TheExorzist said:
Then how can you blaim CoD to be repetetive? I mean, it's just a shooter, right?
Hi!
I'm gonna try to reply to your post to the best of my ability, though I do have the tendacy to lose track of my mind, apologies for that in advance.
I
obviously can't judge the mindset that goes into the scores given by reviews, but I can give my personal take on why certain games
require a greater leap than others to make an impression in a sequal.
First of all, everyone's mentioned the proverbial elephant in the room of "time between iterations" which seems to be a
big problem with a series like Call of Duty.
A big reason for this being a problem isn't
just if it gives new gameplay content or not, but the fact that people essentially want "The same game, but fundamentally different".
If you look at the complaints Zelda has had in the past it's often gone in a "too much change" v.s. "too little change" direction, where people hate on experimental games for deviating too much while complaining about more mainline games for deviating too little.
As said, these complaints tend to be more prominent in the fringe elements of a game's fanbase, but as far as I am aware some of the huge changes made to the franchise in DS games haven't been all that well recieved.
Now you've mentioned two ways a game can be changed to prevent repetition/samey sequels;
1. change up the "end goal" and base formula of the story/general progression
2. fundamentally change up the gameplay.
But one way or another, these aren't
really the core parts of a series that
should be shaken to make the franchise better.
The interesting thing is, if you don't rely on the specific changes you've mentioned, what
do you go by?
When the timeframe between games is massive, one point is extremely easy, namely: graphics.
Eventhough it's not "innovative", people will most likely
treat a game more like it's own unique game when it
looks undeniably different from it's predecessors.
This is where Call of Duty kind of falls flat, games are released at a rapid pace in a style that's meant to be one thing, realistic, meaning little to no strong stylistic differences between the games aside from the mild increase in graphic quality that a year can bring.
I'll say clearly
I'm not a Call of Duty player, but investigating the art for the game for this post has made it clear that I can barely distinguish which shots are from which game, or how many Call of Duty games I've looked at by screenshots alone.
I think it's undeniable that this isn't just a problem with direct predecessors and sequals though, a game that decides to be a "realistic shooter" also has the problem that it has many other similar looking games within the same genre competing for it's place.
Games like Mario and Zelda suffer
a lot less from these problems than a game like Call of Duty would for two reasons.
1. When you go for gritty realism it's hard to stand out, because originality isn't exactly that style's strongest point, a game like mario or zelda is almost always instantly recogniseable and thus suffers less from genre saturation.
Personally I find that a "realistic" game that actually manages to replicate this unique flair is Mirror's Edge. When I see the art for it, when I see the protagonist, I know what I'm looking at.
By giving an unique and memorable physical appearance a game can assert itself as "unique" a lot easier on face value alone, seperating it from the "mass".
2. Although I do agree that the mario games have gone in the direction of more shallow sequals on an artistic level, if I showed you a screenshot of almost
any zelda game, you'd be able to name the game instantly, or at least be able to clearly seperate it from the others.
Eventhough it's not always recieved all that well, Zelda does an incredible job at making itself "stand out" from it's sequals by constantly switching to another strong yet unique visual style.
It might not relate to stuff like "innovation" at all but first impressions are extremely important to assert a game's tone.
I don't think it's odd for me to say that if Zelda just stuck to mildly updated versions of OOTS graphics & CoD would drastically switch from one unique and original art style to another, it'd drastically change people's opinions of the game before gameplay even comes to the table.
Now I'll make one more point to avoid most post becoming too long, but as much as innovation is something people reward heavily, sequals are meant to be spiritual successors to their predecessors.
I can tell you this much, as much as people like pikmin, imagine if the next zelda released had pikmin's gameplay? As in, every single part that makes zelda, zelda, is removed.
It doesn't matter if the game is good or not, fans of the old games, who expect to get "the zelda they all know and love", would most likely be furious.
Now I find it ironic how nintendo games always being "The same" comes up in the thread for Skyward Sword, a game which, according to review impressions so far, actually took motion control to a level we haven't seen properly executed this far.
I can tell you this much, I'm the type of person who
doesn't like just playing "more of exactly the same".
However, I'm also not the type of person to just buy a game cause it has my favourite character in it.
A game needs to innovate, however, this innovation needs to be solid and work towards improving the game.
In a game like Zelda, removing the dungeons isn't "innovation" or even welcome change, it's unnecessarily switching up an established formula for the sake of seeming different.
Wether you save a princess or not in mario might lead to a welcome surprise, but honestly? it doesn't drastically affect the gameplay experience.
The most important question tends to be, what does?
Removing platforming from mario would literally kill the core of the game, what needs to be done to a title is for it to be turned into a "platforming experience that's clearly different from
recent previous versions of the game"
I can say this much, there's enough of a difference between Galaxy and Mario 3D Land to make fans of the first not like the 2nd, and for me to really find 3D Land much more appealing looking than Galaxy.
Part of it is just the feel and the graphics, the atmosphere. Part of it is that the entire philosophy between level design and base platforming just seem different.
Mario games are almost never "the previous mario but with extra enemies, levels and tricks" (obvious exception: galaxy 2), they make a whole new game that sticks to one fundamental rule,
stick to the core design, but do it differently.
Combine this percievable difference between iterations with the fact that we don't exactly get a Mario and Zelda game every 6 months and the games become something to look foreward too, almost always "different enough" to seem like a whole new game, rather than a sequal and only as innovative as it needs to be without alienating it's own fans.
Either way, that's just my take on it, sorry for the long post.
/edit as a side note, pokemon seems more like CoD than Zelda to me when it comes to these observations I made.
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