I find the claim that videogames *need* to innovate a dubious at best. I think we've reached the point where the focus needs to be on crafting strong stories like TellTales "The Walking Dead", Naughty Dog's "Last of Us", Irrational's "Bioshock Infinite" - these are examples of games that didn't need to innovate, only bring a unique and powerful experience to the table. I think in fact that AAA games should stop driving blindly to the next big thing (3D movies anyone?) and just refocus those energies into bringing gaming as a medium into a mature and important place in our society.
AAA Games Have Stopped Innovating
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
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Exactly. The leap is pretty much the same. And with the benefit of hindsight we're allowed to forget the mountains of repetitive, boring or broken titles that lay at the feet of the worthwhile games that stood the test of time.Thanatos2k said:
The frequently referenced Shadow of Mordor gave us a new way of interacting with the enemy exclusive to the current-gen. Rockstar added a (pretty fantastic) first-person mode to GTA V that they were physically unable to fit in the original release. And yes, increases in graphical capability have lead to a welcome burst of detail, vibrancy and responsiveness. From the comparatively blistering speed of an era in which 60fps has become the expected standard and not an unexpected surprise, to the roll of the rain off Batman's cape to the way faces in Until Dawn will sometimes catch the light just right and look like they're about to jump Uncanny Valley on their skateboard. They aren't the most important part of a title by a longshot but yes, they do matter. And it's okay to say they matter.
Speaking of which, we happen to be seeing a new genre forming right there. Now we have the likes of Until Dawn and Life is Strange picking up the lead of the first experiments in a new direction by the likes of Telltale or Quantic Dream and running with it. They emphasized conversation, environmental interaction and above all else decision making over straight logic/inventory puzzles of more classical adventure games, but with a motion, exploration and in some cases even action that set them apart from visual novels. They aren't just a style anymore. Heavy Rain and The Walking Dead are no longer unique curiosities. And while their rise may not have anything to do specifically with a new set of consoles, they still represent the real emergence of something different in the medium, something new. I like to call them Choice-Em-Ups.
The problem with all this is that it's harder to notice because we're in the middle of it. We don't notice just how much of a leap visuals are actually making because we remember the last generation looking that good when we first saw them. We don't remember all the crap we had to slog through in every generation because it wasn't worth remembering as much as the releases that were actually good. And the only things we can analyze from this generation are from it's comparatively early days, when no one has any idea what they're doing. Remember how Resistance: Fall of Man and The Last of Us were on the same system? Or Perfect Dark Zero and GTA V? Heck, just look at the difference between GTA III and San Andreas. Who knows what the end of the lifespan on the PS4 and XB1 will bring.
I'm not saying the current gen doesn't have problems, but we need to keep some perspective here. Every generation has problems, and they turned out okay. You really think in fifteen years we won't have people nostalgically reminiscing about how much better gaming was back in the Eighth Generation? You know, when we had real games, before VR headsets and haptic gauntlets and kart racers became the dominant genre everyone rips off?
EDIT:
Also this, completely. Nothing kills quality faster then floundering about trying to be new rather then trying to be good.Oathfish said:
This may be the reason why I started to lose interest in AAA games. Even though innovation is important, I believe the real deal breaker is identity. Too many AAA games felt the same and very hard to distinguish. Which is why I really do not care or buy many games this year.
There is no real debate here. You were right, we agreed and the AAA game business is a huge time/money/resource sink that has failed to produce anything of significance recently, possibly ever. There are absolutely zero signs that the situation will get better. Better as in making some progress.
I still stick the bane of AAA gaming on suits. Not just the suckiest suit in the business, Bobby The K over at Activision, but the hordes of financially focused/obsessed people that live and die on the stocks. Games making huge amounts of money has attracted the worst from the business world, and to no small part the worst from those in Hollywood. Miserable products, failed releases, a decade or more of abusive DRM leads us to where? Well, rebooting garbage games by doing nothing more than improving the graphics. The results are middling games that are mostly generic; 1 from column A, 2 from column B and mixed with too large an art department. All to produce 50GBs of mostly wasted storage. And these are their best games. Well, they are the best they can do within such a broken environment.
