An Industry Without Innovation

The recent E3 conference in San Diego gave us one solid look at the lack of interest in the current platform but several of the big developers have noted that innovation across the industry is pretty poor.

This is a sad thing to hear following 10 years of Peter Molyneux hypes and radical game designs but I really see their point. It really has become a familiar lament in gaming over recent memory and the collective sense of disappointment at E3 only echoed our concerns. A common trend being thrown around is that every new announcement looks like something else – ‘That feels like Uncharted’, ‘It is just the same as Bioshock’ and ‘Why is Fifa always the same?’

It’s a terrible thought that a comparison with some of gaming’s greats can become such a detriment to building hype for a new IP. Unfortunately these comparisons are going to be synonymous with an industry where precarious production budgets need to be reached and taking risks is not the way forward. When you can’t afford a flop what is really the best option.

The landscape of the next 12 months at least is a valley of sequels, reboots and licensed titles tied into big budget franchises from large well known environments. The problem is that any successful business needs to take risks and know when to but again these same companies need yearly targets to be reached and any failure can indeed be the end of the line. Risks also come hand in hand with the possibility of bankruptcy or even worse industry embarrassment and we all know which option we’d choose.

The view from E3 showed us Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Gears of War: Judgment Day and Halo 4 to name just a few. All of these big blockbusters are coming from current franchises with successful heritages and apart from Watch Dogs by Ubisoft nothing original really caught anyone’s eye. Granted there isn’t anything particularly horrible about any of these franchises or their new offerings and will no doubt be well-made titles but they still lack fresh IP details or innovations.

There might be light at the end of the tunnel though as the next big hardware announcements are still due over the next 18 months or so. Alongside this we can no doubt expect new IP’s, ideas and future strategies that co-inside with the hardware manufacturers and the new mechanics being made available.

Anticipating the increased feeling of stale gameplay though giant publisher Activision have outlined several new ideas for the Black Ops II title due later this year and take steps to combat this trending issue. This comes off the back of Modern Warfare 3’s post launch Metacritic backlash created from stale gameplay and an increasing lack of new ideas. The single player story for Black Ops II will feature branching story points and new missions to implement within the gameplay; namely Strike Force. These punctuate the single-player narrative and sees players using ‘assets’ within each mission to complete their objectives. It looks like an interesting idea and is certainly one being used to combat their increase in backlash after last years outing.

Sadly though in general you don’t tend to let go of a good thing and Activision have been one of the key publishers to get this wrong. Look at Guitar Hero and the Tony Hawk series; both of these experienced similar customer anger as their now iconic FPS.

Whatever happens in the future it’s becoming a bleak landscape at the moment – at least for the short term – but hopefully with a bit more customer feedback and a few new ideas we can approach a new gaming era.