Innovative Nostalgia: The gaming industry goes back to the future

AAA gaming is currently in the depths of a serious creative slump. The vast majority of high budget, highly publicised releases are mostly characterised by their adherence to formula and convention. The most hotly anticipated titles announced at this year’s E3 were sequels or reboots, such as the fifth Assassin’s Creed, the enigmatically advertised Mass Effect follow-up, and the reboot of the Crackdown series (ambitiously titled Crackdown). These remakes, for the most part, follow in the success of their predecessors without expanding or building upon the reason for that success. Even the few new IPs which emerged from the AAA market over the last year, such as the outrageously hyped Watch Dogs, proved to display a depressingly strict obedience to conventionality, preferring unengaging story structure, a typically grey, urban aesthetic, and standard gameplay mechanics with a hint of superficial novelty rather than any genuine innovation. As a rule, major releases gravitate towards a stagnant sameness, suffocating creativity.

This is perfectly understandable from a financial perspective. Massive releases such as these are incredibly expensive ventures and, to guarantee a return on their investment, developers cannot risk straying too far off the well-trodden path. The responsibility to innovate and explore therefore falls, as it does in most entertainment industries, on independent developers. The more low scale the project, the more it allows for singular creative direction, thereby increasing the possibility for experimentation and deviation from the norm. This is how titles like Braid, The Stanley Parable, and Papers, Please came about — games which could afford to take massive creative risks, free from the burden of huge financial stakes.

Paradoxically, some of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed of these titles are those which have their foundations in decade old franchises, as sequels or pseudo-sequels to veteran titles. A common quality of such indie releases, particularly those which were part of the crowdfunding rush of 2012/2013, is their retro feel and their reliance on nostalgia as a selling point. Titles such as Broken Age and Pillars of Eternity are made in styles that have grown steadily out of fashion. The point-and-click adventures and isometric RPGs which these games take inspiration from are extremely dated and almost unplayable for a modern audience, due to advancements in technology and design efficiency. Because of this, it could be argued that independent developers are just as backwards as the AAA — the latter imitating its contemporaries to cater to generic tastes while the former imitates its precursors to pander to the nostalgic.

But the way these nostalgic titles dig into the past could also be seen as an important step in video game innovation. Moving backwards is not always regression, in the same way that moving forward is not always progression. Since the advent of realistic 3D graphics, major releases have become more graphically and technically impressive, while the market has become narrower and narrower. Titles such as Grand Theft Auto 3, Mass Effect, and Halo were remarkable achievements which deserved to be bestowed with their iconic status in the games industry, but they were such monoliths that subsequent titles were heavily influenced to follow suit. Every third person game needed to implement an open world; every RPG needed binary moral choices; every shooter needed to include regenerating health. These ambitious games pushed the medium forward, but also inadvertently held it back. As a result, certain genres faded into obscurity. Isometric RPGs stopped being produced by publishers, and Lucasarts — pioneers in the field of adventure games — shut down their adventure game department to refocus production on action heavy Star Wars titles, as the market for adventure games couldn’t compare to the surging shooter genre. While this led to some of the best games of the last decade, it effectively killed these genres which were once at the forefront of video game innovation. With no one making games in this fashion, available examples grew more obscure and less relevant. To play one of these titles today often requires going to extreme lengths just to run them on current generation hardware, on top of the effort needed to get past the frustrating barrier of datedness.

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(Torment: Tides of Numenera, image via)

This is why games like Divinity: Original Sin — a hard as nails turn-based RPG with extreme gameplay freedom in the vein of the Ultima series — can still have relevance in today’s gaming world. They offer an exploration of the road not taken, combining modern graphical advancements with mechanics which may have grown out of fashion but are no less engaging than they were when they were first implemented. Such titles, like Torment: Tides of Numenera and Mighty No. 9, bridge the gap between two generations: removing the clunky unintuitive controls and hard to love graphics while retaining the undeniable quality at their heart, thereby allowing a whole new generation to experience and appreciate them.

Perhaps what these games best capture from the era that they so heavily borrow from is the willingness to put gameplay quality above everything else. These were games from a younger, more experimental era, in which resources were limited and technology was far simpler, so gameplay needed to be of a quality that could shine through such simple means of representation. Obviously, studios will never cease to make games which push for further realism, and more elaborate graphical capabilities, but the point of diminishing returns on such extravagances has long since been passed. In the wake of the graphical era, it is time to refocus and to push the boundaries of video game innovation in ways that haven’t yet been considered. In this way, the games which look back to these old titles aren’t simply taking steps back, forsaking years of advancement to celebrate the past. They are returning to pick up a torch that has been left behind.

 

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