Derivative games in 2008
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Apr 162008
2008 is the year of gaming | Tech news blog – CNET News.com
Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be inundated with titles that will let us explore totally new worlds and enjoy totally new ways of playing video games. Unlike many other years where most of the titles were derivative, this year we may have something to propel creativity in the industry.
Emphasis is mine. Their list?
- Grand Theft Auto IV – sequel
- Ninja Gaiden 2 – sequel
- Ghostbusters: The Video Game – semi-sequel, plus the movie is how old?
- Devil May Cry 4 – sequel
- Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots – sequel
- Killzone 2 – sequel
- Far Cry 2 – sequel
- Rainbow Six Vegas 2 – sequel
- Super Smash Bros. Brawl – sequel
- Mario Kart Wii – sequel
- Fallout 3 – sequel
- Lost Odyssey – a spiritual sequel and pretty derivative
- Fable 2 – sequel
- Starcraft 2 – sequel
- Gran Turismo 5 – sequel
- Little Big Planet
- Spore
So, by my count, two. Thank goodness for the smaller titles.
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Raph’s Website � Derivative games in 2008: (via edmundito)
Discussion: Lost Remote,Raph’s Websiteand Digg
Joel Johnsonwrote an interesting post today on Here�s a quick excerpt Grand Theft Auto IV – sequel; Ninja Gaiden 2 – sequel; Ghostbusters: The Video Game – semi-sequel, plus the movie is how old? Devil May Cry 4 – sequel; Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots
What an utterly …no, I say it, rubbish, utterly rubbish “blog list”. Crappy and downright incorrect journalism at it’s best in the game world (as bad as calling Doom 3 Innovative! I bet innovative will be spread around like wildfire for many of these games too…).
There are good well-look-forward-to (or released-and-have-done-well) non-sequel games coming out, not that this list seems to know of them! (for me; Audiosurf, N+, Professor Layton, and Sins of a Solar Empire so far…)
Not that derivative games are bad, mark my words some are better then the originals in all ways, but that is just poor journalism. It’s been the same almost every year for the past dozen, to assume this year will be otherwise is rather silly, considering their own evidence!
If anyone comments; N+ is probably “derivative” since it was based on that flash thing, but there we go, I got one wrong, but I only played the multiplayer which certainly was frustrating and fun at the same time, heh.
I love N+. 🙂
Many of those smaller titles are going to be riding on the back of the infrastructure made possible by “bigger” games. ala Steam/PSN/Xbox Marketplace etc.
Even though it seems all the big publisher games are sequels, I would bet that more people than ever before will have access to smaller, more innovative games. Hopefully this will impact the big-budget games over time.
I read another article by the author who, by the way, is not an employee of CNET. So, really, for CNET that’s just bad vetting. Well, in the other article, Reisinger claims that the Xbox 360 directly competes with Apple TV. That’s just silly.
Functionality is mostly irrelevant in this context. Xbox 360 and Apple TV are not direct competitors primarily because the Xbox 360 is positioned as a video game console and Apple TV, well, I’ve never even heard of Apple TV. Asserting that they are direct competitors is like asserting that the iPhone cannibalizes iPod sales or that car stereos, which are inherently and obviously mobile, compete in the portable music device market.
Ouch. This is a pain to look at. Here we go – The game industry’s becoming saturated, so even good, original content is beginning to show trouble finding the spotlight. Even worse, we’re becoming like the film industry. Sequels, Sequels, Sequels!
Next there’s game to be a major top selling game – Video Game Game.
And it will be designed by EA Games, and star John Madhand, Solid Cake (LOL FUNNY PORTAL REFERENCE!), and Marry-Ho.
PS: Raph, I wanna give you my support for Metaplace 🙂
Just saw a youtube video demo of setting up your own world really quick. That’s amazing.
Pritchard wrote:
The games industry has a lot more in common with the music business than with Hollywood. Sequels aren’t horrible. The Beatles released many, many sequels. We just call those sequels “new albums.” Elvis Presley is a franchise. Just like Grand Theft Auto. Sequels aren’t inherently trite.
@Morgan:
I agree, but I feel that development on sequels are being seen as a safe bet in game design. That it shows a lack of risk and willingness to experiment among game designers, studios, publishers, or whoever. And that it shows that we’re hunting for stability in the market. You find something safe, and you stick with it, as looking for something new is too risky.
In my mind, sequels have the opportunity to actually show more creativity.
Sounds strange, but if you think about it, giving people characters that they already know gives you a much greater opportunity to create new puzzles/courses/gameplay that these characters have not yet been through before, while building on the love people have for those characters.
Or at least, it can. It often doesn’t, but I can dream. 🙂
I prefer see game squeles how expansions to existent games.
I don’t know about that. I think if you look at the portfolio of products that any of the big publishers have, you’ll find great variety. Yes, you’ll find a lot of franchises, too. But they’re part of that variety.
