The Chains of Genres (Patreon)

In my last video, I brought up the infamous Jamie Gresimere quote…

"In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over and over again. And so, if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game."

In it, Jamie himself explains his issue with it, and clarifying what he really meant. In that same interview with T-Posers, he made another point ireelevant to my topic at the time, but actually stuck with me a lot more. When talking about having Chief throw grenades, and limiting his arsenal to two weapons, he was asked if those decisions were made to account for the Xbox Controller.

He said…

"At that point, shooter meant you've got eight different weapons on the number key, if you want to throw grenades, you hit six, and then operate it like any other weapon… it was all ID's baseline, everyone reskinned DOOM over and over and over. Halo threw out a lot of that stuff early on… At some point, it becomes a barrier to entry of "well, if you didn't play the previous six games in the genre, it's baffling what the mechanics were. So, we were trying to refresh a lot of that stuff, create a new entry point.

The reason it stuck with me is how many times I've witnessed this happen first hand.

Apex Legends might not be the most popular multiplayer game on the market, but I'd definitely say it's one of the most influential, as for a solid year, from Fortnite to Rainbow Six Siege, lots of games were just straight up copying its ping system, because despite having more than twenty years of Multiplayer shooter development, no one decided to iterate on call-outs from games as old as Battlefield 2.

In every Battle Royale game, developers figured, if you want to communicate, use VOIP, because that's what the last six games in the genre did.

I'm not sure if cover shooters ever did escaped their genre conventions after sixteen games, let alone six.

And of course, I'm a racing fan, which means I've been through this process 3-4 times.

What's unfortunate though is that when developers make the decision to wipe the slate clean and create that new entry point, it's rarely in the context of a whole new game. Most of the time it's done as a sequel to an existing formula.

For some reason, strategy games seem to be the easiest examples. The Dawn of War franchise of Warhammer 40k games has done this twice, and Command and Conquer rather infamously dropped all of its conventions in the finale of its decades long Tiberium saga.

One of the consequences of companies making far fewer games than they used to is that you won't get the genre iteration that leads to genre's evolving. Figuring out what to keep and what to leave behind, because honestly, you never know something until you try it.

It's really funny to look back at old interviews for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and watching developers spit out their drinks when asked if Crossplay between Windows Live and Xbox 360 would be possible.

I'm someone who's got plenty of ideas for games that are extremely iterative, or just made up of mechanics I like from games I've played. I'm not at all against wearing one's inspection on their sleeve, but when you're following not just one game, but the last six, I doubt it's inspiration.