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More Products From the Sequel Factory
Both the New York Times and Electronic Gaming Monthly have commented recently on the ongoing trend of sequel production in gaming. The NYT specifically cites EA's recent trends regarding endless rehashing of titles, while EGM talks more broadly about the role of sequels in the industry. While most reviewers lament the current state of the sequel factory, those within the industry rely on new versions of old titles for their bread and butter. From the EGM article: "Let's assume the publisher's position that sequels are a necessary evil, and the blockbuster videogame industry we have today cannot exist without sequels to support its often great financial burdens for research and development, marketing, distribution, etc. So, what are sequels doing for the gamer who's not interested in keeping up with the sequel treadmill?"
So, what are sequels doing for the gamer who's not interested in keeping up with the sequel treadmill?"
hmmm... maybe not buying them?
however, while some gamers might not venture into the sequel of their favorite game, there must be enough followers to keep the gaming industry making sequels after sequels.
it's similar to spams, while most people just ignore them, some of them ended up buying from the spammers, and this is what keeps the spamming industry going and even growing.
creating a different genre or trying something new is a big risk that most companies can't afford to take, this is especially true if each new game costs few millions to produce. that's why we saw a lot of interesting, exciting and ground-breaking games in the '80s because the cost was so low, people were more willing to take risk and create different games.
i have created a game almost to the words as described here (Point 2 Paragraph 2) and discussed here.
but let me tell you, it's been very difficult to get people playing it or even understanding it, because everybody's so used to the grinding.
everyday, i have to answer questions from players who want to know how to grind their stats to the top, because grinding is what defines game at the moment.
Play Found: Desert Island
This is basically the problem with the gaming industry. Sequels can be innovative and original, and new titles can be boring, and direct rip-off of other titles. The Final Fantasy games I think is a series that tries to be original - with different characters, worlds, 2D -> 3D, storylines, etc, and that series count up to over 11 already.
And then on the other hand, how many Street Fighter/Tekken/Soul Calibur/Virtual Fighter clones do we really need?
http://www.rayn.net . Funny. Stuff.
Some times, you really do a game well, and it's just nice to do more of it. I think the GTA series are a good example. GTA 3 (which itself was a sequel) was just really well done, tons of fun to play. So no we have GTA VC and San Andreas. They aren't really anything new, but just more of the same game done very well. Both also a lot of fun. You can over do it, of course, but I think in many cases it's nice.
Also sequels over the longer term can be real cool, like GTA 2 to GTA 3. There are many older games that I'd like to see redone to current technology. I mean I still play X-com because it's a great game, but what I'd really like to see is a new X-com, designed for modern hardware, with updated graphics, AI, etc, etc.
I agree that in many cases it gets stupid, it seems that it's just "Hey that last one made money, let's release another exactly like it!" but you get that even in non-sequels, you get games copying heavily from successful games.
I really don't think a game has to be unique to be good. I don't care if it's the 5th game in a series so long as it's entertaining.
With lots of feedback on the gameplay of the originals, a sequel can be tweaked to make it better.
Some games are also rather short, especially ones with intricate levels, and releasing a sequel or expansion pack allows the publishers to continue working on the game while also earning money.
If you don't like the game, just don't buy the sequel!
Ars has a good comment up already here. Basically saying that there's nothing wrong with sequels per say (ie. Half-Life 2), but series like Madden where things seem to be changed just for the sake of changing them from year to year.
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I read today that Hollywood will produce 40 movies this year that are derived from old TV shows. And that doesn't count movie sequels.
EA Games: Sequel Everything
Whereas movies typically get a healthy amount of advertising on TV, the majority video game ads are found in magazines or online. Thus, name recognition in a title - "The Legend of Zelda: _______" or "Mario [sport]" - plays a much more important role in selling video games to casual gamers than it does in getting casual moviegoers to the theatres.
Is to try and make a better version. It doesn't matter if you are making the next one in a series, or if your game is highly similar to another one, it matters that you are abot to make your game entertaining, and hopefully by improving on the orignal.
Take Rome: Total War. Excellent game, one of the best strategy games in a long time. First time in a long time a strategy game has been on the best sellers list for a good amount of time. However not at all orignal. The plot is, well, Roman history. There's some modifications for playability and creative license and so on but the story was taken directly form the history books. The game is, of course, the latest in the Total War series, itself based on earlier games like Civilization.
However for all that, it's a ton of fun to play. It is so well done. The gameplay is excellent and engaging, the music is superb and the graphics are amazing, good enough the History channel uses the engine.
It doesn't matter that there's no orignality to plot or concept, the game is just flat out fun, more fun that those that came before it, and that's what really matters.
