Jimquisition: Sequel or Slaughter

Imp_Emissary

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Jimothy Sterling said:
Arnoxthe1 said:
Jimothy Sterling said:
Left 4 Dead is nowhere near the level of Battlefield 3. It does not matter.

You're asking me to understand things I already understand, which is patronizing, and clearly off-base considering you're assuming I've said games are cheap to make when I have not. People go where the games are best, not where they look best. Another case -- PS2, last in its class in the tech department, best in show when it comes to success.

Besides which, we're supposedly arguing about the cost of making a game people perceive to be good. Modding a source engine is not as expensive as building a new one. You're saying I don't understand that a game must spend extra money to hang with the big dogs, then telling me Valve games can hang with the big dogs because they can use their engine that doesn't need extra money to be rebuilt. Telling me you need to spend a ton of money to be in the same ballpark as a successful game, then telling me Source Engine can be tweaked to look good, does not compute.

What YOU're not considering is that engines can be reused for many things, and can last a long time, so unless you decide to build every new IP on a new engine, the costs just aren't gonna stay the same.
But most engines aren't made to be reused. Here's a brilliant example. Halo 4 was built off of the Reach engine. While they got it to play nice for the most part, they couldn't get Theater for campaign or Spartan Ops to work right so they had to cut it because the engine wasn't meant to be modified so. And that's not exactly a small feature to cut.

Can Publishers make adaptable engines? Certainly. Do they? Most of the time, no. I don't really know why though. Most likely because it's cheaper. If a publisher has a good old engine they can use, more power to them but not all publishers have this luxury.

Yes, engines can be reused but as I stated in the above point, it can cause a lot of headaches if it's not meant to be modified. Further, making a new engine, even if you do have a good modifiable engine, is inevitable sometime.
Which all goes back to the wanton waste that feeds into overspending. Meanwhile, the makes of Unreal, and CryEngine, and Source are doing quite well making and also licensing their engines, so they can make money rather than just cost it.

It gets to the point where I'm gonna have limited to zero sympathy for a company that makes disposable, expensive engines.

Side note about the argument Jim;
MovieBob did an Overthinker episode a while ago about while things are getting more expensive in the video game industry. He noted like you that it's part of it greed in the industry, and the consumer eating it up then asking for more. However, most of what he talked about was the part of it I don't hear about most often.

The blame of the game designers. The artists. The episode is called "Starving Artist". http://gameoverthinker.blogspot.com/2013/05/episode-84-starving-artists.html

Basically what he talks about is how the artists sometimes in the games industry want the newest(and most expensive) tools to make there games. For some reasonable reasons, and some kind of selfish ones.

Also, one question about this whole "we can't afford to make games that just end after one" thing.
For the sake of argument, lets say what Ubisoft is saying is true for at least them. That they just can't afford to make a game that just ends the story.(I agree with you that they more than likely can, but don't want to, but again for the sake of the argument lets go with this hypothetical).

Anyway, if they can't afford to do that, I have to ask; Can they then afford to make only games that can be turned into franchise?

I don't just mean can they take the risk over and over again and put lots of money into new IPs hoping to make them into franchises, but even if they do make very cool games can they support themselves with that system if they can't afford to make a game on a budget? For example; say they have five game franchises, but only 2 are selling really well(and seeing as some say selling 5 million copies is a failure my guess would be having 2 out of 5 selling well would be optimistic).

They would have some of their franchises doing well, but the others suffering and costing them A LOT of money. Video games are expensive to make, and buy. It's not reasonable to expect all of their fans to be able to buy every one of there games, or even want to.

I really liked Assassin's Creed, but I didn't buy every game, and I'm not likely to be buying their yearly installments. To much of a good thing makes you get a bit sick of it eventually. Especially if you don't get enough time away from it to miss it.

Thank God For you, Jim.
Sorry about the long post.
 

