When we talk about the best video games of all time, one factor tends to outweigh all the others: innovation. Scroll through a list of the greatest games ever made, and you'll constantly be faced with the games that changed the game. On IGN's , 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario 64 makes the top 10, while no other 3D Mario games do. The reason? You never forget the first game to blow your mind, to do something you'd never seen before. Super Mario Galaxy and Odyssey may be more polished, may have smoother controls, but Super Mario 64 presented a new way to play that changed the medium forever, and that tends to supersede everything else.
But as we look at the games that are up for the top prize at this year's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Game Awards, they are, bꩲy and large, games that build on prior success.
I haven't played much of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Alan Wake 2, which I hear does some really cool stuff, so I'm going to leave it out of my considerations here.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 4 Remake is great, but it's a modern reworking of an established classic. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is a lot of fun, but it's an improvement on the formula established by Marvel's Spider-Man and Miles Morales. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Th🌌e𝔍 Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is wonderful, but it reuses the map from Breath of the Wild. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario Bros. Wonder has a lot of new ideas, but♑ none of them are big and bold enough to jump out of the shadow of 2D Marios that came before.
Baldur's Gate 3 is the game I most expect to win, but its overwhelming popularity has little to do with actual innovation and more to do with the appearance of innovation. Larian's latest is building on the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Divinity: Original Sin games the studio made before just as much as Tears of the Kingdom or Spider-Man 2 are standing on the shoulders of their predecessors. Baldur's Gate 3 was such a breakout hit, though, that it feels entirel꧃y new for the mass audience that has discovered it.
But, isn't that how we usually use the term innovative? When Doom launched in 1993, it was such a defining game that first-person shooters were just called "Doom clones" for the next decade. We look back on Doom as a game-changer. But was it really? id Software had released a first-person shooter the year before in Wolfenstein 3D. Most of Doom's innovations weren't mechanical, they were technological. Really complex texture mapping made the game look more immersive and realistic than games had until then, and it had an incredible sense of speed. But Doom wasn't, fundamentally, a different kind of game than Wolfenstein. Just like Mario 64 wasn't, fundamentally, a different kind of game than Jumping Flash!
While critics and players tend to put a premium on innovation, there isn't much that's truly new. What we're actually prizing is the stuff that feels new. Breath of the Wild felt new because there had never been an open-world 3D Zelda game before. Baldur's Gate 3 feels new because it's bringing Divinity: Original Sin 2's gameplay to a bigger audience with a huge increase in production value. That shouldn't take away from these games. Not at all. But it should make us question how much innovation actually matters. Maybe another game did it first, but who cares? If a game incorporates ideas that feel fresh in a way that makes them compelling to play, that matters a whole lot more than whether those ideas are entirely new. After all, is anything?