The true purpose of the sequel is to get the consumer to pay for the second half of a hit game. Has anyone else noted the trend toward shorter games these days? If you liked game A, then they are hoping you will shell out again for part B, which is more of the same, with a couple extra things thrown in to sweeten the pot.
you won't play the same Madden commentary sound files on every fifth play. "Whoa, he looked like he was hit by a truck! A five-ton truck hauling a trailer!" Yes, you'll hear that one six motherslapping times in one game of Madden '05. YOU HAVE A HARD DRIVE NOW, taking data from a 9 GB DVD. You have NO excuse to keep recycling the same mindless observations over and over and over again until we're pointing at our television with a shaking finger and screaming "EAT ME, JOHN! JUST EAT MEEEEEEE!" as most of us do now.
Obviously this guy has never watched a football game where Madden was doing the commentary. Madden moves between a few mindless quips and stating the obvious. Why people are so impressed with Madden, I will never know. Yes, the guy really knows football, but listening to him makes me want to shoot myself.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
1.) Movies make tons of money off sequels that may not give the same emotion as the original hit.
2.) Technological Advances are usually a very very attractive feature without having the game being identical otherwise (cept Doom 3 which was technically a very sweet redo minus the original emotion for most)
3.) There are always new kids/buyers to sell to and nobody wants to buy old games or watch old movies. Maybe the hairstyles turn people off ;)
You may agree or disagree, but I believe these are obvious points.
some sequels are completely lame, but others OTOH are actualy a marked improvement on a fun game.
take the command and conquer series. the first game was awesome and each consecutive release was better than the last. now were going on to something like the sixth or seventh and they have yet disapoint me*
even after ea took over, I grudgingly admit, red alert 2 and generals were (and still are) a lot of fun. and from what I hear, theres a red alert 3 comming.
*renegade dosent count. that game was completely lame. that was a bad sequel.
"What does slashdotting mean?"
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Sequels are fine.
Sequels that are marginally different from their predecessor suck *COUGH EA*.
But then again, when you try to make a sequel that isnt a mirror image of its predecessor, people stop chanting how they want innovation just long enough to bash the game *COUGH Mario Sunshine, Zelda Wind Waker, etc*.
People are now working on making and visiting complete worlds, not just sequels.
I believe it's similar to how our songs are getting longer and longer, too- it's not unusual to hear a song that goes on for 20 minutes, now. In fact, we just call it a "mix," and it's a big long stream of music, with a little of this, a little of that, mixed in for funn.
People feel attached to these worlds, and they wonder about these characters. They don't want to be hit with a brand new world everyday. Rather, they like a particular world, and they want to see it carried out further.
Also, they want it on multiple senses. They want to read it in book format, they want to play it as a video game, as a role playing game, they want to see it as a movie, they want to keep up with it as a TV show. All these things that people want to do.
People want to know the side stories, feel out the nooks and crannies of the complexities.
This is Slashdot, so I should mention that there are implications for Free Software game developers: network your worlds. Make a Tetris game that celebrates a theme from a constructed world that some tabletop gamers articulated in detail. Fetch fanfic authors to create stories based in this world. Get an existing RPG engine, and see if you can make a short game out of one of those authors' stories. See if an illustrator won't do an illustration of a major scene. We can have whole worlds, not just isolated projects.
Shaddup already and gimme.... Deus Ex 3, System Shock 3 Doom 4 UT2005 XIII part deux StarCraft 2 etc etc etc.. Sh*T man, Get us hooked on storylines and THEN makes us wait until we're over 35 ?? Hey Brossard, you Jerk ! where the Hell is Duke Nukem Forever ??!!! Peace out to ALL Game Coders
End of Line.
Sequals are easier to make, that's why we see so many of them.
If little Timmy doesn't have to buy Halo, Half-life and Doom sequals he can buy 3 "not sequal" games. Which then means they make the same amount of money but don't risk annoying a fanbase.
If you flood a market with oranges and then see oranges getting 75% of all sales on that market, oranges arn't running the market, they're bring forced down peoples necks because there is nothing else.
I like muppets.
... Recent trends??? EA has been putting the same crappy sequel year after year to their games. In my opnion single handledly the most un-innovative game company out there!
It's pretty simple, really. If I can't beta a game (for MMOs especially) then I don't really want to shell out $50 to find out it sucks.
For non-online games, it still hold's true. I have more games that turned out to be complete stinkers on my bookshelf than I care to admit.
Most gamers don't just look at the company and say "Oh, EA made X, so Y should be great!". They look at X, and believe X2 should be at least as good, or at least offer a reasonable hope of fun.
If you played and loved Fallout and Fallout 2, and Interplay releases Fallout 3, aren't you going to buy it? Heck, even if the game engine doesn't get a radical overhaul, I'd still want to try it when it hits the bargain bin.
New games often require new engines, and a ton of creative juice. A sequel to a very successful game requires a new plot, maybe some engine tweaks, some graphic tweaks, and you are done.
