Banana Scoop

You may or may not want to read the article linked here before continuing onward to the rest of the article. This week I talk about where the industry is headed after reading some alleged testimonies from various employees at major game publishing companies such as EA or Activision. While these intervies/reviews of the companies may be entirely false, I’m operating under the assumption that they are in fact employed at said companies. If it turns out that I am wrong, then I recant the following…

Alright, so as you folks may or may not have read over the past few weeks, many anonymous ’employees’ from various major publishing/developing companies in the gaming industry have revealed just what goes on under the hood of your favorite game manufacturers. While I’m a little wary of taking these posts at face value, I continue my article under the assumption that they are in fact tied to the companies they represent, and can completely agree with their viewpoints after looking at the game lineups for the past few years. Even CEO/Head/President or some other such fancy titled person has gone so far as to state that they proudly cast away the single player only games in favor of games that either are only multiplayer or have both single player/multiplayer capabilities. This statement bothers me. We’ve seen a decline in what people consider ‘good’ content over the years in favor of the same exact re-hashed ideas spoon-fed to us over and over again a la Call of Duty. While this may not bother those who play games like that solely for the competitive nature and anonymity of your persona online, those of us that enjoy good story lines and deep, fulfilling experiences may get shafted in the long run.

Though it is true that these games sell more than ever considering the vast majority of players that actually enjoy them to some degree, it limits the ingenuity and creativity of the developers when we can’t get anything but the same old gun and run games we keep getting just to ‘milk the margins’ as an Activision employee stated in the first interview. Creativity is but a barrier to entry into the field of game design now, it appears, and that (at least in my opinion) shows that there is something severely wrong with the current state of the VG industry. The flock that flies to the shelves every time a new Call of Duty is released are only paying for an upgraded map pack with weapons and new character models. While I cannot fault them for what they enjoy, I despise the fact that they know that they’re paying for over-glorified map packs. While the companies that develop games like that can rant and rave about how they’ve improved ‘speed’, ‘graphics’ and ‘gameplay’, all they’ve really done is re-textured some elements and slapped some new sounds on a new lineup  of old guns to make the game ‘look’ different than the previous iterations of the title in question.

Nothing new here, folks…move along!

Even in single player games, we see trilogies and sequels to games that may not have really needed them. With a slew of Uncharted, Infamous, Prototype, Assassin’s Creed and other games of the like, I wonder just how much we’ve become accustomed to the exact same thing as a multiplayer gamer. What do they change besides the graphics and new weapons/unlockable content? As far as the eye can see, there is nothing new or game breaking about the games I’ve listed so far. While they are all amazing in their own regard, we’re essentially getting perspectives of the same game with different eyes. We’ve seen the open-world beat-em-up style game before that we get from Prototype or Infamous as far back as games like ‘Spiderman 2’, while we’ve already seen the stealth/action approach from Assassin’s Creed in Metal Gear Solid. While these games may be different in a variety of ways, the core concepts of them seem similar to many of the major AAA titles we’ll be getting this year. Note that this does not mean I am absolutely against sequels. In fact, when in good taste, I enjoy a lot of the games we play nowadays (including many that I’ve listed). I’m trying to be as objective concerning my views here without trying to make leaps that are far too large. On an additional note, I’m not saying we need to have brand new amazing content every single time, I do wish we’d get something more out there than what we get currently.

Creativity seems stifled nowadays, and is as much a rare commodity in the industry as gold is in the world today. I applaud the developers for games on the WiiU such as ZombiU for this reason alone. Despite us seeing the exact same zombie tropes over and over again in games like Resident Evil, House of the Dead and the DayZ mod for Arma II, it’s a little refreshing to know we can still milk fun gameplay ideas out from one of the horror genre’s greatest scary creepers. Correct me if I’m wrong, of course, but I thoroughly enjoyed watching the trailers for that not because of the graphics, but because of the new ideas they rolled into compatibility with the WiiU tablet controllers.

I’m still incredibly excited for this.

I suppose in closing, I just really wanna see something innovative and cool that we haven’t seen yet. When put that way, it feels a little selfish and rather juvenile, but that’s just the way it is. The gaming industry is stagnating rapidly, and unless we get some new life into it, we’ll just end up getting CoD: ‘We ran out of wars so here’s a dating sim’  GOTY edition…