Modern-Day Gaming: Are There No More Good Ideas?

In Features by Chris Durston

Of the twenty-five best-selling video games of 2018 so far (according to VGChartz as of November 23rd 2018), how many do you think were new intellectual properties (IPs)? That is, in among that bunch of new releases, what’s the number that weren’t a sequel, an entry in an existing franchise, or using characters or worlds from previous games? Or, for that matter, an outright remake or remaster?

I’ll tell you how many:

One.

Sitting happily there at number twenty-one, Detroit: Become Human is the only game in the top twenty-five worldwide bestsellers of the year to be a completely new idea, a new property, something not derived from what came before. An argument could be made for Insomniac’s Spider-Man, which is (deservedly) swinging around at the number two spot: it is, strictly speaking, a new line without direct ancestry in the annals of gaming history, but… well, it’s Spider-Man. He’s been around since before the Beatles recorded their first album.

Image credit: http://www.webspinas.com/beatles/

(As an aside, I won’t be all that surprised if Spider-Man has reached the number one spot by the time you’re reading this, since it’s only a few thousand copies behind God of War at the time of writing and has only been out for five weeks, while GoW’s been racking up sales for a full twenty-five.)

It’s tempting to ask, looking down this list, whether there just aren’t any more good new ideas. Perhaps every decent spark of imagination has been used up, and we’ve got all the stories we’re going to get: everything from here on out is derivative, friends, so get yourself a stiff drink and make the most of it. There are titles on the list like FIFA 19, Call of Duty: WWII, and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey: the latest entries in franchises spanning more than a decade, and that’s without mentioning the presence of flagship mascot titles starring Mario, Link, and even Kirby.

I had a quick count, actually (I’ll probably get corrected on this, but whatever), of how many of the games on that list of twenty-five are not only not new but are the fifth or later instalment of their respective franchises: I made it at least sixteen, even being cautious when it comes to things like whether a spin-off is defined as a game in the series and that sort of thing. I’m no statistician, but I feel that this is significant, or at least that it tells us something about the state of the industry, the market, perhaps even the mindset both of people playing games and people making them. The question, then, is what is this telling us?

Easy to Market, Easy to Profit

I want to be cynical first, because that means I get to be all optimistic later. I’m climbing up the hill here so that I get to slide down it later, or spending a few hours grinding so that I can pummel Sephiroth into the ground with a giant key that I got from Winnie the Pooh.

The fact is, hype is easier to build when an audience is already familiar with something. See, for example, the multitude of videos featuring people reacting to trailers for the upcoming Kingdom Hearts 3: in some, nearly every new frame (or even a moment of audio, in some cases) is met with a resounding scream and Olympic-worthy facial gymnastics. This is a series which is already dearly beloved by legions of fans; it boasts a large cast of characters, many of whom were not expected to return for this game or whose fates were unknown following previous entries. As such, any time a returning cast member appears for the first time in a trailer – or is revealed in a surprising situation – you can guarantee instant floods of theorising on YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, and anywhere else where discussion happens, not to mention absolute torrents of the aforementioned reaction videos.

TheGamersJoint is just one of several people to have turned the art of screaming at Kingdom Hearts into pretty much a full-time job.

This is one of the factors which must make established franchises so attractive to the powers that be when deciding what games to invest their budget in creating: you don’t have to win people over, to convince them that something will be worth loving, or even explain to them what the thing is, which is half the trouble of marketing a product people aren’t already familiar with. In fact, with something like Kingdom Hearts, all you really have to do is remind the fans that the thing that they already love exists, and just sort of gently suggest that perhaps they might want to spend money on deluxe editions of a new instalment of that thing.

Again, that’s a very cynical ‘business’ argument, but… well, that’s the world. Companies need to make profits in order to survive and continue doing the work they do, and in order to achieve that there are people who make decisions about whether to try something risky or whether to go for a ‘safer’ option. It may be that their own livelihood, their ability to keep a roof over their family’s head, will be in peril if they make the wrong choice, so you can see why the latter must be attractive.

The converse, by the way – that a new IP is harder to market – was fairly nicely demonstrated by our friend at number twenty-one, Detroit: Become Human. It’s done well commercially and critically following its release, of course, but prior to its release there was a degree of controversy around the way it presented itself. Specifically, there was a trailer which polarised the community through its depiction of a child abuse situation; Eurogamer’s Martin Robinson challenged writer-director David Cage on the inclusion of such a sensitive topic, and feelings were split as to whether it’s something that games ought to be looking at at all.

I don’t intend to actually make an argument either way here because it’s not really relevant to the discussion at hand; the point, here, is that a new story needs to sell people on the idea that it’s something worth investing in, becoming emotionally involved with, and to do this generally means flaunting whatever it is that you’re doing which is different from what other people are doing. That’s never without risk: a new, unproven idea will always be met with at least some degree of concern or disdain, and in an age where anyone can express their thoughts to the entire world those opinions quickly snowball into controversies, or even into entire audiences simply deciding that your new idea just isn’t worth buying into.

