These are just some thoughts of mine, as this is my first blog post i will just make a general outline of what im going to be doing on here.

As you can tell my name is James Bielby, i am currently 16 and am in sixth form in england. I started making games as a hobby and until now have never really put them on the internet. the first game i actually released was a game i made for the saltworld game jam. if i ever get round to it i shall put it on gamejolt. i have recently got very into making my games and have started to put effort in to strangthen my weak areas which is mainly art. for making games i use a variety of programs when making games but more recently i have been using construct 2 as it is incredibly fast to get a prototype made and is generally fun to use.

Now on to the subject of this blog, for the majority of this i shall use call of duty as my main example but i may refer to other games throughout. When a game or series becomes successful there is an immense amount of pressure put on the developer because not only is money at risk but their reputation is as well but in some cases a game that tries to deliver what people can reputation of being repetitive cough call of duty cough. Anyway when a game gets a big following the company they can get a bit scared to try new things because they either A) do not want to disapoint any followers they may have or B) they are not sure it is something the game needs or maybe C)they dont think it is worth the risk

I will now give some example of games that either have claimed innovation but stuck to their normal thing or games that have innovated but has gone wrong or maybe even gone right

Let’s start with the obvious

Call Of Duty:

As most of you will know call of duty is made by 2 companies Treyarch and infinity ward no i would argue that it is only infinity ward that fears innovation, treyarchs first call of duty game was cod3 and after that cod world at war if you look at the difference between the two they are quite different for example cod3 did not have a pc version where cod5 (world at war) did now i wouldnt call this innovation but what i will call innovation is the introduction of mod tools although i know someone will point out cod4 had mod tools but they were publicly available until 23 nov 08 whereas cod5 mod tools were public available at launch 11 nov 08 mod tools help give the title a longer life and if the right mod comes along they may receive a large spike in sales (arma 2 with dayz for example) another way they have innovated is with zombies but personally i would say that this is not new they are many games that have seperate zombie minigames or a seperate game mode that is unlockable. infinity ward however does not seem to innovate cod4 is essentially the same as mw2 and 3 yeah they put a new tin of paint on it but its still the same room and with ghosts its the exact same thing yeah they added extinction thats the same as zombies but many thought they would add that to mw3

now ill stop with cod

Ratchet and clank:

Good innovation, the big main innovation in ratchet and clank would have to be the introduction free choice of locations in a crack i time in stead of having a planet list they added a space flight thing allowing you to litterally fly to the next panet they even added moons to add a kind of side quest type thing

bad innovation, do i even need to say it? all 4 one and q force these titles tried to innovate by adding multiplayer and not multiplayer in the way ratchet and clank had multiplayer more like full game coop and if you didnt have anyone to play with you were given bots to play with. luckily insomniac games themselves have recognized these games are baad hence they are making a sequal to a crack in time

I will continue this and add more detail but for now i need to get on with my game jam game