Are games getting predictable?

[McMock]

I find that they are, up to the point where I can predict what will happen almost up front. Scene 3 - long cooridor, seemably empty. You KNOW that at the end, there will be an ambush. Do cooridors exist without an ambush in real life? Yes. But they don't exist in the game world. And it gets soooo tiring.

Oh look. A bridge. And I've just picked up a panzershrek. I WONDER WHAT WILL HAPPEN? I WONDER IF, LIKE REAL LIFE, NO TANK WILL SHOW UP BECAUSE THE ODDS OF THAT HAPPENING ARE MICROSCOPICALLY SMALL. *walls gets knocked down and a fucking huge tiger tank shows up *

I hate that kind of stuff in movies, and now it seems to have creeped up in games too. That whole 'if there is an opportunity to surprise the player with something cool, we should do it' kind of thinking that no executive bigshot seems to realise that it has been done a million times before. And nobody ever bothers coming up with new tricks. You could do so much with peoples suspension of disbelief here. They know you're gonna drop a tank on them when you give them a panzershrek. Drop an airplane on them and have them hide from it, instead. BUT NO! ROLL IN SURPRISE ENCOUNTER TANK #1

There are so many examples I could give. It's gotten to the point where hardly anything that happens in a game I haven't seen before. And it makes me long for the times when you went into a level and there wasn't a single spin in it. Just simple mario, mushrooms in blocks, and jumps. Pure gameplay, but at least gameplay that didn't try to be anything else, didn't try to be a movie, and succeeds at being a lot of fun.

Yeah. It bugs me. I actually thought of all of this when I was playing metal gear solid the other day, and finished it. It had a lot of great moments, and not a single one of them predictable. Like, at the end level, I'd go up tthe ladders, explore, and I was absolutely certain that there would be a squad waiting for me. That there would be a trap, and instead there was just an enemy. Nothing special. Thank god for game designers like that.