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[Alec S.]

Yeah, that bugs me too.  I remember seeing a thing where they were showing off a splinter cell game and they were like "We wanted a more natural and immersive way to show the player the mission objective, so we had it projected onto a building"  Like, okay, that's a fairly cool stylistic thing, but don't pretend it's anything other than that.  Having text just appear on the side of a building isn't any more "immersive" or realistic than having it in the center of the screen.

Really like that in Splinter Cell and while I don't think it's more realistic or immersive, it adds something to the narrative,
the protagonist is old and kinda crazy, so it's like he is seeing those things in the background. And it sure is stylish.

Yeah, I don't really have a problem with the effect itself (I think it's actually pretty cool, stylistically), it just bugs me the way they talked about it.  

This actually ties into a larger pet peeve of mine which is the obsession within the videogame field with "innovation".  Like, it's something that appeals so much to the business and the engineering side of games, that it ends up seeping into the artistic side.  Like, how often do you see movies or books or songs be described as innovative.  You'll occasionally hear it, like with something like Avatar or Lord of the Rings or maybe Birdman, but probably most of the nominees for Best Picture at any given Oscars are not going to be often described as "innovative".  The word "innovative" isn't brought up much when describing the artistic merit of a film (Note that whenever games people try to unpack what makes something the "Citizen Kane" of games, one of the first things they jump to is that Citizen Kane invented new filming techniques.  Nevermind the fact that you could watch the movie not knowing that and still come away having had a significant experience).  

It's like when David Cage said the key to emotional games was more polygons, or when Peter Molyneaux said, before Fable 2 even came out, that the game would have an innovative dog companion in it, and that the dog would die, and this would make the audience feel emotions.

[oahda]

i wish big budget games tried to be innovative with the actual game and not with stylistic choices or graphical effects :^)

if you strip that away, they're mostlhy horribly uninnovative, stuck in the same loop forever, continually making "what sells", rarely trying to break the mould

indies is where it's at

like there's almost an inversely proportional relationship between budget size and amount of true innovation

[Torchkas]

the more money/time you spend on something the less you want it to fail. it kind of makes sense

[oahda]

That's not really the perspective I'm discussing from.

I already know that it's likelier to sell more when "playing it safe". I'm not talking about what's a monetary success and what is not. Simply about what I personally think is interesting.

[s0]

the more money/time you spend on something the less you want it to fail. it kind of makes sense

plus, today's situation is much worse than it used to be. AAA game budgets are skyrocketing, games that sell 1 million units are considered "failures", studios get laid off for a single game that commercially underperforms, publishers are increasingly run by suits who don't care about games etc.

add to that the amount of time a AAA game takes to develop and its easy to see why AAA is inert to the point of near-stagnation.

i know a lot people won't like to hear this but i think as far as "mainstream" games go, most of the innovation is happening on mobile these days. sure it doesn't look like that from the outset because it's very crowded and there are a million clones of every popular game, but mobile iterates extremely fast and goes through genre trends at a pace that makes AAA look like a slug crawling in molasses.

i mean, the games that are popular in the AAA sphere now (shooters, open world games etc) are still basically the same ones we played 5 years ago, just with better production values. in that same timeframe, mobile gaming has gone through tower defense, line drawing, time management, match 3 rpgs, clash of clans and similar games, digital card games, idle games and clickers, minimalistic number puzzle games, flappy bird, monument valley etc.

[oahda]

Is there any way to take AAA back a few notches again? Or will it just have to crash and burn and then be rebuilt from the ground up?

[s0]

probably the latter tbh

[Sik]

And it probably won't happen.

But approaching innovation directly in gameplay tends to backfire too... saying this from experience with coping with a designer who'd reject anything that he couldn't see as innovative. There are too many genres to pick from now... I'd say, these days it's probably better to look at the world you're trying to make, then pick the genre (or blend) that suits more closely, then start tweaking it to make it match the world's quirks. A lot of well known games were based on common genres and added a few small quirks that had a lot of impact in the long term. And after enough mutations, you may end up with a whole new genre altogether.

[oahda]

Then I ho pe the future lies in the hands of indies. We've grown so much already. People do buy our games and keep us alive, even when they're unusual and novel. And some companies manage to grow without losing that innovative spark. I'm reasonably optimistic.

