One of the biggest problems I have with the video game industry is the lack of innovation. Time and time again I see games getting awards for something that is a cheap trick, a reinvisioning of an old tactic to fool the player into thinking something deeper is happening. This happens because someone in the company, or perhaps the collective, decides that it would be cheaper and cost effective to go the simple route. Rather than drive innovation, companies employ plays from a 30 year old playbook.
For this rant I need a target to examplify my point and for many reasons I am choosing Left 4 Dead. It urks my nerves the amount of people that think this game is a divine representation of what games could be. They throw so many undeserving awards at the game it is as if it is because Valve had something to do with it. There are many cases being made for the game but I will only focus on two: cooperative play and randomized levels.
People are claiming that Left 4 Dead is the best and most innovative cooperative game to come ever. They are pointing fingers at the situations it imposes on the players which force teammates to come to the aid of others. For instance there is an enemy that can wrangle a player, pull them away from the relative safety of the group and put them in a state where self defense is impossible. This requires the other players to drop what they are doing and help the teammate being attacked. Another example is how the death and revival system is implemented. When “killed” a player is put into a last stand position that allows other players to revive them. If revival fails, the player is put into a closet in the map for retrieval, generally after a group of enemies has been slaughtered.
The problem? This has been done before! Left 4 Dead is forcing situations that would naturally arise if the AI should have. Ever play Ghost Recon (1) coop on the hardest difficulty? Ever been in a situation where you or squadmates are pinned down? I have countless times, after all it is the reason they call it cooperative play. Coming to the assistance of teammates is part of the formula! Forcing the issue through specific enemy abilities is a horribly cheap trick.
What about the randomization? Surely it is a innovative feature that hasn’t been done before! After all, both enemy locations and guns are randomized. Hell, even what enemies appear is randomized! Sadly, this has been done before and the randomization has a very low upper bound. What I mean by this is that with any sort of randomization like this has specific locations or enemies that may or may not exist. You know going into a level that a certain amount of objects in the game may or may not exist.
It quickly turns into a game of asking “will object A be there?” rather than “what will be next?” This “innovative mechanism” has been used many times in the past, such as in Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. When you dive into the Worldstone Level 2, and 3 in Hell difficulty of D2:LoD, the enemy locations and types are randomized. The problem is the same though: there is a known set of enemy types that can or cannot exist. You will quickly run out of new, unexpected types very quickly. This isn’t innovation! This is faked non-repetitiveness, a cheap trick to make you, the player, think that the game is more than just a set of pre-defined levels.
So what is my point? Innovation should be driving new game development, not the idea of making money. Instead of the pathetic implementation of randomized objects, L4D could employ algorithms that teach the zombies to use portions of the environment as weapons. For example a tank that is spawned near metal piping learns it can use the piping as a weapon after a player accidently blows it up. It then knows that piping is a weapon and learns to rip the piping off the wall. If this is extended to a majority of the objects in the world you quickly create an environment that is completely open. Yes, the developers should be afraid of the game breaking itself but it is a risk, a necessary learning step in the name of innovation. Gamers aren’t going to care if the game originally breaks itself because they will be too frightened of what the enemies will learn next! Imagine facing a large enemy that all of a sudden sees a pile of enemies it previously disposed of, picks them up and starts chucking them at you. Now imagine facing him again; you are expecting the same thing to happen right? Except this time instead of throwing them he swings them at you because he saw you wield a bat. He has learned through example and now you are screwed. Using a gun could mean him using a gun, each tactic you use will be used against you. The world now becomes almost real…
So if you are a game developer remember immersive gameplay is created by creating deep and rich worlds, not by faking them with cheap tricks. Also remember Left 4 Dead isn’t the only case of this, I am just using it as an example because it is the perfect example. Almost every game suffers from this to a certain degree.
Games | John Sedlak | 
December 19, 2008 8:55 pm | 
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