Do we really expect innovation in new games?

[Hashi]

Well going from the hate Jim Sterling received for his review of Mario Kart 7 and how it got a low score compared to MW3. OP thought that since both games we're not exactly innovative, that the scores should have been much closer then they were. For those who don't know, Mario Kart 7 got 5/10 while MW3 got 9.5/10.

But do we really expect innovation in new games? And why?

Look at almost every other product you can buy and tell me how innovative they are. Most you will find are iterations, and "improvements" on the previous model. And that is an economic necessity. A company may have released a good product 10 years back (let's say a razor), but if they don't release new models each year/cycle etc, that same company would not be doing so well on the strength of that product from 10 years back. Incremental releases and improvements are essential to keep an economy running.

I do not believe that no or little innovation in games is a bad thing or that the industry will stagnate. Look at Beyond Good and Evil and Psychonauts. Great innovative games, but did they sell well? Nope. Deus Ex didn't sell all that well either. Great game, it just didn't sell too many copies. Then the team try and do new things in the sequel, and everyone has a cry (what happened to the skill tree?! etc) and that game did not sell too well either. Sure it had its shortcomings, but they tried new things for the sequel and everyone cried about it. I imagine these babies would only have been happy with Deus Ex with with shiny new graphics and a few changes.

With Modern Warfare, the team found a winning formula and can release new games that might not be all that innovative, they improve on the tight formula that people love. And with good advertising, the third game sold well. People might be vocal about how they want innovative games and all this, but ultimately they voted with their wallet. There may be entire forums dedicated to people who love psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil etc. but the simple fact is that this doesn't matter. Those games did not sell well compared to MW3.

I see it as a good sign that the industry can release incremental improvements on games and ship a large amount of copies. You think the staff who made MW3 can now just stop and take a few years of holiday break, just because of how successful MW3 is? Off course not. They're most likely at work on the next game, and if that includes another MW title, so be it. They can be comfortable in their jobs and don't have to worry that if the game doesn't sell well that they will lose their jobs.

Innovation is all good but familiarity is best for both consumers and the people working on the titles. I know if I had to worry about my job because the game might not sell well enough, I wouldn't be working as well as I might if I had fewer worries. People may be vocal on the issue, but ultimately it comes down to the wallet and the wallet won out. I think this is a good thing.

What do others think?

[Jonas]

But do we really expect innovation in new games? And why?

Who is "we"? If by "we" you mean veteran game players with an intellectual streak like most of the people who frequent this forum, then yes - we clearly expect and desire innovation in games. I suspect the reasons are as varied as the people you'd care to ask, but fundamentally it probably boils down to the fact that we play a shitload of games, so we are intimately familiar with the medium and most of what it has to offer, and we are delighted when a game comes along that challenges and confounds our expectations. Some of us merely desire innovation, others demand it (I'm in the former group).

But don't make the mistake of conflating us and people like us with the game-buying public at large. Almost everyone who fits our demographic would jump at a chance to criticise Modern Warfare 3, but there's an evidently far larger group of people on the market for precisely that sort of game.

Look at almost every other product you can buy and tell me how innovative they are. Most you will find are iterations, and "improvements" on the previous model. And that is an economic necessity. A company may have released a good product 10 years back (let's say a razor), but if they don't release new models each year/cycle etc, that same company would not be doing so well on the strength of that product from 10 years back. Incremental releases and improvements are essential to keep an economy running.

This is an awful analogy since entertainment products operate on completely different terms than utility products. Yes, games are used as much as they are experienced and so their usability and quality control demands attention, but they can no more be compared to a razor than you can compare a film to a piece of furniture. You'll get nowhere with such a comparison.

I do not believe that no or little innovation in games is a bad thing or that the industry will stagnate. Look at Beyond Good and Evil and Psychonauts. Great innovative games, but did they sell well? Nope. Deus Ex didn't sell all that well either. Great game, it just didn't sell too many copies. Then the team try and do new things in the sequel, and everyone has a cry (what happened to the skill tree?! etc) and that game did not sell too well either. Sure it had its shortcomings, but they tried new things for the sequel and everyone cried about it. I imagine these babies would only have been happy with Deus Ex with with shiny new graphics and a few changes.

It's worth noting that a lot of people believe Invisible War would have been received far better if it hadn't been created as a sequel to Deus Ex. We all want new games with new IPs, meaning new narratives, new settings, and new gameplay elements. But when you're making a sequel, there's no getting around the fact that people will expect something similar to the predecessor. To release a Deus Ex 2 that was drastically different from Deus Ex 1 is a betrayal of people's trust. I believe most of us would have respected ION Storm Austin if they'd announced that they would never make a sequel for Deus Ex 1, and had chosen to do their innovation within a new franchise. They probably would've loved to do that, too, but commercial realities conspired against them.

