“It sounds weird but we try to keep our innovation as low as possible,” the director explained. “We’ll say ‘it’s this game but with that.’ It takes so much time to innovate. Sometimes you find the hidden holy Grail of game design, but often indie developers sit for five years trying out stuff. We’re a studio of 50 people with bills to pay. So we can’t do that.”
IMO, “it’s this game, but with X” is innovation. It’s certainly more innovative than “it’s this game, again, with absolutely nothing new” like Ubisoft basically does with every sequel to every IP they handle.
Absolutely. I think most of us are excited for incremental evolution.
And conversely a lack of that is the chief source of my frustration with games. Bethesda is another dev that comes to mind with the loading screen debacle that was Starfield.
Starfield was just weird. Like, I expected the load screens and all the other GameBryo/Creation jank. But that’s not what made it disappointing. It was just… Boring. I couldn’t get immersed in the world because nothing about it was interesting once you scratched deeper than the surface. Even the twist ending/NG+ system which is actually kind of a neat idea wasn’t done well (like you might have to go through the entire, boring-ass game up to 7 times before you even see a difference).
The draw from Skyrim and other ES games is wandering around and stumbling on cool stuff.
They both removed wandering by having you fly your ship to a planet, and removed the cool stuff by making the planets procgen.
It’s good fun exploring the cities and space stations but then that’s it. They designed out the entire game in favour of more procgen content.
I don’t know anything about the NG+ system because I steered way clear of Starfield, but it sounds like somebody at Bethesda saw people playing Skyrim over and over and thought “How can we monetize that”, hence the grind you’re alluding to. They expected you to encounter it organically because of course the game was such hot shit everyone was gonna play it forever. Oops.
Call me a cynic if you want but these are the guys who invented paid cosmetics.
You’re a cynic. Weird request but I hope you’re happy :)
Ecstatic! I’m sure it will go bad somehow, though.
Its this game but with x is how we got most new genres.
I actually was thinking about this the other day with soulslikes as I make my way through Bloodborne. This is an entire genre that isn’t even new. They’re Metroidvanias (or whatever you would classify the OG Castlevania as other than just “side scrolling platformer”)! The only real difference is that you don’t get tools as like weapons/accessories to reach new areas, you just get a boring ass key that opens a door, you open a door from only one side, or a trigger automatically opens a new path when you defeat a boss. 🤣
while metroidvania is an apt comparison souls-like games and specifically dark souls games feel a lot like classic dungeon crawlers ( but with real time combat instead of grids. Which in the case of fromsoftwares earlier games kingsfield, makes a lot of sense.
Is it your first playthrough of Bloodborne? If so I’m so jelly. I’d do anything to play that game for the first time again!! Don’t forget to do the dlc :)
Or the EA Sports games: same game but with a different number on the box art.
I honestly don’t know why they don’t simply make those a subscription service at this point. They change nothing but the stats to try and reflect real life in most iterations. Sports games are the one type of game that because of how they already do them would be perfect for the live service bullshit, and yet, inexplicably, they are the one genre that has next to no live service games. I can literally only think of one of the FIFA games which is free 2 play and live service.
I’ve thought about this before, I think it’s because the devs/publishers want to have their cake and eat it. They release a new game every year at full price for that up front cash then they nickle and dime you all year and then reset with a new full price game.
I’m pretty sure the amount of money EA makes from FIFA or Activision makes from COD would go down dramatically if they just had a single live service game.
Ugh. Sports games are the worst when it comes to that.
That’s one thing I’ve always really respected about the Forza/Forza horizon series. It’s familiar but each entry does kind of feel like its own thing. In particular the world they have you drive in
It’s evolution rather than revolution. Which is fine, not everything can be revolutionary.
For sure. And I’d say most of us who like roguelikes and DRG both would just enjoy a good, faithful treatment of it that understands the genre. I don’t expect innovation within a genre, I just want a solid implementation.