I ought to note that there was also a lot of positive talk around other trailers and preliminary marketing discussing the game’s premise… and that if some were skeptical, it’s entirely possible that some of it may be due to thoughts on Cage himself, about whose previous work a lot of people seem to have quite strong feelings one way or the other. There have certainly been new IPs in the past which have had more unambiguously negative reactions to their pre-release campaigns, or indeed which have promised something in the advertising which turned out to be broadly a completely different thing from the final game, and those are probably both worse sins than attracting a bit of flak for tackling a difficult topic.

I said that I didn’t intend to argue for or against the legitimacy of gaming including these hard subjects, but for what it’s worth: a. I think that games have as much right to deal with these things, sensitively and in service of a good story, as any other medium, and b. in a trailer, devoid of wider context, it’s impossible to judge whether the full product does in fact deal with it in such a way.)

Then, of course, there are the new IPs which simply don’t have much in the way of marketing budget at all and go unrecognized, or at least don’t get the level of recognition they deserve. By their nature I can’t actually give many good examples of this, but let’s take one recent game which is now coming into the light thanks to great reviews: Astro Bot: Rescue Mission.

By all accounts this is an excellent game which makes great use of its virtual-reality format, but until recently almost nobody knew about it purely because it was buried under all the other, more hype properties. (The fact that it is a shining example of a PSVR game but received relatively little mainstream attention may also reflect on the state of PSVR in general, which I think has a lot of potential but is simply unexplored – as well as being inaccessible for many people for reasons of budget or a range of physical or neurological impairments.)

While we’re talking about the difficulty of introducing new ideas, let’s quickly consider a related point which I think is potentially both symptomatic of this franchise-driven market and a factor in perpetuating it.

‘Celeste is the Dark Souls of Super Mario

When was the last time you saw a review of a ‘difficult’ game that didn’t compare it to Dark Souls? The language that critical discourse uses these days when discussing new gaming releases, particularly those which are also new IPs, is incredibly derivative. There are perhaps threads of argument to follow here about the nature of gaming discussion, criticism, and analysis, particularly when compared to similar forms of discourse around other, older forms of art (literature, music, film even), but that’s a rabbit hole I’m not jumping into, at least not for today.

Image credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoOC2y9s4VA

It’s not just Dark Souls, of course, although I think the sheer saturation of this use of Dark Souls as shorthand for ‘challenging’ is really quite remarkable; any creative work is going to be in some way influenced by, or a response to, what’s come before it, but it’s as if the language of gaming has forgotten how to define what something is without needing to do so by comparison to something else. Too often it feels as if we can’t get around the task of describing an RPG’s nature without falling back on saying that it’s ‘like Skyrim’ or that it has a turn-based battle system ‘like what Final Fantasy does’ or that its story is ‘better than Mass Effect’.

I mean, I can see why we do this: it’s so much harder to really, deeply consider what a game is doing and to try to do so on its own merits than it is to simply sum up with ‘it’s Prince of Persia gameplay in a Dragon Age setting with Total War-style military elements and a deep character-driven story in the style of Knights of the Old Republic’. (If anyone wants to make that game, by the way, let me know and I will gladly pay money to play it.) This is all shorthand, shared knowledge that the community can use to easily share and gain understanding based on our previous experience.

Unfortunately, I think that in some ways it probably encourages people to think of new games only as improvements on, successors to, or variations of things that have come before, which means that it’s difficult for an audience to build interest in something that doesn’t compare easily. It’s also probably more daunting for a creator to try to do something that’s not really been done before, because all of us are just so used to thinking about games in this way. It’s such a convenient tool, to sum up a game with the neat little formulation ‘X is the Y of Z‘, but it simplifies all three components to the point of doing each of them a disservice and creating an image of X as just… being Z in a Y-like way. As we talk about games in this way, though, it becomes easier for developers to make games that follow this pattern: they know they’ve got an easy reference point to base their hype around, if nothing else.

Despite the two games not really being similar at all, Cuphead’s status as ‘the Dark Souls of platforming’ is sufficiently ubiquitous for there to be multiple mashups of the two. (Credit for this particular one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBE8sh7nv4s)

There are of course wonderful exceptions: Undertale, for example, genuinely does do some things that nothing before it had done to quite the same extent, but even there it does so by referencing, learning from, deconstructing tropes and techniques from gaming’s past. It’s interesting to me, too, that the main way I see fans of Undertale try to describe it, or sell it to someone who’s not familiar, is to say that it’s unique, that it’s not like anything else: it’s so rare for something to be in this category that thousands of people flocked to Undertale just to see what it was about. I have to think that if Undertale were a product of a corporation rather than an individual there would have been tremendous pressure to make a sequel as quickly as possible (because, as discussed already, additions to something people loved are safe bets for profit). A true sequel, though – by which I mean a story following on from Undertale in the same world and continuity – would by its nature have gone against the themes of the first game and so would have been, creatively speaking, a bad idea. (Since we’re talking about this, and tangentially about Dark Souls, see Michael Saba’s excellent video letter on why more Souls sequels, while potentially a good business move, would be a bad thing from a creative perspective.)

