06-23-2015, 03:54 PM
Well no, the examples I gave are pretty tame. I was honestly going to expand my post a bit more when I had some time, but eh.
When I said "off the rails", the "rails" I was speaking of would be games that are guaranteed to make a bundle of money rather than creative titles that they want to make. For Nintendo, side scrolling platformers have always done super well compared to 3D free-roaming ones, a fact that is true even in modern day, surprisingly. If they just wanted to produce games that they know are going to do well, they could stay firmly on those tracks and produce nothing but sidescroling platformers and never really innovate.
But if you want to go REALLY off the rails, you brought up a good one yourself. What about the Paper Mario series? Where the heck did that come from? It's neither really anything like a traditional Mario game nor like any traditional RPG we'd ever seen before. Nintendo went wildly off the tracks there and it paid off considerably.
How about Pikmin? Who would have thought a game about micromanagement would be fun or beloved? Animal Crossing? That game is literally about nothing and it's adored. And if you just want to stick to spinoffs, how about Mario Kart? That game re-innovated racing games with its item mechanics, but before that series' first release, racing games literally only did well in arcade settings, making it quite a risky venture. How about Pokemon Snap? Not a big seller, but my god how many people it made happy, and those people are begging for a sequel to this day. Wario Ware came way out of left field, and look how popular those games are. And who would have imagined the successor to Super Mario World being anything like what we got in Yoshi's Island? And let's not forget Kirby, the master of nontraditional spinnoffs, with games like Block Ball, Dream Course, Canvas Curse, Epic Yarn, and Mass Attack, all of which were phenomenal games.
The point is, Nintendo is a company that understands that the point isn't always to make a game that they know is going to make them a shit-ton of money. Getting to really flex your creative muscles is its own reward, and even if your game doesn't sell well, there's always the chance that its going to make the few hundred people who are willing to go outside of their comfort zones very happy, and that in itself is worth the risk.
... I am doing a very poor job of trying to explain myself on this topic.
When I said "off the rails", the "rails" I was speaking of would be games that are guaranteed to make a bundle of money rather than creative titles that they want to make. For Nintendo, side scrolling platformers have always done super well compared to 3D free-roaming ones, a fact that is true even in modern day, surprisingly. If they just wanted to produce games that they know are going to do well, they could stay firmly on those tracks and produce nothing but sidescroling platformers and never really innovate.
But if you want to go REALLY off the rails, you brought up a good one yourself. What about the Paper Mario series? Where the heck did that come from? It's neither really anything like a traditional Mario game nor like any traditional RPG we'd ever seen before. Nintendo went wildly off the tracks there and it paid off considerably.
How about Pikmin? Who would have thought a game about micromanagement would be fun or beloved? Animal Crossing? That game is literally about nothing and it's adored. And if you just want to stick to spinoffs, how about Mario Kart? That game re-innovated racing games with its item mechanics, but before that series' first release, racing games literally only did well in arcade settings, making it quite a risky venture. How about Pokemon Snap? Not a big seller, but my god how many people it made happy, and those people are begging for a sequel to this day. Wario Ware came way out of left field, and look how popular those games are. And who would have imagined the successor to Super Mario World being anything like what we got in Yoshi's Island? And let's not forget Kirby, the master of nontraditional spinnoffs, with games like Block Ball, Dream Course, Canvas Curse, Epic Yarn, and Mass Attack, all of which were phenomenal games.
The point is, Nintendo is a company that understands that the point isn't always to make a game that they know is going to make them a shit-ton of money. Getting to really flex your creative muscles is its own reward, and even if your game doesn't sell well, there's always the chance that its going to make the few hundred people who are willing to go outside of their comfort zones very happy, and that in itself is worth the risk.
... I am doing a very poor job of trying to explain myself on this topic.