Seven years ago, Bilzzard Entertainment released Diablo II, the first commercial game I ever worked on. The ESRB rated it 'M', and we were worried that retailers like Target and Wal-Mart might not carry it, due to the buckets of gore and blood that our artists had detailed the game with. We knew we were building something special, and a great deal of care went into building the game. At every step of the way, we asked ourselves: is this fun? Is it too easy? Are we being true to the spirit of the original Diablo?
We first demonstrated the game in 1998. Each time I showed the game off to magazine editors and reporters, they'd ask me a few questions, and typically the conversation went something like this:
Me: This is Diablo II, a sequel to Diablo, which is a hack-n-slash third person role-playing game. In the first one we had three character classes, in Diablo II, we have five all-new character classes. We tried to keep the controls the same as the first one, so it's still very friendly, you just point and click, and we've added several more features to make reassigning keys and controls much more friendly.
Reporter: Wow. This game looks great. When's it shipping?
Me: It ships when we're done with it. We still have a lot to polish, things we want to complete, features we want to implement, and we have the Blizzard reputation to uphold of releasing a game that doesn't have a lot of bugs.
Reporter: So how much of the game is done?
My response here varied, depending on how far along we were. At the very beginning, I was saying 50% because Acts I and II was all that we had done when we were first showing it off, and it was two years later that I could say definitively Summer 2000. When we presented it at E3 in 1998, there were people who played for hours in that first area, and we knew we had something really special.
In building Diablo II, we knew we were building a proper sequel. We always felt that we had to take the game up a notch, that it couldn't just be Diablo I with a new graphics set, and that was partially why it took so long to make Diablo II -- the play area was several times as big as the first Diablo, and with 5 new character classes with all different skill trees, it really set a new standard for what a sequel should be. No one ever questioned Diablo II being a game in its own right.
This is ultimately, why I hate game sequels (though I myself have worked on them). It's not enough to me that they have new areas, or a new graphics set, in my mind, such an offering is just an expansion set. It should be a new game with echoes of the past game. It should be familiar, but totally new, and if one were to examine a list of "great games" one should see games that didn't have sequels, and games that did in there. I don't mind a games list that includes Zelda: A Link to the Past along with Zelda: Twilight Princess and Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. All three Zelda games are very different, and each game brings something different, yet remains familiar.
These days, everything has a sequel, and a lot of games have sequels that are released at regularly scheduled intervals. The games industry is increasingly hesitant to take risks now, and that means sequelizing the crap out of a game before everyone loses interest in it. On the flip side, to sequelize something to that extent destroys the value of that brand name. Take the popular racing game "Need For Speed", which has a franchise so sequelized that they use subtitles to differentiate the games rather than numbers.
All these sequels are indications that the game market has gone conservative. To make a new game entails a certain amount of risk -- namely funds that could go towards a "proven" game license are going to an unknown. Brand name marketing must be done, advertising and so forth. With game studio names meaning nothing to everyone except the most hardcore of fans, the names that the average consumer is familiar with is the names of the franchises and the publishers. The anonymity of the people who make the games, and the studios they work for also don't help the situation. But the games industry can't really survive without retail, and for retail, one needs publishers to put the boxes in the Wal-marts and Gamestops across the nation.
A games publisher doesn't want something new, they want something like what everyone else is selling, which is why everyone these days is selling a MMOG, a first person shooter, a driving game, a movie or tv license of some sort and some kind of puzzle/casual game. Take a look at any of the major publisher's sites and that's what you'll see. There's very little that's new and innovative, it's the same thing year after year with newer and better graphics. Once in a while you get a new spin on an old genre, but new games that move the industry forward are few and far between.
I admire those game designers that can create something new and innovative and bring it to market, games are simply too young an industry to have expired out of ideas, but with publishers running the games industry, it seems all too likely that players will be playing retreads for the forseeable future.
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