(05-10-2014, 07:50 AM)synaesthetic Wrote: I don't like the use of established IPs because it diminishes the potential for innovation. It's "safe." It's "proven."
When nearly every goddamned game you own has a number at the end, you know there's a problem. Now, I'm not saying that sequels are necessarily a bad thing, but when everything is a sequel/reboot/remake, you have some industry-wide creative bankruptcy going on.
I would like to see more than the typical sword-and-sorcery MMO, sure, but before we can get to that point, we have to get away from constantly raising IPs from the dead. Right now, that's all the entertainment industry can do... make sequels and reboots and remakes.
The older I get, the more I'm convinced indie game developers are the only source of actual creativity and outside-the-box thinking in the industry. I don't care if this makes me sound like a hipster; I don't play games for anyone else's benefit but my own.
Wildstar has being an original IP going for it and that's fantastic. It's unfortunate that I don't really care for the art style and focus on humor.
Wildstar might be an original IP, but it's not an original game. Â That's the problem. Â I don't mind them reusing old IPs especially in new applications. Â Nobody said Dr. Mario was just some retread of the old Mario series because it was a completely different application of their IP.
They're just slapping glossy paint jobs on old products. Â Dark and Demon Souls seem very original as games, but you hear a lot about how retro they are. Â In reality, they are retro; they're a giant step backwards from where we went to a more pure gaming concept. Â In fact, most indie developers aren't being original, they're using concepts for gaming that have gone wildly out of style. Â Very few people have developed concepts that are, literally, the first of their kind. Â The reason they seem so original is because so many people didn't grow up on NES and never went to a real quarter arcade. Â RTS games that stretch your brain and planning seem like brand new concepts if you weren't around to remember the Blizzard v Westwood games.
Case in point, we don't have any MMORPGs like Crimson Skies. Â It might not be an original IP, but we don't have a Crimson Skies MMORPG or anything really like it. Â At this point, Wildstar is the closest thing we have to a Jak and Daxter IP. Â But those games might be wildly divergent from what we're used to in an MMORPG. Â It wouldn't make sense to say, "Oh, Capcom's just making another Mega Man game" when it's been over a decade since we got a Mega Man Legends game, almost a decade since we got a Battle Network game, and the rest are all old-school 2d scrolling shooters. Â To make that IP into an MMO wouldn't just be completely different than the other MMORPGs, it would be completely different from what the IP is used to.
I mean, we take it for granted now, but WoW isn't like the rest of the Warcraft franchise unless you count their book RPG. Â Now that it's the biggest MMORPG on the planet, we kind of forget how weird that was at the time. Â I remember wondering WTF they were doing converting a realtime strategy game into EverQuest and how that was even going to work. Â It was less of a jump when Square developed FFXI, at least that was originally an RPG.
I guarantee that if From Software used one of their existing IPs to make an MMORPG, it would be a lot less derivative than what your average indie kickstarter developer could do with an original IP. Â Indie developers just don't have the juice to pull off what they promise. Â It's one of the saddest things about Star Citizen. Â It sounded like it was going to be an original-style of MMORPG. Â It's been depressing to watch them backtracking from all of their ideas and ending up with a slurry of Wing Commander crossed with EVE Online. Â They were supposed to make space interesting to explore and to give us a challenge. Â They can't offer us anything.
I would say our best bet for something that actually plays as an original RPG is going to come from one of the larger studios that's still in the business of innovating. Â Hell, if From Software made a Tenchu MMORPG, it might be from an original IP, but it would be very different from anything we have on the market. Â Hell, for all we know, Titan is going to be a very different kind of game from what we have, since Blizzard has a tendency to develop very well despite their size.
I think, in the end, the games industry has suffered ever since we started viewing it as a visual and narrative, rather than spacial, medium. Â We're trying to model games on films and books, two forms of art that severely restrict and limit the growth of the industry. Â People just forget that video games aren't a series of related vignettes and stories, they're inhabited spaces. Â That mindset has hit MMORPGs, the most spatial of genres in games, the hardest. Â There isn't a story in video games that I haven't seen before done better somewhere else. Â The point is that you are supposed to be "in" these worlds; they are inhabited rather than observed. Â Even indie developers don't really get what that means, so they keep gutting the same settings and refinishing them for new tenants over and over. Â It looks brand new, but it's the same game with new paint and new shrubs.