Take a look at the list of the highest selling games of all time and you'll find the majority of the entries are the third or even fourth iteration of a series. Understandably so. When disappointment lurks around every corner and any game, no matter how awesome it looks could be a stinker, the sequel is the closest thing to a sure bet any of us have.
Our desire for good games, games we can really get excited about without having to worry that the whole thing might come tumbling down like a house of cards, leaving us looking like idiots, changes the way we look at sequels. When you're clinging to a piece of drift wood in the middle of the Atlantic you generally don't start criticising its paintwork.
But if you look closely at these games you'll start to notice a pattern emerging. Repetitive little flaws not unlike the results of excessive inbreeding. A chromosome missing here, an extra one there. It's easy to miss at first, the occasional sixth finger or webbed foot, but it only gets worse with each passing generation. Then one day you have to deal with cousin Rodney who has grown six arms, grown lobster claws for hands and started eating passing hitchhikers.
Imagine for a moment that a start up developer has just released a hit. Even assuming they don't instantly get bought out by EA and shipped off to a slave labour camp, they still have to answer to their publisher. The publisher, once they've finished diving into piles of money Scrooge McDuck style, will, quite naturally, demand a sequel. But what they have now isn't just a wild idea some nerds jotted down on a whiteboard anymore. It's a proven earner, a franchise. They just can't leave a potential money spinner to a bunch of programmers and writers, there's too much money riding on the final product. Someone needs to make sure the developers don't go and fuck it all up. So the publisher ambles over to the local crypt and hires some marketers.
[http://doctorpus.wordpress.com/files/2008/09/cthulhu6_s.jpg]
In this picture EA middle management has sacrificed a hundred virgins and summoned 'Market-Go-Shoggoth' Dread fiscal consultant of the southern abyss. Shortly he will open one of his sixteen mouths and, in the voices of a million screaming babies, utter this month's market share analysis.
The main problem with marketers, aside from the fact they have razor sharp teeth and a hardened bullet proof carapace, is that they're not gamers. Now don't get me wrong, not everyone on the development team should be a gamer. Everyone from the writers, to the sound guy, to the tea lady should be fighting constantly with the programmers to get the final product as close to their particular vision as possible. That is how video game art is made.
Marketers however, do not care for art. They don't even care if the game is remotely good, that's not their field. All they're paid to care about is how many people they can sell the game to. They are occasionally necessary. It sometimes takes a good marketer (actually there's no such thing as a bad marketer, they eat their weak and wounded) to stop a self important auteur developer from ruining his own game, but most of the time the influence they have on games, especially sequels, is entirely negative.
So if you happen to be a games developer working on the follow-up to your hit debut game and you're called into a meeting, possibly by a 7 foot tall shambling butler with ill-fitting clothes and bolts sticking out of his neck, I advise you to watch out for the following.
Making it darker
The bizarre tone shift
Worst offenders: Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within, Bomberman Zero, Shadow the Hedgehog
Not darker literally of course; most modern games disgorge so much bloom counter terrorists could use them to clear out buildings. I'm talking about the times when in their desperation to appeal to the McFarlane comic book."
[http://doctorpus.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/bombermanzero3da.jpg]
The worst part is I can't actually think of a way to make this picture seem any more ridiculous.
The most obvious example of this technique gone horribly wrong is, surprisingly, not The Warrior Within (a game, I might add, with a tonal shift so drastic it has become a cliche to complain about it) but is in fact esque shit city, armoured death squads and a gun toting, threat making, car stealing, murdering douchebag with a totally awesome extreme sports goatee which made everyone under the age of fourteen shout "awesome" and everyone over that age want to eat their own head.
"Time Fuckery"
Time Travel
Worst offenders: Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time
Time travel is just one of those ideas that always crops up eventually regardless of genre or medium. It's understandable of course. The ability to time travel is am obvious power fantasy. Imagine going back in time and giving yourself the winning lottery numbers or being able to answer trivia questions before they are asked! You'd even be immune to whoopee cushions and other practical jokes. From a production standpoint it's easy since you can just use the same set three times and everyone knows that a character's grandparent or grandchild will look exactly like them saving you from hiring extra actors or making extra models. Easy. But the negative effect excessive time fuckery can have on a game cannot be overstated. One needs look no further than the Legacy of Kain series.
It started well enough, with a pair of simple revenge tales, one of which happens to be one of the best games on the Raziel go back in time as a vampire and kill himself, a move I'm pretty sure would cause the universe to implode, he goes on to kill himself (current self) so he can become a magic sword his past self will wield to murder his even further past (pastier?) self.