RJ 17

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Rebel_Raven said:
I'm not trying to come off as being hard on the series, as I've said a couple times now, I absolutely love it. In fact, it's the story itself that I love the most. Sadly I've never had a chance to get my hands on the actual novel, but back on the NES there was an RPG-like game called Destiny of an Emperor which is based off the 3 Kingdoms story. You start as Liu Bei with Guan Yu and Zhang Fei making the oath in the garden, you go on to fight the yellow turbans, and it basically follows Liu Bei's quest to bring peace to the land.

And it is true, all the changes do add up in the end. DW7 is VERY different than DW 4 because there's been time for the tweeks to pile up. But getting back to the point of this topic: look at the Assassin's Creed series. Sure, there's different things from game to game, but are any of the games really that different from one another? I'd argue that the DW tweeks are going in the right direction, for the most part the changes they make actually do add to the game rather than keep it neutral or make it worse unlike the AC series, I'm just saying that I don't deny that fundamentally the DW games are all very much alike.

>.> there was one change in DW 7 that I absolutely hated though: no special horses in the campaign. Like I said, I really love the story, that's one of the main reasons why I happily play through it game after game after game. But to stick you with either walking on foot or having a bottom-of-the-barrel garbage horse in the campaign? That was a horrible idea! I fought my way through Conquest mode all the way to the bottom of the map to get the Red Hare and you can only use it in Conquest Mode. That really chapped my caboose...it takes forever and a day to get anywhere in the campaign, and there's way too many battles out there where you'll be all the way across the map and all of a sudden *AMBUSH!!!* and 6 guys are beating the crap out of your leader. You hurry back only for him to die because you couldn't get there in time. Would be nice if I had a horse that could actually run faster than I would walk... >.>
 

KungFuJazzHands

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Big_Willie_Styles said:
KungFuJazzHands said:
We as consumers need to face facts: IPs these days are made specifically to line pockets, and we're the ones willfully handing them the money.
And how is that a bad thing? It takes money to make new IPs. If said companies have investors (i.e. public companies,) they have to show profit. That's how American accounting standards work.
Look, if you can't see how the quest for higher profits can have a noticeably negative effect on the quality of any particular piece of long-running work, then I'm not sure exactly what that says about your personal taste in movies, music, video games, or art.

Profit over artistry is what gives us a constantly-flowing river of soggy shit like the Assassin Creed and Call of Duty series. It's what gives us brain-dead ADHD crap like the Transformers movies. It gives us the Twilight books. It gives us late-career Metallica. When ingenuity takes second stage to profit, the final creative result can suffer greatly.

Are there exceptions? obviously. But they are -- far and away -- the exceptions, not the rule.

The motive behind a game is to explore something, a new idea or new take on a character or whatever. The game requires, usually, some sort of investment to make. Said investors expect a return on said investment. That's just how things work. Without start up capital, a game never gets made.
Capital isn't the problem. Overbudgeting and unrealistic expectations on the part of shareholders are certainly issues, however.
 

Rebel_Raven

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RJ 17 said:
Rebel_Raven said:
I'm not trying to come off as being hard on the series, as I've said a couple times now, I absolutely love it. In fact, it's the story itself that I love the most. Sadly I've never had a chance to get my hands on the actual novel, but back on the NES there was an RPG-like game called Destiny of an Emperor which is based off the 3 Kingdoms story. You start as Liu Bei with Guan Yu and Zhang Fei making the oath in the garden, you go on to fight the yellow turbans, and it basically follows Liu Bei's quest to bring peace to the land.

And it is true, all the changes do add up in the end. DW7 is VERY different than DW 4 because there's been time for the tweeks to pile up. But getting back to the point of this topic: look at the Assassin's Creed series. Sure, there's different things from game to game, but are any of the games really that different from one another? I'd argue that the DW tweeks are going in the right direction, for the most part the changes they make actually do add to the game rather than keep it neutral or make it worse unlike the AC series, I'm just saying that I don't deny that fundamentally the DW games are all very much alike.