I still stick the bane of AAA gaming on suits. Not just the suckiest suit in the business, Bobby The K over at Activision, but the hordes of financially focused/obsessed people that live and die on the stocks. Games making huge amounts of money has attracted the worst from the business world, and to no small part the worst from those in Hollywood. Miserable products, failed releases, a decade or more of abusive DRM leads us to where? Well, rebooting garbage games by doing nothing more than improving the graphics. The results are middling games that are mostly generic; 1 from column A, 2 from column B and mixed with too large an art department. All to produce 50GBs of mostly wasted storage. And these are their best games. Well, they are the best they can do within such a broken environment.
I think due to the relatively increasing budgets of game development, the risk is simply not placed on the AAA market anymore. It's up to the indie crowd to come up with an idea, upon which the AAA market can then latch onto and try and improve.
I may be out of place, but I think since we've reached a stale position due to the new gen shift, games and mechanics have been somewhat stagnant, but story telling has been on the upshot. The Last of Us, some of Telltale's releases, The Witcher 3 - I mean there's some really deep interactions going on there, involving the player or not. For the games in which story is not important, it has been a non-issue. But where it does weigh, they've been great IMO.
Something like Watchdogs was pretty innovative, they just didn't flesh it out enough and the hype generated didn't match up to the product. I enjoyed it, and could even understand why they still fell back on certain conventions such as gunfights and "radio towers" just to keep some sort of consistency to ensure things didn't go completely down the drain.
Also, in the middle of the last generation, it seems we hit those milestones that were so successful that it became a case of money-printing, because of the "don't fix what ain't broke" mindset. We had CoD 4, and Assassin's Creed. For the last 3-4 years, all we've had are newer iterations of them, each copying from the last (with varying levels of success).
Even Arkham Asylum, which brought something new to the table in open world story-telling and combat. Was doing rather great (with one exception I guess) up until the point they started introducing city-destroying Batmobiles and poor porting.
That's enough points for now I think I'll get back to "work", but it's less than 2 pages and only 1.5 spaced alright?!
Edit: revised for wordiness and added a point on Watchdogs
I may be out of place, but I think since we've reached a stale position due to the new gen shift, games and mechanics have been somewhat stagnant, but story telling has been on the upshot. The Last of Us, some of Telltale's releases, The Witcher 3 - I mean there's some really deep interactions going on there, involving the player or not. For the games in which story is not important, it has been a non-issue. But where it does weigh, they've been great IMO.
Something like Watchdogs was pretty innovative, they just didn't flesh it out enough and the hype generated didn't match up to the product. I enjoyed it, and could even understand why they still fell back on certain conventions such as gunfights and "radio towers" just to keep some sort of consistency to ensure things didn't go completely down the drain.
Also, in the middle of the last generation, it seems we hit those milestones that were so successful that it became a case of money-printing, because of the "don't fix what ain't broke" mindset. We had CoD 4, and Assassin's Creed. For the last 3-4 years, all we've had are newer iterations of them, each copying from the last (with varying levels of success).
Even Arkham Asylum, which brought something new to the table in open world story-telling and combat. Was doing rather great (with one exception I guess) up until the point they started introducing city-destroying Batmobiles and poor porting.
That's enough points for now I think I'll get back to "work", but it's less than 2 pages and only 1.5 spaced alright?!
Edit: revised for wordiness and added a point on Watchdogs
Honestly I stopped being a fan of Halo ever since the third game came out. The first game was one of the first videogames I had ever played and it just blew me away with the combat and the story. It seemed at the time so incredibly innovative. I ended up getting all the Halo books I could find because I loved the ideas that were introduced in the game. Then Halo 2 came out and I was again blown away by how much they had improved (at least for Me) on the first Halo. I loved the direction they took with the branching narratives and everything that felt new and not just a retread of the original.
So I was incredibly disappointed when Halo 3 came out and just seemed to not introduce anything especially the new (The Ark was lame) and kept making references to how good the previous games were. I also didn't like how they seemed not to know how to deal with Master Chief instead just freezing him until they could come up with something later. Halo 4 seemed promising to me because they actually introduced something different. And they finally reached what I felt was a satisfactory conclusion to the Chief and Cortana relationship. It is a shame to know that Halo 5 is just another step back for the series.
So I was incredibly disappointed when Halo 3 came out and just seemed to not introduce anything especially the new (The Ark was lame) and kept making references to how good the previous games were. I also didn't like how they seemed not to know how to deal with Master Chief instead just freezing him until they could come up with something later. Halo 4 seemed promising to me because they actually introduced something different. And they finally reached what I felt was a satisfactory conclusion to the Chief and Cortana relationship. It is a shame to know that Halo 5 is just another step back for the series.
