Jimquisition: Sequel or Slaughter

Lightknight

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Deathfish15 said:
Here's a list of sequel spewing series that need to die:

-Call of Duty

-Battlefield

-Diablo

-Starcraft

-Assassin's Creed

-Tomb Raider

-Fallout

-Grand Theft Auto

-Total War

-Halo

-Killzone

-

-<insert anything with "Mario" here>

-Sonic

-Crysis

-Final Fantasy
Is the existence of these games hurting you somehow? Several of these titles are beloved by many people and that's how they're still alive. This video isn't the death of franchises, it's about not ruling out IPs that can still be very lucrative if budgeted for properly.
 

MB202

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I actually JUST had a discussion on a forum about how Capcom is only interested in making sequels, and almost nothing else. Someone commented that it wasn't as bad as Ubisoft, and apparently, it's true.
 

Lightknight

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Lilani said:
Lightknight said:
Are you saying that Peter Jackson does not also enjoy money and/or keeping himself and his staff employed for another 5 years?
He's Peter Fucking Jackson. He hasn't had a tough time finding work since LotR was completed. He's been doing whatever the hell he wants to do. He directed the 2005 King Kong and Lovely Bones adaptation, he produced District 9, Adventures of TinTin, he's directed and produced a few short films of his own, and there are a few other projects he's working on which are slated to come out in 2014 or 2015. Whether or not he did the Hobbit movies, he was pretty set when it came to money and acclaim. When you're signed as a producer for a film directed by Steven Spielberg, there isn't much you can't do in the realm of filmmaking.
So you're saying he doesn't, in fact, like money anymore? He officially now has all the monies he wants and wouldn't perform any actions to obtain a few additional millions of dollars?
 

Johnny Novgorod

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Lilani said:
Johnny Novgorod said:
There's no real reason to make The Hobbit into three movies. They already made a Hobbit movie in 1977 - it was 77 minutes long. And it's a lovely movie. The whole Necromancer/Saruman/Radagast subplot is just there for filler and to solidify the connections with the comparatively more mature LOTR, just as Galadriel is just there because the movie needs to cast at least ONE actress, and Tauriel was made up by the same principle, and Legolas is there for fanservice, and... you get the picture.
The necromancer storyline has been in the movie since the very beginning, even back when they planned to do it all in two movies. I personally love it being there, it gives Gandalf more to do and makes his presence and arc within the story make more sense. So that's where I stand on how relevant it is. They only split it into a trilogy VERY late in the game--I'm talking May of 2012, just six months shy of the premier. So to me, saying "there's no real reason to make it into three movies" doesn't make sense because it's still the same project they set out to complete from the very beginning. They're just giving all their ideas more breathing room. And yes, they do need to make a few connections with LotR, because unlike when the Hobbit was originally written they know a bit more about the world and what was going on. Hell, Tolkien himself edited some parts of the Hobbit after he came up with the story of LotR so that their continuities didn't conflict.

I'll admit Legolas is probably for fanservice, but his presence still makes sense because Thorin and Co still encounter his father Thranduil and his people in Mirkwood in the original story. It's not like they bent the story backwards, they just said "Hey, Thranduil is the king that imprisoned the dwarves, and even though Legolas wasn't a character when the Hobbit was written, it would still make sense for the son of the king to be there." In fact, knowing the full continuity, if Legolas weren't there in some way they would have had to address it anyway.

They picked through the appendices to make parts of LotR make sense--for example, even though the book never shows how Aragorn died, they got the imagery of showing him on his deathbed during Arwen's vision from the appendices. And now they're doing the same thing in the Hobbit. Yes some things are different from the book, but it's all still from Tolkien and just as with LotR, what they can't adapt accurately they at least try to honor in some way or another.
Yes, it all makes sense, in a technical, hand-wavy sort of way ("Oh, Legolas would be around", "Oh, we should show Gandalf's actions, even though we could not and let him be the mysterious character he was written as", "Oh, we could totally stretch every single setpiece to turn an adventure story into an action story"). I can't get over the fact how unimportant Bilbo, The Hobbit, is. I love Martin Freeman as Bilbo but he's pushed aside for the most part even though he's supposed to be the main protagonist and narrator of the story bearing his name. We see more of Legolas and "Tauriel" in the new trailer than we do of Bilbo. And speaking of the trailer - they show they're going as far as Bilbo stepping into Smaug's lair. So what's the third movie going to be about? 170 minutes of the Battle of the Five Armies, which Bilbo totally didn't miss in the novel?
 