>.> there was one change in DW 7 that I absolutely hated though: no special horses in the campaign. Like I said, I really love the story, that's one of the main reasons why I happily play through it game after game after game. But to stick you with either walking on foot or having a bottom-of-the-barrel garbage horse in the campaign? That was a horrible idea! I fought my way through Conquest mode all the way to the bottom of the map to get the Red Hare and you can only use it in Conquest Mode. That really chapped my caboose...it takes forever and a day to get anywhere in the campaign, and there's way too many battles out there where you'll be all the way across the map and all of a sudden *AMBUSH!!!* and 6 guys are beating the crap out of your leader. You hurry back only for him to die because you couldn't get there in time. Would be nice if I had a horse that could actually run faster than I would walk... >.>
The novel is avaliable for free in an online web page based version. Not sure I can link it here, but an internet search should unocover it.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt in you not wanting to come off as hard on the series.

I grant you that the story mode retreads the same story, but in diffirent ways.

I agree with you that the tweaks in DW have piled up a lot over the years, and that they are going in the right direction. I'm not denying DW games, fundamentally, are the same, but I think it underselling all the changes that were made is a bit much.

Yeah, I think they changed that in 8 having seen Red Hare in gameplay vids, but that might just be free mode.
 

Matthi205

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Sequels are not inherently bad.
When you've got a story that you want to tell that is very long and interesting (upwards of 70-80 hours of gameplay), it makes sense to split it into 2 games. I don't get trilogies in this respect, but 2 games that tell one story seems OK to me. Anyhow, I'm thinking of a smaller development house that, after the first ~40 hours of gameplay are finished, needs money to come in to keep itself alive.

This doesn't make sense with big dev houses and publishers like EA and Ubisoft though... it really doesn't. Those two are companies that can take a risk, and they should, seeing as their stock market value is dwindling. They've got tons of money they could give to developers to develop good games to sell, broadening the audience they can reach (more different games means more genres get covered, not just action-adventure) and the audience that plays and enjoys playing games. Further, they could thus risk making games that don't sell very well, because some other games are bound to become popular.

Getting back to my original point now. Sequels aren't inherently bad, but a needlessly drawn-out story with a shit ending is (See Mass Effect for that, without the padding and with good mechanics from the start, the game would be an enjoyable 50 hours long[footnote]Please don't get me wrong - I love all the Mass Effect games. There are just some things about them that I need to get off my chest. I'll probably do a review some time, when I can actually play the complete ME series back-to-back so I can actually rate the story as a whole, and not just as the parts I remember + the parts I replayed[/footnote] ).

I find that a sequel that explores a well-made world with a different character and a whole new story is very interesting and very much enjoyable, because it presents us not only with a new story, but a new story in a universe whose rules we know, that has locations we know about and are happy to revisit again, and a story that actually has some fucking closure. Also a smaller, self-contained story means that the focus must be on the characters, forcing devs to give us some interesting characters again and also giving us an opportunity to experience the game's world from a completely different perspective.
I don't mean the Bioshock 2 way of doing it. More like the Bioshock:Infinite way of doing it. It must always be the same team doing the sequel in this case, and it's actually better if it's more tangentially related to the story of the first game than directly following it or asking for prior knowledge of the first game's events.

Another good way to do sequels is the Far Cry way of doing it. Making games with more or less common mechanics and a common theme, but with a new story and a new location every game. It is interesting, allowing people to immediately recognise what the game is about in today's "action-adventure" genre. It is easy to say that this type of sequel is not very good too, but I think it's quite the opposite: The gameplay is more polished and enjoyable every game, and this type of sequel gives the artists and writers a chance to explore a broader concept with as many different approaches to making a story or environment design as they please.
 

brazuca

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I have a game for you: FarCry and GTA, well that is in fact two games. You get the point right? It's about branding. I know what I get in Farcry series. Open world shooters. I know what I get with GTA open world crime dramas. The sequel is not the issue. The bad using is not even an issue. I agree with you that the issue is doing a game to be a sequel without that game even being on the market. It is like saying Universal transformed Fast and Furius in a franchise due to the quality of it's first two movies.
 

