Gamecenter’s William Harms complains to Wired that, “There are no original ideas [for computer games] anymore, just reshapes or rehashes.” Big deal.
Look the same thing is true with pretty much every piece of fiction from novels to movies to whatever. This year I’ve probably read 20 or 30 novels and seen many more films and each of them used a variation on a few basic plots that have been around for thousands of years.
The sign of a great book or film is not that it tells a basic narrative that nobody has ever told before, but rather that it tells that basic story in a compelling way. The basic plot of a novel such as Crime and Punishment is not unique, but Dostoevsky has few competitors who come close to his novel (compare Dostoevksy’s novel, for example, to Hitchcock’s disappointing riff on the same basic story in Rope).
Games are much the same. I wish game developers would spend less time trying to “innovate” — which usually means throwing features together that don’t really mesh very well — and more time creating compelling games on top of the basic games that people expect.
A good example of this is X-Com. X-Com was a brilliant game. Assemble, train and equip your squad of soldiers and send them out to do battle against alien invaders. There have been a number of excellent squad level games since (including the excellent Jagged Alliance 2 which I’m currently playing my way through), but the people who own the X-Com rights don’t want to hear any of that. Nope, they’ve been working forever an on “innovative” X-Com first person shooter with “strategy elements.” Ugh.
On the other hand look at one of the games Wired considers to be non-innovative: Age of Empires 2. I can’t stand most real time strategy games mostly because the back story is so ridiculous its hard to stop laughing, and I have no time to learn all of the bizarre different units. AO2 works very well because it brings a well-balanced historical perspective that I can jump into immediately. I have no idea how tank-mounted plasma torpedoes might affect battle tactics, but even I can grasp the effect of cavalry on warfare.
Ironically Wired cites Rune as an example of a game with creative spark, but that’s just Unreal Tournament with Norse warriors that has been ripped in reviews for tailoring the game to the game engine rather than vice versa (as one reviewer noted, players spend most of their time in Rune in underground caverns dispatching monsters — a far cry from Norse myths and legends).