With Modern Warfare, the team found a winning formula and can release new games that might not be all that innovative, they improve on the tight formula that people love. And with good advertising, the third game sold well. People might be vocal about how they want innovative games and all this, but ultimately they voted with their wallet. There may be entire forums dedicated to people who love psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil etc. but the simple fact is that this doesn't matter. Those games did not sell well compared to MW3.

There will always be games like Modern Warfare 3 - massively popular and successful games based on entirely pretested concepts and using no original elements. These games can have incredible production values because investers see them as safe bets and because the implications of every element in the game is known already because somebody else has done it before. But there must be somebody who can come up with the new stuff for other people to take and polish. For Modern Warfare to exist, at least 10 previous games must have taken the creative risks and invented the different elements that come together to shape this huge blockbuster.

There's no saying how long the Call of Duty series could keep going if they froze it in time now and just kept churning out a new game every year the way they've been doing, but look to Guitar Hero for an indication: they milked it dry and the customers completely lost interest because the series' creative bankruptcy had become so apparent. For a similar example from another medium, look to James Bond: the series has changed a lot over time in order to keep people entertained, but it reached a point where it was just so over-the-top and so desperately unoriginal that nobody liked it. In response, they threw it all out and reinvented it in a much more modern style with Casino Royale. Then they ran out of money because of the recession, but that's another story.

I see it as a good sign that the industry can release incremental improvements on games and ship a large amount of copies. You think the staff who made MW3 can now just stop and take a few years of holiday break, just because of how successful MW3 is? Off course not. They're most likely at work on the next game, and if that includes another MW title, so be it. They can be comfortable in their jobs and don't have to worry that if the game doesn't sell well that they will lose their jobs.

They work for Activision, so job security and comfort probably isn't even in their vocabulary. Activision's executives can be comfortable in their jobs as long as the series remains commercially viable, but they'll keep milking their actual developers for every ounce of passion they've got left until they burn out and quit one by one and need to be replaced. But I digress.

Innovation is all good but familiarity is best for both consumers and the people working on the titles. I know if I had to worry about my job because the game might not sell well enough, I wouldn't be working as well as I might if I had fewer worries. People may be vocal on the issue, but ultimately it comes down to the wallet and the wallet won out. I think this is a good thing.

What do others think?

There are essentially two ways to make great games: you can innovate or you can perfect*. I feel that combining and perfecting existing concepts is underrated by game enthusiasts, but there's no question that's where the real money is. Ultimately it's the innovators who will get the most respect and be remembered by history however, because our culture is just wired that way: we love the people who are the first to do something awesome, even if somebody else comes along later and does it much better. There's something... really basically admirable about that sort of creativity, seemingly pulling new ideas out of the air and making them work at least well enough to show that they're viable. If nothing else, there's the fact that the perfectors could never exist without the innovators, but the opposite is not true.

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* There's an argument to be made that no creativity is true innovation, everything can be traced back to somewhere else. Let's assume that there's a distinction though, without necessarily defining it in detail, and that one thing that definitely counts is taking inspiration from another medium or ideally even from real life and being the first to put it in a game.

[Hassat Hunter]

Jonas pretty much said it all.

Sailant detail; Guitar Heroes was also an Activision product. It would be interesting to see what happens with them if their currently only milk-cow dies off.

[bobby 55]

Would it be fair to say that a fair percentage of indie developers show innovation in their games? Sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much.

Innovation is nice, just don't expect me not to buy Mass Effect 3, or Bioshock Infinite coz they're not more innovative, if in fact that is the case, than their respective predecessors.

[gamer0004]

The most innovative developers tend to be indie, though not all indie developers are innovative. I've seen enough "nostalgic" pixelated games thank you.
But yeah that's the reason why nowadays I play more indie games than regular games. I have gotten bored with most regular games so I started trying something different, and most indie games turn out to be really nice.

[AEmer]

I think Jim Sterling is an asshat.

I've never played a modern warfare game. I played the first call of duty, half of the second, then decided I'd had enough of that type of gameplay for now, and I just never felt like it again.

Only places I've played modern warfare is at multiplayer LAN parties. I think I actually own the first one on account of a steam sale and how good some people say it is, though...

@ Razers and games

You'll get nowhere with such a comparison.

I tend to think that you can make at least one point: There's a certain fatigue amongst customers when it comes to old-feeling products among nearly all product categories, and iterative development saves you from this. Not all razer design is timeless, and not all game design is either.

