Are games choking on their own polish?

The video game industry has gone from strength to strength over the past couple of decades, constantly pushing the boundaries of what was once thought impossible and reinventing genres. However, are today’s big titles stifling the development of the industry? These days many games are being hailed as ‘immersive and cinematic’ usually with exceptionally good graphics, but have developers lost the plot? Are these intensely visual games missing the point?

The most awarded and praised games of the past few months: Uncharted 2, Bayonetta and Modern Warfare 2, are all utterly unoriginal and in fact have almost no unique features. they are simply polished to a shine with good graphics and cinematic gameplay. They are by no means bad games but are rather just HD versions of games we have seen before. Uncharted 2 is well Uncharted 1, along with every other Shooter and Action/Adventure game. Bayonetta is just devil May Cry with a witch. Modern Warfare 2 was in fact COD4 with a couple of mods to it. The point is that there is nothing special about any of these games besides their visuals and polish. Once the next Uncharted or Modern Warfare is out, the last one will be out of our minds.

So why do we love these games so much, you might ask. Well, they are actually good games, but ‘cinematic experience’ should not be a game’s only selling point. Games are losing the innovation and boundary pushing that they once had. More and more developers are heading towards pimping out the wheel rather than reinventing it. We also love these games because it’s something that we’re familiar with, we always say that we want something innovative and new, but when it comes we shoot it down like a Nazi warplane – the original Assassins Creed is a case in point. It was like no other game in terms of its experience and style, but it was hated on  because it was too redundant. What most didn’t realise is that it was something new and fresh so Ubisoft had decided to focus on getting the basic formula right before seeing to the other aspects of the game. It is still one of the most enjoyable games for me personally.

Developers are too scared to do anything radical or new because they don’t know how it will be received by the stoics who ask for the new but still want the old. Prototype is another example of gamer hypocrisy. It was without a doubt the most entertaining game that I played last year (this opinion is shared by many others whom I know) as well as showing what a sandbox game should really be about, but it was downtrodden for its poor graphics and storytelling. Just because every other game has a good narrative and visuals does not mean that it is the criteria of a great game. Portal, for another example, was excellent, but it was really a simple game with regard to graphics and story. It still went down as one of the greatest games of the decade, because as a game it deserved it.

It is also far too easy to make a rather generic game and just slap on some pretty colours and the problem is that developers know it will sell. So they spend less on making the game and still sell the same amount of copies. Developers are beginning to exploit this to make a quick buck in the interest of pure capitalism. It is just plain wrong, I mean, what happened to the benign innocence of the video game industry?

There just aren’t as many innovations in gaming as there should be. Each year we have maybe one game that does something different or redefines a genre, the rest is just a shiny pile of redundancy. We must accept that some games will be different and even if they aren’t as good as they could we need to realise that they are shaping their genre. Can you imagine if everybody hated on the first Metal Gear Solid? Where would we be today, as far as the intricacy of game stories is concerned, if not for Metal Gear Solid?

We need to accept that some games are trying to do something different and as such may not come a little rough around the edges but ultimately they will be the point of origin for a truly great game somewhere down the line.