To be frank, one of the biggest inhibitors of innovation come in the form of reviewers like Yahtzee.
When a truly innovative game comes along, often it's not as shiny and perfect as might be. But the critic mob descends (led by the reviewers whose "shtick" is negative reviewing), the game gets torn to pieces, and then neither indies nor AAA developers want to try that again.
When a truly innovative game comes along, often it's not as shiny and perfect as might be. But the critic mob descends (led by the reviewers whose "shtick" is negative reviewing), the game gets torn to pieces, and then neither indies nor AAA developers want to try that again.
The last three years has actually seen a dramatic increase in female and homosexual protagonists--two sorely underrepresented avatars in videogames. The problem though, I contend, is that publishers, whether indie or AAA, seem to prefer that the two be mutually inclusive.That is, most female protagonists are implied to be homosexual (or assumed to be by the gaming community), and all intentionally homosexual protagonists are female. This is troublesome b.c. it propogates the mindset that femininity is a crutch that can't be heroic or identifiable with audiences, particularly in the action-adventure genre.
While it's true AAA games have stopped innovating as much as they COULD, technically they have stopped completely.
As unfortunate as it sounds, when you look at in the terms of business, it's NOT their job to innovate a ton, that's left to the smaller business. Games by small/medium teams and indie games.
But I have to say that i'm can't get up in arms about the state of AAA games. Yes they should innovate a bit to keep games interesting, but I feel that the big point of a AAA game is not to be "Best game ever, can't be beat" but instead be an expected minimum quality.
New Call of Duty? I can expect the game to be 6.5/10 at WORST. Fallout 4? Ton of effort put into it, expecting a 7-10 range. Yeah not a ton is new, and it doesn't appeal to everyone, but its still made with an expectation of quality that can't be put on a random Indie Dev. Still, hats off to a AAA game that takes a ton of risks, because it shows dedication to their work despite sinking a large amount of money into something that might not even sell.
TLDR: With smaller games, you never know if it will turn out the next big gem or a total buggy and broken mess, it's a gamble. AAA games aren't always gems, but they're a reliable experience and time-sink more often than not.
As unfortunate as it sounds, when you look at in the terms of business, it's NOT their job to innovate a ton, that's left to the smaller business. Games by small/medium teams and indie games.
But I have to say that i'm can't get up in arms about the state of AAA games. Yes they should innovate a bit to keep games interesting, but I feel that the big point of a AAA game is not to be "Best game ever, can't be beat" but instead be an expected minimum quality.
New Call of Duty? I can expect the game to be 6.5/10 at WORST. Fallout 4? Ton of effort put into it, expecting a 7-10 range. Yeah not a ton is new, and it doesn't appeal to everyone, but its still made with an expectation of quality that can't be put on a random Indie Dev. Still, hats off to a AAA game that takes a ton of risks, because it shows dedication to their work despite sinking a large amount of money into something that might not even sell.
TLDR: With smaller games, you never know if it will turn out the next big gem or a total buggy and broken mess, it's a gamble. AAA games aren't always gems, but they're a reliable experience and time-sink more often than not.
AAA is about Evolution, not Revolution.
That is, it's more about making tiny, incremental annual improvements to existing ideas over introducing new ideas.
It won't change until the current model that sustains AAA fails.
And it inevitably will fail; all media markets peter out if they don't crash. It's just a matter of time.
That is, it's more about making tiny, incremental annual improvements to existing ideas over introducing new ideas.
It won't change until the current model that sustains AAA fails.
And it inevitably will fail; all media markets peter out if they don't crash. It's just a matter of time.
It's true that not all games have to do something completely new. In fact, the shouldn't. But the problem is that AAA games have stopped making any improvements to gameplay and narrative.
In The Witcher 3, you can gallop by holding down one key. If you're following a path it won't consume stamina. That's a small detail that felt like a big leap forward.
One of the reasons I ragequit on Far Cry 4 was that NPC's were still useless. They had hundreds of heavily armed people but it was up to one guy to win the war. In The Witcher 3,
In The Witcher 3, you can gallop by holding down one key. If you're following a path it won't consume stamina. That's a small detail that felt like a big leap forward.
