When I review (sadly, stupidly rarely these days, but I'm hoping to review Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword soon), I do tend to give credit to games that give a feeling of freshness. Too many times, I play games these days and come away with a feeling of how stale the general game is, this is despite the game only being out a week or two. The general Call Of Duty/Battlefield/Medal Of Honour game types are the most stale, but you also get the "one man saves the world" games which have been run into the floor and MMORPGs which use the same or similar formula every time.
It was only recently that I ended up ranting about how MMORPGs lack any real imagination in terms of races. They each have the classic "human", "elf" and "orc" races, with minor tweaks to avoid law-suits. They each encourage team work, something that barely works due to how anti-social the cocks on these MMORPGs are. They each have two sides which are pit against each other for some inane reason. They each try to create a story to make you feel like a hero, but the immersion ends when you remember there are millions of other players who are following the exact same storyline, one which is a linear as a tunnel. They each use the same general array of classes, almost scared to step away and try something new. They also do the system where you stand still, looking sort of proud of yourself and attack the enemy on the spot, ignoring the guy clubbing them in the face. Sure, you could argue that some MMORPGs do something new in each of what I said, but the key word was "some". Obviously I'm ignoring games like City Of Heroes which abandoned the fantasy genre, did well, got drunk and threw up Champions Online. However, the ones which do fantasy, usually do about 75% of everything I just said. Some have an excuse since their source material says they have to put those in, like World Of Warcraft and Lord Of The Rings Online, but games like Rift have zero excuse.
For the record, All Points Bulletin was a general flop but at least it was fresh.
