As I said I quite enjoyed AC3 and thoroughly enjoyed the ship missions so I was quite excited by the prospect of more of these missions appearing in the next game. The main character's name may have been linked to Connor, but I thought that was just for fun as Ubisoft did say that they were bringing in a new team. Now that I've had time to think about it though, I've realised that we're steadily moving away from Assassin's Creed completely. We're no longer going to be fighting Templars and foiling their dastardly schemes, we're going to be sailing the seven seas and be out-sourced by the Assassins's to occasionally take down a Templar or two. It's then that I realised that if you look at the majority of games that have come out over the past year or so, they're either sequels or re-makes of older games. In fact I'm going to try something new here and crack out some bullet points with games that have been or will be released in 2013: DmC: Devil May Cry - A re-make of the series made by Ninja Theory, with level design by Ninja Theory, character development by Ninja Theory and break-time coffee made by Ninja Theory. (Seriously, if you're going to put credits at the start of the game at least have the decency to name people rather than keep spamming up Ninja Theory for everything) Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 - A sequel Hitman Trilogy - I'm sorry SE, I love you really but you're one of the main people who's releasing sequel after sequel Dead Space 3 - Yet another sequel Crysis 3 - Yup, sequel Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance - A sequ..actually what on earth was this? I'll leave this for another article, ignore it Tomb Raider - A terrible, awful, whiny, woe is me prequel Bioshock Infite - "Rapture in the air" quel What I'm trying to get at here is that none of this is new, they're all part of a franchise that started years and years ago that the developers and publishers and still trying to cash in on. I know the saying is "If it 'aint broke then don't fix it" but the system IS broken. We haven't seen a good idea spring up from any of the main developers in a while, sure they've added in some new features and stories but they're still clinging onto ideas that are getting rather old. Why is it that back in the PS1 days developers could push out new ideas on a daily basis and rake in the cash but as soon as they try it now they go bankrupt and have to be bought out by EA. Why do we have people like Bungie promise a new game that is nothing like Halo as Microsoft has the rights, then announce a game that's exactly like Halo? Why do we have EA releasing a new FIFA game every year with no actual changes and Activision shoving another Call of Duty game with 4 new maps and a few new guns? In fact, why do Square Enix put the Final Fantasy franchise on hold so that they can release 3 games about Lightning Did they not realise that no one bar sappy 13 year old girls liked 10? The answer's quite simple though, we're all to blame. That's right, it's your fault. All yours. We reward these developers for terrible ideas and games by continuing to purchase their games no matter what. I say that I despise Call of Duty, yet every year I fork over £60 to buy their latest mess and try out the single player. As soon as I see a new Square Enix game, I don't even bother to read what it's about I just pop onto Amazon and purchase the shiniest and biggest edition of it; I haven't even played FF13-2 yet or worn the T-shirt that came with the £70 package. I've already pre-ordered the Lightning Returns I check Amazon/GAME every day for when I can place a pre-order on Dragon Age 3 and Mass Effect 4. I'm not the only one however who's doing this, there are thousands upon thousands of us who will buy the game, complain that it's terrible and then buy the next one. Sadly with the current economic climate, gone are the days where a small time developer can get their new idea out for the general public; they have to rely on Steam accepting it or using Kickstarter to fund it. Publishers like EA won't touch something unless it's made of pure gold and in this day and age the only thing that will make money is a FPS or sports game. The younger generation don't want to sit at home on a Sunday afternoon searching for the Key of Paravandior so that they may rescue the princess or release the kingdom from eternal darkness; they want to spend 3 hour holding down a trigger and spraying everyone with bullets whilst shouting at their mothers for more juice. Even when I pop into the student union for a few cheeky pints, there are young adults spread on all the sofas playing FIFA game after FIFA game, at times spending hours there. Sure, it's great fun to play football with your friends on a large TV, but isn't it a lot more fun to go outside and play football? It sounds rather hypocritical for me to tell people to go play football outside and beg for better video games with an engaging story in the same sentence, but I remember as a child when the lunch bell would ring it would be a rush to get outside for a game of football. It didn't matter where you went during the '90s, at lunch time all the kids were outside and after school they'd still be outside. In the past 10 years we've had a dynamic shift where games like Call of Duty, that barely made sales are suddenly at the top of the ladder. That's right, there were 3 Call of Duty games before Modern Warfare hit the shelves and barely anyone played them. Sports games were for when it was raining outside and you had your friends round, even then you'd rather play Mario Kart. Sadly, there's nothing anyone can do about this any more, developers want to make money and storyline and game-play aren't enough. It's all about graphics and multi-player capability and as long as you've got these two things sorted it out, it doesn't matter what your story is about. Throw in a few guns and you'll have children lining up with their parents at midnight for the release. Video games may still be produced and the video game industry may be worth billions and billions of dollars... but video gaming as we know is dead.
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