And even if they do update the engine, etc... If they had released Doom 3 with just "Resurrection of Evil" as it's title, with no reference whatsoever to it's Doom legacy, what do you think it's sales would have been?
John Buchanan, the university liason officer for Electronic Arts, came to our university. I remember him specifically talking about how EA was not an "art house" and that their main objective was to entertain people and make lots of money doing so, much like Spielberg (sp?) and Lucas want to do this very same thing in Hollywood.
The way to achieve this? Sequels of course, and rehashes of tried and true concepts (read: steal ideas liberally from best-selling games). Nothing else is guaranteed to be a profit, and although you won't ever come out with a truly stellar bar-raising game that makes zillions of dollars, on average you're going to be doing better. How do you get new ideas? Buy out smaller companies. John challenged us to name one original game that EA has put out in the last five years -- he said he'd give us twenty bucks -- and nobody could. He was sort of strangely proud of this, proud that they'd figured out a way to just, well, fucking rip people off and let them have a good time at it. How does EA get new games, ever? They buy out smaller companies.
If you want to become a games programmer because creativity is your thing, EA is not the place for you. It was quite disconcerting to hear someone be so upfront about these things.
I asked him if it was depressing, to him personally, as a human -- the fact that he acknowledges what they're doing is hardly art, is hardly revolutionary, but just aims to please the masses while earning them all a big fat paycheck -- and his answer? No... the money's good, I have some fun, I get to travael, why should I complain?
Basically I was just disgusted by the whole experience. IBM, Google, Microsoft, Sun -- they can all afford research departments, I don't see why the major games companies in industry cannot... even if there's no short-term payoff, in the long term I think there's a lot more money to be made... there's an incredible amount that simply *hasn't* been done with computer games and interactive entertainment to date, to the extent that it could really really push outside of the current teenage "gamer" market.
I mean, think about it: the games industry grosses more than the Hollywood box office, yet its real market is a fraction of the size. How are you going to reach a larger market? Research, risks, bona fide works of art, and truly engaging experiences.
I'd to throw in that not everyone plays "sequal" style games in a linear manner. I played the original GTA, and I own Vice City. Didn't play any of the ones in-between though, so perhaps people who grab Madden 2010 haven't played 2009 and below... but they'd still like an up-to-date roster, physics, etc.
Sequels that are "same ol' same ol'" are definately a problem, but just because something has the same name doesn't mean it's the same game... and sometimes sameness elements make the game familiar/fun as well. When I buy a Final Fantasy game I'm looking for an experience similar to what has come before, but unique enough to still keep me interested (which, except for FFX-2 is usually the case).
I just wish that making 'similar' games didn't kill off original games.
Man, how dare they give me: ... and, you get the point. The idea that because a game is a sequel means it's "unoriginal" and unfun is kind of stupid.
1. Half-Life 2
2. Battlefield 2
3. Freespace 2
4. Civilization 2 and 3
5. Jagged Alliance 2
6. Descent 3
7. Quake 3 (bad example?)
8. Unreal Tournament 2004
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
No, you want depressing? Your comment prompted me to reach for my copy of Strike Fleet (circa 1987) and read the box copy: And remember, this was the company which in its early days brought us (stolen from Wikipedia):
- Pinball Construction Set (1982)
- Archon (1983)
- M.U.L.E. (1983) - Dani Bunten, we miss you.
- One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird (1983)
- Music Construction Set (1984)
- The Seven Cities of Gold (1984)
- Skyfox (1984)
- The Bard's Tale (1985), by Interplay Productions
- Adventure Construction Set (1985)
- Populous (1989)
- Chuck Yeager's Air Combat (1993)
Could those games have been made at EA today? I may just go and cry now. What a difference twenty three years makes, eh?Carthago delenda est!
There's a difference between a sequal and a remake. A sequel usually involves the same characters in a new (though perhaps similar) story. A remake however involves the same characters in pretty much the same story.
GTA3, GTA VC, GTA SA each use a slightly updated engine, but with new characters, in a new story.
The EA games however use a slightly updated engine, with the same characters, and the same story.
While sports games are sometimes an exception because the rules of the game are fairly ridgid, people tend to prefer sequels over remakes.
As for the people who would buy the new version even for the updated roster, I'm reminding of P.T. Barnum's statement "There's a sucker born every minute".
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
Many of the titles that EA creates are sports titles, and so it is not exactly accurate to say that they just keep releasing sequels because sequels are absolutely necessary in many sports games. I'm an avid sports watcher and an avid sport video game player and I *want* the updated rosters and draft picks and whatnot. To be honest I could care less about new features. The game could stay EXACTLY the same from year to year and I'd still buy it just for the updated season info.
