Quote Originally Posted by Aulayna View Post
The beat 'em up genre in general. I miss the PS2/GC/XBOX glory days where Beat 'em ups had your standard arcade and versus modes but they also had fun little challenge modes and adventure modes and ludicrous rules modes and more unlockables than a vault.

Fast forward to Soul Calibur IV which was essentially just marketting for Star Wars: Force Unleashed and Soul Calibur V which was basically an online VS game with a half-assed offline mode shipped for a full box price. It makes me weep. Playing people online is fun - yes. But damnit I want my Chronicles of the Sword and Edge Master modes back!

On a more general note though this whole idea that developers have to be innovative with each title they release just well and truly knarks me off! Having to "innovate" or "streamline" to appease a bunch of overpaid cynical games critics is probably why games I once loved became so bad.

If I buy a sequel it's because I want more of the same, because I *liked* the first one. Sure if there were any naggling usability issues with the previous game I'll expect them to be ironed out but beyond that I want the core formula to remain the same. Assassin's Creed is the perect example of this, stellar overarching story, first game had a lot of kinks but the core formula was solid - they ironed those out in AC2 and it improved the game as a whole. I happilly gave them more money for both Brotherhood and Revelations and thankfully by Revelations they realised that their "flying" sections handled worse than a bicycle with flat tyres - and subsequently got rid of them. AC3 they're still keeping the core formula in tact there but expanding the world beyond the GTA-esque confines of a city.

Borderlands 2 is a great example too. Borderlands was a fun game but got very repetitive with very little varation in textures etc and the setpieces felt rather disjointed. Borderlands 2 they added some colour to Pandora, made the writing even slicker and comical, nailed the set pieces and generally just tightened the nuts and bolts on the existing package (without really changing anything dramatically) and it was by far a more entertaining experience.

Heck, if Square Enix released a game tomorrow that had a decent story and a Battle System and other gameplay systems similar to VI - I would literally throw money at them. Instead I got lumbered with 50 hours of corridors followed by 20 hours of Calm Lands 2.0 and felt notably shortchanged by it all.

It does my head in when people rail on studios for not being "innovative" if the crux of the gameplay remains largely the same.

Like with this new Fable game that I have to faff around with Kinect and hand gestures and it handles terrible. smurf off Lionhead, no! I want a Fable game - something that I can curl up on the sofa under the quilt cover with and lose hours and hours in the wonder of adventure. Not some bulltrout motion controlled experiment with the Fable name slapped onto it so it can be lauded as "innovation."

If a game is a sequel then it carries with it a set of already established expectations that it's fans want and expect to see fulfilled. Not disregarding and thrown out the window for the sake of being "innovative."

Really I think the gaming community as a whole has really got it's wires crossed and has confused "innovatism" with "iteration." Iteration is a necessity, but doesn't mean demolishing and rebuilding from the ground up - nor does it necessarilly equate to being "good" either.
Of course innovation doesn't equal good. Some of the most innovative games out there have been bad games, widely hated, or both.

But innovation is important. If you don't try to change, you get stuck in a rut and stagnate. A lot of long running series show this.

One of my favorite examples is Harvest Moon. When this game came out, there was nothing else like it. However, ten years later, the series has grown, consisting of tons of titles, and they all seem way too similar.

Enter Rune Factory. While a complete opposition to the idea of Harvest Moon (which was to create a completely nonviolent console game that was still fun, something basically not seen at the time), the series director outlined the project because he feared the stagnation and death of the series if they did nothing new. He wanted something that would shake developers up, get them thinking in different ways, and breathe new life to the series.

And it worked. Since then, both Rune Factory and Harvest Moon have undergone substantial growth and improvement. Changes they made to Rune Factory's farming due to the RPG-esque nature of character progression influenced changes and suggested ideas that filtered into the main series.

Sure, it hasn't been a flawless path. I myself did not much like RF2. But it clearly demonstrates the importance of innovation.


Now, take a look at Assassin's Creed. As good as the series is, the last three entries have been pretty much the same. Revelations was little more than a new map and bombs added to the main game (at least Brotherhood brought multiplayer). That's it. Territory control, armor/weapon progression, mission types... It's all stuff we've seen. And it's fun, sure. But that fun wears thin when you realize that you've been paying full price for a game you bought three years ago. Familiarity breeds contempt. If the series doesn't grow, it's going to get stale. It will feel like a corporate sellout, a money grab with nothing to recommend it except its title, a memory of an old, beloved franchise that got ruined by a publisher who milked it to death. With no innovation, there is no growth. With no growth, their is no life. I want my favorite series to live. As for those that have already died, I just want them put out of their misery.

I think we can all agree that Sonic Team deserves a chance to make something else by now.