When will the games introduce new stuff to the franchise?

[HybridNewborn]

The games really haven't introduced a whole lot of radical new ideas to the franchise. The Prætorians and Predaliens were nice, but were just sort of logical extensions of what we already knew about the species. They weren't really radical new concepts like the Queen or the Runner were at the time. The Crusher is a step in the right direction, going along with the pattern of introducing a new form of Xeno in each film, but right now it's just looking like a Prætorian Runner; it's just expanding on an existing concept.

Any other new species seen in the games have mostly been cattle-types, like the oswoks, that the Preds can kill for honor points or the xeno's can impregnate to get runners. And most of the 'new' concepts from the games, such as the temples, or the stingers in the tails, were just things from the Alien franchise scripts that didn't make it into the films. Meanwhile, Predators comes out and introduces us to not only two new species, the Stickman and the Pred Hounds, but also introduces a new type of Predator to boot!

Are the films the only medium that's allowed to introduce radical new concepts to the series? Each Pred films has introduced a slough of new weapons and tech, along with showing us new and interesting facets of the Predator culture. The games really haven't introduced hardly any new tech, short of a glave and some mines, and really haven't shown us anything new about the Preds that we didn't already know from the films.

Same goes for the Humans. Each Alien and Alien vs Predator film showed us more about the Company and the World of the future. Each game has recycled Aliens and really hasn't added anything new there beyond importing ideas from the Colonial Marines handbook.

The games have just recycled either content from the films (jockey in a derelict, marines on a a bug hunt, Predator hunting in the big city with voodoo gangs and crime bosses, the Military/Company tries to tame Xenos and fails, I could go on), or concepts from draft scripts that didn't make it into the films (Alien pyramids, tail stingers, etc).

While I'm not in any way saying the games are bad, I'm just saying they could stand to be a bit more innovative, you know? I can only play so many games about Colonial Marines investigating a Company Colony that's had a Xenomorph infestation, possibly while Predators roam the grounds.

[Xenomrph]

AvP2010 introduced updated gear for the Marines - it actually overhauled pretty much all of their stuff. Armor, ships, weapons, everything got revised. Some of the other games have introduced new Marine gear, too (the miniguns, grenade launchers, shotguns, precision rifles, those are all new).

The Predators have gotten some new gear from time to time (plasma pistol, flechette launcher, glaive, mines, etc), and AvP: Extinction added a shitton of new stuff for all three species.

[HybridNewborn]

The stuff I was talking about was more.... I don't want to keep using the word radical but its meaning fits the bill.

For instance. Alien introduces us to the Alien and its lifecycle. Awesome and mind-blowing. Aliens introduces us to the Queen and what the Hive looks like, also awesome and mind-blowing. Alien3 shows us the runner, which, at the time, was, well, Mind-Blowing. There was no way to know that a dog would birth that type of alien. For all we knew at the time, it was going to look like the ones in Alien or Aliens, you know? Alien3 also showed us the Queen embryo and Super Hugger. Radical new concepts.

The Prætorian is just an extension of the Queen-Burster concept, that a Queen grows differently. The Predalien is just an extension of the concept introduces in A3 that the host plays a large part in what the Alien looks like. The last film to have a radical new alien concept was actually Requiem, with Chet's Reproductive system. The games don't really have something out there like that.

I'm not saying they haven't introduced anything new to the Aliens. The games are, after all, the medium that canonized the pyramids and the tail barbs. Prætorians and Predaliens showed up first in the comics though, IIRC.

Look at the Preds now. Predator showed us the Predator, his hunting, and some of their tech. Predator 2 showed us some more tech, yes, but also showed us what their ships looked like, a bit more about their culture, and showed us the trophy room. AvP taught us even more about their culture, as well as their relationship to the human race. Requiem showed us a frigging Predator planet, along with a new concept for the Preds, that of a "sweeper" that cleans up messes. They're not all just hunters then. Predators introduced a new race of Predators, and showed us radically different tech and methods than we'd seen in the last 4 films. We got to see Hounds, Bird bots, variations on their tech, and learned that they have freaking game preserve planets.

The games have given us... some new Pred tech. Other than that, I think Concrete Jungle's assertion that they are a Nomadic race and that a good chunk of WY tech is reverse engineered or salvaged from Pred tech are the most out there concepts that have been introduced by the games for our hunters.

[Xenomrph]

I think part of it is the game creators prefer to play it "safe" and not necessarily do anything radical that might get contradicted by a later movie or whatever, and frankly I'm okay with that.

Also AvP Extinction introduced military-grade Pred tech.

[Jango1201]

We have a new concept in Aliens: Calonial Marines in the form of a nuclear mutation.

[The Necronoir]

The variety of things introduced by the games is perhaps second only to the comics, and even that's debatable. Go back to some of the early arcade games and you'll encounter some really oddball ideas, to say the least.

[OpenMaw]

As i'm playing around with my Alien into the vents idea i'm seeing there are some unexplored avenues for Alien style games.

One thing i'd love to see is something to do with the WY Commando's. Playing as one of those guys up against the aliens with some anti-xeno specific hardware would be rather cool I think.