Are games "new" anymore?

[Alex]

It feels like games aren't necessarily breaking new ground anymore. The leaps in graphical quality from the PS1 up through the PS5 are definitely profound, but the games themselves feel the same as they did 15 years ago.

The fact that remakes of games that are 15+ years old are a regular fixture every year certainly doesn't help the matter!

It feels like games look and run way better than they used to, but the actual kinds of games are largely the same as well. Genres are largely stagnated, it feels like. Sony keeps making and re-making their filmic character action games, Nintendo launched their new console with the 9th Mario Kart which is by all accounts still just Mario Kart, and third-party games seem largely cookie-cutter from following one trend to the next.

Indies carry some hope for continuing novelty in the space, but a lot of indie games seem to be attempting to remake games from their own childhood.

I made an analogy elsewhere before, where each successive console generation just feels like driving a nicer car. The ride is nicer, but you're not going anywhere new.

 

[Kazin]

I feel like the 360/PS3 was the last time games felt "new", which I know isn't true, really, but I think we're just getting old. I also don't think the graphical jumps after that era have been profound, either - yes, I can tell the difference between a PS3 and PS5 game, but they're not *that* different imo.

 

[JBear]

As someone who values and seeks out novel experiences, I feel that we're embarrassed for choice in this regard more than we have been at any point in the past. There are new and innovative games coming out all the time. Just last night, I purchased a 4x game that is also a roguelike deckbuilder. One of my most recent obsessions has been Blue Prince, which folks have been calling a "metroidbrainia". Sure, AAA plays it safe, but I'd argue that that's been true since about as long as we started making the distinction between AAA and indie in the first place? Innovation is alive and well in the industry if you care to seek it out, IMO.

 

[Bongo]

Games achieved a standardization of interface design during the sixth generation, early in the HD transition period. This was driven in large part by the proliferation of middleware as a means to control rising development costs.

The fidelity and complexity of game scenes has continued to grow since that time, although in the case of fidelity we're well into a period of diminishing returns. However, prior to the interface standardization, a game whose technical improvements enabled a new milestone in visual fidelity or complexity might find that no sufficiently mature precedent existed for an interface capable of taking advantage of that step forward, so they'd have to invent something novel. The fact that interface evolution is far less drastic than in the prior era means that it's harder to notice the game design innovations which the interface innovations complement.

I think that transition is a watershed between video games' experimental early period and its more stable present.

However, if big-budget games have grown more conservative on average, it's because their big-budgetedness induces risk aversion, not because gaming itself has grown stagnant. The maturation of game design as a field of artistic study makes novelty more discoverable, not less.

 

[FelixSH]

AAA games probably, yeah. I mean, I guess, it's not like I still play them.

But indies? I think there is a lot of creativity in there. Consider, how many you don't even know about, because they didn't have the luck to be seen by someone who could make them popular. I mean, genres, in general, yeah, those are kinda solidified now, and a lot fits at least vaguely into those spaces. But there is still a lot of space in there.

I mean, it depends a bit on how new something has to be. Untitled Goose Game is not that new, but it's so unique that it totally feels new to me. Similar with something like Inscryption, Gris or Gone Home. Disco Elysium is an rpg like no other. Baba Is You is essentially just a puzzle game, but it's core mechanic, and the way it lets one create puzzles, is mindblowing and new. I haven't played Animal Well, but it also seems to be unique enough to feel like something new.

I mean, these are all not new in the same sense, as Mario 64 was new, or Ocarina of Time, because from 2d to 3d was such an insane jump. But honestly? I think that was the last time we got really, really new types of games. Maybe in the PS2 era, but everything after that was iterating and combining stuff that was there. With a few exceptions, I guess, but I think since then, so maybe during the last 20 years, we didn't really get anything NEW, or at least nearly. Dunno, it's enough for me, how it was since then.

But also, keep in mind that we have played games for decades now. We have seen a LOT. It's no wonder that it's harder for us now, than as when we were younger, to find something that feels new.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

Lots happening in the indie space, yeah. But I think there's also creativity within triple-A games. There are aspects of TOTK that are familiar from other games but there is NO game that has played with assembling things and using physics in the way that one did. And there is tons of room within established genres to develop a novel approach. Balatro, Inscryption, Hades, Elden Ring: Nightreign—those are all, technically, the same broad kind of game, and look at the range between them. The only thing that's much like Death Stranding is Death Stranding 2, which came out this week. Tunic is a Zelda-ish Soulsy game until it's actually a huge puzzle. Little compares to Outer Wilds or Return of the Obra Dinn. These are all in the last seven years or so.