V TheSystem V

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That is what irritated me about BioShock. It was an amazing game, with a gripping story throughout and a satisfying enough ending for Rapture. We saw Fontaine die, we saw the Little Sisters being saved, and we saw our character escape the 'utopia' which had been a piece of his past and the place that had prospered and had fallen underneath all its ambition. All of that was explored, all of that was discovered by the gamer and there was no need to go back there. Yes, I would have been happy to see how Rapture fell, but it was unnecessary because we all know how Rapture fell.

Instead, 2K commissioned a sequel. Not a prequel like what was wanted by the fans, but a sequel. It was unnecessary due to the ending of the first one, and the story just wasn't interesting because, I repeat, of the first one. It was an intriguing idea, stepping into the boots of a Big Daddy, but it was one we experienced a bit of in the first game, and it wasn't a concept which could have carried over well to a full game. They improved the gameplay, I will give Irrational that, but it wasn't a good game. It was not what the BioShock fans (from what I could see) wanted from the franchise following the first one. This kinda reminds me of Jim's video about the perfect pasta sauce - people were intrigued about how the Big Daddy came to be, or liked the idea of controlling one, so they took that idea (and not the prequel idea and made a game out of it...THROWING IN MULTIPLAYER.

However, BioShock Infinite exists, and for that I am grateful. It is an exception to the rule, as it doesn't explore Rapture, but a different city. It takes the franchise name and goes to different places with it. Hell, it could have lost the name and could have been something else, and it would have still been as amazing as I believe it to be. It wasn't a sequel, but something that took place in the vein of the original. It worked, which is more than I can say for BioShock 2.
 

PcaKes

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Movies are JUST as bad and I hate it. I DON'T NEED A SEQUEL TO FINDING NEMO. I DON'T NEED A SEQUEL TO THE LAST OF US.
 

Imp_Emissary

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Magog1 said:
Imp Emissary said:
Side note about the argument Jim;
MovieBob did an Overthinker episode a while ago about while things are getting more expensive in the video game industry. He noted like you that it's part of it greed in the industry, and the consumer eating it up then asking for more. However, most of what he talked about was the part of it I don't hear about most often.
I could point out that if the game developers are doing it,
and the gamers are going for it It's rather patronizing of jim to say "there's a problem."

I understand Jim's point. But again I intend to agree with him most of the time.
I am one of Jim's sheep (and proudly so).

If the people making the game want to make sequels, and people want sequels,
on the other hand,
what are you gonna do? He makes a fantastic well made point, but that won't even get
you seconds at the soup line. What can we the fans do?
stop asking for sequels even though we want them?

who's patronizing who.
Firstly; I see what ya mean, and as for what's wrong with it? Well, you saw today's Jimquisition.
Sequels aren't always bad. Hell, sometimes a bad game can get a sequel that is really great. Jim's saying that the developers should be making the games because they want to, and they think the players will find it fun.

The problem with having all new games be the first of a line of sequels is that it is limiting. You always have to put a lot of money into them so you can make it good, and get sales(not always the amount of money they put into some AAA games, but even the ones made on a budget need a lot of money). This can lead to them always playing it safe because if they take a risk, and fail, they'll be screwed.

It's also limiting from a story perspective. You always have to end the games so that you can have another one after it.

Again, Jim's point isn't that there should never be any sequels, but having ALL games made for sequels is a bad idea.
Having all games have sequels, and having no games have sequels are both bad ideas because they both limit what you can do with the game and story.
As for what we, the fans, can do? We can tell the people in charge that we don't like what they're doing, and make a fuss.

Secondly.
Because I only know one sheep here at the Escapist. I demand a test to prove yourself!
Kill these lambs to prove you are a real sheep!
 

