Innovation

I have been gaming, to some extent or other, for the the last eighteen years or so. I have been, with varying levels of interest, following gaming news for around fourteen years, roughly since the days of the PS1. Now, I’m not going to say that this makes me the most experienced person in the world, or that I was around for the entire history of gaming. Those facts patently aren’t true of me but I think I have been around for long enough to use the phrase “I can’t remember a time.” I mean, fourteen years isn’t the longest time in the world, certainly, but I think it’s probably long enough, right?

[drop]Anyway… I can’t remember a time when we’ve seen franchises so strong. Sequels are by no means new, they’ve been around since the early days of gaming. They’re a pretty obvious part of any entertainment medium really. If you make something people like, they are always going to want more. I’m certainly guilty of this, happily gobbling up any and all content from the Halo universe. I’m not just talking games here – DVDs, books, figures, Xbox 360 controllers, if Microsoft license it I will probably at least look longingly at it. This has, in all seriousness, happened to me at least twice in the last week alone. You wouldn’t expect I’d encounter things attached to Halo that often, but it happens with startling regularity, somehow.

Sorry, I seem to have gotten distracted talking about Halo for a moment there. My point is that right now the market seems to be dominated by franchises and sequels. That’s not an inherently bad thing, just because a game is a sequel or a prequel or even an interquel (apparently that’s when something fits between two pieces of fiction that already exist, and yes I had to look it up) it’s not worthy of scorn. I mean, even with yearly updates there can be some incredible games coming out, just look at Assassin’s Creed. This will be the third year where we’ve seen an Assassin’s Creed title on home consoles and, if I’m honest, I can’t wait; particularly after the ending of Brotherhood.

However, while there’s no reason for a sequel/prequel/interquel to be bad, the industry generally seems to have forgotten that you get to a successful franchise by building some new IP. Even Call of Duty was new once and, if you think of Modern Warfare as a relaunch for the series, it wasn’t all that long ago that this was all brand new. We need new ideas and characters if we’re ever going to get new series.

That’s why when EA announced their commitment to new IP my initial reaction was to applaud. Well it was for the first instant, then when I read “two new IPs a year” I became a little less enthused. Is two really that many? EA may have lost their ‘biggest publisher’ crown to Activision, but they are still putting out a pretty significant number of games. I know that new IP is obviously a significant business risk, particularly given the cost of developing games these days, but even so, two doesn’t seem that many to me.

[drop2]However, then I thought again. That’s right, I managed to think about the same thing three times in a row. I’m impressed by my own level of focused thought about something that isn’t working out how awesome Batman is (the correct answer is ‘super freaking awesome’).

Lets return to Call of Duty again. Compare Call of Duty 3 to Modern Warfare and it becomes clear that it wasn’t just a relaunch for the series, it was pretty much a brand new IP; they just kept the name for marketing reasons. And then I thought about some other franchises like Need for Speed. Look at the variety in the different Need for Speed titles EA are bringing out. Shift 2 really wasn’t anything like Hot Pursuit, and The Run looks to be unique again (although harking back to older Need for Speed titles). Yes, they all revolve around racing but it seems that Need for Speed is pretty much just the brand name for racing games that come out of EA. If they created an EA Racing division and used that to mark all their racers we’d happily mark it down as new IP, but by using an established brand they’ve seemingly forfeited this.

So really all I can say is: judge games based on how good they are, not whether or not they’re new. I’m not subtle with my messages am I? Perhaps I need to write about monkeys and trees.

Frontpage image credit: Glogster