Games aren't evolving anymore? Or are they?

We need Rick Sanchez!

First game that came to mind was Crypt of the Necrodancer, which you don't own.

When you look at it - its true for a lot of things these days.
Cars, computers, phones. There was time when there was huge leap in all these technologies. When new things surpass the old.

But now a lot of things get improved and we dont perceve it like anything groundbreaking. There are of course new innovations. They are just so small and incignifent that we dont see it as anything revolutionary..

Games get better graphics, better physics. Cars get higher horsepower ratings, lower emissions, more comfortable. Computer get more powerful. Its all relative.

But games - I remember that there were giveaways for a horror game that used hearth monitor (or webcam) to see how you react. And if you start to get frightened, it becomes even more scarier. Cant remember the name. But I thinks thats pretty revolutionary... We all know games that adapt to our choices, but a game that adapts to your physical state ? :D I think thats pretty advanced

Well, once we had very few genres, so everything was fresh. Adding feature X from genre Y to genre Z was a revolution (generally, adding RPG stats/levels/perks to anything that didn't have them, or adding physics to otherwise static worlds). Nowadays it is hard to think of an entirely new genre, or some cross-genre, without someone saying "hey, but game X already did that".

Sure, you can have new features, but you'll be adding them to a game that otherwise resembles something else, so evolution will slow down. Decades ago, when the first X-Com came out (or Dune II, or Doom), it was hard to define compared to anything that existed. I can't think of how could anything like that happen today.

In terms of mechanics I can say Kerbal space program is a game like no other.
In terms of story and lore, there are tons of new great stories, you just need to search for a bit. Those great stories are rare like unicorns in AAA games.

Not sure how old the games can be but: Portal, SUPERHOT, Hue, Middle-Earth's Nemezis system, Sunless Sea and probably many more I haven't played yet. Also I don't have huge knowledge in gaming so not really sure if they fit your criteria :P

They are evolving, now is multiplayer without essence, loot crates for money, microtransaction, etc. Some years ago was about DLC and Season Pass... Now that's the norm. See how everything changed?

I think AER: Memories of Old, ABZU and Copoka are pretty unique. That's just my 2 cents. NieR: Automata was pretty fun as well.

first things first - innovation is incremental. Take cars as an example. New cars are effectively the same as old cars - same steering system, same drive train, etc. But now there's rear-view cameras, driving assistance, etc. that, though not earth-shattering, do make the driving experience that little bit better.

Same is happening in games. It's very difficult to create a new genre, but there's still incremental progress. 3d shooters no longer have tank controls, simulation games have in-game wikis, realistic physics is now a staple of just about every game, RPGs are a lot less grindy, etc. whatever changes there are can be very small, but incrementally still make the game better. rockpapershotgun features regular articles where game makers talk about their craft, or other articles about the inner workings of games, such as how the nemesis system in shadow of mordor was a brilliant improvement.

Games are still evolving. Just play a recent game and then a comparable 10-15 year old game. You'll notice pretty quickly that there are lots of little things you don't even think about that makes the recent game better in many ways and not just graphics

AAA games usually don't innovate as much these days, since innovation = taking a risk. Games are more and more expensive to make as we move forward so big developers don't take chances.
Indie games smaller studios on the other hand, can produce more creative games if you know where to look, I suggest checking some of these games out from time to time.

I can't agree.
Games are business, they need to sell well. This means it's comfortable to stick to things that worked in other games. Reinventing the wheel when it comes to motion controls could be innovative sure, but it's doubtful most people would enjoy such novelty. Also, keep in mind innovation gets more subtle the more an industry progresses. Just a few new game design elements is already enough for a game, there is no financial benefit to that. Shadow of Mordor introduced the Nemesis System, which was a way for the player the influence enemies and outcomes drastically. Without this innovation, Shadow of Mordor is just a more combat oriented Assassin's Creed game. But this innovation alone was able to carry the entire game. Other games innovate in the narrative department. The Witcher had a very choice based narrative with very different story arcs and endings. Some games introduce gimmick mechanics that have the ability to hold a game together while building on previous, already established mechanics. Quantum Break did this, basically, the time mechanics were coupled with tps shooting. This way we got a shooter that had a new twist.
Not every game needs a new mechanic, not every movie has something neverbeforeseen.

