User blog:Sammyfun1/Has Game Development Stalled?

It’s in the wake of a slew of a series of new, disappointing and non-innovative games that I come to you in this dark hour. I fear video game development is slowly grinding to a halt.

Sequels aren’t really sequels anymore. Even “true” next chapters like Fable 3, Splinter Cell, or Modern Warfare 3 are no longer innovating, and in some cases, even moving backwards. I loved Fable as a kid, yet Fable 3 is a massive step down from the second game, with features actually taken away, and definitely no lingering issues from the previous installments fixed.

Splinter Cell, a fanchise based on stealth is now all about shooting, it has become yet another shoot em' up game.

You have the half sequels, a disturbing new trend that indicates that developers are just running out of ideas in this current console generation. Fallout New Vegas is probably the best example of this, taking the exact same everything from Fallout 3, shaking it up and throwing it in a new location with a new storyline. Minor tweaks sure, but it’s nowhere near a true sequel.

I would consider Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 to be in this same category. Switch a few perks, a few guns, throw in a six hour campaign, and boom, sequel. But really, nothing different that we’ve seen from the genre since the original Modern Warfare.

The gaming industry is becoming like Hollywood. They know which franchises are hits, and because they are hits, studios are now reluctant to simply add minor fixes to games without adding any innovation.

Every company is guilty of this. Sony’s Killzone and God of War series are getting stale, Microsoft is taking steps back with Fable and Halo, Nintendo is still beating the same five classic characters to death year after year.

It’s a rarity to sequelize a game and have it truly evolve. I’d say this was the case with two games in recent memory, Red Dead Redemption, which was leaps and bounds removed from its predecessor and gave us our first amazing open world Western, and Assassin’s Creed Revalation, my game of the year whose developers listened to nearly every single complaint made about the original games, and fixed ALL of them.

So what’s holding back these other developers? Outside of a straight up lack of creativity, and direction from their corporate overlords to quickly churn out cash-making, unfinished projects, I have two ideas.

The massive success of the console caused motion controls to become the new, hot thing, so rather than start developing new systems, as is the normal cycle for consoles, Sony and Microsoft started building motion control schemes of their own. Sony’s Move, is a slightly better version of the Wiimote, and Microsoft’s Kinect employs some decently cool technology, but for gaming? Neither of these new control systems has anything to do with any game I’ve mentioned so far in this article, gamer’s games. Yes, they might compete with Wii’s Sports, Dance and Party-type titles, but if the fundamental hardware is remaining the same, at this point developers have maxed out what they can do with each console. And Nintendo? With how massive the sales of Wii and DS have been, they couldn’t care less if the next console generation arrived 20 years from now.

There’s innovation in the industry, but it’s innovation in an avenue I couldn’t care less about. Motion control gaming cannot replace actual gaming until the technology is advanced light years beyond where it is now. Yes, maybe it’s good to lay the groundwork for when the tech does evolve, but in the meantime, these graphics we used to think were so awesome are starting to look dated, and my Xbox is constantly whirring like a jet engine about to take off. Technology has to evolve in ALL aspects of a system, not just motion control. You want to make your next system have a built in eye-toy or Kinect sensor? Great, but start making a new system. Until then, we’re stuck with more or less the same games over and over again.

Now we get to my second hypothesis as to why game innovation is grinding to a halt. Developers are focusing more on DLC for their existing games than they are their future games. This is a double-edged sword because not only does it delay future “true” sequels of our favorite games, but it also causes less content to go into the original game.

I’ll use one of my favorite games, Borderlands, as a prime example of this. When I played through the game, I loved it, but I thought it was a bit short. I hit level 37 out of a 50 level cap right as I beat the game. The game wanted me to play the entire thing over again with slightly harder enemies. I would rather they made the game 30% longer.

And they could have. Since the game’s release, there have been four packs of DLC for the game for $10 each. They could have been developed and included in the original game, satisfying the length the game should have been, but rather the idea of DLC was planned, and they’ve been slowly released over the past two years, adding another $40 onto the price of a $60 game.

Or this other scenario could have taken place, where Gearbox left Borderlands a bit short, but rather than releasing four separate mission packs of missions for the original, those who were working on that could have spent that entire time working hard to make sure Borderlands 2 is better and brighter than the original.

I’m not saying some of these new games aren’t fun, but we don’t seem to be moving forward on nearly as quick of a pace in the industry as we used to. Focus on motion controls is taking us backwards in terms of game design, and DLC is shortchanging our existing games while delaying future ones. This may be the ramblings of a disgruntled gamer, but it’s just what I’ve observed, and I thought it might be possible that others felt the same.

Thanks for listening.

SammyFun1