Recently, Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls designer David Cage made a controversial statement to Official Playstation Magazine stating that video game sequels are killing creativity and innovation within the industry. The easiest example to site in this case would be the Call Of Duty games. COD games haven’t really evolved much in recent years. No where is this more evident than by skimming gaming review sites; COD scores are getting lower and lower with each iteration. Nevertheless, is it fair to condemn the entire gaming industry?
At a basic level, it is really unfair that gamers should be blamed for wanting sequels. If a quality game comes along, developers should be encouraged to evolve that concept whilst still maintaining the core identity of the series. Over time too, better hardware becomes available for more robust games to be created, and fans will want to see a new take on their favourite series with these new hardware. It will undoubtedly help the hardware sell too, as fans will be more than willing to spend their money.
15 years ago, we had a spate of sequels in the gaming industry. We had a number of Tomb Raider games, Resident Evil games and Final Fantasy games to name a few. These games even appeared on an almost yearly schedule. Yet gaming survived. If creativity and innovation is stifled by sequels, surely the gaming industry would be in a much more worse state than it is today. In fact, it could be argued that those old sequels helped built a core fanbase of video gamers.
When gamers are tired of a series’ formula, developers will know. Plenty of series no longer have a foreseeable future. A good example would be the Suikoden series. After 5 iterations, Konami has not made any inclination of making a new game in the series. So much so that while the series may have gotten stale a few years ago, the lack of quality JRPGs have some fans clamoring for Suikoden to return. As such, the gaming industry can essentially take care of itself. The same happened with the Resident Evil series. As gamers grew tired of the old classic Resident Evil formula, Capcom knew they had to make some changes to the series. Resident Evil 4 was then born.
Quite a few new IPs were created this gen. Perhaps it’s the fact that this generation of console gaming has gone on for longer than usual, but nevertheless, we’ve had a good amount of good new titles. From Uncharted and Dead Space to Demon’s Souls and Dragon Age. There are plenty more examples out there. This isn’t even taking into account all the indie games released yearly that are undoubtedly fresh and creative, since they need to be to gain success. From my perspective, gaming is in a great situation currently. We can afford to have yearly releases of COD games as we have a bunch of other games that can make up for the lack of creativity or innovation associated with COD games.
As a final thought, it is hard to take David Cage seriously at times. This is the same man who is proud of Heavy Rain’s butchered storytelling. At the end of the day, sequels help to maintain interest in the gaming industry as gamers wait for developers to create another great IP. Both new games and sequels are important contributors to the gaming industry as a whole.
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