Are games getting predictable?

[McMock]

That's not true, Darkvare. Come on. Game creators are just losing their edge. They're afraid to so something risky.

How many superpowers can you come up with? Let's say, sandman, who is capable of shooting a ray of sand at you. Deathman, who can extract life out of you with his mind. Not very hard to come up with something here.

Yet every video game that has a superpower in it has a variant of bullet time. Bloodrayne, a vampire, has some kind of crappy aura something that comes down to bullet time. It's completely unrealistic, there are so many more cool thing they could do with the concept, yet rather than come up with something, they copy Max Payne. Because that works.

I understand why it's being done. It's risk minimalisation and you see it with movie studios as well, it's done because games cost so much money to make that they damn well can't afford to have one flop.

But I think there is a big difference between doing it for trivial, important matters, and taking it too far and having it influence the really creative, vital things. You can steal what works from the good games, but you can't skimp on having a good story, or a nice set piece, because unlike with game mechanics, a good story really turns into a bad one when it's recycled stuff.

So I disagree with you. It is very much possible to avoid clichés. Not alltogether, and not in every department, but in story, level design, things like that, games don't need to re-use what other games have done, and they do not benefit from it at all.