Yes, there are gamers who love getting the same old thing, but I can’t think of any gamer who wouldn’t be excited for something brand new, offering content they’ve never seen before. Resident Evil built the survival-horror genre from the ground up along with the Silent Hill and Fatal Frame franchises, just to name a few. However, Dead Space premiering in the latter half of last year showed a new science fiction spin on the survival-horror genre that proved there was still something very significant out there which gamers hadn’t quite seen yet. Touching on innate fears that gamers possess and offering a mechanic of strategic dismemberment as opposed to yet another first-person shooter where you back out of the room and just keep shooting. Playing through the title, the removed heads-up display along with the ambient atmosphere illustrated a new universe, loaded with new lore that players hadn’t seen before and was able to stand up against many other titles coming out last year. Conversely, Mirror’s Edge offered up a new amount of gaming content in the form of truly well designed parkour elements that made the game fun to race through, however rocky combat elements made the game suffer on a few levels. Ultimately a relatively fun title, it could potentially be able to garner better design in the form of a sequel. But what this boils down to is that constantly changing gaming tastes in regards to the community as well as design boundaries that creators are willing to push frequently shape the experiences gamers will be able to have and those developers should be applauded for offering us something new.
Regardless of whether or not a franchise is selling, that doesn’t demand it be driven into the ground for the sake of turning another buck. As far as I’m concerned, Guitar Hero 2 was the last title worth being played in the series as everything thereafter has dropped off the quality scale like a rock off a cliff. Essentially, without the new ideas necessary to keep a genre fresh, it’ll likely disappear on a long enough timeline. That’s why it is a necessity that games persistently offer players at least one new mechanic that drives the creative elements of the industry forward, as long as it isn’t proven to be superfluous or without contextual meaning to the overall aesthetic of the title in question. Creativity is great, however repacking the same thing over and over eventually becomes out of the question. If things never change, gamers will eventually realize that they are being fed crap and will go out of their way to seek out, mod or design games that will feed the intellectual cravings they have in particular. While it may be true that the more things change, the more they stay the same; this doesn’t have to be the case. A new title borrowed, rented or even bought on an impulse can’t possibly hurt anymore than the next time you purchase a copy of Madden or Call of Duty, the difference will simply be that you might see something that you’ve never seen before and that can’t possibly kill you.
