Extra Punctuation: Building Sequels Badly

[Moeez]

Yahtzee, in the interest of talking about sequels...what do you think of Alex Mercer from Prototype being made an antagonist in Prototype 2?

This is one of the main reasons I'm interested in the sequel.

 

[pepitko]

Not sure I agree with Yahtzee's take on sequels. For instance, some games create whole worlds such as Mass Effect or Assassin's Creed, so in that case, I don't really mind if the gameplay is quite similar to the first game, I just want to see more stories from within the game world. That having been said, I do agree that you need to change up the characters for the sequel unless it was planned from the beginning. Mass Effect is a good example of this, they killed off Shepard in the first one and had to magically resurrect him in the second one and we will be seeing him/her again in the third one. I would much rather have different set of main characters for each game, to have a slightly different angle on each of the games.

 

[lord.jeff]

I agree with your points but you raised the challenge: Sly Cooper, Metroid, Metal Gear, Mass Effect, Sonic, and Shadow Hearts.

 

[bue519]

Case in point: Final Fantasy. Look at what happened when they stopped creating and started polling: Final Fantasy 12, 13, and 14... None of which deserve numerals. (XI doesn't either, but for different reasons. It's pretty good I guess, so I'll let it slide).

EDIT One thing though:

Name me one sequel to a game that wasn't left open for sequels, with the same main characters as before, whose story was regarded as better than the first. Let me help you out: there aren't any.

MegaMan 2 and 3.

And Fallout 2, and Donkey Kong 2. Man, it's pretty easy to contradict that statement.

If you look through the history of gaming there are a lot of examples.
I would actually include Portal 2.
I thought it was a better game than the first. Don't get me wrong, I loved the first but it wasn't really a complete game; it was the introduction of an ingenious game concept that I got as a bonus to a game.
But then again, I don't really consider story an important part of a game; and if I did, I don't think I would be much of a gamer.
At the same time, I greatly appreciated the new archetypes they slipped into Portal 2 from the fool to the god that created it all. It wasn't contrived or pretentious and while the hilarity wasn't as surprising, it was just as clever.
To me what was more important was adding new elements to the existing structure of the "test chamber" and to that end I was most satisfied.

If I want a good story experience, I'm not going to reach for a game and many of the games that people say have good story experiences only have good stories when compared to other games and tend to have some tedious and/or sparse gameplay.

I enjoyed Portal 2 also, and thought it had a fun story. However, I thought that the first was better if only because it was more unique. The sequel adopted the Half-Life 2 formula, where you get puzzle, puzzle, story element, then back to puzzle. Portal was better in this regard, because the story didn't need to take you out of the game to make it better. Portal 2 just lacks the soul that made the original so unique. Now it feels like Portal Life 2.

Maybe that's a good thing.
I didn't get that feeling that the story stopped the gameplay... for very long. There weren't any cutscenes, just little bits of dialogue while you went from place to place and I liked that the puzzles weren't all portal-centric. If you look at it portal1 & portal2 had the same puzzle to story ratio, it's just that portal 2 is a longer game so you got more puzzles (and bigger ones at that), more elements (goo, bridges, funnels help keep the game unique) and more dialogue/monologue (with more characters to keep it interesting).
Overall, if you split P2 into P1 size chunks, it all seems balanced out in the same way.
Sure it can't be as fresh as the first but I didn't want it to be. I did want more portal puzzles and they delivered on that quite spectacularly.

True, and perhaps duo of great story of the Half Life games (atleast 2 onwards, although I love the first it just told the story differently) and awesome puzzles of the Portal games. (perhaps it could even rival the mixing of Metroid and Castlevania)However, I just found some of the story elements a bit jarring. An example is during the escape attempts where there weren't many puzzle to solve, besides the find the other white wall you need to go to. These were nice, but I felt more engrossed in Portal because I only got the hint of what was going on and found out more and more over the course of the puzzles. With Portal 2, it felt like I just got blind-sided by baseball bat, I just prefer the subtlety of the first.

The first definitely seemed more subtle but I sometimes wonder if that?s just because it was still very mysterious. It?s like how 1 got me to laugh more but I think that?s because I wasn?t really expecting to. P2 seems just as humorous, but I was expecting it to be so I probably didn?t laugh as much... But I can?t be sure.
Once again, you?re right about this one having more of those ?you have to shoot the portal at that white spot in the distance,? but I also wonder if that?s just because there was more game and more ?behind the scenes? parts than we?re used to from the first, which also had those moments but all at the end.
I kind of appreciated that the test chambers in 2 weren?t all necessarily the clean polished modern lab experiments but also the retro (almost steampunk) style bowls of the facility with their cavernous spaces. I?ll admit that it did make some of the solutions contrived (making the tough part of the puzzle, finding where you can place the portal) but the effect also made the execution of the solutions visually spectacular.
I can understand why one might prefer the original for the same reason that my replays of Fallout 3 aren?t as awesome as my first playthrough.
Do you think you would?ve liked Portal 2 more if it came out first and still had that mystery?

