| LilChicken22 said:
I’m talking about this quote Miyamoto said in a recent interview:
But the question that we always ask is: “Does a new character really make it a new game?” And to me, the answer to that is, “No.” What makes it a new game is new gameplay and new interactions.[1]
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Love Miyamoto and I agree but at the same time, he speaks BS.
I think all of us that lived through the 16-bit and 32/64-bit eras remember the various amounts 'clone' games that originated from popular ones during that period. Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat both had various imitators both in visuals and gameplay. Super Mario 64 created a legion of similarly playing knock offs, as did Resident Evil after RE2 blew up. Even today, do people really care about every Tetris or Angry Bird clone out there? So in that sense he is right, a new character, setting and such doesn't always make for a new viable IP.
That being said, the Nintendo approach these past few years is still crap.
Nintendo in the past didn't really have problems trying out new IPs with similar gameplay to other major IPs. The current Nintendo mindset seems to be the opposite however, prehaps it is just a issue with the industry as a whole in terms of rising development costs but the over reliance on established IPs that play slightly different doesn't mean they aren't in the same category of unoriginality as a new character that plays the same.
I mean for all his talk, outside adding slightly different vehicles does Mario Kart really play so differently over the last few incarnations? And for all his talk about not being able to come up with an idea of how to make another F-Zero game, how is it that we see a Mario Kart on every system since the SNES? How exactly is the New Super Mario Bros series any different then a remix version of classic Mario side scrollers with new abilities and stages?
I loved Miyamoto when he was a producer/designer but this seems more or less corporate speak justifying Nintendo's policies mixed with the truth. And it doesn't take into account that the audience seeing familiar characters/settings at a glance are going to think the game is similar to one in the past and judge it based on that. Reusing IPs can help have a built in audience but at the same time it can cause the audience to be judge the game on a different standard that it might not live up to as well. He is an executive and has a lot of power in determining Nintendo's direction when it comes to software, which right now is looking suspect. No disrespect but he isn't the be all or end all of the industry or how it should be run, especially these days as the Japanese side of things seems to be regressing on the major console front.
