Games that wasted a perfectly good premise/plot
- Thread starter Dalisclock
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It was already a good looking game, was probably pretty easy to just upscale some textures and maybe add some rtx or something to. I really want to see a remaster of Burnout Vengence without origin.
I do appreciate the little difference of how they treat each other when the other dies.
Orenstein: My dear fallen comrade in arms, I will avenge thee.
Smough: BIG HAMMER SMASH!
He’s not wrong though. Technically it’s impossible for any game itself to “kill” its respective franchise, seeing as it’s merely a victim of circumstance. EA made shitty enough choices with it to turn enough people off, and rather than say, “Hey, maybe we should make smarter choices like building off the earlier installments so more people like it.” they just said “Oh this didn’t sell as well. Clearly people don’t like Burnout anymore, so fuck it.”
EA is just one of those companies that’s lost sight of what ingredients make good games through having shitty leadership. While it wasn’t a high point for much besides presentation, I myself enjoyed it enough; more than any NFS that followed at least, so it was disappointing to see it abandoned while a franchise with even worse design choices somehow stuck around far longer.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Oh my fucking g... SEMANTICS. We're all basically saying the same thing. Of course the game didn't gain sentience, grab a shotgun and kill its predecessors and the company that birthed it. I'm saying what you're both saying: the Burnout franchise died at Paradise, and I'll add "because of EA's decisions" for clarity if that helps.
EA made bad decisions in Paradise that made the franchise less appealing to long-time fans hence less appealing to EA to risk further, substantive investment hence no new Burnout in the past 14 years. Meanwhile, we've gotten another Assassin's Creed every 48 seconds in that same amount of time. My calling Paradise "the franchise killer" was simply my concise way of saying we didn't get anymore Burnouts because Paradise is where it lost its appeal all around. Was Paradise the worst game ever? No. Was it the worst Burnout ever? Absolutely.
No. Once again, that belongs to Burnout Legends (DS) and Burnout: Crash. You're letting your hatred blind you.
Even if I take Crash out of the equation, that's still leaves the DS version of Legends. Plus, the earlier games are hard to go back to. I'm mainly referring to the first and second game. They play like more standard arcade racers of the late 90s and the early 2000s.
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I haven’t played it in what, fifteen years now but I don’t recall the action/crashes being horribly done or a series worst either, even going by just the main console entries. Of course, I’d only played mostly Takedown and a bit of Revenge, so my opinion is limited.
Anyways, this might be worth watching -
Wow so after reading some comments, apparently the head of Criterion can share or take most of the blame for it. He wanted to do something different and ultimately left. Not sure why EA didn’t just hire someone else though.
Crashed Alex Game Credits4 years ago
As much as everyone loves there to be a villain in life, in this case there isn't one. As the person that started the series off, I was also the person that chose to do something different in 2008 and have a crack at making Need For Speed. So it was me that really chose to take a break. We only planned to make one NFS to give Black Box in Canada some more time to make a game. But we ended up doing two. After eight years at EA - myself and Fiona were ready to leave and form our own independent studio. EA often gets a lot of bad press, but to us they were great employers and they took care of a lot of people, often going really above and beyond for some people who needed it. Since we left in 2013 we've learned a whole new engine and worked on all new hardware. So far we've made "Dangerous Golf" "Lethal VR" and more recently "Danger Zone"." We know that EA are funding some people to remaster Paradise. We wish them and EA all the best. At Three Fields Entertainment, we've got a few things up our sleeves that a lot of you just might like. ....Alex
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I saw this video back in 2017. So I'm already familiar with it. So the blame pretty much lays with EA splitting everybody off and not knowing what to do with their own license. That's pretty much the argument I've been saying since the beginning. Paradise didn't kill the franchise. The game has plenty of fans despite his issues, it's EA just being EA. The pattern we are all familiar with it. They take a successful game or ip, and run it into the ground or do nothing with it because the IP doesn't make all the money in the world. Or they split off different developers for no reason other than just cause.
I don't consider niche arcade releases and a release for a hand-held console substantive installments to the franchise. If anything, that adds to my argument that the franchise lost significant support after Paradise failed to maintain steam for the franchise.
I've already made my case and proven my point. Check out the spoiler tag on @hanselthecaretaker's previous post with the video. It will have all the info you need.
Okay this one is gonna be a bit of a different take on this thread's idea, but hear me out.
Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 2, both waste great story, great setting, great characters, because the gameplay is absolute dogshit and it's miserable to play. Does that count as wasting a perfectly good plot? The plot is good, the characters are good, but since the game stinks it goes to waste because it's unplayable trash.
Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 2, both waste great story, great setting, great characters, because the gameplay is absolute dogshit and it's miserable to play. Does that count as wasting a perfectly good plot? The plot is good, the characters are good, but since the game stinks it goes to waste because it's unplayable trash.
Oh yeah, that definitely counts. A great story is marred far too often by terrible gameplay. If you have to struggle with the bad gameplay just to get to the great story, well, the story isn't that great either.
Like KOTOR, FF12, and many other games, Xenoblade Chronicles is the case of a game that tries to LOOK like an action RPG and would have been infinitely better as one, but takes the lazy way out and instead plays as a turn based RPG and makes the rest of the game far far worse as a result. All of these games, with the exception of FF12 because the story is terrible, live entirely off of their great stories rather than their gameplay. That's the reason I really really hope the KOTOR remake goes full action RPG like it should have been in the first place.
