, CD2, BK:N&B, RDR, DR…).
But in previous generations, we had few shooters, few RPGs, few sandbox games, but tons of 3D platformers, racing games, and 3D fighting games. And back before that, there were tons of side-scrollers and flight sims and graphical adventures and 2D fighters. Genres wax and wane in popularity over time, and shooters are popular now, but they’re not the only thing that’s popular.
I’m not saying this in a snarky way, just making an observation, but I think we have different ideas when we say innovation. You made a good post and I’d like to expand more at length, but I’m posting this on my phone. Ill try to expand more later. :)
I said “nearly,” because obviously things aren’t totally limitless. But do you really believe that the next-gen console hardware is going to unleash a ton of possibilities in gameplay that we never had before? I guess it’s possible, but I really don’t think it’s likely.
Game sequels are awesome though. People are always down on sequels, but honestly you take a game, do your best developing it and etc and then you release it. You probably had to cut 25% of your great ideas and innovation just to get the damn thing out there, so the second game is bound to be bigger, better, and more fun and largely, game sequels ARE just that! It’s silly to complain about. A good game is a good game, and a fun experience is a fun experience, regardless of a number after a title.
I think if you define innovation much higher than that, you don’t end up with many games that end up clearing the bar. If your list of innovative games is like Mario 64, Starflight, Ultima IV, Zork, Pac-Man, and Doom, then there was never any golden age of innovation.
Would you rather I lied?
Diablo 2 was a billion years ago, and BF3 is indeed a franchise but one of the few decent PC shooters left. That still leaves 95% of the sequels being announced as being stuff I really am not interested in.
And yeah, I’d prefer a new game rather than BF3, but it seems like no-one’s capable of doing a great FPS any more.
Not at all. Those were technical constraints. Like I said in the paragraph right after, mechanical constraints are pretty much gone these days.
smack You shut your whore mouth, bitch!
I am old (40) and jaded (get off my lawn) and yet I still enjoy watching the E3 conferences and will check out some of the coverage from the show floor. Sure the biggest excitement these days seems to be over sequels (Halo 4, Mass Effect 3, Moiderm Warfare 3, etc.) but you know what, a lot of those games look pretty damn good. Flashback 10 years ago (2001, when Halo was born) and you’ll discover people having tons of fun playing Baldur’s Gate 2, Civilization 3, Grand Theft Auto 3, Dragon Warrior 7 and Final Fantasy 10 among others.
E3 is like a nice little sampler plate full of tastes of things to come. It’s about glimpsing what’s next for old favorites, seeing a peek of something new, and making sure your favorite console maker isn’t planning on doing something stupid like putting all their eggs in the motion controller basket (oh…wait). E3 is about letting retailers and the gaming press know that all the big players are going to make everyone money hats in the year to come, and thus isn’t where I expect to see them flaunting an abundance of debut titles that nobody has heard of and nobody knows how well they will sell. When Microsoft says “We will support this Kinect thing heavily so you can sell tons of them, and oh yeah WE GOT HALO 4 COMING BITCHES!” then everyone present breathes a little easier.
I wish there was an E3 style show for the PC. Somewhere I could tune in to see what developers and publishers have in the pipeline for the platform for the coming year. Then again, that’s what I have QT3 for…
E3 is for all electronic gaming, including PC. PC games all tend to be console ports these days, which is why they’re often missing from the show floor.
Yes. Game design is fundamentally iterative, in a way that other creative endeavors aren’t. Plans and encounters with the enemy, and all that.
However, that doesn’t mean that developing a sequel is necessarily the best way to take advantage of that. They can run the gamut from fixing obvious and not so obvious issues (Infamous), to more of the same (God Of War), to breaking something great (Crackdown).
That’s a succinct way to summarize it. I was thinking recently that half my all-time favorite games are sequels, but lately they’ve been more of a mixed bag. I’m probably just being selective.
This is a sad statement on many levels.
Where the fuck is Mechwarrior 5?
OK. Sequels by themselves are not automatically bad. Sequels that are rehashes or that add little to a tired series are bad.
I can’t speak for DW7 or FF10 - never played either series - but GTA3 took a favourite game and made it fully 3D (genuinely jaw dropping at the time). Civ3 was a major overhaul. Baldur’s Gate 2… uh, pass. I didn’t like either of them. I’m sure someone can tell me if it fits my theory or not.
Then there’s things like Diablo 3 - a reimagining of a game from 2000 - or the direct Syndicate & X-Com remakes that people are desperately hoping will appear. These are attempts to give us modern versions of old classics. Again, not really something that’s a problem.
But when you have sequel after sequel where you start struggling to see the incremental improvements, then it’s a bit depressing.
I agree to a certain extent, but I hesitate to put a military simulator like Arma 3 in the same category as a story-based action-adventure title like Bioshock or Deus Ex.
Also, is there something bad about these titles? If it was a slew of casual shovelware, I’d be selling pitchforks and torches right now. But the games you cited are all justifiably popular or at least greatly anticipated. Who doesn’t want to see Id Software’s next big idea? It looks pretty cool so far, doesn’t it? Are we down on Irrational doing a Bioshock game set in the sky?
Honestly, I think most of those are in genres that people don’t actually play, as seen from the outside. Ask a COD fanatic if MW2 is better than MW1, and they’ll give you an unhesitating answer with plenty of reasons behind it. But to me they seem pretty similar.
Arguably EA’s sports franchises are the exception to this rule, but Madden being unoriginal is pretty much a tradition (despite which it still looks pretty different now than it did in 1997).