Poll of the Day 2/01/06

[Rob]

Innovation is great, but I would prefer everything to just be greatly done, even if that means it is mostly the same, but top notch.

[DanTheManPR]

Well.... inovation is important, but it takes a little perfecting before innovation is fun.

[Fzoulcmbyl]

Yep, Innovation is good and all, but I could play a game like BG2 forever.. no matter how old the engine, or style is... if they had continued on to make other titles under the same "heading/style" I would own them all.

Things like:

Waterdeep

Mythdrannor

Ravenloft

Cormyr


:thumbup:



Fzoul

[Cloudw4lker]

Good innovation is better but innovation in general is sometimes not a good thing. I'm sure many members could name games that tried something new and failed horribly at it.

[Rob]

I agree completely Cloudw4lker. The reason I chose this question is because I have seen quite a few posts lately that pretty much stated being through with WW2 shooters. Got me thinking, what would be better, a great and refined WW2 shooter or a shooter with a new theme and tried to innovate the genre but was still a bit raw.

[DanTheManPR]

Interesting, Rob. I would use two examples:

Wolf ET: I would argue that the XP system, unit classes and objective-based gameplay is something rather inovative for a WW2 shooter (when it was released). It was really fun - I played the game a lot.
Call of Duty: I wouldn't say there is a whole lot of innovation here. Iron sights, holding two guns, but when you played a deathmatch it came down to very tried-and-true gameplay. It's also one of the most polished shooters ever. Really fun - I played it a lot.

But what if:
Wolf ET came out ten years ago, and Wolf-ET style games were the norm, and suddenly out of nowhere this revolutionary "innovative" game called Call of Duty came out.
Does anything really change? Both are still fun. Maybe some people will be sick of the Wolf ET formula, and will play CoD for that reason.

I can't say that innovation is bad - every idea was innovative at some point in time. Polish is something that happens later. If anything, innovation and "perfected gameplay" are just two different steps to any gaming concept.

[OldsterHolster]

Tough call. I voted "old, but perfected, gameplay," but I don't see why we can't have both. Doing something "tried and true," but with new twists, or features, is really all that's needed to make a game innovative. Too much innovation, with it's seemingly inherent bugs and problems, quickly gives a game a bad reputation and plays havoc with the sales; so it's understandable why developers are cautious. Edward.