Hello good reader!
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, away from people for the past year and a bit (in which case I would envy you greatly) you’ve probably seen the PVRs on PCP that are the Xbox One and the Playstation 4 (although the Xbox took a slightly smaller dose) and have heard the face about all the supposedly groundbreaking games and features that will come to these machines. In this nerd’s humble opinion, it’s all a little bit rubbish.
Sure, the consoles themselves might have some pretty shmick capabilities, but most of it isn’t that much of a step above their predecessor. Granted, it is nice to have something that can play most kinds of modern media (but no cassettes, bugger it), so you don’t need three annoying, fidgetty black boxes sitting near your TV, but they aren’t trully anything groundbreaking. But the games next genn-ness is where the real failure is.
I can’t speak for everyone who has ever played a video game, but for me it was always about the narrative experience I had whilst playing. Graphics never really put me off, or lag, or really anything, I just wanted to have a memorable, or at least interesting narrative experience. Now I don’t necesarrily mean ‘narrative’ to be ‘story’, I just mean an series of connected events. Many older games were built from a system and employed mechanics that allowed your own stories to emerge from you playing the game. I played the original Halo’s multiplayer when I was twelve, I still remember some of those matches with my friends. Not because the graphics were amazing or the gameplay was revolutionary, but because the game was well thought out and it’s design facilitated a narrative to write itself. The same goes for the third Elder scrolls game, Morrowind, which is not only my favourite game, but one of my favourite stories and mythical worlds, simply because of the narrative freedom that the games core design allowed for.
These were, and will be for a long time,some of the only truly groundbreaking games, even by todays standards. What publishers now expect people to accept as groundbreaking is messes like “Beyond: Two souls” which, for all intents and purposes, was a really long, interactive movie. Sorry guys, games did that in the 90’s. In todays games the great graphics are there, the innovative gameplay, new and interesting ideas, but ther core mechanics of the game don’t encourage, and sometimes hardly allow for the same sort of narrative freedom that thier ancestors had. They tell you how to play the game, you play it that way. If video game industry wants to become a more relevant and respected industry, they need to (do a lot of things) advance their innovation past “new, exciting parkour system!”s and create something that is really new and original, and above all, trully advanced, but hey, that’s just my opinion.
Until next time.
The Mind Cellar 