Verrenxnon

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Always love your insights, Jim. As usual, they're spot-on. Honestly, though, I don't think this video needed to be 9 & a half minutes long. Like a lot of your Jimquisitions, you seem to belabor the point when it could be made so much more succinctly and effectively.
 

MB202

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Also, I completely disagree with Jim's views on The Hobbit, for the same reasons Bob said in The Big Picture. I don't think it's out of greed, though I WILL say it's probably because Peter Jackson wanted to do it.
 

Arnoxthe1

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Jim, you keep having this misconception that these games are cheap to make. Cliff B. mentioned a great video on used games in one of his recent blog posts and I think you should watch it. It may seem disconnected from what I'm saying at first but trust me, it will all connect in the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G_f8YBy39M
 

Ishal

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Hollywood is and has been ever increasingly garbage. The business practices and crappy premises have been going stale and stagnant for years, and this is what people want their games to be? Why? Fucking why?

Movies aren't the be all end all of "art" they are very similar to games in that there is just as much pulpy schlock and just as few... ugh, I have to say it, Citizen Kanes.

There are nothing bad about sequels, but I remember playing Halo: Combat evolved when I was really young, and bring wrapped up in the story and the questions it presented, then after completing it having a second game be teased. When that happens, there should be a sequel. But in a game where everything presented and neatly wrapped up in the end, there doesn't need to be. Don't follow Hollywood, its a waste of time. Movies just don't have it anymore.
 

Adon Cabre

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synobal said:
Personally I think Studios should not be attached so much of creating squeals but instead creating new games with in the same setting. Unfortunately this means a lot of times they will be tempted to do the same thing again and again rather than explore new aspects of the setting.
Often, that happens when they hire other writers or another studio to create the sequel. Bioshock 2 comes to mind.
 

Casual Shinji

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Lilani said:
Normally I agree with you Jim, but I have one MAJOR problem with this episode: Back the fuck off the Hobbit. Making it a trilogy was Peter Jackson's idea, not the studio's. The studio approved it of course, but it became pretty evident during production that they weren't going to fit all of their ideas in two movies as originally planned. Because remember--it was originally supposed to be two movies. It was planned that way, and the studio approved it. And there was no doubt in anybody's mind it was going to make money. The halfway point for principle photography was about the same number of days into production as the halfway point for LotR. And the reason it's getting so long even though the Hobbit is such a simple story is because they're bringing in the necromancer story from the Silmarillion, which regales what Gandalf was doing when he wasn't with Thorin and Co. Also, I think he's fleshing out the culture of the elves of Mirkwood a bit, exploring their inner politics more than the original book did. But it's still all from Tolkien.

So that one comparison got a major NOPE from me. Peter Jackson is many things, but a sellout is not one of them. If anything, he had even more creative freedom with the Hobbit. I mean, who else can tell a studio "I want to completely restructure this project in and add a whole other movie to it" in the middle of production and have it approved? That not only requires a ballsy director to make the call, but a lot of trust on the studio's end that he can pull it off and not have the whole thing fall apart like a house of cards.
Peter Jackson may not be a sell-out, but he's very close to reaching George Lucas amounts of overindulgence. King Kong already displayed a lot of that.

And with The Hobbit he's very content with continuing that same path. With stuff for the sake of stuff, CGI for the sake of CGI, and fan favourite characters for the sake of fan favourite characters.

It took balls for him to demand three movies for Lord of the Rings - A project no studio had any faith in, and one that everyone in Hollywood thought would bankrupt New Line. With The Hobbit he simply had to ask, "Hey, can I make this three movies?" To which the studio replied, "Well, you made shit tons of money with that other Fantasy franchise, so sure!" Nothing really ballsy about that, just regular Hollywood business.
 

Adon Cabre

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Ishal said:
I'm sure it was BS, but Speilberg and Lucas were doing some forum a few weeks back and they were talking about all of those high budget John Carter, After Earth movies that were flopping. If a few more go, they said, the industry would collapse.

Disney wanted to make Lone Ranger another Pirates of the Caribbean franchise; and while I would never fault anyone for wanting to go big, it's ultimately up to them to make a great movie/game/novel. If Watchdogs sucks, it won't sell; and like Aliens: Colonial Marines, it will disappear. But if its ratings and sales are golden, then why not?