One of the reasons I ragequit on Far Cry 4 was that NPC's were still useless. They had hundreds of heavily armed people but it was up to one guy to win the war. In The Witcher 3,
you can leave Zoltan to fight the troops and go after Dandelion. In any other game it would've been the decision that determines which one of them dies.
There was something fishy about how the thing with Letho played out, but I finished off the thugs anyway because that's what you usually do. When Cerys asked me to trust her, I knew she meant business. If it wasn't for the previous incident I would've thought that the game expects me to say yes because it doesn't want me to hurt her feelings or so that she'd sleep with me later. I wasn't sure we saw eye to eye. (They repeatedly scolded me for not respecting their ways, one of which was making a person sacrifice themself at a funeral. It was hinted that Udalryk was being pressed into sacrificing his son). I still said yes and made the decision based on that. I later learned that you can inspect the house beforehand and see that the oven has a door on the other side. If I had noticed that I would've suspected that they're playing with me.
There was something fishy about how the thing with Letho played out, but I finished off the thugs anyway because that's what you usually do. When Cerys asked me to trust her, I knew she meant business. If it wasn't for the previous incident I would've thought that the game expects me to say yes because it doesn't want me to hurt her feelings or so that she'd sleep with me later. I wasn't sure we saw eye to eye. (They repeatedly scolded me for not respecting their ways, one of which was making a person sacrifice themself at a funeral. It was hinted that Udalryk was being pressed into sacrificing his son). I still said yes and made the decision based on that. I later learned that you can inspect the house beforehand and see that the oven has a door on the other side. If I had noticed that I would've suspected that they're playing with me.
I'd tentatively place the start at Super Mario Bros (NES), for post-crash era gaming.CaitSeith said:
Prior to that, there were popular classics but mainly arcade hits; nothing was really planned as a franchise.
All AAA started somewhere, I realize, but the longer a company remains a major player, the less they tend to innovate.
(and that's when they aren't just outright dying)
I wonder whether a large part of the problem is that, with large AAA budgets forcing developers to be risk-averse, there's no longer room for innovating upon the 'glorious failures'. By which I mean games that ultimately failed because they weren't all that great overall, but which could have been the first drafts for games that are truly special.
Example: Obsidian's Alpha Protocol. The game is weighed down by poor stealth feedback (ruining what is a fairly impressive system 'under the hood', with its focus on AI reacting to noise, and that the right gear is critical to moving with any degree of silence/stealth whatsoever), inconsistent combat quality, the use of 3rd person camera for a genre where FP would be far more preferable, and the silly separation of 'safe-house' hubs and the mission sites which hampers the non-combat interactivity.
BUT it still has, to date, the greatest choice+consequence interactivity of any game to date. And I don't mean the bits where you're told outright 'choose A or B'. In fact, those choices are part of the problem, as it encourages players to think that they're the only bits where your choices matter, when often the most important choices are subtle and well integrated into the gameplay, without any intrusive 'here's a big choice' signals.
If you could put up with the failings, it's the kind of game where you could play it a dozen times, read every FAQ around, and STILL miss major deviations in how the character arcs and main plot plays out. There are many ways of getting just about every major character on-side or off-side, many fights that you can only get if you combine special info with pissing someone off enough, or getting them to lower their guard enough, that they'll expose themselves instead of fleeing. One character, for example, can be convinced to help in the end-game by either discovering his connection to another dead character (needs discovery of certain info in the mission, plus particular choices with the other character while that character is still alive) OR by discovering enough intel on the geo-political situation that you can convince him that his calculations are off and he's about to create a hot war instead of a cold one, OR by combinations of discovery and intel to show him that a certain other character is untrustworthy. All of these options are easy to miss on most playthroughs.
You can befriend or backstab literally every character - you can join the lead bad guy, backstab him to take over his plot once he's outlived his usefulness, or (VERY difficult) get enough respect from his second in command that you can join with that guy and run a less heartless version of the bad guy's scheme.
You can get backup troops in the end-game either by befriending a certain ally, or by making him hate you so badly that he'll send troops after you (which aids you by making it a 3-way fight instead of you vs an army).
None of it is in the form of linear 'have X points in X stat' stuff either - it's all from your choices in-game.