Of course. Would you want to ride a plane, experiencing turbulence every second of a fourteen-hour flight? Everyone’s looking for stability, eeven the people coming out with radically new products. Stability degrades over time. That’s one of the reasons why we innovate: to restore balance.
New can be risky, but so can old.
Well, a sequel can still be creative, and create totally new ways to play games (Star Control II, anyone?), so technically he could be right.
However, I haven’t had a chance to play any of the games on the list yet, and I’m fed up of being told how creative and different the games this year are compared to last year (and the AI! this year it REALLY IS intelligent!). It hasn’t been the case so far, and I doubt it will be now.
Incidentally, isn’t Little Big Planet fairly derivative as well? I mean, combining a level editor with a homebrew mod-sharing service may not have been so seamless before, but Garry’s Mod was pretty darn close.
I agree that the article is pretty vaporous and the list is laughable. I do think that sequels/license/spiritual-sequels *can* innovate. It’s debatable whether incremental change in a big title is more or less valuable than big change in a small title. I’ll take both, thank you.
Now, that being said, don’t read too much into the article. It’s easier for writers like this to point backward at innovation (Portal, Flow, etc) than forward. Pointing forward requires awareness, which is only being worked for the big titles, so the last two on the list are ones that pubs have made big bets on and are among their riskier bets.
I have no doubt that this time next year, the same writer could point backward at a title from ’08 and say “oh yeah, I didn’t know about THAT game when I made the list”.
All I can say now is “I agree.”
Maybe I can also add that the list would change up a bit if we divided it by who’s a major innovator in the industry vs who’s simply depending on their franchise. Yeah, the franchises exist, but a lot of them exist because they actually do something interesting, and they’re just continuing on that.
Not like I wouldn’t like a little more competition, and maybe I want uncertainty so we could find more time to experiment and find new things that work…
Like the market for financial derivatives, this can only produce short-term profit, then give way to a staggering cascade of ruin.
Well, a sequel can still be creative, and create totally new ways to play games (Star Control II, anyone?), so technically he could be right.
A more well-known example would be… Warcraft 3, anyone?
The games industry has a lot more in common with the music business than with Hollywood. Sequels aren’t horrible. The Beatles released many, many sequels.
I feel this analogy is a hard sell. Could you elaborate a bit more on where you find similarities and where you feel the limitations of the analogy are?
Specifically, I’m trying to imagine how you could not produce a sequel when you produce a new album. Do you have to change up the group? Switch genres? Innovate the genre?
Well I agree with the author that we will see innovation this year, but it won’t be from most of the games he listed.
Well, a sequel can still be creative, and create totally new ways to play games (Star Control II, anyone?), so technically he could be right.
A more well-known example would be… Warcraft 3, anyone?
I didn’t find Warcraft 3 to be particularly innovative for its time. It had upgraded 3D graphics, but that had already been done by lots of other games, going back to Total Annihilation in ’97. The added RPG element was fairly superficial, and had also been done by other games a long time before (Warlords Battlecry, ’99).
Star Control II (http://sc2.sourceforge.net/), on the other hand, took a strategy game and turned it into a space adventure game, with the only similarity remaining with the old engine being the ship-to-ship battles.
To talk about innovation it’d be more interesting to make a list of past games that pass a litmus test for that label. Depending how strong you define that litmus test you’ll get different answers. The second question is of course is innovation what matters, or is it that people have fun.
Should Harry Potter have been just 1 book, Star Wars just 1 film, Diablo just one game? Should people stop playing tennis and find a new sport after a set period because otherwise they don’t participate in innovating?
We stick with the same because we enjoy it, there is nothing wrong with that. Let there be Starcraft 12 and The Sims 8 if people enjoy themselves with it that long. EA’s sport series goes through annual releases. Nothing wrong with that as long as people like it.
If the topic must be innovation, it often comes in odd turns. The original one hardly gets noticed or tractions and only later iterations do get the visibility and are hailed as landmark innovations.
Who remembers the first RTS ever and not the first RTS they played? Was Wolfenstein or Doom your innovation towards FPS or something else? Did The Sims create the casual simulation based craze or is that as old as Civilization, Sim City, Little Computer People or even MULE? Why are we seeing newer and newer flight simulators, when I played my first one in the 80s? Was the MMO breakthrough DikuMud or WoW or something else? And how is Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero all that different in concept from the late 70s Simon? Looking at Spores I am reminded of The Sims, Creatures, Viva Pinata and more… is it a sequel in spirit of any of those? And isn’t little big planet also falling into a similar category maybe with just a dab more of “build your village” ala Anno, Settlers, Sim City, Black & White etc…
Iteration and improvement on a core concept is innovation too, though it may not be as flashy. Often these iterations prepare the possibility of innovation. FPS simply became possible technically, just as MMOs became possible. Gesture based gaming ala Wii was in the air for years among academics at least who studied alternative ways of control and input long before we see it now as commodity.
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