How come when I pick up a game these days, I always get the feeling of dread? There seems to be two things that compensate each other. Gameplay and Story. It's quite rare that we have both of these, at the same level of skill and quality, in one single game. Yes, I get it, companies need to get their games out there to break the bank but honestly, if they actually just thought about it instead of using die hard heavy business tactics, they'd actually, and quite easily, make a game worthy of buying and playing, possibly even topping the most popular games of all time.
I'll go into detail about numerous parts on how this could work.
In general
The game industry is the biggest market out there right now, it makes a LOT more than the film and TV industry. So, it'd only be common sense to make sure you beat out game after game after game after game etc etc
Wrong.
What makes a company popular is having that
one game which impresses everyone. Halo is to Bungie as Mass Effect is to Bioware. I actually had to research what other games Bungie made, same with Bioware. So the right move is to make a game stand out from the pack. Granted, Halo is a generic
FPS but what makes it special is that it
launched the FPS genre straight into popularity. It remains the mainstream king and it'll stay there. Personally, I think that if Halo didn't become popular and the
Call of Duty series took the crown instead, Halo wouldn't have been as popular as it was as the standard of shooting games would have been fast paced instead of having to deal with shields and tactics for different enemies.
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Why am I such a whore for
DBZ games? |
Other ways is to latch onto a franchise that already has a reputation. For example. numerous companies have been jumping on the anime band wagon to create games for
Dragonball Z, Naruto and Bleach. The already huge amount of popularity with these franchises takes on the concept of
being a part of that anime's universe. Well to some extent. Most
anime games only cover the main aspect of each show and it's usually fighting. I guess the main business idea that applies to this corner of the market is to not put it all into one little package so they can make other games based around the anime but covering different aspects. Either that or they're damn right lazy. If they took their time for a huge project but done right, yes, I'm looking at you
Alan wake and
Duke Nukem Forever, they could create a game that could make a gamer feel right at home within the the world it represents.
Gameplay
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You'd have thought they'd have learnt
for the sequel but nooooope. |
Obviously, gameplay has to be the top priority, I'm lookin' at you,
Final Fantasy 13 and yes, I look at things. Gameplay can do either of to things these days and that is fall into one of the generic genres
OR create an entirely new concept. Now whilst the Fable series is a bunch of failed promises due to a team that isn't capable of extending its production time and making wonderful, majestic Peter look like a right twat. His ideas are interesting, what he put forward created an adventure/action/RTS/sim hybrid which I think is quite fun to play. If Peter didn't overestimate his shitty and stubborn production team and stuck to what he knew would be made, the game would be amazing as it'd pull through what it announced. Even with the setbacks, the Fabler series is still a standalone genre, you wont get the same feel that the Fable universe gives you. Back to gameplay, it doesn't centre on one thing. It centres on numerous things. The main aspect of Fable is probably the fighting. In reference to
Fable 3, the more you fight, the more your weapon injects steroids into itself to get rid of the sexual tension of touching too many skeletons. Or in simpler terms, it levels up. The gameplay is sparse, not focusing on anything but that's the trick to it, it's unique.
A
bad example of gameplay would have to be the new Dragonball Z game called "Ultimate Tenkaichi". It has the most repetitive fighting style I've ever come across. If I wasn't such a sucker for DBZ games, I'd have stayed away from it. Every character is basically the same due to this fighting style, you just choose your favourite character and hack away. From the previous game, a level of skill and spam was needed to fight. In this game, the only skill you need is to initiate a combo to start a tame sequence of "
Rock, Paper, Scissors". You did it wrong, Bandai, you really ****** up with this game. I honestly don't know how the creative directors in games companies get their jobs. I've thought up better ideas whilst typing this blog post. But the whoever made the big choice to turn DBZ into a flashy game of chance needs to be sacked. Give the damn job to me and I'll
SHOW near perfect ideas for a DBZ game which would draw in people who've never heard of DBZ. They did bring back the story mode though which they shouldn't even have gotten rid of in Raging Blast 2 but the gameplay makes it boring as ****.
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SAVE OUR GENERATION
OH MIGHTY ONE!
A good example of gameplay would be Megaman. Yes. I said it. Megaman. No, I'm not legally retarded, I'm being serious. Every single game company should take tips from the Megaman series for it's gameplay and I'll explain why. There are ZERO tutorials in the early series and the X series, far as I'm aware. How the hell did we learn what to do then? Easy, the game level design showed us. They use gameplay to trigger your little mind into reacting correctly to a situation, they SHOW you what happens before you get to the main challenge yourself. It's called "Initiative Gameplay" and that's why it's awesome. It's a straight out shooter based platformer and the only reason it's better then everything else is because of making players use initiative. |
In conclusion, the point I'm trying to make here is this. They seem to cancel each other out these days. Usually, the stories good and the gameplay's bad and vice versa. The creative juice and time put into games these days focus on little tid bits rather than creating a game you can truly be immersed in. In Mass Effect 2, I always thought there wasn't enough. You've got an amazing concept of alien races, planets, big ass enemies and quite the plot but I always felt secluded onto quite a shallow path I couldn't venture far from. Sure, different things happen when you do things differently but they're not that great, they're just minor differences.
If a game concept focuses on one over the other than that's ok but they should at least state that with a slogan of some kind like "Made purely to blow things up" or "An immersive story that leaves you wanting more" or something similar. Game concepts have the potential to become HUGE in terms of there being hardly any technological limitations these days. I'll buy the game that makes an immersive universe filled to the brim with content, freedom and player choices all with DLC that just keeps adding and adding to the game.
That is all. Peace out, squires and squirettes. o/
I already regret trading you in, you time wasting, attractive little ****
