Stagnate or Innovate

With all the kafuffle about Eve Online at the moment and the impending closure of Star Wars Galaxies I’ve been thinking a bit about innovation in games recently. Mainly about which companies are driving the genres forwards in the way in which Eve and Galaxies did so well at their start.

I don’t think Eve is any more. It may not be a popular opinion, but I think Eve has been stagnant for years now and the fact that the devs keep getting distracted by each new feature before finishing the last means that very little innovation is being done by CCP. In fact the very slow player number rise over the last three or four years really doesn’t sound much like a game that is doing much more than treading water. It’s the players that make that game and they are the gem, not CCP now.

Galaxies was a massive innovator and still has the best mechanic for gathering resources ever put into an MMO. Chasing over the deserts of Tatooine on a speeder bike while pinging your surveying tool looking for the highest concentration of a certain mineral made crafting into exploration gameplay, even if sometimes you find that perfect spot only to realise that it’s under a nest of monsters you can’t kill or, even worse, somebodies house. Still Galaxies stopped innovating a long, long time ago now.

But what of the recent games? Riff springs to mind, but that’s small refinements to the WoW model and I don’t see it being more than tweaks and improvements over what it’s trying to copy.Not to say that’s a bad thing, it’s just not really innovation.

The upcoming games may be good, but they are still out of reach for now. For all of The Old Republic’s samey looking combat I have to hope that they will bring real innovation with their storytelling. Guild Wars 2 is where my hopes really are though. There are still aspects of GW1 that games should consider copying and yet haven’t…

There are other games of course. EQ seems more caught up in progression servers than moving forwards from my view on the outside. LOTRO seems to have stalled somewhere and moved backwards with their release of content as there was a time when you would be promised more book content every couple of months. Now we wait a long time and I think that’s something important that has been lost. Of course being brought out followed by the move to free to play probably got in the way of a lot of this.

The game that I really think is doing the most for innovation at the moment is Star Trek Online. I know others think that they “promote stagnation” (to pick the obvious persons view about Cryptic) but having watched Trek Online go from it’s roots of a rushed release on a dangerously compressed development time scale to a game with really good communications with the community (something Eve really lacked this weekend), regular content releases with the weekly episodes (when they return after episode 4 is released) and a constant stream of actually sometimes quite good user generated content through the foundry. Sure the game still has problems but they do seem to be addressing them one by one (over a very long period of time to be sure). Of course there are still massive glaring flaws in the game of course, but this isn’t about what’s good and what isn’t. It’s about who pushing things forwards the most and I have to say that from here it looks like Cryptic have picked up the baton and are running with it in several areas nowadays.

I am, of course, most likely wrong. Which other companies still do a good job at innovating and pushing MMOs forwards? What cool new features haven’t I heard about in games?