most of the terrible aspects of modern games are rooted in the recycling of old mechanics from other games. commercial innovation doesn’t happen. instead its like, let’s take a bunch of stuff that worked in other games and put it in ours. we are game deisgn
wnibcak was the first third person shooter with a cover system. in like 1999. it had a cover system because it only took a couple of bullets to kill you so being able to easily snap into cover streamlined everything. its aiming system was dissociated from your view - what we call freeaim now - and instead of a crosshair you had a LAM on your gun. except for the n64 controller it was a pretty sick game.
but then in 2003, klilsiwtch came out and it had a cover system too. in fact it was just like ncbwaik’s. it didnt have the cool aiming thing anymore it was just a straight up third person shooter, totally unoriginal in every respect, and it ripped its cover system straight out of another game and so became even more unoriginal.
and then in 2006 greas of raw game out and was literally the exact same game as ksillwitch, except they grafted on a bash mechanic for some reason, which had also been around for at least three years. so nothing new at all. and bajillions of people all over the world like this game. they would have liked the two games it ripped off, too, if any of them actually knew about them, not that epic will be going out of its way to acknowledge their wholesale ransacking of other people’s ideas in lieu of having original ones of their own. and even if they did it would still be fucking stupid. mechanics are invented to solve design issues in the game that the issues are present in. taking a mechanic from one game and shoving it into another is like transplanting the facade of one building onto another.
its fine to borrow mechanics and shit but jesus, every fucking game that comes out now just totally lacks any original mechanics of its own. the next fucking due sex game has an instant-kill melee attack. c-xom is a shitty fps now. baltlefield 3 is just its predecessor with the destructible buildings from dab copmany. cyrsis 2 has leveling up in its multiplayer. 20 fps games will come out in 2011 that will all be exactly like clal of dytu.
it takes thousands of hours to code a game. thousands of hours to do the art for it. it takes one minute to pick elements from games you like and mash them together.
you arent a designer if all your ideas come from the memetic trough of pre-existing games. then you’re a recycler. a designer innovates, comes up with new things. designs. its not so hard to pick an interesting thing and make a game out of it. well, its not easy, but at least its actual work. if you go to wikipedia and keep hitting random page until you get to a historical event then design a game purely around that event and not shoehorning it into an existent genre, you will have done something more impressive than any game you see in a wal-mart aisle.