Now I realize this is not the same for a lot of people, so from the point of view of a consumer I can see that it gets boring and old for a company to keep releasing the same game with minor updates, but please keep in mind that developing and selling a Madden '06 is not exactly the same as developing and selling a Metal Gear Solid 12 would be.
I don't know why no one has figured this out yet, but sports games are not "sequels." For the majority of sports fans, they are buying NFL200X because it has the new players/rosters, anything else is just gravy. In all honesty, if you told them it was the same exact game they have, but with the teams updated, they would still pay 50 clams for it.
Now that we can do local storage on consoles, why not just sell the rosters every year at the same price, and sell a true "sequel", i.e. an improved game, every other? Your current revenue stream would remain largely unchanged, and every other year you could double it by selling a new game.
Sports fans buy sports games. Sports fans are fiercly loyal. Give them what they want, the players/teams they identify with. Let the sports *gamers* decided when they want a new game.
-- I have fans? Wow.
Final Fantasy has changed significantly since FF1... in that it has more cutscenes of a formulaic anime melodrama these days, but it is hardly something to be held as an example of originality in a series. FFX had just as many tired cliches as every other interactive Japanese soap opera.
I would say Ultima is a better example of a long series that had maintained originality (no pun intended), with the last three games in the series being dramatically different from the previous games- in story as well as gameplay. If you shoehorn the Underworld titles into what is considered the series, there's even more originality and fresh gameplay.
Also, though I tend to pan Nintendo for whoring their 20 year old franchises, they have a pretty good track record of making good games out of said franchises. Look at the variety in the Zelda, Metroid and Mario games through the years. Okay, so the stories are all pretty much the same, but the gameplay is almost always fresh.
While the melodramatic stories are certainly not to everyone's taste, each FF game is different in that the skill learning/character customization system gets a shakeup in every game, and the series isn't afraid to try bold experiments that sometimes don't work as well as hoped (e.g. the Junction system in FFVIII -- innovtative system that abolished armour upgrades in favour of using magic for stat alteration; probably worked very well on paper, but made the game too easy in practice).
FFX-2, the first direct sequel in the series' history, is a completely different experience from FFX because the character customization systems are radically different.
-Stephen
They might have a point if only the greatest games around weren't sequals themselves. Anti-sequalists have this idea that games should come out perfect the first time, fully god-breathed and explore all potentially interesting aveneues. Yet the best games we have are almost exclusively sequals. A Link to the Past was a second sequal, as was Super Metroid. Grand Theft Auto 3 was in the same boat. Final Fantasy is probably the most legitmate target of sequal haters, in that aside from a few common semi-plot elements (crystals, airships, etc) the only thing uniting them is a combat system and a desperate need for your money.
The history of literature disagrees with anti-sequalists. Long before the written word set story in stone-type, civilization had the oral tradition. Tales were told of ancient gods, and of heroes in epic battles of fate. But each telling of the tale was different, and afterwards the storyteller could evaluate what worked and what didn't work, and maybe what might have worked had it been changed only slightly. The origins of comedy come from improvisational humor, and even today's stand-up routine is a dynamic, flexible presentation. Live music is improvizational, and improvization is central to Jazz music. None of these forms of entertainment are capable of calling a singular act 'perfect.'
I like to consider each Zelda game not as an internally consistant series of adventures of Link, but an evolving image of the Hero of the Master Sword. In fact, we've come to accept and require that the series introduces changes. The most common and valid criticism of the Zelda Oracle games was that they were too similar, both to Zelda DX and to each other.
Anti-sequalists essentially translate the modern literary theory onto games, and ignore the naggling details that emerge when finished. Games aren't the work of a single guiding authoring force, responsible for the day to day decisions that encompasses the work, forming a singular message for the player(s).
I wonder, then, what people who promote 'originality' have to say about 'We Love Katamari.'
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Open Source Sysadmin
The reason that that is the case, is that the state of the art in games progresses at a much faster rate than the state of the art in movies. You could even remake a game within three years after its original release, and it would be a quite different game, and probably of much higher quality.
Basically, there are two reasons why game sequels may suck: (1) when the creators think they can "improve" the original concept (e.g., the simplification of Deus Ex 2, the MOO3 overhaul); and (2) when a publisher gives the developers not enough time to develop a real sequel, because it has to go to market quickly (e.g., Knights of the Old Republic 2 without a proper endgame).
However, if a sequel is just like the original game, except with better graphics, better AI, and better sound, it may give players the same good playing experience but modernized. And there is no reason why its quality has to be lower than the quality of the original game.
Laser Squad Nemesis is supposedly a pretty good modern version of X-Com. It was actually created and developed by former X-Com developers, so you may want to download the demo and give it a try. I haven't been able to try it out yet, so I couldn't tell you how it is, personally. The reviews seem pretty favorable, though.
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