I know that games like Red Dead Redemption and The Last of Us are masterpieces. I know this. Let me get that out of the way, right now. Even a glitch filled game like Skyrim was the kind of game I was truly longing for as a child. From storytelling to scale, I recognize modern games are staggering, and they further the genre as a whole. Hell, some games even seem to be overtaking Hollywood in terms of scope and budget. But let’s dismiss the BioShocks and Red Deads for a moment and look at the bigger picture, shall we?
The main problem with gaming now as compared to gaming when the boom first happened in the 80s with Nintendo is, now, if your game doesn’t make hundreds of millions of dollars, it is considered a failure. Do you know how many GREAT GAMES you have all skipped over this last gaming generation, simply because they did not sell well or a magazine told you the game sucked? Games like Enslaved: Odyssey To The West or Shadows of the Damned. Games that were fun, fast paced, funny, and brilliant, but didn’t make Hollywood blockbuster size profits, so they got shuffled away, left to die in the Gamestop bargain bins. That is the first part of this all being not okay. The big stuff gets pushed, and the great, smaller products get ignored and inevitably become obsolete as a result.
We can also look at games like Call of Duty (bring on the hate mail) to see why video games have lost their souls. Whereas the best part of gaming for any real gamer should be in the act of playing the game, games like COD end up having this super-linear gameplay, squashed into ten minutes of what feels like interactive storytelling per “level”, yet very little of it is actual gameplay we control. You have these big water cooler moments, but it hits you within thirty minutes of the game that four of the six hours of this sixty dollar game is all non-interactive or quick-time-events, which boil down to a perfectly timed button push. How does THAT compare to the ten hours of exploring the world of Legend of Zelda, or the hours put into mastering any of the brutal Mega Man games?
The other problem this causes is that these huge games that follow this blueprint and sell well are FORCED to become series. Look at the above pictured Gears Of War for example. The first game was great, because we had played nothing like it before it came out. And the new generation was still new enough that the graphics took our breath away, which was a big factor in keeping people intrigued initially. But look at that series now? They are four games deep, and after you played through the first two, what did the other two have to offer that you felt like you hadn’t played before? I will answer for you after the jump.
