Where Do Video Games Go From Here?

A long time go I purchased a little game you may have heard of called Bioshock. I lived to regret it. The game itself isn't bad. It looks good, sounds good, the story works... But despite the plasmids and gene tonics, despite the focus on single player... I couldn't shake the feeling "Haven't I played this somewhere before...?"

Here We Go Again

And I have. Every smegging FPS game that comes out. They're all starting to turn into the same thing. I've played so many FPS games now that I've realized they're all the same bloody game just with different bells and whistles.

I'm getting very, very bored of shooters.

The first one I played was Doom II. Hell, it was one of the very first video games I played, and th efirst PC game. And you know what's changed since Doom II? Very, very little. Okay, the graphics have become more realistic, we have multiplayer modes, we can look up and down... But ultimately, the game formula hasn't changed one iota. You still have the gun lurking there at the bottom of the screen, you still run around shooting things, collecting ammo, maybe looking for keys or solving the occasional puzzle. The graphics and interface have changed, but the idea hasn't shifted at all. And to be honest, the idea is starting to smell like week old fish.

And it's not just FPS games, strategy games, RPGs; they're all just flowing into one big mass. They're all fundamentally the same. I ran out to buy C&C3 hoping that I'd get something new and revolutionary. What did I get? C&C generals with different units. Okay, there where subtle differences like the lack of builder units, but lets face it, it's like comparing granny smith's and Cox's orange pippins (those are apples incase you didn't know). Little differences, but ultimately it's still an apple.

Some Things Do Change

The only company who've thrown out some decent stuff in recent years are introversion. Uplink, Darwinia and Defcon. I've not played Darwinia, but Defcon was freaking awesome and uplink kept me occupied for weeks. Hell I just started playing it again and I'm having a blast. These are really simple games, but what makes them so great is the fact they are new, fresh ideas! They prove that what makes a great game isn't how realistic you can make it look, or how many special features you can cram in, it's not how many people you have working on the project, and it's not how much money it cost to develop.

It's the idea- Fresh, new ideas. And for some reason, no one's working on them except introversion. What happened to the platformer genre? Games like crash bandicoot and sonic adventure 2: battle where awesome games. And how about the adventure genre? Nowadays adventure game seems to mean "Freeform first person shooter". The elder scrolls games (Morrowind and oblivion) where interesting and fresh in that they did something new with both the first person genre and the RPG genre, combining them, making that combination work and also allowing players to create a unique character rather than the generic "this is a fighter", "this is a wizard", "this is a rouge" class restrictions. I liked it; it was fresh, new and interesting.

But Some Things Stay the Same

Conversely nowadays all we get are endless FPS games and MMO's. Nothing else seems to matter, I read magazines and other genres barely get a paragraph in situations where an MMO or FPS gets an entire bloody article. Well at least we no longer have a market flooded with tones of WWII games. The trend seems to have died off now, and if I see another WWII game being released anytime soon I'm going to find someone responsible and introduce them to the business end of a pair of nutcrackers- be they male or female. Remember a few years back? The same thing happened with star wars. We had star wars MMO, RTS, FPS, RPG and every other three letter acronym under the sun. They killed the damn franchise.

It wouldn't be so bad if these people actually tried to make decent games. Nowadays it just seems like the only reason people make video games anymore is for the money. Okay, that's a big part of it I'll admit, but even so it's painfully obvious that no love at all has gone into a lot of modern releases. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Could have been one of the greatest RPGs of our time. But they released it way before it was ready in order to try and make money. The result? A glitch laden pile of douche. Later patches made the game playable and very much enjoyable, but still as you where playing you couldn't help but notice all the little problems that took what could have been a masterpiece and turned it into something that was only moderately enjoyable. Little things like graphics glitches, missing animations, mission bugs…

So What Now?

So where do video games go from here? Are there no new ideas to be had? Nintendo seems to be doing a very good job trying to find new and interesting control systems, the Wii remote, the DS touch screen... It's a shame developers refuse to touch the damn things as they don't have a clue how to work with these new systems. The Wii has the potential to be the best console out there for the simple fact that it's the most innovative. But do developers see it that way? No. They look at it and see a slouch of a processor, crappy graphics hardware and an amusing gadget instead of an actual controller. They look to the Xbox360 and the PS3 to develop games on as they can stick with the same trend they began years ago- better graphics and try to coax some new ideas out of the dead horse that's been flogged down to the skeleton. Please guys, just try and take a risk on your profits? You might find it pays off big time to break the mould, Nintendo has already taken the plunge. In fact, more than any other company, they seem have it right, because the most realistic graphics in the world won't change the fact that that videogames are just becoming more and more boring. No matter how smooth you get the edges of the models, no matter how realistic the HDR lighting, no matter how perfectly lip synced the characters are and no matter how good the physics, an old idea is an old idea. Games just don't have soul anymore.

What do you think? What's the way forward? Is there a way forward? Am I just being cynical?

Some exciting new developments in the video game industry! Maybe there's still hope yet!