Top Design Trends of 2008

Written on December 24, 2008.
On this most wintry of Christmas Eves, my thoughts turn to this year's prominent trends in gaming that have shaped our play habits and primed our expectations for 2009. Other blogs and enthusiast sites have already been nominating -- and in some cases, even awarding -- various titles for "game of the year" accolades.

Believe me, I'd really like to join in the fray. I only hesitate to start proclaiming this year's best of the best because, despite my eager subscription to the "hardcore gamer" identity, I only play a fraction of the games released each year. My platform allegiance to the Xbox 360 doesn't exactly help with broadening my horizons either.

So with that reality etched into our collective brains, please allow me to enumerate the big trends of 2008. How did the big publishers surprise us? What's been in the zeitgeist among game development community? Will we see a continuation of these trends into 2009? In no particular order, I give you my list of Top Design Trends of 2008:

Morality
Giving players the sense that their choices mattered and had ramifications within their games was one of the most defining design trends this year. Given their complementary natures, it's also no surprise this trend coincided with some very high profile releases to the open-world sandbox genre, including Grand Theft Auto 4, Saints Row 2 and Far Cry 2. Moral choices also figured very prominently in 2008's top-tier RPG releases, most notably in Fallout 3 and Fable 2.

While the pervasiveness of morality is fast becoming a cliché or back-of-box bullet point, there remains to be much work done to better integrate moral dilemmas into the fabric of single-player stories that make them not only more emotional resonant but also more relevant to the core play experience. Both Fallout 3 and Fable 2 consistently bombarded players with opportunities to play the saint or the devil, with the resulting consequences pandering more to player's vanity or willingness to experiment than offering any dramatic shifts in how the story would unfold. Here's hoping 2009 sees developers taking more risks with moral choices, putting even more power into players' hands and letting them live with the consequences of their actions.

Social Networking/Community
For so long the domain of Web 2.0, the concepts of social networking in console gaming matured to an alarming degree thanks to the efforts of Microsoft and Sony. Earlier in November, Microsoft did the unthinkable by smoothly rolling out the first ever operating system update for a game console, dubbing it the "New Xbox Experience". With it's personalized Wii-like avatars and enhanced cross-game party system, the NXE simultaneously sought to grab a greater slice of the casual gamer market while offering greater flexibility to dashboard diehards who demanded easier and faster ways to play games with friends.

Not content to watch from the sidelines, Sony launched the public beta for Playstation Home in early December. Rendered as a 3D virtual world akin to the controversial PC MMO, Second Life, Home is being positioned as a social hub for Playstation 3 owners and publishers alike, stressing among other things social interaction completely unattached to retail games and a unique marketing platform for the Sony brand and their partners.

Edit: User-generated content also reached a new high. See: LittleBigPlanet, Guitar Hero World Tour and Far Cry 2.

Co-Op
2008 saw a deluge of games great and small that supported, often from the ground up, cooperative play between two or more players. This has been an often ignored style of play even as the first wave of current generation games arrived on the scene at the tale end of 2005. The co-op pendulum has swung the other way this year and gamers are better for it. We saw the release of Too Human, Army of Two, KUF: Circle of Doom, Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Mercenaries 2, GTA 4, Saints Row 2, Fable 2, Left 4 Dead, Resistance 2 and Gears of War 2 to name just a handful of games that supported co-op play as more than just a lazy after thought. In a few cases, co-op play was designed as the bedrock for optimal game play enjoyment as was the case with Left 4 Dead and Army of Two.

Even smaller developers got into the act, with a bevy of top-notch Xbox Live Arcade releases leading the charge. Castle Crashers, Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2 and Bionic Commando: Rearmed reminded us all that classic game design gave birth to co-op play as we know it. 2008 was indeed a watershed year for playing cooperatively with friends. There may have been a few missteps along the way, such as the trimming of Too Human's much vaunted 4-player co-op to 2-player and the atrocious implementation of Fable 2's co-op mode. Yet it cannot be denied the popularity of co-op and one can only imagine this becoming more of a standard feature in our games for years to come.

Zombies
From the intense, co-op centric survival dynamics of Left 4 Dead, to Call of Duty: World at War's undead fascist Easter egg, it was clear that the pop-obsession of pirates and ninjas of year's past has been handily usurped by all varieties of zombies. Even games that were not marketed as "zombie games" featured the filthy, shambling undead in some form or another. Case in point are Too Human's Helheim level and the ubiquitous wasteland ghouls of Fallout 3. If there existed a year-end award for "Best Zombie Porn", the undisputed winner would have to be Valve's Left 4 Dead. This is such a noteworthy release in the way it so effectively scratches two long-standing gamer geeks itches: essential co-op play built from the ground up and virtually experiencing the zombie apocalypse with your closest friends (or for more horrifying thrills, with complete strangers).

Classic Remakes
What was old is now new again. This philosophy was exemplified in a slew of downloadable and retail "reboots" of old and revered properties. The care and fan love that went into remakes was remarkable. Developers clearly wanted to do more with these games than just polish off a few pixels, add in a wide screen mode and call it a day. Instead of taking the easy route, they updated the classic formulas for modern times while still paying homage to what made the originals such timeless artifacts.

Capcom is the clear leader in the remake resurgence game with their loving tributes to Bionic Commando, Mega Man 9 and Street Fighter 2 Turbo all within a 5-month span. They consistently set the bar so high that we can only expect more quality remakes in 2009 from all publishers.

High-Profile Indie Games
If you are a budding games developer, I personally feel that 2008 marks the first year to be officially excited to be working in the field. The awareness and acceptance of smaller budget games on all platforms has exploded in the past couple of years and the trend has only reached new heights in 2008. Free-to-play Flash games are routinely making their way into "Best of..." lists in not only enthusiast publication but the mainstream press as well. The announcement of an established publisher picking up talent from the modding community is becoming a matter of course instead of a cute, general-interest story. I can't remember a time in recent history when there were so many paths to a sustainable career in game development.

The web has always been a platform for homegrown, DIY gaming but I can't stress enough the role Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have played with their respective console download services. They are all succeeding brilliantly, proving to themselves and to consumers that smaller games are not only profitable but serve as an essential breeding ground for innovation. Innovation, I might add, with a much lower price tag for risk which serves as a rather crucial motivating factor to innovate in the first place. Special accolades need to be served to Microsoft for launching their long-awaited Community Games service with the release of the NXE.

The increasing popularity of handheld devices -- along with the arrival of relative gaming neophytes such as Apple's iPhone -- will only reinforce the demand for games that make take less time to create and play but still maintain a standard of quality that can rival traditional boxed retails products.