Does It Matter If Good Games Have No New Ideas?

Can a game like Kena or Resident Evil be great if it has no original ideas?

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I recently reviewed Kena: Bridge of Spirits, and I kept running the same thought over and over in my head – this is good, but it isn’t doing anything new. It reminded me of the open-world exhaustion I felt with Ghost of Tsushima, although I did find it less exhausting here. It’s also clearly Pixar does Horizon, and as a result of boiling Horizon down to its most basic ideas, also feels like Pixar does Tomb Raider. Its story themes have some vanilla eco themes, and as a result it seems like a shadow of Princess Mononoke. The gameplay feels reminiscent of Beyond Good & Evil, with a little Jak and Daxter. Eric Switzer, another editor here, compared it to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Difficulty aside, boss encounters have a touch of Dark Souls – a huge looming boss up against an underpowered warrior in a dark fantasy setting. And inescapably, it’s like Zelda – it’s the version of Breath of the Wild I always wanted, although I suppose the version we actually got is probably more important.

Does that matter? Kena’s pretty good – does the fact that none of it is all that original make it somehow less good? This isn’t just about Kena, either. Last week, someone asked on Twitter if triple-A games and indies received the same level of respect when it came to the end of year awards. I suggested they weren’t even close, even if note-perfect breakouts like Hades and Celeste got to stand with the big guns. I used Resident Evil Village as an example, calling it an average triple-A title and predicting it would end up on more end of year lists than more creative indies like Chicory or The Artful Escape.

Immediately, I was pelted with replies from people telling me Village would be on their list which was a) exactly the point I was making, but also b) not the point at all. Genuinely impressive twittering there. Anyway, how you feel about Resident Evil is largely irrelevant – Village doesn’t bring anything new to the table, and that’s why I’d struggle to call it great. Kena, despite borrowing from anything and everything, is nothing like Resident Evil – but it’s also exactly like Resident Evil. Neither of them bring any new ideas to the medium, and despite players having fun with them, neither will be looked at by other devs in the future, with the possible exception of “big lady = good memes.”

Having said that, I’m less dismissive of Kena appearing on end of the year lists. For one, developer Ember Labs is an indie studio without the budget or might of Resi’s Capcom. I also prefer Kena’s genre and had more fun playing through it. I still don’t think either of them should make the cut above The Artful Escape, but does the fact they don’t do much new really need to be such a deal breaker here?

Even when I don’t review games, I still like to give them a score. It helps me refer back to them, like if I’m torn between two scores for a game, I can have a glance at where I’ve landed on other games that left me with a similar feeling. This year, I’ve mentally given five stars to just one game – Life is Strange: True Colors. Our reviewer, Jade King, concurred. Undoubtedly, True Colors does something new. While these sorts of games aren’t your usual million dollar headline grabbers, True Colors reinvigorates the narrative adventure genre the way the first Life is Strange did back in 2015. By introducing open world elements, upping the art direction, and relying less on binary this or that choices so often, True Colors definitely and definitively changes the narrative adventure genre.

Games I either have or would have given four and a half stars too are the same – they all do something that future games will probably pay attention to. Subconsciously, that a game provides a foundation for future games is obviously something I take into consideration. Take New Pokemon Snap, for example. A fairly pedestrian game for a lot of people, but as a huge fan of both Pokemon and photography, it was always going to be a winner with me. It might not seem revolutionary, but as I’ve already written about, it is the next evolution (geddit?) in Pokemon storytelling.

Other four and a halfs were: Persona 5 Strikers, the best musou game I’ve ever played and a perfect Persona 5 conclusion; Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, the first truly next-gen game of this generation; Chicory, one of the indies I’ve been banging on about and some of the most creative platforming and personally accurate depictions of depression I’ve ever seen; The Artful Escape, a game that understands the transformative joy of music like no other game ever has; and NEO: The World Ends With You, although there’s nothing new here and had I been reviewing it for real, I might have landed on a four star rating, the same as I gave Kena.

So, does it matter if a game does nothing new? I mean, these are toys. I guess any of this matters as much as you think it does. But as much as what numbers we give to these toys, I think I’m landing on ‘yes’. To be a great game, you need to be the kind of game other developers will look to in the future. The kind of game the director tells everyone to go and play, or the kind that gets tossed up on the whiteboard while the team debates how to steal X thing in Y way and make it do Z.

Kena isn’t great. It’s very, very good, and you’ll have a carefree, bouncy time with it, but I don’t think it’ll live long in the memory – either of you or the collective inspirations of other devs. Apart from the words ‘sexy big lady in hat’, I don’t think Resident Evil Village will either. It’s fine if you liked them – hell, I liked Kena! But in borrowing so much from elsewhere, it forgets to have any original ideas at all. Without them, it can never be seen as a great game.

Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/triple-a-indie-games-new-ideas-resident-evil-village-kena-bridge-of-spirits/