[Crabby]

Then I ho pe the future lies in the hands of indies. We've grown so much already. People do buy our games and keep us alive, even when they're unusual and novel. And some companies manage to grow without losing that innovative spark. I'm reasonably optimistic.

Hooray for optimism. But if the AAA industry does fall, which is probably going to happen, then it could change more than just the design. Indie games could even become the primary source for games, being cheaper than expensive AAA productions, and being easily accessible from the Internet. It could be quite an interesting future prospect if AAA crashed.

[Alec S.]

See, this is what I'm talking about.  I make a post about how "innovation" is overrated and a poor metric for quality and artistic merit, and the conversation suddenly becomes "But the REAL innovation is coming from indies."

Like, we shouldn't all be chasing after the new widget or the new feature.  What's "innovative" about Hotline Miami?  Sure, it's unique and interesting, but just about every individual element is a refinement or variation on something that already exists.  But taken as a whole, it's an original masterpiece.  What's innovative about Super Meat Boy or Spelunky.  What's innovative about Dark Souls (the invasion/message system, and maybe the bonfire system, but those aren't even close to being the end-all-be-all of what makes that game great).  But you see this time and time again.  "How do we make games art?"  "How about a new feature?".  Art isn't a feature.  Art is the a cohesive whole.  Like, make something new if the game calls for it.  You don't have to make a game around the idea of making a new feature.

[Tuba]

Innovation is not quality. An innovative game can be bad and a game that tries nothing new can be good.

One of my favorite games of all time is Chrono Trigger, and while I think it's a masterpiece, it's a game that does absolutely nothing new, it's just a great RPG that combines everything that was good about the genre at the time.

[ProgramGamer]

Innovation should be in service to the overall quality of the game, not for it's own sake. If something "new" doesn't benefit the overall design of the game, then throw it away.

[Alec S.]

Exactly!  I think in general there's a problem in games where there's too much focus on features and not enough focus on cohesion or detail.  Again, it comes from the marketing and engineering sides of things where you want to make technology with new and marketable features.  You want bullet points for the back of the box.  So you get games (in both AAA and Indie spaces) that have really cool features, but are shallow or incoherent with everything that isn't those features.  (And, again, books and movies have a synopsis on the back cover or store page.  Games have a features list).

[mtarini]

My pet peeve is so obvious that not seeing it mentioned makes me think it might be off-topic (for unknown reasons):

ACHIEVEMENTS.

That's lazy and a way to cheat players of rewards. Give something for the player to see, design some consequence, do something for Christ's sake.

[ProgramGamer]

Achievements are actually just thoroughly misused.

If designers used them as a way of keeping track of what secrets and Easter eggs a user has found within a game instead of turning them into selling points, then people might think more highly of them. I would personally make most of my achievements hidden so that finding all of them is a genuine challenge.

[s0]

Exactly!  I think in general there's a problem in games where there's too much focus on features and not enough focus on cohesion or detail.  Again, it comes from the marketing and engineering sides of things where you want to make technology with new and marketable features.  You want bullet points for the back of the box.  So you get games (in both AAA and Indie spaces) that have really cool features, but are shallow or incoherent with everything that isn't those features.  (And, again, books and movies have a synopsis on the back cover or store page.  Games have a features list).

oops i didn't read your initial post. i was replying to prinsessa.  

yeah i can agree with that.

[Quicksand-T]

My pet-peeve is water levels in platformers where suddenly the controls are purposely (?) super frustrating and un-intuitive (edit- oops). Especially in series where the responsive controls are key, like in Sonic.

[ProgramGamer]

Un-intuitive?

[Alec S.]

Exactly!  I think in general there's a problem in games where there's too much focus on features and not enough focus on cohesion or detail.  Again, it comes from the marketing and engineering sides of things where you want to make technology with new and marketable features.  You want bullet points for the back of the box.  So you get games (in both AAA and Indie spaces) that have really cool features, but are shallow or incoherent with everything that isn't those features.  (And, again, books and movies have a synopsis on the back cover or store page.  Games have a features list).

oops i didn't read your initial post. i was replying to prinsessa.  

yeah i can agree with that.

No worries, I just found it kinda funny that that was the way the conversation immediately turned.