If It Ain't Broke...

I've been playing a bit of Lord of the Rings Online this weekend. I might have done a critique of that, but a couple of thoughts hit me while playing:

1) "Hey, this is kind of like World of Warcraft!" Not original, since most MMOs are like WoW. But that brought me onto...

2) "Do MMOs seem to copy WoW because WoW just happens to have cracked MMO gameplay?"

It's no secret (in fact it's the lament of many gamers) that the AAA games industry lacks innovation right now, at least compared to earlier times. Many games just seem to be rehashes of popular titles with different wallpaper, and it's a source of frustration seeing a lot of talent go to waste on rip-offs and copies when new ideas could be nurtured with the right effort and money. Of course, money is too much to risk these days on experimental ideas that don't guarantee profit, not when we already know what sells.

I'm not going to waste any more time on discussing innovation as a thing now. Better minds than I have far more to say on that. What I wanted to talk about was a rather plausible (and almost justifiable) reason for the seeming lack of new ideas in the medium.

We've pretty much cracked it right now. Think of a genre of games, and I bet you can think of one game that pretty much worked out how best to "do" that genre, and is now copied to death. MMOs, as pointed out, have WoW. Fighting games got Street Fighter. Action games have God of War. Shooters seem to get a new one every so often: Doom, Quake, Halo, Call of Duty right now. It does make sense that when making a game, if someone else has made a game (or games, as I'd say a lot of RTSs are amalgams of tried-and-true mechanics) that does want you want really well, you'd want to take something from that and try to shape it in your image a little. Take God of War, for example. You want to make an action game, but Sony basically got hack n' slash awesome down ages ago. You could try to go in a totally different direction that, yes, could bring about a new age of innovation (that's how these aforementioned game began), but you also risk falling flat on your face if your bold experiment fails.So, the option to take more than a bit from God of War sounds more tempting.

I'm not going to say that innovation in gaming doesn't need a sound kick in the arse, because it does. I'm just putting in the point that we shouldn't dismiss the reasoning that someone else has cracked it as a poor excuse; because until the medium undergoes a really big development (I imagine it'll be when someone figures out how to utilise motion controls properly), it's the truth. We've got games more-or-less sorted for now. Don't be so hard on the developers.

Unless it's a truly shameless rip-off, in which case don't buy their shit.

PS: I draw an exception at puzzle games. They have a lot more room to innovate, seeing as there isn't a right way to make a puzzle.