Unlike a true turned based RPG Xenoblade doesn't even have the ability to control the entire party's actions with every turn, meaning that we got idiotic A.I. which could've actually been decently smart if they put any effort into it but they didn't. Basically the whole strategy of every fight in Xenoblade 1 was just using the Monado abilities to protect your party members from their own idiocy.
Oh. So that's how the gameplay works in those games? I would have hoped developers had learned not to do this kind of thing (AI partners in turn based RPGs) after Persona 3.
You would hope so, but it's not even that. As entire series like the Kingdom Hearts and Tale series have shown, it's entire possible to make competent AI for AI controlled party members. Especially if there's a means to tweak the AI to the player's liking. FF12 goes way too far in that aspect by making it so you have to dive into a menu and micromanage every last action your AI party members do with it's terrible Gambit system. Do it well and the game can basically play itself, but it shouldn't need that level of player input in order to be good. It's not like the developers don't know each and every enemy the player will ever face and thus can tailor the AI to each and every one or anything... oh wait.
Xenoblade makes it so any given encounter you don't already massively outlevel you have to babysit the brain dead party members in order to be able to win.
No More Heroes 2 - You can't play as Henry Cooldown, aside from a dream sequence. You would use him for three stages, but got cut due to development time. I felt blue balled real hard there! Shinobu is fun, but her boss fights are shit, and the level design is even shittier.
Now that I think about it, a lot with the modern Ninja Gaiden games. Considering they're glorified reboots of the NES games, turned in to prequels. It does not help that Tecmo could not make up there minds on the matter until Itigaki got fired, and Hayashi took over.
Crysis 2 having almost none of the surviving characters from 1, appear in 2, and are killed off in a side story comic book. I understand why Crytek chose this. Start fresh; introduce new gaming audience. Most who did not have a rigged out PC. They still could have handled it much better, or done a few name drops. Crysis 3 mostly fixes these issues.
Dead To Rights never getting a true follow up where Jack Slate becomes a mercenary-for-hire and leaves Grant City. In order: we got a sequel-prequel, a crappy side story prequel on the PSP, and a reboot copying Gears of War. DTR II was average and forgettable, the PSP game sucked and used many assets from II, and the reboot fucking sucked! So first game where leaves Grant City, so he does not take the wrap for the inevitable fall out and power struggle is the canon ending for 20 years now. Everyone human he knows in Grant City is dead.
Now that I think about it, a lot with the modern Ninja Gaiden games. Considering they're glorified reboots of the NES games, turned in to prequels. It does not help that Tecmo could not make up there minds on the matter until Itigaki got fired, and Hayashi took over.
Crysis 2 having almost none of the surviving characters from 1, appear in 2, and are killed off in a side story comic book. I understand why Crytek chose this. Start fresh; introduce new gaming audience. Most who did not have a rigged out PC. They still could have handled it much better, or done a few name drops. Crysis 3 mostly fixes these issues.
Dead To Rights never getting a true follow up where Jack Slate becomes a mercenary-for-hire and leaves Grant City. In order: we got a sequel-prequel, a crappy side story prequel on the PSP, and a reboot copying Gears of War. DTR II was average and forgettable, the PSP game sucked and used many assets from II, and the reboot fucking sucked! So first game where leaves Grant City, so he does not take the wrap for the inevitable fall out and power struggle is the canon ending for 20 years now. Everyone human he knows in Grant City is dead.
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KH and the Tales series aren't entirely menu based though. KH is very action heavy and Donald and Goofy are very much designed as support for Sora and on higher difficulties they die almost instantly against the more difficult challenges while you as Sora do all the work. The Tales series has also had distance and blocking as well as the ability to take over the other characters. What I'm talking about is specifically RPG games that are almost completely about the systems.
More specifically, this is a problem when enemies have effects that can cripple or outright murder your party if someone in your party doesn't do what you need them to. As an example of a game that avoids this issue, in Criminal Girls, plenty of bosses will have a hyper beam like move where they charge up to hit you with a nuke of some kind. In Criminal Girls, you do not directly control the party, you can select who is currently fighting in one of the 4 party slots, you can use items as essentially a free action every turn, and you direct them with "suggestions" on what they should do but they won't always follow your wishes. There is however one ability for one character that will always happen whenever you select it which is a grand guard ability your tank and that reduces damage on the next turn by a huge amount.
Games that are much more tactics based rather than execution based are much more finicky with AI controlled teammates.
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FEAR 2: Project Origin. F3AR even more so. FEAR 2's story and lore of other characters you have to know from developer interviews or the wiki, and not in the actual game you're playing. Aside from notes the player is never going to read. 3 feels so rushed and was farmed out to a different studio. The only good thing going for it are the cinematics, and the ending where Point Man lives.
FEAR 3 (I refuse to call it F3AR) was a clusterfuck of "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" design. I will say that exploring Alma's daddy issues was not a bad concept, but The Creep was executed so terribly that it destroyed any sort of investment I might've had in the idea.
The only level in the game I remember with any clarity was the mall. Everything else just blurs together in my mind.