The popularity of shooters has grown substantially throughout this console generation. Some gamers may argue that the genre is becoming stale — a sentiment Battlefield 3 developer DICE chalks up to a lack of innovation.
Karl Magnus Troedsson, DICE’s general manager, believes that few developers take the need for evolution seriously. Troedsson believes that FPS gamers expect to see a worthwhile step forward from new games, and that a lack of innovation will cause those same games to be left behind.
The developers at DICE try to get around this issue by constantly challenging themselves to do better. The members of the Swedish studio believe that there is always something they could have improved on, and by focusing on those faults they’re able to keep innovating.
“DICE has a strong history, for good and for bad, of doing this. We constantly bash ourselves and say, ‘We could have done that better’. It might just be a rendering feature but in the end it adds up to the complete experience of what we’re doing.”
While the Call of Duty vs Battlefield debate is pointless, it encapsulates many of Troedsson’s points. Battlefield 3 ended up being a huge success for EA, and that is perhaps due in part to the differences between the two franchises. Battlefield 3‘s vehicles, destructible environments, and large player count helped it to stand out from Activision’s shooter.
Even with the differences between the two games, they did have one thing in coming: a modern setting. Troedsson, however, doesn’t believe modern settings will be the de facto standard for long — as with gameplay, developers have to change eventually.
“I think we’re going to start seeing people moving away from the modern setting, because every now and again settings or themes start to get stale and then everyone jumps over. Y’know, at some point dinosaurs are the hottest thing and everyone is making games with dinosaurs, but there are trends. It used to be WWII, and recently it’s been the modern era and people are now moving towards near future.”
Troedsson’s points also bring up the issue of AAA budgets, in that games are just becoming too expensive to make. Shooters in prticular can be a massive cash sink for developers, especially for those who want to compete with the likes of Call of Duty and Battlefield. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that developers don’t want to take risks when one game can make or break a studio’s future, leaving it hard to imagine much innovation coming from developers who don’t have the financial backing of a studio like DICE.
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Source: EDGE
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He mentions dinosaurs… Interesting… That would be innovative
turok
Developers don’t want to be innovative because they believe that if they give the gamers what they’re used to, their game will succeed. This is actually not true in many cases. The developers do that, and then, since there is no innovation in their game, it gets bad reviews, players don’t like it, and the game fails. That’s why developers do, in fact, need to innovate: so people will be delighted at the new things a game brings to the table. This mostly applies to new IPs and struggling franchises, however, as blockbuster, AAA franchises like CoD and BF don’t need to innovate as much to make their games successful. Although DICE does still innovate with their BF games, whereas Treyarch and IW have done very little with their last few games to innovate.
lol, you are a funny piece of work call of duties come out every year and battlefield games up to 5 year breaks between games and call of duty games still have more changes and innovations between games than battlefield with the exception of graphics and engines other than that battlefield has done nothing but copy call of duty and halo to get new stuff call of duty games change more than any game that has a franchise of games all bf3 had new from any other battlefield was tdm other than that nothing i could name over 20 new things that mw3 had ofcourse everyone ignores them all and says exactly what you say youre all just a joint group of haters
Alright then, state 20 things that IW changed in MW3 from past CoD games. And don’t tell me BS things like new menus and new text fonts. I mean major changes that make MW3 completely different from any other video game. By the way, each new gun doesn’t count.
Well instead of sitting around and b*tching about it, why don’t they go out and do it. Create something that is original or something close to it.
I’d rather they make Battlefield: Bad Company 3 or Battlefield 4.
That was supposed to be in response to Shalkowski.
I would like DICE to make a third person shooter with the destructible environments. Almost like a modern Socom since zipper failed miserably to make one for this gen.
That would probably be a gimmick though because it would be the same as BF3 but in 3rd person. DICE would have to innovate even more to keep it from being a copy/paste game.
I would too; I’m just saying that instead of complaining take action.
I would have to agree that some developers go very cookie cutter… Allowing companies to create and move various IPs yearly, or in some cases Bi-monthly lol (GH) with little to no innovation, to the base formula. Now obviously we know whom I am speaking of.
Other companies seem to try and fix things that needed no fixing. I really liked THQ’s Red Faction Guerilla, and I thought they might continue the trend with RF:Armageddon, sadly I was wrong in my assumption. I found the game’s “Innovative” features to be lackluster, they dumped the open world sandbox, for a cramped 3rd person corridor shooter. So really, innovation can help or hurt depending on the situation. Some people do prefer familiarity as opposed to a new experience, I think this helps the popularity of certain games as well.
“Allowing companies to create and move various IPs yearly, or in some cases Bi-monthly lol (GH) with little to no innovation, to the base formula. Now obviously we know whom I am speaking of.”
I have no idea who you are talking about.
They should have implemented a Dino mode in BF3.
T.T