Cactus, With Occasional Music

This month’s Game Informer has a short article that suggests a Frankenstein’s monster approach to building the perfect role-playing game. It recommends, for example, the world of Fallout 3 and the art direction of Odin Sphere. Now, to be fair, the author isn’t suggesting an actual game made piecemeal out of parts of other games — they’re not suggesting a brightly colored nuclear apocalypse, for example — but rather pointing out the tightly-knit themeatic cohesion of the Fallout world and the importance of a striking visual style. But the article is still suggesting borrowing huge swathes of ideas from other games, in many cases key parts of what makes the game series in question unique. It really calls into question the entire article, because what’s the point of picking bits and pieces out of other games to make the “perfect” RPG? The end result is going to end up being painfully derivative, not to mention incongruent.

To be honest, there are a lot of places where games could stand to learn from one another, and a number of the suggestions Game Informer makes can and should be taken up by designers. For a start, they call out a number of cliches which are pervasive in the genre even today. The surprise princess, for a start, in which the game tries to surprise players by revealing that the stuffy, prim magic-user is (shock shock) a princess, or the final boss swap, in which the villain you’ve been pursuing the entire game is pushed aside in favor of an abstract embodiment of evil.

But the overarching idea of the article is really one of the biggest problems with the game industry today. There’s far too much “me too” going on. After the success of the early WWII shooters, the market exploded with them, leading to a glut of games sending players after the Nazis. Grand Theft Auto popularized the sandbox gameworld so effectively that every third game now tries to boast of its “huge immersive worlds.” Do we really want to encourage games to continue ripping each other off, rather than coming up with new ideas of their own? If anything, we should be talking to game designers about thematic cohesion, about making games that have a well thought-out purpose, not throwing elements together piecemeal in a misguided attempt to make the perfect game.