Video Game Trending

Trends in gaming come and go like the wind, five years ago it was cover systems introduced by Gears of War and since then it’s be experiences point systems, noire and downloadable content.

When Gears of War first came out we were all still having problems deciding whether we were in a safe area during third person fire-fights. However Gears threw this idea out in favour of a wildly successful cover system that has been used by pretty much every game since. It was refreshing to find we could duck behind a well placed concrete block when the shit hit the fan.

Next in line was the experiences systems now found in pretty much every multiplayer game still being played. We have the brilliant Call of Duty series to blame for catapulting them to the forefront of online gaming today. We have also had a large increase in recent games jumping on the DLC bandwagon with extra guns, gameplay features, missions and maps being readily available.

Trends come and go but the majority of them will be picked up and used for many years to come. Each developer tends to learn from the next in order to perfect their game prior to release. If one gameplay element gets good reviews then it tends to be picked up by other studios and implemented into their games where possible.

The current trend in gaming seems to be on choice and consequences – thanks Mass Effect! It seems like whatever you play now you can expect some sort of branching path. Whether it’s a decisions on the storyline or an action that decides on the life of death of an NPC we seem to be seeing more and more examples of actions and effects.

Some studios like Bioware have been doing this for years but it seems now that having a linear game is a detriment to the review score and reception from the public. Most studios want you to make a decision for them now and then with Red Dead Redemption or Deus Ex highlighting this for us. Most games make you toy with different actions and outcomes which result in longevity through multiple playthroughs.

Series like Mass Effect are built around players choice but I never really feel like I have much of an impact on the world. No matter how I played the first game and no matter my decisions I always end up going through the Relay and fighting the human reaper.

Don’t get my wrong I love Mass Effect as much as the next man – in fact probably more then the next men put together but I know the decision making is just an illusion. Nothing you do or say in Mass Effect 1 fundamentally changes what happens at the end of Mass Effect 2.

I have had many conversations about this with fellow gamers and whether they are readable or writable.  The Mass Effect games are good readable games as they give you moments of interaction within a same story outcome. Writable games are things like Just Cause 2 or most Multiplayer based games, as half the things that you remember are stories you wrote yourself - that time you skydived onto a helicopter and used your grappling hook to hang the driver from the bottom and fly him into a water tower or when you threw that grenade that bounced towards you only to kill both yourself and four others giving you a 3 kill streak. 

I have recently read that Sid Meier once said that a game is "a series of interesting choices", which I for one think is true. My worry about choice-and-consequence games is that the more games are developed for choices but where an outcome is predetermined the less meaningful the choices become.