Perhaps this is why a lot of the well-received new IPs are coming from smaller studios: see the acclaimed Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, made by a small, dedicated team of people who presumably didn’t have to do as much corporate risk-assessment and were therefore more free to try something that wasn’t a safe bet. The other side of this, of course, is that there must be many, many more people in the same position who simply didn’t get as lucky, who tried something just as new and potentially just as good but which we just haven’t heard as much about.

Succession is Not Unoriginality

Of course, Toby Fox has now come out with Deltarune, which is, erm… a demo or first chapter or teaser or something along those lines for what seems to be a spiritual successor to Undertale – not the aforementioned true sequel, but something which employs different methods to explore different but related themes. Here we can, I hope, start to make the promised movement away from the cynical view and towards something that might even be optimism, because I think that Deltarune’s approach to being inevitably seen as ‘the one after Undertale’ is a sort of microcosm of things that games in general can do very well in order to be not new, but not unoriginal either.

Let’s take a look at the game in the number-one spot on our top twenty-five list of 2018: God of War. I’m a little bit uncertain as to how to define God of War, actually: it’s definitely not a new IP, and it isn’t a straight-up remake, but although it’s in the same continuity as the previous games I think I consider it more of a reimagining than a sequel, or ‘just another’ of the same sort of entry in the franchise. I’ll just call it a sequel for now. Either way, it’s a new title which takes as its basis an existing IP, which means it’s got established characters and settings – and, because it’s a game and not just a story, it also has a history of visual identity, gameplay mechanics, and sound design style to draw upon. It makes a very deliberate choice immediately, however, to forgo most of the recognizable elements of its predecessors, instead taking a character who’s been defined as angry, arrogant, driven by vengeance – an antihero if ever there were one – and reinventing him in a new light, in a new setting, with new context and really a new identity for the franchise around him.

God of War is a more effective story, and a more effective successor to what came before, because it embraces wholly different themes and tells a wholly different tale. It’s about fatherhood, loss, grief, family, and it truly is a phenomenal example of storytelling. I don’t think anyone could argue, either, that it lacks creativity or originality: it is so good, in fact, at tackling these themes in powerful ways that it single-handedly caused the BBC to realize that games can have emotions and stuff (a much-mocked epiphany among those of us who’ve been arguing this for years).

It wouldn’t be as powerful, though, if it were a new character rather than the Kratos who used to be so wrathful: having seen his previous life, and lived it with him by playing through it, the impact of the change on the man is felt by the player because it’s a change for them, too. So guess what? God of War is both a sequel and original, and it’s only able to be as good as it is because of both of those things.

Mark Twain wrote in his autobiography:

‘There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.’

I think that’s the important point, though: there are new and curious combinations to be made. This is perhaps the power of the spiritual successor, which is to say a new (non-sequel, non-remake) follow-up work which might borrow heavily from the themes, techniques, or styles of its predecessor but doesn’t actively continue the same story. Team ICO have made this their modus operandi: the trio of The Last Guardian, Shadow of the Colossus, and ICO are all related in ways both subtle and not-so-subtle (and there are theories that they may or may not be in the same world after all), but none is a direct sequel to another. Making use of the pre-existing context in novel, creative ways can give rise to something which is, despite its resemblance to other work and its being assembled from the same pieces of coloured glass, a great and – I would say – original bit of creativity.

The Future

There are upcoming new IPs for the gaming community to be excited about, I think: Anthen, Cyberpunk 2077, Sekiro and, I’m sure, a host of indie and other titles which will change the landscape of gaming.

Will any of them be original? Almost certainly not.

I mean, look: it’s just ‘samurai Dark Souls’. Does that mean it can’t be awesome? Hell no!

They’ll all be freely comparable to things which have come before, and that’s OK. Perhaps some of them really will be dull and derivative, but some will make use of that toolkit and those materials to knock up something we’d never have thought of, like taking a set of LEGO bricks that are supposed to form a bridge and using them to make Pikachu instead.

You know what? Even if you do just make a bridge, that bridge may well have a place and be awesome at being a bridge. The recent slew of remakes and remasters, while it definitely isn’t original, isn’t definitively a bad thing in my book: it allows those who loved games once to experience them again, or even for their kids, who might now be the same age that they were when they first discovered these gems, to get into them for the first time. I hope I won’t be accused of having a vendetta against anything that isn’t a new IP; I just like seeing new things!

I don’t think originality is dead. I think that the way the industry – the world, in fact – works is probably geared to encourage the continued creation of ‘safe bet’ games, things that are easily marketable and hype-able and designed to produce big profits with relatively little risk. Creators, though, are continuing to prove that it’s possible to create something that’s truly worth experiencing despite this, and I have faith in the ability of people to carry on doing what people do: rearranging the glass into something beautiful.

Chris Durston on Twitter
Chris Durston
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Aspiring non-procrastinator; amateur writer of odd fiction and Thoughts About Games.