A fascinating article, to be sure. I think a lot of devs--even ones I like--get hung up on some gimmick of their game's and they forget that most gamers have seen all this before. I really think that if developers would think of their games in a story context first and build the game from there, game development would ultimately be better off.
Currently, it appears as if they go about things by looking at the game genre first, then iterating on it. "Hey, I want to make a 3D Platformer." "Cool. How do we make it different?" "What if it had teleportation that turned your character different colors?" "Alright, awesome! This will clearly be the greatest game ever" "Yes. I agree with your assessment. Let us spend forty million dollars on this game now." "Okay."
As a result, we get something that doesn't, at its core, feel very special. Even if it's done well, it's not interesting enough to retain attention.
Any good storyteller will tell you that one of the most important aspects of storytelling is surprise. If your audience knows what's going to happen next, your audience won't care. Games are quite similar.
If developers were to focus on story first and gameplay second (realizing that gameplay is a way of telling a story, thus avoiding the trap of "story first, thus horrible cutscenes"), they'd have to come up with mechanics that supported the story.
Let's say you've decided to make a game about a thief in 1930s Paris during a zombie apocalypse. The city has been walled in, and now everyone's just waiting to die, sometimes shuffling between the other cities that survived on massive, heavily-guarded trains.
What kind of gameplay would work best for that? How can thieving be made interesting? How do the zombies affect gameplay? (obvious answer: they serve to influence the attitude of the narrative and present a natural barrier that keeps players from leaving the city)
Asking all these questions can result in new kinds of gameplay that feel more organic, coupled with an interesting story. Instead of being Gameplay + Gimmick + Bolted-on Story, a game with the story developed first, if it's done correctly (See: Max Payne 2's greatness as opposed to Max Payne 3's terrible overuse of cutscenes, even for simple things like climbing ladders), ends up feeling like a more organic whole.
So yeah, if you want more innovative gameplay, stop trying to come up with gameplay mechanics out of the ether: let them from organically from the story you're trying to tell (and what successful AAA game doesn't try to tell a story?).
I gave up on Assassin's Creed: Revelations because the story sucked; while the mechanics were fine, they were somewhat stale, and there really isn't much reason to stay with that franchise for gameplay that hasn't fundamentally changed (aside from the hook-blade and bombs that Ubisoft were HYPING as if it was going to change everything--kinda proving my point) since Brotherhood.
It's not to say that designing a game with gameplay first won't always work--Dishonored, which hyped the teleportation gimmick up, was still brilliant because of its massive emphasis on player choice, as well as its flawless use of the first person perspective in everything from melee to shooting to to climbing to swimming and even basic walking. Of course, having a great story (too many people confuse
plot with story, but that's another discussion for another day) definitely helped, but Dishonored is one of those rare gems that did
everything right from a gameplay perspective. Too bad people felt like it
had to be Thief 4, rather than its own, unique thing.
Um, Bulletstorm tanked. Not sure why he thinks he's in a position to give advice for success.
Your ignorance of the article aside, Bulletstorm's failure was a result of a terrible demo, off-putting advertising, and a really short single-player campaign with co-op multiplayer. For whatever reason, people seem to prefer versus.
Oh, and it wouldn't let players jump, which made movement
suck.
It was a great game in a lot of aspects, but it needed to be longer (lengthy first-person perspective games tend to perform quite well; otherwise, they need substantive multiplayer) and have some genuinely unique skillshot stages instead of recycled campaign nonsense.
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