Nearly everything is a derivative of something from before. Occasionally something new comes up though. I don’t remember anything like Getting Over It seems to have created the Foddian game genre for example. And while Balatro uses relatively normal cards for its base, the gameplay itself is unique.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 day ago
That’s pretty much been the landscape of major commercial gaming since I’ve been alive. Just replace Fortnite and Overwatch with the current popular game. Doom, Diablo, Minecraft, etc.
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 day ago
The MOBA genre as we know it today simply took Warcraft 3 and tweaked the gameplay a bit with the original DOTA mod. But then stuff started ripping it off and we got League of Legends which, from what I could tell when these were rerelatively new, was the same thing as Dota but with different characters.
Palworld gets a lot of attention for duplicating some elements of Pokemon, but the whole game is basically a reskinned Ark, which itself is just Rust with more gimmicks.
The BR genre started as an Arma mod, then became a stand alone game, which Fortnite shifted gears from some kind of PvE game to add the BR that is dominating now, and everyone is trying to copy that. As a 40 year old gamer, it really is starting to feel like there is nothing new under the sun.
nyctre@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Even DotA itself was inspired by Aeon of Strife which was a StarCraft map. There were a few AOS-like maps at the time but DotA became the most popular. Then Riot came along and approached an ex DotA designer to help them make a successor. They also approached the owner of dota-allstars.com which at the time was the main site for DotA. Discussions, hero suggestions, fan art, pretty much anything dota related was there. Then, the owner, Fuck Pendragon, took the entire site down and replaced it with a LoL ad. Ofc all those hero suggestions were taken and implemented into LoL without crediting the creators. A few years later he also tried to use blizzard to sue valve for the dota rights but blizz and valve settled it out of court without him.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 1 day ago
Depends on how you define new. Battle Royale could be viewed as just an evolution of the arena shooter genre where you expand the map and the player count to the maximum with the “arena pickups” being randomized. Or it could be viewed as something new because it fundamentally plays differently. IMO taking things that have been done before and combining them into something that hasn’t been done before is still creating something new.
And if you want really fresh ideas, there’s always the indie scene. I will always point my finger at Noita and the absolutely insane wand/spellcrafting system which is probably the most wizarding experience you can have. You can literally create a wand that (and I’m significantly simplifying the process because honestly I have no idea how that actually works) summons a deer into a parallel world and then swaps your location with the deer making you teleport into a parallel world. And no, that is most likely not the intended use of any of the spells that go into that wand. The devs themselves were probably trying to figure out if that’s a feature or a bug.
JandroDelSol@lemmy.world 1 day ago
And ow there’s a bunch of rougelikes based around other kinds of games like dice. Not a bad thing, but Balatro has certainly started a new mini genre
rigatti@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Agree but I think the trend started before Balatro. Slay the Spire was probably more influential in that sense.
rozodru@pie.andmc.ca 1 day ago
to be fair there are many games that are like Getting Over it or Balatro or even Vampire Survivors it’s just many of them aren’t as successful or known as those games.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
The major difference being how many recurring costs you incur for chasing live services rather than just making Diablo or Doom clones.
wagesj45@fedia.io 1 day ago
Same problem, new challenges.