8 Ways All Video Games Are Becoming Exactly The Same

The video game industry has always followed trends. Whether it was chasing the success of modern-military first-person shooters at the tail-end of the 2000s or jumping on the console-mascot platformer craze in the early 1990s, the biggest video games have always been influenced by whatever was popular at the time they were made.

But while that might be true for any medium, it gets to the point with games where the biggest new releases all seem to be different versions of the exact same title.

Developers and publishers might as well have a big checklist of features that every other game is using, as they attempt to include every single one of them without considering whether they suit the game or not.

Consequently, you could pick up any major new title without knowing anything about it and understand everything perfectly after only a few minutes or so. And while that might be beneficial for a couple of franchises or genres, the approach is inevitably going to strangle creativity, transforming the industry into an even more homogeneous mess.

Just like how first-person shooters were the dominant genre in 2007, the gaming industry is obsessed with open world games in 2017. All of the big publishers are getting in on the action, taking cues from the Ubisoft school of design by making everything a sandbox game whether it needs to be or not.

But not only are the majority of titles coming out new instalments in the open world genre, even franchises that used to be linear are adopting the same sandbox design philosophies.

While they might not be strictly speaking open world games, even titles like Uncharted 4 have adopted a sandbox approach to level design, creating wide-open spaces that give players the opportunity to tackle objectives however they see fit.

So while it's technically true that not every new release can be classed as belonging to the open world genre, most big releases definitely feature the same sandbox approach to level design.