Improving Originality
I wonder, in the back of my head as I ruminate on this pet MMO project of mine that will likely never see the light of day anyway… is it a good idea to approach a game, even partially, from the perspective of trying to “fix” what was wrong with a game you’ve played in the past and found flaws with?
At first, it sounds like a brilliant idea, but upon closer inspection I think it’s something you have to do very carefully, and even sparingly, perhaps to the point of giving up on fixing some of the flaws. Two games I’ve played come immediately to mind when I think of previous efforts along these lines: Myst III: Exile and Homeworld: Cataclysm (I’d link these to official sites, but neither of them exist anymore). Both games, it so happens, were made by third-party developers, who took on the universe of another company’s creation while the parent company itself was busy with another project. Specifically, Presto Studios did Exile while Cyan worked on Uru, and Barking Dog Studios did Cataclysm while Relic Entertainment worked on Impossible Creatures.
Anyway, in both cases, the games got somewhat mixed reviews from fans of the original developer’s work, and it so happens that Exile and Cataclysm often shared the same complaints… it was easier than the original, or it lacked the cohesiveness, or took the artistic style and narrative structure somewhere different. Both games also introduced a new generation of fans to the community, who often times found themselves at odds with the more tenured members, and in some cases, were actually uninterested in the games done by the original developers. This in and of itself is something I want to go into a little deeper in another post, as I think it’s a cause of some of the divisiveness in the Myst community, but I digress.
Both companies approached their projects with the intention of “fixing” what was “wrong” with the games… removing oft-complained-about elements and replacing them with simpler or just plain different game mechanics. Presto made a conscious effort to not just make the puzzles easier than they were in Riven, but also to make them far more obvious in Exile. They certainly succeeded, though I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide whether they went too far. I think Presto was trying to make a true “Myst II”, since Riven was (and is) considered to be an altogether different beast. Maybe without Riven, Exile would seem more impressive, but it seemed more reactionary in its design than visionary (not that vision has much time to manifest itself in an 18-month pre-rendered development cycle). Cataclysm, by the same measure, reacted to many of the things people complained about in the original Homeworld: fighters had fuel concerns, the Mothership was a giant, defenseless, floating space banana, and the enemy fleet was so much a carbon copy of yours that you could actually play the single-player campaign as either race with little difference. As a result, while the game shared the same artistic style, and added a few welcome improvements to the engine, there were a number of nonsensical changes made as well, and changes that simply didn’t seem to fit into the construct of the universe that the guys at Relic had created.
Interestingly enough, Cataclysm is also what kicked off my initial thought to make an RTS where you could actually *fail* mission objectives and still be able to continue, with the game compensating as you went along, changing the structure and objectives of later missions.
Anyway, I look at what I’m trying to do - namely, come up with an MMO that I would enjoy playing - and I see myself taking his same reactionary approach to engine design, featureset development, and player controls, and I wonder if I’m falling into the same trap of trying to make a game I’ve already played “better”. Obviously the largest problem with trying to make anything “better” is that it’s a subjective term… “better” for me may be infinitely worse for a lot of other people. And yet, at the same time, I want very much to take the universe I’ve conjured up (which, after seeing Firefly, ended up being not nearly as original as I thought in some regards, but whatever), and turn it into a living, breathing place in a way that hasn’t really been done before online. Where does one draw the line between originality and improving on existing concepts? Is there really much originality left, especially when it comes to space-based games?
I’ve got more to ramble about specifically relating to my own MMO concept, but for the sake of coherency I’ll split it into a separate entry. I just wanted to throw this ponderable out there.