I'm just putting that out there.
[http://doctorpus.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/2001-a-space-odyssey.jpg]
A gamer foolishly stares directly at the plot of Legacy of Kain: Defiance.
"The one-two-up-the-wazoo"
Make it a trilogy
Worst offenders: Halo 2, Shenmue 2, Metal Gear Solid 2, Ratchet and Clank: Future, Half life 2, God of War 2
You might recognise this one from the movie industry. The one-two-up-the-wazoo is an advanced technique that ensures players will buy the third game in a series, not by making the second game a well rounded, attractive product but by ending it prematurely so players have to buy (and wait for) the third game to find out how the story ends. The only upside to this technique is that it's slightly more subtle than putting a bear trap in the manual.
The main problem with the one-two, aside from the fact it's a cheap, manipulative trick that's designed to score sales for a possibly hypothetical product that is years away, is that it has a chance of miss-firing and bringing the whole series down with it. If a one-two is done particularly badly the second game will not sell as well as the first which actually reduces the chances of a conclusion to the trilogy being made. That my friends, is pure, Morissette grade, irony.
Add to that the fact that sometimes developers go under, sometimes deservedly and sometimes not (for an example look at Ensemble). So what happens if a developer or publisher goes under during a one-two maneuver? Gamers get shafted that's what.
*When this technique is used on the first game in a potential series it is simply called 'up the wazoo'. For a good example of it going horrendously wrong, see Advent Rising.
[http://doctorpus.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/42-15440608.jpg]
"Here is your sandwich. What's that? You want bread? No. That comes out next year."
"The Combine"
Nonsensical game linking
Worst Offenders: Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Manhunt 2, Command and Conquer, Silent Hill, The Quake series, Unreal 2, Red Faction 2, The Tales of... series, Shin Tensei: Digital Devil Saga, Rainbow Six: Vegas, etc
We've already established that sequels are generally a safe bet for gamers so quite naturally marketers are going to encourage developers to produce titles under an established brand name. Occasionally this causes marketers to link together games that have absolutely nothing in common.
The Final Fantasy series is probably the most successful example of XLII in between fighting off giant scorpions and trading bottle caps for Iguana meat.
Occasionally a series will reach such critical mass that it will literally collapse upon itself like a black hole and start sucking completely unrelated games into the series. Super Mario Bros 2 is probably the most famous example of a completely unrelated game being edited and re-branded as part of a series. How many original games have been throttled in the development birthing canal then resurrected as a horrifying zombie servant of a gargantuan franchise? Not only is this kind of game assimilation profoundly insulting to the developers whose ideas it subverts, but occasionally it results in a game that actually drags down a good series as a whole. Silent Hill 4 -- I'm looking at you.
That final point brings me to a conclusion. Sequels are an easy bet yes, they're almost guaranteed to be at least decent, but sometimes the easy bet isn't the best one. If a game needs or deserves a sequel then a sequel should be made. If not, then developers should branch out in new directions with new IP's, but they won't do that while sequels are guaranteed money spinners. What can we, the gaming public do about it? I have no idea.
Although pitchforks always work.
sumary
[http://doctorpus.wordpress.com/files/2008/09/gm_package_large.jpg]
Harold, a young man with a hideously bulbous head and terrible haircut, is transported to a disturbing alternate dimension where everyone wears massive collars like it's still the 1970's. There he meets Sandra, a girl with an arm made out of rubber and a shocking lack of knowledge about the stop, drop and roll procedure. Along with their new ally, Kevin Bacon [http://snarkerati.com/movie-news/files/2008/06/bacon.jpg], they must fight against an evil cabal consisting of a elvish demon Nazi chef (top centre), a swarm of well endowed Nazi air hostesses (who are known to be 30% more evil than regular air hostesses), a giant disembodied wolf head, and worst of all, two errant members of the minimalist, German Kraftwerk.
Our desire for good games, games we can really get excited about without having to worry that the whole thing might come tumbling down like a house of cards, leaving us looking like idiots, changes the way we look at sequels. When you're clinging to a piece of drift wood in the middle of the Atlantic you generally don't start criticising its paintwork.
But if you look closely at these games you'll start to notice a pattern emerging. Repetitive little flaws not unlike the results of excessive inbreeding. A chromosome missing here, an extra one there. It's easy to miss at first, the occasional sixth finger or webbed foot, but it only gets worse with each passing generation. Then one day you have to deal with cousin Rodney who has grown six arms, grown lobster claws for hands and started eating passing hitchhikers.
