The Same Old Games

In the roleplaying game Eternalis: Rivers of Moonlight, you play as a hero who must defeat an evil mage by collecting the seven Globes of Elemental Mastery.

Actually, I just made that up. There is no such game as far as I know. If there is, then I must say that the irony of the situation is considerable.

However, I would bet that anyone reading that sentence would have no problem believing that it was real game. It sounds just like a great many other games, does it not? The basic outline submitted there - "hero must find X number of Y item in order to defeat Z evil guy(s)" - is so standard in games that it is a cliche. Yet do we really get that many games which deviate from this? No.

Brought down to their most basic level, bereft of the packaging, one finds that there are not that many variations to gaming. The real variation tends to be in the form of presentation and to an extent in the gameplay. For instance, in RPG's, most quests will always come down to either being a courier or killing something. Sure they may dress it up nicely or mix the two together, but that is really all you ever do in an RPG save for a precious few games which add in extensive dialog. FPS games? Most FPS games are really about getting from point A to point B while killing everything in your path. Sometimes they throw in some keys that you need to move on. Then they found that game reviewers complained about keys and (this is just my speculation) we started seeing key "puzzles" which are cleverly disguised so as not to seem like key puzzles. That is why in Bioshock (wonderful game, btw) you are asked to retrieve a camera and take some pictures before a certain character will let you through an otherwise impassible door. The difference between this and finding the Gold Key Card in Doom is mostly superficial, though I will give credit to the developers for adding the photography aspect which did make it more interesting. It still comes down to "You cannot get through this door until you find item X".

There have been a lot of attempts by game developers to bring innovation and especially choice into gaming. Some games have succeeded in being very free-form in a relative way. Even so, it has always been relative. The Grand Theft Auto series had a very open style of play, but all the missions basically go into the categories of "Kill", or "Drive" with most mixing the two. And although there was a lot you could do outside of missions, that too was limited if you really examined it. After you have driven your motorcycle off of a rooftop for the fourth time you begin to wonder what else there is to do. Deus Ex also offered a great deal of freedom in how to achieve your objectives. There were even choices in that game which would effect who would live and who would die amongst the games characters. Then there is the Hitman series, in which each "level" is a masterful free form puzzle in which you decided how 47 is going to whack the bad guy - as loud or as quiet as you want to be about it. And this is just a few creative titles.

All of this interesting gameplay and creativity, however, is rooted in the basic ideas and formulas which nearly all games stem from. And as many choices as you might have, there is still a limit. Sure, in Deus Ex, I might have three ways to get into a building. That is exciting. At the same time, if you think about it, I only have three ways. In real life, there would be all kinds of options not presented here.

So what I have to wonder is: Can we really fault developers for making games which, in the end, follow one of the few formulas which pretty much saturate the gaming world? We might say we want something different and more creative, but is that thing out there? And at what point does a game become so "creative" that it ceases to be fun?

I think that ultimately certain gameplay conventions cannot be avoided without avoiding the fun. It is really all about how creatively the developers can present these old ideas and the creation of a great gaming atmosphere - a world to play in. Even so, I still see game reviewers and gamers alike routinely slam games for having "tired" concepts like "courier quests" or "key hunting". What they are really saying is that the presentation didn't work for them. That game which they were gushing over yesterday had just as many "tired" concepts in it. They were just presented differently.

Another common thing is that when one game does a certain convention very, very well then almost any game even remotely like it afterwards becomes a "clone" of it. Now, I will grant that there really are some clones - some attempts to cash in on the popularity of Doom or Diablo, what have you. But have you ever noticed that most of the time a game is only a clone if the person labeling it dislikes it? I mean, sure, you could draw a great deal of similarities between FPS's made in the year or so after Doom and the game Doom itself. Yet what do you want these devs to do? The reason Doom succeeded was that the concepts in it worked. So people want other developers to try stuff that doesn't work? There is a reasonable allowance which should be made.

So maybe we really are just playing the same old games all the time. But I don't mind.