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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

>“Creativity has gone”. Black and White (2001) and Spores (2008) are perfect counterexamples.

Bit strange having to reach back 20+ years in a 25 year review to prove "recent" examples of creativity.

Game devs do seem to stick to tried & tested formulas especially with AAA titles which are major financial bets.

e.g. If you compare overwatch and say DotA. The one is a 1st person shooter the other a RTS engine. Yet conceptually they're identical. ~5 a side lane push mechanics with two tanks, two dps and a healer with each having unique but complementary abilities to emphasize teamwork and coordination. CSGO, TF2, League etc...same thing over and over

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> If you compare overwatch and say DotA. The one is a 1st person shooter the other a RTS engine. Yet conceptually they're identical. ~5 a side lane push mechanics with two tanks, two dps and a healer with each having unique but complementary abilities to emphasize teamwork and coordination.

Conceptually identical is a pretty strong claim there. Overwatch has no concept or equivalent to the various RPG-style mechanics in MOBAs (e.g farming, items, XP, shops) while DOTA2 only has a single match type (i.e. no Assault vs Push vs etc) and significantly less mechanically demanding gameplay (barring a few micro-intensive characters like Meepo or Brood). Hell, I'm not sure if I'd claim OW even has lanes instead of flank routes (compare an Overwatch lane to a CS lane) and the majority of DOTA supports aren't even healers (maybe 5ish?)

I feel like we often do this with video games, comparing aspects that are very low level to the game and are often just a part of being interactive pieces of media. Would chess to checkers and be conceptually identical? They're both board games and involve the same base mechanics (move pieces across the board, capture enemy pieces). And if they are, would that make one of them a worse game? Should we have not made checkers since we already had chess?

>Game devs do seem to stick to tried & tested formulas especially with AAA titles which are major financial bets

Because that's what makes the most consistent, safest money. That's really all there is to it. When a marginal improvement on an existing series prints you more money than investing in a risky new IP, of course innovation takes a backseat.

By comparison, aside from personal interest, indies don't have any existing series to draw from, and competing with an existing series on aspects they will most definitely beat you is a bad idea to begin with. At the same time, most popular indies suffer from staying in their lane too, continuing to pump out similar style games, as they notice the same issues. People making RPGs continue to make RPGs, people making platformers continue making platformers, etc.

And in a twist of irony, this is what developers should be doing anyway. Experiment with spin-off games, iterate on your main line games. The only problem with this pattern is the humongous number of games this would create, in a market which is already very cutthroat.

Hm. Lol and dota are the same, overwatch is TF2 meets lol+dota, and tf2 is CS with classes. There's a spectrum connecting everything you've mentioned, but dota and cs are definitely different enough.

Tf2 is casual quake and has little relation to CS.

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