Games have long been intensely iterative. The 80s and 90s saw how many shmups and platformers? Games that spark a new genre or a sea change are rare and far apart almost all the time.

I think about this in terms of board games too, which tend to have a relative few genres they group around. But this worker placement game is not THAT worker placement game; there are key differences that make each their own experience. I have all three -span games and while they share elements, they are all three very different from each other, and each worth playing for its own reasons. Video games are much the same.

I do find that the hardware enables fewer new things than it once did (they keep trying with VR but it just costs too damn much to adopt). There's far less difference between a PS4 and a PS5 in the way there was between a PS1 and a PS2. But things are only same ol' same ol' until something else new comes along. Honestly, we live in a time of gaming riches, not drought, even with the big publishers sticking to safe stuff.

 

[Second Duke Revier]

There is definitely much less innovation happening among the big name games made and released by big companies, as their budgets have ballooned to absurd heights and so they can't afford taking risks. Further, there are certainly some genres where the basic blocks have become too codified, so to speak. However, I'd daresay there's still plenty of innovation and creativity around, particularly in the indie sphere. If anything, the actual problem with games these days is that many of them have rather underbaked designs and structures, making them feel unfulfilling despite the promise their premises, visual presentation etc exhibit.

 

[Isrieri]

Since games cost far too much to produce, for innovation to be widespread in the public eye it will come as risky ventures and baby steps just like in the pre-NES days. I suppose VR is that right now, since there's only so much about it that can be coined "reality" and it's still stuck just aping normal games with a controller and visual feedback. If and when we see something groundbreaking in that scene, you'll see innovation once again become the hotbed of financial investments. Like if someone mods Breath of the Wild so that you can "run" through it with a VR headset and the Wii Fit controller. Some popular but low-risk new wave idea that inspires others to take a crack at it.

 

[Violentvixen]

To me games feel so different now, because I can find characters who look like me but aren't treated like sex objects or wearing gross boob armor. Yes, you can show me examples of great characters here and there from the 80s and 90s, but that wasn't how it was really treated and I was always told I was doing something "for boys". Any of my friends who weren't white talked about how they wished they could see themselves, or how they hated the horrible caricature token character in [insert popular game here].

Even now the indie space is still where you'll see good representation, AAA games exist that have good characters, but it more often that not are still tropes and very often an obviously token queer/black/female character. I don't know exactly what the game equivalent of the marketing phrase "shrink it and pink it" is but AAA is still doing that. It's getting better, and I think it's similar to how the film industry is starting to see more female directors recently. We're having more women be allowed to run the show/have their own companies and that's going to result in new ideas.

What I'm intrigued by is the fact that Japan's workforce is shifting to have more women (I think if you look across all industries it tipped to actually be over 50% women already, but that includes part time). I know from being in science that even once you hit that number it'll still take another 20-40 years for women to be in high level decision-making roles in the big studios. I want to see THOSE games. What are teams with that background going to do with a AAA budget?

I get that this isn't the tech stuff the thread started on, but it's been really profound for me to find these small games where I could identify with the character. I spent most of my life sneaking in game time and not feeling like I belonged in the hobby. Now I do.

 

[Baudshaw]

It feels like games aren't necessarily breaking new ground anymore. The leaps in graphical quality from the PS1 up through the PS5 are definitely profound, but the games themselves feel the same as they did 15 years ago.

The fact that remakes of games that are 15+ years old are a regular fixture every year certainly doesn't help the matter!

It feels like games look and run way better than they used to, but the actual kinds of games are largely the same as well. Genres are largely stagnated, it feels like. Sony keeps making and re-making their filmic character action games, Nintendo launched their new console with the 9th Mario Kart which is by all accounts still just Mario Kart, and third-party games seem largely cookie-cutter from following one trend to the next.

Indies carry some hope for continuing novelty in the space, but a lot of indie games seem to be attempting to remake games from their own childhood.

I made an analogy elsewhere before, where each successive console generation just feels like driving a nicer car. The ride is nicer, but you're not going anywhere new.

My opinion is that a lot of the ground has already been broken in terms of genres, and there's little room for improvement in terms of the actual way people play things. For example, the Xbox and Playstation use the same controllers for all their consoles. VR is slowly getting there, but it's a snail's pace in terms of innovation.