And here's the big thing - it's ultimately based on systems, not just good writing. Obsidian explained it as this: instead of having a branching plot (starting with 1 thread and splitting into branches), they used a hexagonal plot system. Think of a square made up of 8 lines of 8 dots each. So each of the 8 start points will ultimately get to one of the 8 end points....but with an amazing array of potential paths that can be taken to get there (you could go straight to the other end, or zig-zag your way to the other side, or spiral to the centre and out again, etc)
...and so it's a mechanic that could have been replicated by other games that do a better job of the rest of the mechanics.
Dead State is another example. A game where the plot (and the survival/actions of other survivors and camps) moves forward with the passage of time (day passes whenever you rest at the shelter) instead of the player's actions. Again, wonderfully innovative mechanic that in a previous era would have had breathing space to be refined over multiple iterations, until we could a game that makes better use of the mechanic, and avoids the game's weaknesses.
Nowadays a game is seen as not worth drawing from if it isn't a hit in itself. Glorious failures are forgotten, depriving us of the opportunity for glorious successes.
Example: Obsidian's Alpha Protocol. The game is weighed down by poor stealth feedback (ruining what is a fairly impressive system 'under the hood', with its focus on AI reacting to noise, and that the right gear is critical to moving with any degree of silence/stealth whatsoever), inconsistent combat quality, the use of 3rd person camera for a genre where FP would be far more preferable, and the silly separation of 'safe-house' hubs and the mission sites which hampers the non-combat interactivity.
BUT it still has, to date, the greatest choice+consequence interactivity of any game to date. And I don't mean the bits where you're told outright 'choose A or B'. In fact, those choices are part of the problem, as it encourages players to think that they're the only bits where your choices matter, when often the most important choices are subtle and well integrated into the gameplay, without any intrusive 'here's a big choice' signals.
If you could put up with the failings, it's the kind of game where you could play it a dozen times, read every FAQ around, and STILL miss major deviations in how the character arcs and main plot plays out. There are many ways of getting just about every major character on-side or off-side, many fights that you can only get if you combine special info with pissing someone off enough, or getting them to lower their guard enough, that they'll expose themselves instead of fleeing. One character, for example, can be convinced to help in the end-game by either discovering his connection to another dead character (needs discovery of certain info in the mission, plus particular choices with the other character while that character is still alive) OR by discovering enough intel on the geo-political situation that you can convince him that his calculations are off and he's about to create a hot war instead of a cold one, OR by combinations of discovery and intel to show him that a certain other character is untrustworthy. All of these options are easy to miss on most playthroughs.
You can befriend or backstab literally every character - you can join the lead bad guy, backstab him to take over his plot once he's outlived his usefulness, or (VERY difficult) get enough respect from his second in command that you can join with that guy and run a less heartless version of the bad guy's scheme.
You can get backup troops in the end-game either by befriending a certain ally, or by making him hate you so badly that he'll send troops after you (which aids you by making it a 3-way fight instead of you vs an army).
None of it is in the form of linear 'have X points in X stat' stuff either - it's all from your choices in-game.
And here's the big thing - it's ultimately based on systems, not just good writing. Obsidian explained it as this: instead of having a branching plot (starting with 1 thread and splitting into branches), they used a hexagonal plot system. Think of a square made up of 8 lines of 8 dots each. So each of the 8 start points will ultimately get to one of the 8 end points....but with an amazing array of potential paths that can be taken to get there (you could go straight to the other end, or zig-zag your way to the other side, or spiral to the centre and out again, etc)
...and so it's a mechanic that could have been replicated by other games that do a better job of the rest of the mechanics.
Dead State is another example. A game where the plot (and the survival/actions of other survivors and camps) moves forward with the passage of time (day passes whenever you rest at the shelter) instead of the player's actions. Again, wonderfully innovative mechanic that in a previous era would have had breathing space to be refined over multiple iterations, until we could a game that makes better use of the mechanic, and avoids the game's weaknesses.
Nowadays a game is seen as not worth drawing from if it isn't a hit in itself. Glorious failures are forgotten, depriving us of the opportunity for glorious successes.
The industry has certainly innovated in 2 fields - criminalizing its customers with ass-backwards and toxic press releases (anti-piracy and anti-used sales and whatever, also don't forget GamerGate), and pulling every cheap fucking trick they can to maximize profits by releasing completely broken shovelware, day 1 DLCs, season passes and micropayments, all in the name of double-dipping and "whaling" (ugh).