Has the gaming industry ran out of ideas?

 By Sam Coles:

Gaming is something I’ve been passionate about as far back as I can remember because it was always new and exciting. However in recent years I’ve lost the spark for the industry because they’ve seemed ran out of ideas because they either play it safe or they’re releasing games that came out on the Xbox 360 and PS3 which I’ve already played or owned. The problem is though is that people are praising these moves from the publishers saying that these remasters are “necessary” which I would say no they’re not.

It wasn’t always like this because at the start of the 8^th generation of consoles everything was new and exciting as we got new and interesting titles such as Shadow of Mordor and Wolfenstein The New Order which were great games. Then at the end of 2014 the first of many remasters of 7^th generation games came out and that game was Sleeping Dogs which at that point only came out 2 years ago and didn’t need a remaster and the differences where not noticeable. This slowly started a trend that has gotten out of hand and developers and publishers are releasing these games because they can’t be bothered to come up with new ideas and the people who are praising it are more than likely the younger gamers who were too young to experience games like Assassin’s Creed II and Call of Duty 4.

Let me make things clear I don’t hate remasters they can be a great way to bring games to a new audience if they are really old and are not widely available due to a platform that doesn’t look great on a modern television as it is in standard definition. A great example of this is Resident Evil the GameCube remake as good as it looks on the GameCube it doesn’t hold up well with its 4:3 aspect ratio and standard definition resolution. When Capcom released this on current generation consoles people ate it up and also showed that people were still looking for a good survival horror game which may have swayed them their thoughts about Resident Evil 7.

The point is that Resident Evil is starting become expensive on the GameCube and not everyone is a game collector like myself and it’s nice to have a bit spit and polish on an old title from the 6^th generation and below. The games that are getting “remasters” don’t need this treatment as they are already in HD and most of the games that are getting this treatment still look good on 360 and PS3 I mean for goodness sakes Bioshock on PS3 ran at a native 1080p.

I know what people are going to say to me that the industry did this during the 7^th generation, they did however not as much and they were HD touch ups of games that were not HD because have you tried playing a PS2 on a HD TV? It doesn’t look great so games like Metal Gear Solid HD and God of War HD etc. were great if you wanted to play games from yesteryear with a bit of polish instead of a fuzzy mess.

This also aggravates me as a critic because I’m reviewing games that I have reviewed 2-5 years ago which I’m starting to repeat myself and the differences in these re-releases visually are not dramatic they just up the resolution to 1080p and slap 60 frames per second on it and call it a day. Therefore there is not much else I can say about a game that I’ve already reviewed without repeating myself.

I just wanted to do a quick post about my opinion of the industry at the moment so let me know what you think do you agree or disagree? Let me know in the comments or Tweet at me @samcoles2.