The best cover song of all time is a debate that comes up annually, if not more often, in TheGamer Slack. While the obvious (and correct) answer is Valerie by Amy Winehouse, that feels too easy, so I’ll proffer Nothing Compares 2 U by Sinead O’Connor, How Soon Is Now by t.A.T.u., All Along the💧 Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Cash’s Hurt, and Nirvana’s The Man Who Sold the World. I welcome an🧸y more banging covers sent by email (Joan Baez’ Dylan covers and the entirety of Patti Smith’s Twelve have already been taken into consideration), but you get the picture.

Books, too, retread the same stories time and time again. I’m not talking about sharing the same of one of Booker’s “seven basic plots”, I’m talking about actively reworking an old story for modern times. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Robert Jordan (and most fantasy writers throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, for that matter) ‘covered’ 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Lord of the Rings after Tolkien’s success. Robert Silverberg reimagined and expanded several of Isaac Asimov’s stories. I think every budding science fiction writer hꩵas tried their hand at covering, altering,🦩 or responding to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.

Films do this too! 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Lion King is famously Hamlet. She’s the Man is Twelfth Night. While The Lion King is a better film t꧋han She’s the Man, only th𝐆e Amanda Bynes film is better than the original Shakespeare. Fight me.

So why don’t games do this? The short answer is they already do. They copy ideas from each other all the time,🌼 but each idea – whether a narrative device, control scheme, or mechanic – is such a small part of the greater whole that the resulting work isn’t a bona fide cover version. Few developers spring to mind that have ever seen a game and decided to make their own version of it.

Covering a game isn’t about taking the live-service battle r𓆉🍃oyale of Fortnite and sticking it in the Titanfall universe, it would be reworking the campaign of Fortnite but setting it in, I don’t know, a sch⛎ool sports day or something. No, I’ve never played the Fortnite campaign either.

I’m sure t꧂here are a few examples of this in gaming (and I’m not including the shameless cash grab ripoffs of viral games like Among Us or Vampire Survivors), but here are a few I’d love to see.

Larian’s Dragon Age: Inquisition

This may seem obvious, but we’re starting lukewarm and getting hotter as we go on, I promise. Dragon Age: Inquisition, in the eyes of many (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:including my own), strayed too far from Origins’ formula 💜to be a completely enjoyable sequel⛎. Larian could take it back to basics, iterate on the tactical fighting, and steer clear of the trite dialogue choices.

I don’t hate Dragon Age: Inquisition, but I’m not sure I like it. Howe🔯ver, I’d definitely give it another whirl if it played more like Divinity: Original Sin 2 or, dare I say it, Baldur’s Gate 3. To be clear, I don’t ju𝕴st want the Dragon Age characters and setting transplanted into BG3 – I’d want some of BioWare’s original intention to shine through, but this is a cover I’d be guaranteed to play again and again and again.

Fumito Ueda’s Tears of the Kingdom

Tears of the Kingdom already takes a lot of inspiration𓆏 fr✃om Fumito Ueda’s work. The gargantuan Divine Beasts bear distinct similarity to the titular Colossi of Shadow of the Colossus, thematically if not mechanically. According to of with Tears of the Kingdom producer Eiji Aonuma, Ueda sent a copy of The Last Guardian to Aonuma during the development of Breath of the Wild, and some elements influenced his game design.

Now it’s time to let Ueda fulfil his dream of making a Zelda game by allowing him to cover Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom. Hyrule’s spꦇarse landscapes and minimal story in the Switch era already fit Ueda’s style perfectly, so I’d like to see 💧what he’d change if he had his own way with Link’s adventure.

Hideo Kojima’s Grand Theft Auto

Hideo Kojima is a bit of an enigma, but his games have never been afraid of being ov꧃ertly political. I want him to💦 approach the Grand Theft Auto series (he can pick whichever game he likes) with the same critical eye.

When people comment that Grand Theft Auto games are unnecessariꦰly violent and offensive, there’s a common rebuttal from players that it’s satire so it’s okay. For me, the satire has been evident in places but is often too subtle, if existent at all, to be effective. Kojima would have no qualms bringing any subtext to the forefront, and I’d love to play through his scathing take on American cultu💎re.

Hidetaka Miyazaki’s Oblivion

Obli👍vion is my favourite Elder Scrolls game, despite not being my first. I hopped on the train late with Skyrim, but going back to play its predecessors showed me the light. Oblivion stood out to me immediately for how it stretched the technology of its time to the absolute limit, creating vast plains to explore and expansive narratives from meagre technology.

I want Miyazaki to ignoreꦑ all of that. Give me Oblivion, but it’s all tight corridors and enemies standin🔯g behind corners. Oblivion, with Dark Souls combat. Let him have his way with The Elder Scrolls lore, the Daedra designs, let him scavenge the juicy meat of Cyrodiil like a deformed vulture and let’s feast on what he produces.

Gareth Damian Martin’s Titanfall 2

I told you we’d get spicy. And before you ask, no I didn’t ju෴st smush my two favourite games together like a kid playing with Barbie and Ken. Okay, maybe it’s a bit of that. But Gareth Damian Martin’s Titanfall 2 would be a very different game to the original. It wouldn’t be an action game, nor a first-person shooter, nor any of the things that make Titanfall 2 the best FPS ever made.

But I’d love to explore the worlds of Titanfall from the perspective of an ordinary person. A pilot and his trusty mech talking to civilians, giving aid where possible, and I suppose occasionally foiling the Apex Predators. Not in battle, nor jus🐲t 🃏in conversation, but perhaps… Politically? I don’t know, I’d just love a Citizen Sleeper-style RPG retelling of the events of Titanfall 2. Maybe the indie developer would retell the story from the point of view of some grunt or civilian watching the war unfold? That would be a tale worth telling.