A professional writer and creative director is supposed to create -- sometimes for a sequel, or sometimes from scratch.
 

spoonybard.hahs

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Deathfish15 said:
Certain games should get sequels and certain games should not. Binary Domain is an example of one that left a semi-cliffhanger out of the ending, but was still a great enough story plot to not have a follow up.


The problem with the AAA market right now is that every other game, they decide to make a new engine ($$$), new character models ($$), hire new voice actors ($$$), conduct a symphony for the sound track ($$$), and get as many story writers as possible ($$$). But with all that, where's the game? You see the problem, right? There's no game there, it's basically the set up for a new movie that is "one-sitting and done"


I will say this: some sequels do it right. Guild Wars 2 took much of the background story, the character models, races, and the like...and then built on from there. However, it's still a completely different game with a different type of mechanics, newer style gameplay. Though many of the old game's fans [like Jim said] had demanded a sequel to be just like the first, the developers said "no" and went a completely different route. And it works. And it's good.


Here's a list of sequel spewing series that need to die:

-Call of Duty

-Battlefield

-Diablo

-Starcraft

-Assassin's Creed

-Tomb Raider

-Fallout

-Grand Theft Auto

-Total War

-Halo

-Killzone

-

-<insert anything with "Mario" here>

-Sonic

-Crysis

-Final Fantasy
Your list - for the most part - is pretty flawed. For starter's, Diablo is barely a franchise by Ubisoft's standards. There was that whole decade plus between D2 and D3. Same for GTA, Sonic, Fallout, Final Fantasy, and Tomb Raider (at present, no sequel has been announced for the reboot), which aren't even on a yearly release cycles.
 

JemJar

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Zachary Amaranth said:
canadamus_prime said:
This is why it irritates me every time the "What games deserve a sequel" thread pops up on this site. We have to accept part of the blame for this.
And the fact that gamers routinely are reticent to try something new.
This is in large part because games are expensive things to try and demos are a pain to make.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QM6LoaqEnY
 

Sheo_Dagana

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I too have a lot of jizz on my copy of Dynasty Warriors 8. All slow-down issues aside, it might just be the best DW game yet! All it needs are Gundams.

OT: I personally wish companies would think a bit more about their financial/long-term staffing before they get into sequels. There's nothing worse than a series getting out of control or ending in the middle of a story. Take Assassin's Creed for example - they lost some of their creative staff and the series has gotten out of control ever since. I mean, this is a franchise that was supposed to be a trilogy, and yet the series is now on it's fourth numbered title which is actually it's sixth game.
 

Jimothy Sterling

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Arnoxthe1 said:
Jim, you keep having this misconception that these games are cheap to make.
No I don't. I never said they're cheap. In fact, I know they're expensive, which is why I speak out against senselessly bloated costs on top of an already expensive project.

Games aren't cheap. Through avarice and short-sightedness, they can be more costly than they need to be, a stance backed up by as many devs as refuted, depending on who serves what masters.
 

Grimh

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I don't want a TLoU sequel. Fuck that.
It's up there as one of my favorite games this generation, possibly ever, and I never want to see it again.
That doesn't mean I'm against sequels mind you. The Assassin's Creed world to me is pretty suitable for making sequels, I just think they did it wrong.
 

Carnagath

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Johnny Novgorod said:
undeadsuitor said:
If it wasn't for the developer telling us they're related, nobody would have known.
That's the whole point though, isn't it? They tell us.

They tell us they're related, market them as related, sell them as related. The same group of people working under the same developer name for the same production company develop three similarly themed, similarly designed, similarly looking games that are marketed as part of the same franchise and the first two are even sold together nowadays, as halves of one story.
So, 3 games with complete stories, completely different gameplay, different names, released in a period of over 15 years (if we're lucky) don't deserve to be mentioned as standalone games, but are instead... milking the Ico world? Like... I'm trying to see your point, but I'm really struggling here.
 

Lilani

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Lightknight said:
So you're saying he doesn't, in fact, like money anymore?
No, I'm saying he has access to so many ways of gaining obscene amounts of money that he didn't have to spend another three years exhaustively tramping across huge uninhabited swathes of New Zealand in order to get it. If money was all he was after, he has many easier and faster ways of getting it than three Hobbit movies produced on the same scale as LotR.

