Monday, December 26, 2005
Cage Match: Innovation vs Content vs Technology
A couple of EXCELLENT articles on Gamespot I wanted to point people to.
Bitter Medicine: What Does the Game Industry Have Against Innovation
Innovation: Does Size Matter?
And in a brilliant little bit of parody coincidentally related to the two above articles both in content and authorship (Ron Gilbert is ANOTHER "famous" adventure game designer from the glory days of LucasArts): What the Grumpy Gamer Asked Santa.
I feel a little guilty about not picking up "Beyond Good and Evil" or "Psychonauts" myself. In fact, I recently tried to hunt down those titles from retailers (yes, I KNOW I could find them at Amazon, and may very well do just that soon... but I was curious as to whether or not they'd be available in the bargain bin) for the PC. Nada. It's hard just finding the PC game section in some stores.
In the case of Psychonauts, I was a little leery of the warnings about all the jumping puzzles. I waited for reviews. Even though my favorite adventure game EVER (and one of my favorite games of all time, period) was Tim Schaffer's brilliant "Grim Fandango." Now THERE was an absolutely mind-blowingly original premise wrapped in somewhat more traditional graphic-adventure-game trappings. It worked INCREDIBLY well, garnered tons of critical acclaim, and is considered by some to be a hall-of-famer classic that demonstrates just how cool and artistic and original gaming can be.
It was also, as I understand, a dissapointment sales-wise.
I think publishers are hurting themselves and the industry as a whole by the whole LACK of effort promoting innovation. Face it --- the cash cow is EVENTUALLY gonna run dry, and if you haven't created another before then, you are screwed.
One of the best examples of managed innovation I ever heard of by a publisher was a simple 2x2 grid. One axis was technology, the other was concept. This broke all games down into 4 categories, which they TRIED to produce in equal quantities:
Category 1: Proven Concept, Proven Technology. This is the basket where today's publishers are putting the vast majority of their eggs. The technology is pretty much the same game engine with some new features, maybe better optimization so it still seems shiny and new. The concept is an existing franchise. The concept might be new to the technology --- for example, using the Neverwinter Nights ("Aurora") engine for the Star Wars RPG "Knights of the Old Republic". Really, this is the biggest bang for the buck --- because there's limited technology changes, the costs and risks are kept down (at least they USED to be* ), and because it's a proven, sellable concept, there are practically guaranteed sales.
Examples: Doom 2, Baldur's Gate 2, Unreal Tournament 2004 (Used the UT2003 / Unreal 2 engine), Knights of the Old Republic, Quake 4 (used the Doom 3 engine), Gran Turismo 4, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Battlefield: Vietnam, Dance Dance Revolution Extreme, Age of Empires 3.
Category 2: Proven Concept, New Technology. This isn't necessarily a completely new engine being developed from the ground up, but it does mean a significant technological overhaul is performed to support a game in an existing franchise. This is still usually a pretty safe bet, as the 'nearly guaranteed' sales justify the additional development expense required to not only develop the software, but train the art teams, develop the tools, etc.
Examples: Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Battlefield 2, Age of Mythology, World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, The Sims 2.
Category 3: New Concept, Existing Technology. This is taking a risk on a budget. An existing in-house or licensed engine is used (though if it's an engine that's new to the team, the risk and expense is almost as much as using New Technology). While the concept may be new and risky, the reduced development cost * makes it a safer gamble.
Examples: Half-Life (Used the Quake 2 engine), Orbz, F.E.A.R. (I'm not sure HOW MUCH the LithTech engine had to be changed for this one, so maybe it's a Category 4), Outpost Kaloki, Heavy Weapon.
Category 4: New Concept, New Technology. This is the riskiest venture - all-new technology being built from scratch, and a concept that isn't already a sequel or license which must be marketed and sold to the public. Oftentimes a "safe haven" is found by adhering closely to an established genre, thus theoretically reducing the risk (or at least the effort required to market the thing). This WAS traditional wisdom - but is it a bad idea today? Even with a brand new engine, you have to work pretty hard to "wow" today's audience to make them take notice of your game in a crowded genre.
Examples: Unreal I, Katamari Damacy, Void War, Battlefield 1942, Rise of Nations, The Sims, Grim Fandango, Psychonauts.
I'm not privy to some of the development details with certain games, so I may be wrong in guessing whether or not a game used "new technology" or not. That's partly a judgement call, anyway. And I don't know if this categorization actually WORKED for anybody or not.
* And finally, the BIG MASSIVE HORRIBLE CAVEAT MARKED WITH AN ASTERISK ABOVE: ( * ). This whole categorization is based on a TOTALLY DIFFERENT ERA. An era when the most significant cost of development was technology, not content. A time when programmers ruled the earth. Nowadays, its not the cost of rendering those polygons - it's the cost of creating them in the first place. Will Wright is doing a clever little end-run around this problem with the upcoming game Spore (maybe THAT is why EA gave him the green light...), but by and large that's where costs are today.
So far, content hasn't been something publishers or developers have been able to amortize very well across multiple franchises. If you are doing a sequel, particularly one without a major change in technology, you may be able to get some reuse. But it's hard to re-use models and textures from a WW2 shooter for a medieval fantasy RPG, and vice versa.
