Innovation

 Recreation.

Innovation in design is a topic I talk about quite a lot on this blog; although mostly disparagingly in order to insult Ubisoft for their lack of it. But that's only because innovative ideas is one of the few things that can keep push forward a medium that is reaching the ceiling of graphical fidelity more rapidly than it wants to admit. Making games wider isn't going to be much of an option going forward in development, at least according to Sony, who want us to believe they're barely making minimum wage up in their platinum-plated space-station offices. So if we're busy subsiding the absolutely terrible development costs that has Mr Yoshida hunting down stray galley rats in order to cook and feed them to his destitute family, I guess the only way games can improve is by becoming smarting and more complex. By innovating, instead of expanding. Which is an idea that had me thinking about the best innovations in video gaming past. Innovations like the unified control scheme.

Before there was any sort of consensus on what a video game 'genre' was, or how a certain type of game should be designed; there was absolutely no consensus on how video games should control or play; which inevitably led to some collisions in intent. Maybe for one video game the button to shoot your gun will be the red circle; maybe for this other one it would be the blue cross, maybe, if you're lucky, it'll be the trigger button! Some games featured better schemes than others, and whatever you got lunked with typically was your lot because this was the time before options menus and picking your button layout too. In this age, tutorials still served a very real function for telling you how the basic controls of every game worked, because gamers couldn't yet develop intrinsic familiarity with that very basic control scheme which today is compatible with just about every game bar some odd regional differences. (Can never get behind Japanese games and the swapped 'confirmation' and 'cancel' buttons- it bums me out.)

I can't say when the exact moment was when all of gaming made the unified choice to stop playing silly buggers with what controls did what; but that was a huge step forward in general cohesion of game design. Controls were designed to be ergonomic and sensible, prioritising buttons that would have to be pressed often towards fingers that could comfortably do the pressing. The world started to heal, things made sense. Every now and then you get a wild-card developer who believed they were going to reinvent the wheel, but basic settings menus with button configurations thankfully saves us from those anarchistic elements trying so desperately to destroy our clean, functioning, unified control scheme governance. In many ways this was the most important innovation ever to grace game design for the wide reaching effect it's had on the consciousness of gamers and the permutation of game playing proficiency, but it's also the most boring to talk about so how about we get a bit classic and specific?

How about we talk about saving? We all do it all the time, unless we happen to have a free 40 hours to complete brand new games start to finish without taking a single break. And yeah sure, I have that free time but I'm a desiccated old man hooked up to an energy extracting bacta tank; most of the rest of the world isn't. The Legend of Zelda was perhaps the first game to implement the ability to save the state of the world so that you could come back to that comparatively large game and pick up where you left off, and since then it's become an industry standard feature that we don't even think about. As universal as breathing and sleeping, but in digital form. Such that games that muck around with saving become weird and novel for their defiance of a standard, such as rougelikes, or Neir Replicant, etc.

But not every innovation totally rewrites the industry standard, some just do something incredible which makes their game stand out from the crowd. The Nemesis System from Shadow of Mordor was once such innovation, wherein the raw gameplay was enriched with a dynamic system that would remember NPCs and build a history of interaction between the NPC and the player. Injuries would be remembered, victories would be rewarded, ranks of hierarchy would shift, the dynamic make-up of guard outposts would evolve. It was a system that made the world feel living and shifting and made the player feel as though they were at the head of conducting their very own story. The Nemesis system was a huge achievement of robust design and oodles of voice recordings and script writings to create a seemingly endless list of permutations.

And that system, at least somewhat, was innovated on again by Watch_Dogs Legion! Now I know I usually rag on Ubisoft, for very good reason, but Legion did manage to quite interestingly iterate on something that Warner Bros. games created. I mean, admittedly they did just kind of take that concept and expand it laterally, rather than add anything in the way of depth, but I'll take what I can get. In Legion, every single NPC can be recruited into the player's army through a dynamically generated quest system that grows stale very quick through a lack of variety. But the differences in what each potential recruit offers will incentivise you to seek them out and endure the side missions anyway. It still doesn't convince me to actually change to someone who's skills work best on a mission 80% of the time, but having the choice is decent enough.

Unfortunately, Legion only really works as an innovation to Shadow of Mordor. However by the time Ubisoft's version of the concept came out, Warner Bros. had already innovated upon themselves in Shadow of War; and in doing so put Legion largely to shame. War was what happens when the raw framework of how everything works is pretty much done from the beginning and the team can spend as much time as they can creating diverse and varied interactions. The Orc armies you build and fight interact with each other fantastically and impressively all throughout Shadow of War, to the point where you'll see betrayals, surprise revivals, random assassination attempts and ambushes all throughout your playtime. If Shadow of Mordor made you the conductor of the narrative, Shadow of War puts you at the mercy of an orchestra gone wild.

Innovation is the fuel of art, and the games industry is blessed to have been showered with more innovation than most art forms enjoy in their early decades. Stagnancy flitters here and there, but is quickly swallowed up by the every shifting wiles of trends and new genre tropes that can make a game from 10 years ago feel like another world away from the kinds of experiences we enjoy today. Heck, with enough innovation the world might one day make a 4X game that I don't absolutely suck at; but then again maybe that's asking for a miracle too far... All of what I've discussed today has been relevant only to software; but hardware for gaming is every bit as evolving and ever-improving, to a frankly daunting degree. Maybe that in itself is ripe enough for it's own innovation themed blog in the near future-