Perhaps this is how far controllers and keyboard and mouse get you. Perhaps technicalities limit game design and not creativity. New kind of controls are emerging, VR is one, but there are eyetrackers, bodytrackers, voice recognition, both Microsoft and Google are looking into thought-based controls.

I believe the limitations we have are simple technicalities and are more or less financial. (Example: VR is not cheap enough yet, no point in creating AAA VR only experiences just now.)
I suggest you look at the indie market for smaller novelties. There are so many different games with vastly different experiences, saying that you don't see anything new is kinda ignorant, I am sorry to say.

They actually evolve, only mostly on the PC indie segment and on Nintendo. On the AAA market, two things hold them back. One is that the mainstream consoles haven't actually changed anything in their controllers in the past 20 years, and when you need to control your games the same way, you also need to create gameplay that is also the same.
The second is that games got really expensive to make because the sheep are only interested in graphics, and this lead to publishers not taking risks, they just redo what seems to make money. And when that fails, they use publishing tricks to make up for losses. DLCs were like that, now microtransactions are the new rage.
Of course, not even Nintendo is perfect. The new Zelda and Mario games jump so hard on the open world bandwagon, I think you could hear its axles creak even from space.

Well not really evolving - more like devolving.

More and more of them are dumbing down and turning into gamblim loot box pay to win/progress applications. Not really for you to have fun but to milk you for more and more money. Not to mention in the old days you got full game at the release .... now you get a piece here and a piece there masked in payable DLCs so after 10 or 20 DLCs you get the "full game". 15-20y ago DLCs were free.....

Thats about it. Its preaty sad in which direction all of this goes.

they are evolving perfectly but there are so many games out there it seems like they aren't. most just follow cliche story, mechanics, characters, etc., only a handful stand out from the bunch of copy-pasted games.

doom, fallout 4, dishonored 2, quantum break, helldivers, life is strange. they all have fresh content and innovate gaming in several ways.

Worthy remembering, what was happening then wasn't "evolution", it was "revolution", it was like every year someone made something that was changing the genre in new directions.
"Evolution" came later, when AAA gaming went into "sequelization" and "franchises" and games started to mostly include Quality of Life improvements over creating something totally new.
Question is, do games still evolve, or are we now in a devolving stage, where games strip more and more features...

Yes they are evolving... maybe not AAA games but the medium is always changing.

Some important genres that weren't popular 10 years ago:

• Walking simulators
• Sandbox
• Rogue like
• FPS puzzles
• procedurally generated

Not to mention the reappearance of Metroidvania, Adventure and cRPG that were almost dead, and the growth of Grand Strategy.

Edit: there were also improvements on UI, AI, interface, graphics and sound fidelity.

I just think the number of games have grown and since the ratio between very similar games and innovative games is weighted towards the similar games, a bigger number of games seems to feel like there are a lot of non-innovative games.

Someone declare an Amber Alert for Chazan's missing inner child!

Lol, j/k.

They're probably still evolving in areas, there's just too many games out there for me to tell.

That´s a really interesting question. I feel like the FPS genre has come to a point where things seem to be very monotonous. I grabbed F.E.A.R. first game because I´ve heard alot about the A.I. In fact, you can check this article on the store page (or just google It If you like):

"Why F.E.A.R.’s AI is still the best in first-person shooters" By Samuel Horti.

And this is something I would love the see in new games like Killing Floor 2 (which won´t happen of course since the game is done): Improved AI. Heck, the Patriarch from the first game behaves smarter than the one from the sequel. There was so much to do with A.I on Killing Floor 2 to make an outstanding game but instead they went for cosmetics with the Zedconomy.

