Lets talk themeing... (and a little about zombies)

Name how many times you've seen this in a game

So in recent events, the Dying Light team commented on the state of zombie games and the possibility that they're over-saturated. They gave a statement some would expect, but a fair and just one, essentially saying there's a healthy market for zombie games. The next point they make is a very good one, and the one that certainly helps set the tone for the article: "Its a setting or a theme you can adapt to various video game genres". Now where I stand I can see why they'd have to answer this question. Zombies used to be an element used a sparing amount across media, but in the last five or so years their popularity has exploded and they've practically had at least triple the attention. That's not just video games either, I'm talking television, books, spin-offs, and merchandise as well. Its gotten to the point where you can expect to see quirky "zombie hunting" gear at a gunshow.

Oddly as a person that grew up loving, and very supportive of the whole creature horror with a B grade biological mutation creating monsters, and killing off a cast of heroes, I can't get behind zombies for whatever reason. They're just too human, too dumb, and get old too fast. At least with bug aliens I can expect to see some occasional cool designs, or get curious as to any unique explanations about how or why they're invading. Zombies... not so much. However they're not stopping me from enjoying a good game, and they're not a problem to me in any way. I still enjoy some zombie-centric games (I still want to pick up Dying Light sometime), and I think its a healthier trend than just making everything copy and pasted grunt soldiers. However that's where my annoyance kind of does kick in. For every 15 games with generic copy + paste enemies we've seen before, we just might get one that has some cool and possibly even new alien designs brought to the table. (in a working fun function of course. Biker fans can attest to the fact that there is a biker game with Road to Hell, but its not like they'll want to play it.) I begin to wonder why we just don't have many cool new ideas, when we've got so much going on in the world of both reality and fiction.

On one hand I would understand its a matter of practical programming, and not many people want to try something like a Reign of Fire scheme for dragons, but then when you think about it with something like oh say... werewolves, or raptors, and it boils down to the same AI as a basic zombies; They run up to the player, and hack away at them until they or the player die. Even The Order 1886 couldn't do this right with the 3 times they choose to even include a werewolf, how do you mess it up so badly? Meanwhile a cheaply made B grade game like Jurrassic: The Hunted, and older games like Turok, and Carnivores had perfectly functioning or even complex AI for dinosuars. Then ask yourself this question: How many military shooters in recent time can you name that had an enemy that wasn't Russian or some random Middle-eastern country? HomeFront, Flashpoint, and COD:Ghosts is all I can name, and none of those exactly lived up to high acclaim. Heck HomeFront basically got free press for how unique their backstory was, and that's just kind of sad. We have countless countries here, so many possibilities (what if any of the existing places had a new civil war?), and all we can do for the most part is recycle cold war logic of "those Russians are bad guys!". I don't get this kind of creative laziness. But if you want me to push this even further, lets move beyond just pointing out cool villains and even bringing up something else that made me think about the matter of themes and premise: Firewatch.

Now forget nearly everything you know about the core game that is out, reviewed, and probably even played by you. Lets pretend we only got the basic idea of what it was in our head, and you can cut that down into this: A game in which you play a new park ranger, with your own station, radio, buddy, and a duty. Basically a Park Ranger game. Why is this a thing we had to wait for an indie team to do? This made me question that about quite a few things. Similarly, lets look at Hardline for another example. Why did it take this long for a police centered game to surface? Closest other game, and somehow way more realistic, is the True Crimes (and Sleeping Dogs) franchise. Hardline doesn't even count for much though, because it smashed the theme up hard. So any other takers? No? Look in both scenarios a lot can be done. These concepts make for amazing video game material, much like how we digitalized sports and have that selling millions. You could also be a cop or detective, run around making arrests, taking investigations, answering reports, or heck even giving simple tickets. You could make an entire mini-game out of just giving off tickets, where you have to walk up and talk to the person, only to then see if you find anything else going wrong like drugs, illegal weapons, or just further car related problems. It'd be like a hidden object game within a whole game full of other stuff, ranging from more generic open world gameplay and shoot-outs, to stuff like RPG-like chat systems of persuasion and investigations. I suppose maybe LA Noir did something of that nature, but come on lets see a little more of it. Then there's the Park Ranger way, which can go in many different directions as well. You could manage equipment that can go bad, take up forest survival skills, tackle dangerous animals, or simply run some big management game of keeping visitors and the state government happy. Now lets think outside the box further: How about more games related to photography? We thankfully got a few underwater diving games, maybe keep that up. How about an archaeology game? We can get even crazy with this stuff to, I mean we did invent a dinosaur hunting lite-simulator, and a business management game set on mars. That's my point, games can be about just about anything, but here we are stuck in a mindset where EA barely wanted to make the first major WW1 game because they were frightened people wouldn't even know about WW1. (Meanwhile they're publishing TitanFall 2, because we all obviously know about that mech war that happened, right? That's totally the reason people are buying that, right?)

I'm still sad about the tragic losses of this depicted battle

Oh hey and speaking of Titan Fall, heck I'll give EA credit there and say that not a lot of people combined Mech elements into FPS gameplay seamlessly. So that's a cool idea in what is really just a cult-loved theme. These things can happen more often though, and it'd be great if they did. I'm not asking for anything super ground-breaking, but taking little steps to make a game pretty unique at least artistically or thematically, would be pretty cool. We've seen generic post-apocalypses, the zombie ones, the generic wars, the space marine vs aliens, and the RPG genre alone is probably 85% Tolkien fantasy, and we've even had plenty of saturday morning cartoon type games. In no way am I asking for those to be abolished (especially not cartoony and space marine games, I love those), but that path has been not only traveled, but its a freakin' tourist stop by this point. (wait, does that even work with the metaphor?) I'm just asking for a little more variety and diversity in what we do get to see. We can get a werewolf game in the same world as we have five upcoming zombie games, and things will be fine.

To be honest, I definitely have to say I miss games that had a mentality like the Turok franchise. This was a series that had portals in space, lizard men, dinosaurs, dinosaurs with cyborg implants and/or rocket launchers, native americans, pseudo-futuristic humans, ape monsters, insect people, aliens, robots, a mutated gunship, zombies, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. The developers through all this stuff at you and said "here's you're setting, and kind of a story to tie it together." and it was awesome. If you thought that was awesome, just wait until you see that imagination go into the weaponry. Even the gritty reboot took place with a weird portal, a foreign planet full of dinosaurs, and some soldiers with a dark project going on who dressed up like metallic-silver helghasts. This game was full of imagination, and threw all sorts of stuff into this completely fictional and crazy world, without going so crazy as to just be entirely unmemorable surrealist nonsense like some platformers. Looking ahead, the closest coolest thing I can think of on the major market (indies are always doing crazy stuff), is Horizon: Zero Dawn. Post-apocalypse, native american culture, and robot dinosaurs all in one setting. Thank you Guerrilla Games!

So I don't know what better way to summarize this other than just asking people to think on this some. At the end of the day all I'm asking for is some extra bit of imagination. Games like any other art medium have the ability to be and do anything. They have a way to immerse players in settings that will never exist. Think of all the barely touched mythologies, the military possibilities yet unexplored, or what weird ideas we could combine. I'm not asking for zombies, terrorists, space marines, etc to stop or go away, but I am asking that before you decide to make generic zombie modern warfare 6: zero-G reckoning, maybe think about the possibility that nobody else is currently working on a good pirate game, or a game where you need to fight off a vampire horde.