It's worth noting that a lot of people believe Invisible War would have been received far better if it hadn't been created as a sequel to Deus Ex.

...Not counting myself among those people.

Invisible Wars development was a trainwreck, and that's what caused the majority of the problems, imo.

They work for Activision, so job security and comfort probably isn't even in their vocabulary. Activision's executives can be comfortable in their jobs as long as the series remains commercially viable, but they'll keep milking their actual developers for every ounce of passion they've got left until they burn out and quit one by one and need to be replaced. But I digress.

Not sure that's entirely accurate, but yes, it is a digression =P

There's something... really basically admirable about that sort of creativity, seemingly pulling new ideas out of the air and making them work at least well enough to show that they're viable. If nothing else, there's the fact that the perfectors could never exist without the innovators, but the opposite is not true.

What about Valve. Do you believe that they get the credit for Portal? Or do the two people who came up with it, and who Valve bought? What about Counterstrike? Valve or the people who came up with it? Team Fortress...Valve or the people who came up with it? Dota...Valve or the people who came up with it? =P

Even the gravity gun isn't a valve original, but rather a perfection of something present in a mod.

(clearly it pays to make valve employee's like your mods)

[that guy]

The fact of the matter is your game has to be good. If it's innovative and good then people will like it (doesn't mean it will sell well). If it's based on a winning formula with few deviations and good people will like it if they're not sick of that formula (and with a large enough marketing budget it will probably sell well). If it's bad people aren't going to think it's good to play regardless of how innovative it is. I haven't played mario kart 7 so I'm not in the best position to judge but I would guess that the reason it reviewed worse than modern warfare 3 was that it was worse (assuming the single reviewer quoted to be somewhat representative). It doesn't matter how innovative it is if its downright bad.

[DDL]

I'm just wondering how innovative mariokart fucking SEVEN can be compared to the previous 6 iterations. Hell, if they managed to get any innovation in at all, I'd be impressed.

Admittedly, I haven't played mariokart since the first one, but it's..fucking kart racing, right?

[Jonas]

It's worth noting that a lot of people believe Invisible War would have been received far better if it hadn't been created as a sequel to Deus Ex.

...Not counting myself among those people.

Invisible Wars development was a trainwreck, and that's what caused the majority of the problems, imo.

Are you correctly distinguishing between not believing you'd personally have liked IW better if it were an entirely new franchise, or not believing it would generally have been received better if it were?

What about Valve. Do you believe that they get the credit for Portal? Or do the two people who came up with it, and who Valve bought? What about Counterstrike? Valve or the people who came up with it? Team Fortress...Valve or the people who came up with it? Dota...Valve or the people who came up with it? =P

Valve is a company, and generally history favours great individuals over great companies. Sure, we all know about Standard Oil, but it's Rockefeller who gets the admiration. History will remember Gabe Newell as a remarkably astute businessman and creative producer responsible for several great innovations within the videogame industry, probably the greatest of which was Steam. Notice how the great individuals in the industry are innovators like Sid Meier, Will Wright, Warren Spector, and John Carmack, while nobody remembers (or even really knows) who to credit for Modern Warfare. Probably the closest we can get to a famous perfector is Mike Morhaime, the CEO of blizzard, but he isn't even a creative person, he's a businessman.

Other than that I find it difficult to answer your question within the context of this discussion because I don't entirely understand what point you're aiming to make. I can try to address it better if you'd care to clarify it

[AEmer]

My point is that valves tentpoles are all perfections rather than innovations, but they're likely the ones that will be remembered by history.

They only ever recognized the innovation relatively late, though usually before it was obvious to everybody else.

Are you correctly distinguishing between not believing you'd personally have liked IW better if it were an entirely new franchise, or not believing it would generally have been received better if it were?

A fair question. I think so. I really do think it was that full of problems and issues.

Of course, I very clearly would not have liked it any better without the Deus Ex name. I'm very certain of that, since I think the Deus Ex'ian story stuff, the fanservice, was it's absolute highlight.

I must admit I may not have looked at every side of the issue; I haven't analyzed it up and down, or turned over the myrriad arguments there may be for and against, but my clear sense is that the game released was a victim of too long a gestation period where too little actually usable content was produced, and so when the game was put together during crunch the product was just really lacking in many ways.

I don't think being free of the Deus Ex name would have changed any of that to any remarkable degree.

[Jaedar]

'sup.

No, we can't expect it. We can demand it, we can hope for it, but we cannot expect it. Not everything can be new. I also find it kind of interesting how you mention BG&E and psychonauts as innovative games, as I find that while they both have original settings, as games, they are not much new. When I think of an innovative game, I'm more inclined towards portal(or rather, narbacular drop) as that had some new gameplay(twist). People in this thread seem to like polished(perfected) vs innovative, but surely portal was rather polished and still decently innovative?