Imagine for a moment that a start up developer has just released a hit. Even assuming they don't instantly get bought out by EA and shipped off to a slave labour camp, they still have to answer to their publisher. The publisher, once they've finished diving into piles of money Scrooge McDuck style, will, quite naturally, demand a sequel. But what they have now isn't just a wild idea some nerds jotted down on a whiteboard anymore. It's a proven earner, a franchise. They just can't leave a potential money spinner to a bunch of programmers and writers, there's too much money riding on the final product. Someone needs to make sure the developers don't go and fuck it all up. So the publisher ambles over to the local crypt and hires some marketers.
[http://doctorpus.wordpress.com/files/2008/09/cthulhu6_s.jpg]
In this picture EA middle management has sacrificed a hundred virgins and summoned 'Market-Go-Shoggoth' Dread fiscal consultant of the southern abyss. Shortly he will open one of his sixteen mouths and, in the voices of a million screaming babies, utter this month's market share analysis.
The main problem with marketers, aside from the fact they have razor sharp teeth and a hardened bullet proof carapace, is that they're not gamers. Now don't get me wrong, not everyone on the development team should be a gamer. Everyone from the writers, to the sound guy, to the tea lady should be fighting constantly with the programmers to get the final product as close to their particular vision as possible. That is how video game art is made.
Marketers however, do not care for art. They don't even care if the game is remotely good, that's not their field. All they're paid to care about is how many people they can sell the game to. They are occasionally necessary. It sometimes takes a good marketer (actually there's no such thing as a bad marketer, they eat their weak and wounded) to stop a self important auteur developer from ruining his own game, but most of the time the influence they have on games, especially sequels, is entirely negative.
So if you happen to be a games developer working on the follow-up to your hit debut game and you're called into a meeting, possibly by a 7 foot tall shambling butler with ill-fitting clothes and bolts sticking out of his neck, I advise you to watch out for the following.
Making it darker
The bizarre tone shift
Worst offenders: Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within, Bomberman Zero, Shadow the Hedgehog
Not darker literally of course; most modern games disgorge so much bloom counter terrorists could use them to clear out buildings. I'm talking about the times when in their desperation to appeal to the McFarlane comic book."
[http://doctorpus.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/bombermanzero3da.jpg]
The worst part is I can't actually think of a way to make this picture seem any more ridiculous.
The most obvious example of this technique gone horribly wrong is, surprisingly, not The Warrior Within (a game, I might add, with a tonal shift so drastic it has become a cliche to complain about it) but is in fact esque shit city, armoured death squads and a gun toting, threat making, car stealing, murdering douchebag with a totally awesome extreme sports goatee which made everyone under the age of fourteen shout "awesome" and everyone over that age want to eat their own head.
"Time Fuckery"
Time Travel
Worst offenders: Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time
Time travel is just one of those ideas that always crops up eventually regardless of genre or medium. It's understandable of course. The ability to time travel is am obvious power fantasy. Imagine going back in time and giving yourself the winning lottery numbers or being able to answer trivia questions before they are asked! You'd even be immune to whoopee cushions and other practical jokes. From a production standpoint it's easy since you can just use the same set three times and everyone knows that a character's grandparent or grandchild will look exactly like them saving you from hiring extra actors or making extra models. Easy. But the negative effect excessive time fuckery can have on a game cannot be overstated. One needs look no further than the Legacy of Kain series.
It started well enough, with a pair of simple revenge tales, one of which happens to be one of the best games on the Raziel go back in time as a vampire and kill himself, a move I'm pretty sure would cause the universe to implode, he goes on to kill himself (current self) so he can become a magic sword his past self will wield to murder his even further past (pastier?) self.
I'm just putting that out there.
[http://doctorpus.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/2001-a-space-odyssey.jpg]
A gamer foolishly stares directly at the plot of Legacy of Kain: Defiance.
"The one-two-up-the-wazoo"
Make it a trilogy
Worst offenders: Halo 2, Shenmue 2, Metal Gear Solid 2, Ratchet and Clank: Future, Half life 2, God of War 2
You might recognise this one from the movie industry. The one-two-up-the-wazoo is an advanced technique that ensures players will buy the third game in a series, not by making the second game a well rounded, attractive product but by ending it prematurely so players have to buy (and wait for) the third game to find out how the story ends. The only upside to this technique is that it's slightly more subtle than putting a bear trap in the manual.
