Other than everyone and their daddy was putting them on XBLA at the time, but Steam does not surprise me either.
Yes.
No. But that proves how fast trends come and go; especially if they're mediocre or bad clones.
Yep. Which makes the good, the great, or the weird and unique games stand out all the more.
If you take mechanics wholesale from other games, you're not designing a game anymore. I'm fine with making a derivative game of X but better, but if you're just copying systems, you probably don't even know why it's good. If you can't even change a couple of words to beat the plagiarism detector, you barely understood the sentence to begin with.
A bigger budget wouldn't have stopped the DLC/Lootbox/Season Pass/Time Save crap by a long shot. That's a symptom of developers and publishers trying to exploit rather than serve their customers. The game industry has forgotten that they exist to serve the customers, not the other way around.
And even in the case where games were rip offs of others in the older days, they were at least cheap rip offs whereas now a rip off can force a team of people to put in huge crunch for low returns. With Indies at least the creator was putting time and effort in for their own desires rather than it being because of the crack of a whip.
Most AAA games do fit under Yahtzee's "ghost train ride" and "open world stealth-action games with crafting and collectibles" genres. It's like say how Ghost Recon used to it's own thing and now it's just another Ubisoft game. Most games are just prettier versions of past games usually with less gameplay depth. It would be nice to see games improving in other elements than just graphics like AI, isn't like FEAR still considered the best AI in a game and it's closing in on being 20 years old? It's kinda sad that a lot of strategy games still require the AI to cheat to be competitive. You can make games quite a bit better like I was actually kinda excited for Dying Light 2 and the impact of your decisions on the world but they seemed to have scrapped that mostly.
Maybe. There's the old saying that copying one person is plargiarism, copying ten people is research, and copying a hundred people is a PhD. True novelty is extremely rare: in practice a huge amount of improvement is putting together things that other people have done into a new package, and there's value in that. An awful lot of games do have effectively identical mechanics, just different settings and level design. But the settings, plot, level design etc. also matter.
Exactly. And that's why sports are so mind-crushingly dull.
Remember when nearly everyone was adding in insta-death QTEs for the sake of it? And served no real purpose other than "Cuz God of War and Resident Evil 4 did it!". Most of the time, these QTEs would show up with little warning, nor hint, or would go on for way too long, that they might as well been cut-scenes 98% of the time.
You know why, we all know why... The Publisher hath decreed that The Metrics demand it.
Well, there's definitely some truth to that, I will never go out of my way to make myself miserable by playing anything from EA. If you're referring to the Dead Space remake by any chance,
Yeah, don't know why I wrote EA. I was thinking WB, just got crossed up. But screw either really. Still haven't forgiven EA for... well a number of things but mostly buying then executing several developers of games I like.
That still doesn't excuse being as creatively bankrupt as Hollywood, nor the overuse of cliches and certain stereotypes. It doesn't matter if they're good or not (the cliches and stereotypes). I accept some cliches, but if it's been overdone, it's overdone. As much as the Indie crowd like to follow certain trends as well: they still got people that creatively try something. Either it's something good, but different. Good but something familiar, but more refined. Or something that brings out the old school in a better way, with new school teachings on top of it.
Nothing that tries to copy is ever as good.
Most of the time and I don't disagree. It is awesome when a clone actually does just as good, or better than the original. I love Final Fight, but man doesn't come off is really basic even back in the 90s and early 2000s. Compare it to SOR2, and everything is night and day. Or look at other clones like Final Fight such as Undercover Cops (make sure it's a Japanese version or alpha renewal version) and Violent Storm. They both surpass it in gameplay and graphical fidelity. Final Fight came out in 1989, while SOR2 and UC came out in 1992, and Violent Storm came out in 1993. Final Fight's later two sequels just rang as mediocre, and slightly above average respectively. Before you start, we don't talk about Streetwise.