Personally, I think it's a bad sign how some franchises can just release the same game every year with very minor improvements(Modern warfares, any EA sport games, etc) and they'll still sell well. If I were asked to prove that the average gamer is a tosser, it would probably be where I'd start. I am probably romanticizing about the past, but isn't this what expansion packs used to be for? Same game, new content. Regardless, it's what they should be for. But I digress.

Sailant detail; Guitar Heroes was also an Activision product. It would be interesting to see what happens with them if their currently only milk-cow dies off.

Well, they'll finally get around to their somewhat delayed bankruptcy that they take every decade. This will create a whirlpool in which the other major publishers will be caught as investors are now fleeing. This in turn brings about the second great videogame crash.

5 years from this, gaming has recovered and enters a second golden age.

A man can dream.

[Jonas]

My point is that valves tentpoles are all perfections rather than innovations, but they're likely the ones that will be remembered by history.

They only ever recognized the innovation relatively late, though usually before it was obvious to everybody else.

Well again, Valve is a company. They identify and hire innovators, so the innovators become part of the company, sometimes before their innovations have even made it out to the public. Then Valve help the innovators to perfect their innovations in such a way that the result is an innovative and polished product. Since the innovators are part of Valve, it's not unfair to credit the innovations to Valve as well.

Even so, I don't consider Valve is a paragon of creative innovation. They made great strides in interactive storytelling with Half-Life 1, and Portal definitely had an innovative core mechanic, but insofar as they are remembered, it will probably be as perfectors. Look back at film history though. Do you remember Orson Welles or do you remember his film studio? Do you remember Stanley Kubrick or do you remember his film studio?

I'm not sure history will remember Valve as a creative force, to the extent that history will remember Gabe Newell as a brilliant businessman.

People in this thread seem to like polished(perfected) vs innovative

I think that's unfounded and it offends me somewhat.

[that guy]

I would be interested to know how many people who use steam or played halflife have even heard of Gabe Newell.

For the sake of argument I googled "most innovative games" and got this hit: http://www.gamepro.com/article/features ... ever-made/. Overall I think I had more luck naming the studios that developed them than the people who lead the design.

I was making the assumption that after 5 incremental sequels to mario kart they decided to do something innovative with the 6th. I have no evidence beyond the first post in this thread to base this assumption on .

[that guy]

I should point out that the actual contents of that list are questionable at best.

[AEmer]

Actually, my point was that none of those games are innovative; they're perfections of innovations already made by other people. I think all of the games I mentioned will be remembered, but that they are inherently perfections rather than innovations.

Of course, portal 2, left4dead 1 and half life 1 are innovative products, which is strange considering portal itself isn't.

I don't really feel like getting into the discussion of whether we'll remember individuals or companies, but surely, if the games that will be remembered are perfections rather than innovations, then company or person, whoever is seen as primary author will also be remembered as perfectors rather than innovators.

TBH. I think the gaming industry has more in common with consumer goods industries than film and media industries...game studios are more business than showbusiness, because they're essentially software companies, and are run like software companies. The people you mention are surely all great entrepeneurs, but whether they're great artists is much more debateable, yes?

I know that the innovator/perfector dicotomy is already a simplified way of looking at it, but I wonder if it's perhaps _too_ limiting a perspective to use. I've seen upmarket/downmarket* analysis be used on gaming and the gaming marketplace to great effect, and I feel l like market dynamics have too much of a say in who we'll remember: Even if a game is innovative (Like say, Trespasser), it won't ever get a large player base if it's downmarket from a market which doesn't even exist...and without that, history will necessarily remember the people who made it accessible to a large player base by releasing a game similar to the innovative game, but at a time where the upmarket was brimming with people ready to try their hand at it.

Thing is, if the upmarket necessary to feed a game doesn't exist untill 10 years after it's released, technological innovation will mean it completely missed the chance of ever being anything, whereas a movie released 10 years too early may well enjoy a late-life bloom (such as shawshank redemption).

In other words, there's a number of things I think are key to historical recognition with gaming that are different from movies (or books, and plays, comics...), part of it being technological, part of it being that gaming must be learned and has a much higher barrier of entry for downmarket games.

*Quick example: Super Mario is a relatively hard core platformer, so it lies downmarket from Kirby's Epic Yarn, which can be played by anyone with just cursory gaming experience. If Kirby's is released first, and bought by millions, and played by millions, these people will be ready to head downmarket to Mario, whereas if Mario existed in a vacuum, it's success would be far more limited.