A few years ago, I would have fully agreed with you, but having tried my hand at (hobbyist) gamedev broke those rose-tinted glasses for me. It’s just extremely hard to curate gameplay mechanics.
The only real way to know whether a mechanic works in your game, whether it’s fun, is to implement it. That means you’ll be programming for weeks and at the end of it, you might end up deciding that it actually isn’t fun, so you get to rip it back out.
This is also a somewhat linear process. If you think of another mechanic at a later point, you’re not going to re-evaluate all previous mechanics to see whether a different combination would’ve been more fun. Instead, you just decide whether this new mechanic adds fun to your mechanic-soup or distracts from it.
Point is, even as a hobbyist and idealist, with theoretically infinite time, I quickly learned to swallow my pride and appreciate when something just adds fun, whether it perfectly fits in or not. You’re just not going to create the perfect game. And a game that’s a sum of inconsistent, fun parts is still more fun than a coherent game that doesn’t exist.
Of course, this does not mean, you should include mechanics even though they’re overused. That seems to rather be a result from long development cycles, where games decide to include the mechanic when it’s not yet overused, e.g. when a popular game featured that mechanic, but once the game comes out, then a whole bunch of other games have come out before, which had also decided to include that same mechanic.
A few years ago, I would have fully agreed with you, but having tried my hand at (hobbyist) gamedev broke those rose-tinted glasses for me. It’s just extremely hard to curate gameplay mechanics.
The only real way to know whether a mechanic works in your game, whether it’s fun, is to implement it. That means you’ll be programming for weeks and at the end of it, you might end up deciding that it actually isn’t fun, so you get to rip it back out.
This is also a somewhat linear process. If you think of another mechanic at a later point, you’re not going to re-evaluate all previous mechanics to see whether a different combination would’ve been more fun. Instead, you just decide whether this new mechanic adds fun to your mechanic-soup or distracts from it.
Point is, even as a hobbyist and idealist, with theoretically infinite time, I quickly learned to swallow my pride and appreciate when something just adds fun, whether it perfectly fits in or not. You’re just not going to create the perfect game. And a game that’s a sum of inconsistent, fun parts is still more fun than a coherent game that doesn’t exist.
Of course, this does not mean, you should include mechanics even though they’re overused. That seems to rather be a result from long development cycles, where games decide to include the mechanic when it’s not yet overused, e.g. when a popular game featured that mechanic, but once the game comes out, then a whole bunch of other games have come out before, which had also decided to include that same mechanic.