Roman Monaghan

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I disagree on The Last Of Us point. I've seen nothing but condemnation at the idea of a sequel and flat out pleading for Naughty Dog to let the story end where it ended. From what I saw that game is one of the few times the idea of a sequel seems flat out scarey to us.

I'm also amused by just how long the Dynasty Warriors footage lasted at the end there. It's like Jim wanted to show off how much fun he's been having with DW 8 or something XD
 

Fiairflair

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Article said:
Art and business, despite what they tell you, aren't mutually exclusive. Not until they make it that way.
This is the lesson learned. Many gaming stories deserve multiple games, just like many written stories work best in a trilogy or extended series (take The Lord of The Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire). But imagine a book publisher declaring that they wouldn't even consider printing your material unless you left your ending open. Almost every classic would have been lost to us were this to have been the mainstream publishing bias.

The story is what brings me to any form of entertainment. Profit may be paramount but diversity is fundamental.
 

FinalHeart95

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I think that if a company goes into a series knowing exactly how it will play out, then planning sequels beforehand is okay. Assuming they do it for artistic reasons and not just out of greed.
This said, I would be lying if I said that a lot of games I really enjoy are unnecessary sequels. The Kingdom Hearts series has many sequels they most certainly haven't planned on since over ten years ago, yet I love them. Fallout New Vegas is pretty awesome, even if the use of "Fallout" is unnecessary. Things like that.
I'm also cautious about the upcoming inFamous game, however. inFamous 2 had the perfect ending, and I can't help but feel that they're going to ruin it.
 
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People are asking for a sequel to The Last of Us?!?! ARE THEY HIGH?! The story wrapped up really nicely, why would they want a sequel?! I mean, you can't even make an indirect sequel since the whole world is kinda...not that special when you think about it.

Seriously anyone asking for a sequel to the last of us insane or has no idea what they're asking for. What they SHOULD be asking for is more well crafted games with good stories. That will scratch the itch much more than a freakin sequel.

Also, the ending to this episode had me nearly rolling on the floor laughing. XD
 

immortalfrieza

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I think the problem with sequels and prequels is that the developers forget the REASONS people liked the first game somewhere along the line in their pursuit of widespread appeal. They turn a game praised for it's horror elements into a bland action shooter, they turn a story driven RPG into a shooter, (they seem to turn EVERYTHING into a shooter) and so on. They miss why people bought the first game, as a result they alienate the fans, losing them as customers, and then because so many games are going to "widespread appeal" there's too much competition for it have much of a chance without an already stable fanbase to hold them up, and since they've destroyed that the game will only manage to do mediocre at best.

Really though, there's only 2 things that need to be done to make a good sequel/prequel:

1. Find out what most people liked about the last game(s) and keep it in as best as they can manage.

2. Find out what most people hated about the last game(s) and at least TRY to fix it.

The worst that can happen is they'll only make a game that was just as good as the last this way.

I've also never agreed with the idea that a game "doesn't have room" for a sequel/prequel, that the previous game(s) have tied up all the loose ends so there's nowhere for the future games to go from there. All that idea shows is a lack of imagination on the part of the audience, nothing more.
 

Aardvaarkman

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So, Jim, when are you going to get a decent camera and a backdrop that doesn't suck?

The things you say are pretty good, but the technical execution is just terrible,,, is that supposed to be part of the shtick? It really doesn't add anything.
 

Scars Unseen

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I don't even think that games designed to have sequels are bad by default. Sure, sometimes it's just a company milking their audience, but that's not always the case. Look at the Legacy of Kain series. Blood Omen 2 aside, each of those games was a wonderfully fun game(assuming you like puzzles), but what made the series stand out for its time was the voice acting(of which it was one of only a handful of good examples at the time) and the storytelling. That series just would not have been as good had it just stopped at Blood Omen.
 

Darth_Payn

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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
What? StarCraft? They only made 2 games in the last 15 years.