More of the Same, But Different

Why aren't their more games out there that I like to play? When I think about gaming I think about having fun and enjoying my time in the basement which houses my setup but more often than not I struggle to find good stuff to play and find myself wondering why that is? In this age of gaming, developers really don't take any chances anymore because they know how high the stakes are if they produce a crappy game. Year after year we see new titles from old IP's and to me this is getting old. Madden 05, Madden 06, Madden 07, etc... This might be changing however, at least a little. EA is giving us some new stuff when Army of Two and Dead Space come out later this year. But then again EA has the money to be able to take chances and its good to finally see them doing so. Where are the other developers who take the chances? Do these guys know that they can take these chances while still delivering the same gameplay that has worked for many titles without necessarily being the same game or throwing an 09' on the title? One way to do this would be to do what EA is doing with the two games that I mentioned. Take an old game mechanic and mold it to a new IP. We have all seen both Dead Space and Army of Two before. Dead Space is Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Dino Crisis, and just about any other 3rd person shooter rolled into a space environment while Army of Two is more or less Gears of War with more emphasis on cooperative play. Personally I think that this is a great thing and I wished more developers would copy what EA is doing but they have to do it the right way, they have to take only the good elements of these games and mix them into the new IP, not the bad. Look what Naughty Dog did with Uncharted. They took all the exploration of a Tomb Raider game and mixed it with a better cover system that Gears of War had then added awesome graphics to create what might be one of the greatest exploration/shooter games of this and the last generations. This is what we as gamers need developers to do, you can make more of the same if you make it better. I heard on a podcast the other day that Eidos has been playing through Uncharted to get some more ideas about Tomb Raider Underworld. At first I was pumped up, playing as Laura Croft and being able to jump from cover to cover to manually aim and shoot would be great but then I heard the next sentence the guy said, it turns out that Eidos is playing Uncharted because they want to make sure they make Underworld different. What? What are they doing? Did they not see how good Uncharted was? Did they not notice that they made countless Tomb Raider games and not one of them can even hold Uncharted's jock strap? I was really bummed out when I heard this and this is an example of what I am not talking about here. Why take good gameplay and good game mechanics and change them from what worked so well in the past. I tell Eidos to copy Uncharted, do everything you need to do to make Underworld exactly like Uncharted. Thats what will get the series back on track, not changing your game so it doesn't copy something else. If your going to copy anything it should be copying the best exploration/shooter on the market today not shying away from what works. I could never understand why developers do this. Back in the day Zelda: The Ocarina of Time was known as one of the best games to ever come out on a console. It had a huge open world, it had awesome dungeons, it had strategic puzzles, it was the game everyone wanted. Why did we only see one? Now I know that Majora's Mask came out also and was good but why did we only see one game of this type released. Why did we not see a game centered in space that copied The Ocarina of Time? Where was the present day adventure game that could have mimicked everything that the Ocarina of Time did right? That is what I am talking about here. Developers were afraid to make a game like Zelda because they did not want to copy what Zelda did but if they would have changed the setting and spiced up the gameplay then they might have had a huge hit on their hands. If these developers would add more of the same in their games but make them a little bit different everyone would win. People would buy the games because they had awesome mechanics, mechanics that were proven in the past with other great titles, this would be tons better than just making another sports game year after year while slapping another year on the end of the title. This article was originally posted on February 13, 2008 on our previous gaming blog.