Johnny Novgorod said:
Yes, it all makes sense, in a technical, hand-wavy sort of way ("Oh, Legolas would be around", "Oh, we should show Gandalf's actions, even though we could not and let him be the mysterious character he was written as", "Oh, we could totally stretch every single setpiece to turn an adventure story into an action story"). I can't get over the fact how unimportant Bilbo, The Hobbit, is. I love Martin Freeman as Bilbo but he's pushed aside for the most part even though he's supposed to be the main protagonist and narrator of the story bearing his name. We see more of Legolas and "Tauriel" in the new trailer than we do of Bilbo. And speaking of the trailer - they show they're going as far as Bilbo stepping into Smaug's lair. So what's the third movie going to be about? 170 minutes of the Battle of the Five Armies, which Bilbo totally didn't miss in the novel?
Again, a lot of the LotR stuff was treated this way. Hell, they even gave totally different characters different lines in LotR. They moved the Old Man Willow scene to the Fangorn so that Treebeard could recite a few of Tom Bombadil's lines, in order to pay tribute to that event. That was not only the wrong place and wrong character, but also the wrong film since that was in the Two Towers, and Tom Bombadil should have been in Fellowship.

While I also adore Martin Freeman as Bilbo, I don't feel he was neglected at all. Yes the Council of Elrond took up time, but it was used to explain how he and the dwarves got out of Rivendell even though Elrond wasn't going to allow them to go on. Yes it took them a while to get out of Goblin Town, but how else could they have stripped that down? They had to fight their way out, and it wasn't as though they were near a door. And then Bilbo's role in the battle against the wolves was greatly increased from what it was in the book. In the book, the eagles basically hear the racket they were making and pick them out of the trees. But in the movie, they had Bilbo fight to make the finale about him and to finish his arc with Thorin. While a lot of the story wasn't about Bilbo, they made sure both the beginning and end were all centered around him.

Casual Shinji said:
Peter Jackson may not be a sell-out, but he's very close to reaching George Lucas amounts of overindulgence. King Kong already displayed a lot of that.
The man is a self-taught filmmaking genius. I never saw King Kong, but if I had grown up admiring a film and finally got the access to money and resources to have a crack at my first inspiration, I'd do it too.

It took balls for him to demand three movies for Lord of the Rings - A project no studio had any faith in, and one that everyone in Hollywood thought would bankrupt New Line. With The Hobbit he simply had to ask, "Hey, can I make this three movies?" To which the studio replied, "Well, you made shit tons of money with that other Fantasy franchise, so sure!" Nothing really ballsy about that, just regular Hollywood business.
I'm not sure what you know about the production of LotR, but he didn't "demand" three films. They had written it as two when they were originally going after Miramax to fund the film, but Miramax said even two was too much and after that they gave up. They scrambled to find another studio interested in the project, and eventually found New Line and pitched their two films to the head of New Line. At the end, the man said "Why are there two films? This is three films." So they retooled their scripts to be three films, and never stopped editing the scripts until they had nothing left to film.
 

TiberiusEsuriens

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Deathfish15 said:
The problem with the AAA market right now is that every other game, they decide to make a new engine ($$$)
Pretty much this. Remember back in the day when there were only two engines, every game using either Quake or Unreal? They still exist today, but instead of 9/10 games using it the ratio has gone down drastically to something like 3/10. Because EVERYBODY used them they could be licensed for relatively cheap, and when the one parent company made updates just about every game studio on earth could suddenly use them. Nowadays every studio wants in on that cash, so the 'Proprietary Engine' is now a thing. Unreal, DICE, Crytek, SquareEnix, etc. all have really cool engines, but they're functionally equivalent. There are differences sure, but not that much to matter (hoping Frostbite ends up with full destructibility some day). There's just so many that the companies can't make mad cash off it. Some major studios are being clever and sharing the engines internally across all sub-companies, but even that's a minority. Squeenix has how many IPs and how many engines? It's 1:1. FarCry:Blood Dragon showed you can reuse assets for a cheap profit, but what did the market take away? "Hey, the consumers love this stuff! Let's make a NEW engine for THE SEQUEL."


On a side note:

Dear Jim,

I was really jiving with this episode, and then THAT happened. Do you enjoy causing gut wrenching vomit to your viewers, or just REALLY like mayonnaise?

Sincerely,
Tiberius
 

Adon Cabre

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Arnoxthe1 said:
Jim, you keep having this misconception that these games are cheap to make. Cliff B. mentioned a great video on used games in one of his recent blog posts and I think you should watch it. It may seem disconnected from what I'm saying at first but trust me, it will all connect in the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G_f8YBy39M
Cynical Brit's pretty much right. At Gamestop I have to push over and again at the counter: "No, I don't want a used game; I want the new one. Yeah, I know it costs more. Blah-blah-blah... just get me a new one!"