A lot of Indie games play/experiment with innovation. I never get tired of saying how much fun was the Sub Rosa Demo for me. My first hour were chaotic since I could not realize who was on my team when things went wrong on a trade and everybody start shooting, and your teammates would probably trash talk you badly but you stayed there because It was fun and you wanted to learn how to control trades and quickly realize who was the enemy (Alex Austin played with the concept superbly by just adding small distinctions in 2 corporations). If only he would have polished that game before the reboot...

You have come to the point where you´ve seen so much games that It´s natural that you wont be impressed with the "new" AAA FPS. You just got a bit more demanding. Indie is the way to go.

evolve doesnt mean change for no reason, be unique for no reason... everything has been evolving correctly, refining, tightening, perfecting, combining, streamlining (obviously at different rates from different developers)

there are SO MANY games out there, thousands of games, there are so many people & cultures working on them, from a single person to a multi hundred person studio, there are so many types of players, so many age groups, so many skill levels... there is wonderful music, beautiful art, clever code optimization

it's statistically impossible not to have what you're implying doesnt exist, reminds me of when people say music is bad or not creative now, well then start digging cuz the passion is out there, the big money wont deliver it, the people listening to the radio or lining up at gamestop wont know about it

i'm not even one to look for stories, so it's even more important for the game or art to be good for me compared to people that are into singleplayer or lore

Yes and No. As an older gamer, for me, even Crysis wasn't much of a change.

I think that innovation is there, but must be sought. There are a lot of really clever and innovative games, and there are games that are quite old, but were innovative in their time, and no other game picked up the torch, so they are worth playing by today standards.

Old games that were and still are innovative and fun:

• Giants Citizen Kabuto
• Bad Mojo
• World of Goo

Newish games that I find innovative and fun:

• Crypt of the Necrodancer
• Desktop Dungeons
• Rogue Legacy
• Sunless Sea
• Kentucky Route Zero
• Pony Island
• Abzu
• Party Hard
• A Story About My Uncle
• Scanner Sombre
• Valley
• Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
• Legend of Grimrock
• Nidhogg

I recommend this videos (and the entire channel is amazing) regarding Adventure games and FPSs:

Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood? (The Death of the Adventure Game)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOPiSYUSrQ0&t

Blood Is Compulsory: How We Talk About Advanced Warfare
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbEiVrnhwlU

I mostly play strategy/simulation games, where nailing the gameplay is way more important than any wow-inducing innovations because those wear off pretty quickly whereas the gameplay needs to hold up for hundreds of hours. So I tend to prefer incremental, well-tested and well-balanced additions to major leaps.

Art and entertainment evolve about as fast as the human emotional spectrum does -- that is, not at all on the grand scale of things, they just change directions every so often. There's always stuff out there bucking the mainstream, if you care to look. You're nostalgic for the times when things were new to you -- Crysis was hardly evolutionary or even special except for its memetic ability to bring even the highest-end systems of those times to their knees.

Aside from that, it's not so long ago that games weren't as ubiquitous as they are now, and so all the unique, groundbreaking stuff was on the same level of prominence as the big budget schlock (or at least easier to find). These days there's a multi-billion dollar industry around making and marketing games, so of course all the conventional, cookie-cutter stuff is hogging the spotlight, same as with any venue of entertainment. Publishers sell proven concepts until the public gets sick of them, then they switch to other proven concepts. Think about the last "evolution" you saw in movies, or books, or music -- and I don't mean technological innovation, which tends to be absorbed quickly without significantly changing the nature of the entertainment itself. There's no reason to think games will follow a different pattern. I haven't looked, but I bet you can find some ancient Greek philosopher complaining about how all the plays currently being performed are stale and hackneyed and he hasn't seen anything really new with a "wow" factor in ages. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Don't stop looking and you may yet find another game that grabs you in the same way Crysis did. This is a highly personal thing, it's rare, and it's not really predictable. It won't be for evolution in games, or lack thereof -- it's about how a game happens to resonate with you, in the way everything comes together. Taking a break from compulsively playing all the new but predictable stuff in the hope that lightning will strike twice can help (if that's what you're doing).