But I still think there are vast differences than even 10 years ago. There's two big things that have shifted the games industry in my opinion: the "forever game" and open-world. You can't really find games like TOTK or Sky or Balatro in the 2000s.

Heck, even if you compare the shooter games, Fortnite is massively different from Halo in basically every way.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I think you could say the same about movies and even get many of the same responses. Art and commerce intersect in these large-scale productions and you'll always have little one-man crews making experimental new games and AAA studios making blockbusters. I think if you watch movies or play games from the 90s, the 00s, the 10s and the 20s you'll find that they're far more distinct to their decades than you think. Elden Ring and Dark Souls are separated by a little over 10 years, and on the one hand you can easily draw a direct throughline, but on the other you can easily divide them by their time periods. Same for, say, the fast and the furious or mission impossible movies. There are arguments people have made about the stagnation of culture overall, about fashion and music and more, but I honestly wonder if we'll look back and still see that stagnation in our present day or if we're just too deep in the shit to appreciate what's different and new and distinct in our slop.

For games specifically, I think innovation in the indie space percolating upwards through all levels of the development drives a lot more than we think. Splatoon 3 had a roguelike as its DLC. That doesn't happen without indie devs pushing new trends (and then rehashing and/or refining them) and bigger studios taking those ideas. Here's a question: Would we have ever gotten Metroid Dread if metrovanias hadn't become so popular in the indie space? Demons Souls is only 16 years old and Dark Souls only 14, but we're still seeing the ripples they've had on action/adventure games translate through the rest of the industry, and now the studio is trying new things reflecting other external trends, and indie games are still aping them or refining and iterating on them. It's all interconnected, maaaaaaan. But the process continues apace, even if it feels slow at times.

Also we're no longer in the infancy of the medium. When we late gen x/early millennials (which most of us here are) were growing up, we watched a massive burst of activity and innovation. We watched the NES give way to the SNES and Genesis give way to the PS1 and N64 give way to the PS2 et cetera and each one of those steps was massive. The curve has definitely flattened and the technology isn't changing so rapidly anymore. We saw a lot of game design evolve alongside the tech. But that tech stability also opens up the floor to more design innovation I think, which happens more slowly but definitely still happens and is still happening. So yes, games are still new. That newness isn't so dramatic or fast as it used to be but it's there.

 

[Olli]

One thing that's getting more homogenized in addition to user interface is the psychological design of games, which leads (at least for me) to games often feeling samey in a way that's difficult to verbalize. Game designers are nowadays pretty familiar with things like what's a good rate of diminishing returns and what kinds of rewards and punishments people respond to. You know how a game is going to zig and zag (even if you might not know exactly when) without playing it before because that's how games are done. It feels like we've kind of collectively, maybe even unspokenly decided how games should be designed; deviating from these "best practices" is criticized on vague terms, and all of this leads to converging experiences.

 

[Second Duke Revier]

That's kinda what I was getting at with "some genres where the basic blocks have become too codified", and it's certainly a very valid thing to feel.

 

[Alex]

Games achieved a standardization of interface design during the sixth generation, early in the HD transition period. This was driven in large part by the proliferation of middleware as a means to control rising development costs.

The fidelity and complexity of game scenes has continued to grow since that time, although in the case of fidelity we're well into a period of diminishing returns. However, prior to the interface standardization, a game whose technical improvements enabled a new milestone in visual fidelity or complexity might find that no sufficiently mature precedent existed for an interface capable of taking advantage of that step forward, so they'd have to invent something novel. The fact that interface evolution is far less drastic than in the prior era means that it's harder to notice the game design innovations which the interface innovations complement.

I think that transition is a watershed between video games' experimental early period and its more stable present.

However, if big-budget games have grown more conservative on average, it's because their big-budgetedness induces risk aversion, not because gaming itself has grown stagnant. The maturation of game design as a field of artistic study makes novelty more discoverable, not less.

I think your first point is probably the main contributor to what I think of when I think all games are starting to "feel" the same. Gone are the days when Square would develop their own in-house engine for one game.

That's not necessarily a bad thing either, considering the volume of their output since adopting Unreal Engine.

Indies are in a good space too, although I worry that too many fall through the cracks when trying to chase trends, leading us to dozens of "Soulslike Roguelites" in a month.