Crisis In Creativity?

I don't know about that...definitely we are seeing a lot of rip-offs when a game is doing well. Grand Theft Auto has Postal/Postal 2, there's a plethora of RTS games, FPS, etc.

The problem in my opinion is that not only is it hard to imagine a new idea for a game, it's equally difficult to create the game engine. Well not equally -- harder actually. I remember way back when ID software revolutionised the gaming industry by creating Doom. Doom used a sort of 'reflecting eye' algorithm to 'draw' what the user 'sees' in rapid motion. It also was three-dimensional, and utilised a somewhat realistic physics system (somewhat being a very liberal term...projectiles are constant velocity and are not ruled by gravity algorithms). Though such things itself was not a big step from Wolfenstein 3D either. In fact the engines are virtually identical EXCEPT Doom can incorporate a temporary instance of floor lifting. It was still limited to just alternating heights, meaning in a huge arena, areas which were higher than others could not be crawled under or walked under -- sort of like stone stairs.

Then they had all the engine copies. Heretic (ID soft) used a very similar engine, except it allowed the user to 'fly'. Duke Nukem was virtually identical to Heretic as far as I can tell, except for very innovative sprite control like the pipe bomb (freeze frame until weapon activate, then use exposion sprite...etc). Hexen, etc etc...

I actually have no problem with engine rehasing. The virtual on series is *basically* a first person shooter, for example. It really is, if you ever bothered to play it. You are a robot running around shooting things from first-person perspective. How is this different than a FPS? Absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. It's really no different than a high-speed insane game of doom 1:1 deathmatch. Yet it had an insane cult following at its prime. Innovative utilisation of an engine is what we need.

Anything can be innovational. I have always wondered why in-game FMVs are so detailed yet the game itself is hardly as detailed. Granted expecting everybody's computer to constantly render 3D Studio Max sprites over and over and over is very tasking, but when computer specs start allowing for such things, we can have very detailed games, which will sell, if only for novelty purposes (we may be maxing out processor speed though, so maybe that's not as feasible as I'd want it to be).

I'm still young, so I'm really looking forward to game development as it progress into the future. Yay!