You raise some really great points. To answer your question I probably would've liked Portal 2 tons more if it had come out first. Mainly because I havn't always been the biggest fan of puzzle games but somehow Portal drew me in and actually made me enjoy doing puzzles (egads!). So now I get to have some of those really great puzzles, with the production values of Half Life 2 to back them up! It would've blown my mind. Luckily, it had a scrappier brother come out first to get me ready for the sweetness.
Not to get off topic, I also admit that I really enjoyed the aesthetics of the second game and some of the puzzles were the best in the series(especially some of those Co-op levels, the ending puzzles for each section are especially memorable). But, playing the newest entry, just reminded me of why I thought the first one was great. So in the end, I suppose I'm just being a poor sport and should just enjoy the greatness that is Valve.

 

[Jaker the Baker]

Was that an Animal Farm reference?

 

[Wisdom Thumbs]

I mostly agree with Yahtzee's hatred of sequels.

I'm actually surprised that he didn't harp on Gears of War 2, though. Sure, the first game ended on a sequel hook, but Epic left it so that if Gears 1 wasn't popular enough then they could just leave it at that and never make a sequel. But it was popular, so along came Gears 2, which was better in every regards (using Gears 1 as a jumping off point to create a new, brand new, much more moving story) but seemed to lose some of the "feel" of Gears along the way.

No biggie, I guess. :/

 

[sievr]

That comment that Yahtzee made at the end of his article. It is about you.

Of course it is. I'm a fan, and so are you. So is everyone on The Escapist.

Touché, sir.

And that includes Yahtzee as well, I suppose.

 

[orangecharger]

Too bad fans are the people holding the money

Good point. Alas it's also quite common for stupid people to have money too. Has anyone actually personally participated in a focus group for a game company? If not, then who are the actual FANS speaking on behalf of all fans? Who is telling these developers to get out their cookie cutter? I would say economics would be part of it, but Valve actually through more money at Potal 2 than Portal 1 and got a worse game out of it -- not sure if the sales would justify the additional cost.

Hey... where is Half Life Episode 3 already?

 

[Viddaric]

here's my only opinion on this: Prince of Persia: SoT wrapped things up really, really well. It had the best video game ending I've ever seen. It was such a good ending that I didn't want to ruin it by playing the sequels and watching the prince go off his angst medication. It was a tight story, and it didn't need any additional bells and whistles.

 

[discrider]

I'm sort of reading backwards through all the EPs here, and I thought I'd just say that GLaDOS is awesome and I really did not care that the gameplay of the story of Portal 2 (See white panel, shoot white panel) was much watered down into constant tutorial section - 1 puzzle - next tutorial cycles. When I take Portal and hold it against Portal 2, Portal has the innovative gameplay, and the minimalist story telling and is an excellent game. Portal 2 embellishes the story at the expense of gameplay, but in my mind at least, these two balance out, and hearing GLaDOS again and Cave, as well as the rest of the arc/music/settings completely makes up for the tremendously easy puzzles.

The puzzles in the co-op and indeed the Perpetual Testing Initiative are much better than the ones in the storyline, and compare much more favourably to Portal. They suffer a bit from not having a terribly good arc I think, as the bots and black dot man don't really progress as characters through the levels the way Chell does in the first, finding Ratman clues and eventually escaping from the facility. But overall the pithy writing is back, the difficult chambers are back, and the cutscenes bookending the co-op work well.

So in all, yes, Portal 2 single player lacks some of Portal's gameplay flair, but it is enjoyable for other reasons and this makes it at least equivalent IMO. However, Portal 2's Co-op is in my eyes the true successor to Portal. And the Perpetual Testing Initiative is just icing on the cake.

Aside from this, I'd like to say that, as a fan, I may be buying everything with GLaDOS's voice in it and enjoying them immensely regardless. Totally enjoyed Defense Grid: The Awakening's Potato ARG tie in Portal DLC. I've played Chime's "Still Alive" level to death. I'm planning on watching whatever that movie is that is coming out which has GLaDOS's voice in charge of a boat 'defending' humanity for whatever reason. And I'm waiting for Poker Night at the Inventory 2 to come out so I can listen to her berate everyone for their unfortunate grasp on the fundamentals of probability.