Stop Reinventing the Wheel

Video game companies are notorious for disregarding what works under the guise of originality. Things like features, button layouts, and control schemes in general. Think about the things that make games suck, weak controls, annoying button layouts, and in this day and age terrible gameplay.

[Sieg]

You're bound to run into similarity between games. If one system works, then the same system might work for other. Somewhere along the line, new ideas come up. But in the meantime, you just gotta work with what you got.

[OdinX]

People need to realize that not everything NEEDS to change in video games; some ideas work and are thus preferable or compliment certain game types.

[KidMakeshift]

Oh gogogamer how naive you are.

[rdgneoz3]

I can see button layouts for certain games (FPS, TPS, some fighters) are great since you're able to pick the game up and play without having to reconfigure the layout to what you're use to or to figure out how to do things. But saying that if a game that comes out is similar to another game, they should copy everything about that other game, is just dumb.

A few / some similarities are OK, since there aren't many completely new and original games these days (there always tends to be a few similarities between games in the past or other works of art {movies/ literature - for story ideas or concepts. ex. Bullet time came out in movies long before Max Payne had it]). But having everything be a clone of each other would be a sad world for gamers.

[AKissFromDaddy]

1. The title of the article is actually, " Stop Reinventing the Wheel"

2. This piece is actually to insist that developers copy everything that works in a good game instead of some parts of it because everything as a whole make the copied game... good, not just specific portions of it.

3.Its really a good read.

4.GoGoGamer(submitter) makes the article appear as something that it isn't, smh.

[bozebo]

"Mass Effect 2 (especially) is a perfect example of utilizing another games playbook. If you don’t see Gears of War inside Mass Effect 2 then I don’t see what game you’re actually playing. Mass Effect 2 uses the combat of Gears expertly and then adds to it with story and RPG features, but essentially the fighting is more than vaguely similar to Gears, and do you know why? Because it works. I don’t hear people whining about the similarity, because both games are great."

lol, that is because both games just use in-built parts of the unreal engine for the shooting and cover system.

"why actually make a game, we'll just turn on this cover system in the engine we are using... done!"

Literally anybody can download the editor and make a game with the cover system and shooting in gears. But yeah, space marine's shooting didn't "feel" too good and the mele combat was a bit rusty too. Relic should probably stick to RTS titles because they have them nailed, or maybe their programmers are all PC gamers and deliberately made it bad because they knew it was aimed for consoles so they can go back to making PC games :P

[MARKUS_MAX1MUS]

and thats exactly why

Mass Effect > Mass Effect 2

[vertigosolitary]

I think there's been like 4825432 games that have copied the God Of War "instant" button feature to their game. If a developer sees that it's popular and cool, they'll undoubtedly add it to their game.

However, when it comes to the point where EVERY single developer puts that into their game, I as a person who plays video games wants to punch the TV if I see it in every game that I play.

I understand that not every game has to "Reinvent the Wheel" (pun intended, although that's the article's real title, I don't think "Reinventing the wheel" would catch anybody's eyes)

Overall, it just depends on us. Will we continue to pay for a game that pretty much is a clone of another one? (i.e. every Space Marine game in existence)