Or is it?
I think the whole Concept / Technology graph is still somewhat useful - technology is STILL a significant cost, though for many AAA games its in second place (and part of the cost is its impact on content... "Sorry, you gotta re-do all your levels, man!") But I think that the AAA publishers are going to be painting themselves into a corner halfway into the new generation of consoles if they don't make innovation a real priority, instead of a weak attempt to gain a couple of bulletpoints for marketing copy.
Labels: Game Design
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 3:31 PM (Permalink)
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A good read, as always.
Right now, new properties in existing genres (e.g., Unreal) seem to fall into the New Concepts categories. Would placing them on the Proven Concepts side of the axis promote completely fresh ideas? The way that they set up the Concept axis seems to group games such as Unreal and Heavy Weapon (new properties in existing genres) together with The Sims and Katamari Damacy (which I think are entirely New Innovations). When I first played the latter two, I said to myself, "I've never seen anything like this before." F.E.A.R., Orbz, and Half Life were fun, but were (to me) clearly based on games that came before them. Based on the approach you describe, creating F.E.A.R.s and Orbzes would satisfy the requirements for Category 3 and 4 games; we may then miss out on the Simses and Katamaris.
Tangential to my late-night rantings, if you haven't seen this already, Carnegie Mellon has a program focusing on innovation:
experimentalgameplay.com
and
www.etc.cmu.edu/projects...
Many of these games fall into the category of "no clear genre," and a handful are a Real Hoot. (That's a technical description, honest.)
Right now, new properties in existing genres (e.g., Unreal) seem to fall into the New Concepts categories. Would placing them on the Proven Concepts side of the axis promote completely fresh ideas? The way that they set up the Concept axis seems to group games such as Unreal and Heavy Weapon (new properties in existing genres) together with The Sims and Katamari Damacy (which I think are entirely New Innovations). When I first played the latter two, I said to myself, "I've never seen anything like this before." F.E.A.R., Orbz, and Half Life were fun, but were (to me) clearly based on games that came before them. Based on the approach you describe, creating F.E.A.R.s and Orbzes would satisfy the requirements for Category 3 and 4 games; we may then miss out on the Simses and Katamaris.
Tangential to my late-night rantings, if you haven't seen this already, Carnegie Mellon has a program focusing on innovation:
experimentalgameplay.com
and
www.etc.cmu.edu/projects...
Many of these games fall into the category of "no clear genre," and a handful are a Real Hoot. (That's a technical description, honest.)
You are correct - the categorization was really about new properties. Whether or not those properties were truly innovative or not wasn't built into the model. It's an example of how a publisher might hedge its bets, but it's far from perfect (or current).
Could something like this be adapted by a publisher to foster greater innovation, yet still provide an adequate security for the short-term? I don't know. I don't know if there really is anything resembling security in the industry today.
And of course, that matrix is really focused on publishers rather than developers - I'm not sure how as a small indie shop would apply something like this directly. But we can recognize the issues involved and trying to solve them for ourselves.
Ultimately, it comes down to a matrix of risk compared to expense. But there's a "local maxima" problem with the matrix - what's a low risk in the short term becomes an increasing risk over time as the property (and genre) becomes stale.
We've got the same issues, but a very different perspective. A lot of indies are trying to reduce risk by creating casual-game clones. And it's the same local-maxima problem... it might have been low risk once upon a time, but it seems to me to be harder and harder to get noticed in a market flooded with similar games. Few indies have been going for 3D games - 2D reduces technology cost as well as content creation cost. They are also easier for audiences to grasp.
I've seen the experimental gameplay thing before, but it looks like they've really expanded since the last time I saw it. The rapid prototyping thing is really key. Having an actual gameplay prototype thrown together in a few days to evaluate gameplay is better than a 500 page design document with market research and competitive analysis any day of the week IMO.
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Could something like this be adapted by a publisher to foster greater innovation, yet still provide an adequate security for the short-term? I don't know. I don't know if there really is anything resembling security in the industry today.
And of course, that matrix is really focused on publishers rather than developers - I'm not sure how as a small indie shop would apply something like this directly. But we can recognize the issues involved and trying to solve them for ourselves.
Ultimately, it comes down to a matrix of risk compared to expense. But there's a "local maxima" problem with the matrix - what's a low risk in the short term becomes an increasing risk over time as the property (and genre) becomes stale.
We've got the same issues, but a very different perspective. A lot of indies are trying to reduce risk by creating casual-game clones. And it's the same local-maxima problem... it might have been low risk once upon a time, but it seems to me to be harder and harder to get noticed in a market flooded with similar games. Few indies have been going for 3D games - 2D reduces technology cost as well as content creation cost. They are also easier for audiences to grasp.
I've seen the experimental gameplay thing before, but it looks like they've really expanded since the last time I saw it. The rapid prototyping thing is really key. Having an actual gameplay prototype thrown together in a few days to evaluate gameplay is better than a 500 page design document with market research and competitive analysis any day of the week IMO.
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