The main problem with the one-two, aside from the fact it's a cheap, manipulative trick that's designed to score sales for a possibly hypothetical product that is years away, is that it has a chance of miss-firing and bringing the whole series down with it. If a one-two is done particularly badly the second game will not sell as well as the first which actually reduces the chances of a conclusion to the trilogy being made. That my friends, is pure, Morissette grade, irony.
Add to that the fact that sometimes developers go under, sometimes deservedly and sometimes not (for an example look at Ensemble). So what happens if a developer or publisher goes under during a one-two maneuver? Gamers get shafted that's what.
*When this technique is used on the first game in a potential series it is simply called 'up the wazoo'. For a good example of it going horrendously wrong, see Advent Rising.
[http://doctorpus.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/42-15440608.jpg]
"Here is your sandwich. What's that? You want bread? No. That comes out next year."
"The Combine"
Nonsensical game linking
Worst Offenders: Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Manhunt 2, Command and Conquer, Silent Hill, The Quake series, Unreal 2, Red Faction 2, The Tales of... series, Shin Tensei: Digital Devil Saga, Rainbow Six: Vegas, etc
We've already established that sequels are generally a safe bet for gamers so quite naturally marketers are going to encourage developers to produce titles under an established brand name. Occasionally this causes marketers to link together games that have absolutely nothing in common.
The Final Fantasy series is probably the most successful example of XLII in between fighting off giant scorpions and trading bottle caps for Iguana meat.
Occasionally a series will reach such critical mass that it will literally collapse upon itself like a black hole and start sucking completely unrelated games into the series. Super Mario Bros 2 is probably the most famous example of a completely unrelated game being edited and re-branded as part of a series. How many original games have been throttled in the development birthing canal then resurrected as a horrifying zombie servant of a gargantuan franchise? Not only is this kind of game assimilation profoundly insulting to the developers whose ideas it subverts, but occasionally it results in a game that actually drags down a good series as a whole. Silent Hill 4 -- I'm looking at you.
That final point brings me to a conclusion. Sequels are an easy bet yes, they're almost guaranteed to be at least decent, but sometimes the easy bet isn't the best one. If a game needs or deserves a sequel then a sequel should be made. If not, then developers should branch out in new directions with new IP's, but they won't do that while sequels are guaranteed money spinners. What can we, the gaming public do about it? I have no idea.
Although pitchforks always work.
sumary
[http://doctorpus.wordpress.com/files/2008/09/gm_package_large.jpg]
Harold, a young man with a hideously bulbous head and terrible haircut, is transported to a disturbing alternate dimension where everyone wears massive collars like it's still the 1970's. There he meets Sandra, a girl with an arm made out of rubber and a shocking lack of knowledge about the stop, drop and roll procedure. Along with their new ally, Kevin Bacon [http://snarkerati.com/movie-news/files/2008/06/bacon.jpg], they must fight against an evil cabal consisting of a elvish demon Nazi chef (top centre), a swarm of well endowed Nazi air hostesses (who are known to be 30% more evil than regular air hostesses), a giant disembodied wolf head, and worst of all, two errant members of the minimalist, German Kraftwerk.
Doctorpus M.D: On Escapism [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.67834#610710]
Doctorpus M.D: Three gaming jobs that suck in real life [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.67918#613692]
Doctorpus M.D: Procedurally generated offense [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.68035#617630]
Doctorpus M.D: "All the world's stage 1, and all the men and women merely goombas" [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.69300#655209]
Doctorpus M.D: Three gaming outrages that never happened [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.69531#662909]
Doctorpus M.D: Tits (welcome to Preachyville) [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.70059#679298]
Doctorpus M.D: Hottie catfight (Return to Preachyville [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.70116#681255]
Doctorpus M.D: Know what else uses a sandbox? [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.71490#725840]
Doctorpus M.D: Three gaming jobs that suck in real life [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.67918#613692]
Doctorpus M.D: Procedurally generated offense [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.68035#617630]
Doctorpus M.D: "All the world's stage 1, and all the men and women merely goombas" [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.69300#655209]
Doctorpus M.D: Three gaming outrages that never happened [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.69531#662909]
Doctorpus M.D: Tits (welcome to Preachyville) [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.70059#679298]
Doctorpus M.D: Hottie catfight (Return to Preachyville [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.70116#681255]
Doctorpus M.D: Know what else uses a sandbox? [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.71490#725840]
