Jimquisition: Sequel or Slaughter

[Dragonbums]

I feel with the Last of Us, it can have sequels(many if they wish) however each would have to focus on a different character(s)
The story of the two main protags is over.
However what's to say the other inhabitants of that world don't have a compelling story of their own?
That's the kind of thing I'm missing. There are games that are so ripe with telling a story of a different character within the same universe but they never do it.

Heck, it's why I've put up so much with Pokemon.
Yeah, it's basically the same. Then again I play it for the new monsters. however each installment is basically self contained.
There are no illusions to past characters or organizations.(with the exception of Team Rocket) so it leaves them with the ability to make each new version whatever the fuck they want because they don't have an obligation to keep specific characters running.
Despite Prof. Oak

On that note, this video really does have me thinking about Mass Effect 4 now.
The game that was a trilogy that ended in a sour note is now just going to be milked until it's sucked dry.
I have no clue what they are going to do in their next installment.
All I know is that there is going to be a lot of paid under the table bullshit positive reviews and disappointment.

 

[lacktheknack]

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

-Tomb Raider

Why?

The latest Tomb Raider is COMPLETELY different from the last nine. Heck, I'd go so far as to say it's more original than some original properties.

And why Starcraft? Sure, it may be a money-spawner, but it also has a huge narrative that I'm enjoying following that needs multiple games to be fully told (because I prefer my campaigns to be less than 200 hours long).

Reading some of these comments, I get the feeling that some people have confused "make it a franchise or die" with "have any sequels at all", and have thus picked up the baby and heaved it out the window, sprinkling bathwater after it.

 

[daxterx2005]

I'm proud of you Jim, Not lumping Mario in with that

 

[ZexionSephiroth]

Hmm...

After watching, I've been thinking about things like "Unconventional Sequels", which range from a Separate Story with the same world and/or characters, to neither if you're Final Fantasy.

That way, you can wrap up one story and go headlong into another later. Provided your world and/or Characters exist in a state where Another Disaster can happen, and the Heroes can do something about it.

Basically this would make the Sequels as good as Standalone Stories in thier own right. The last story being Wrapped up in a fairly neat little bundle while they continue on with a mostly unrelated Adventure.

That is... If your Story, characters and World can actually support all this...

...

One Variant that follows the pattern and could work, is having the "powers" or whatever for the world come into existence in the first game and be useful to most characters, refuse to end after the Big demon or whatever is slain. And in the sequel, deal with life with Powers after the Demon, with a focus on a more "Human" enemy that wants to use the powers to take over the nation.

No Specific link is there between the Demon and the Tyrant, The Demon's Story is done and Wrapped up, and the Tyrant is completely unrelated. The Thing that follows through is the Powers, Characters and World. With a possible chance to look at how life has changed between the two games.

...

Of course... As mentioned before, your world kinda has to be set up so that major things can, and often do happen. To the point that such stories may as well be about an Adventuring Guild, which essentially makes your Heroes Mercenaries.

...Which I doubt everyone is too keen to have in every story. Even though I would really like it.

 

[The Feast]

OI! I loved the fact that they made the Hobbit into three movies to better showcase everything that both happened in the Hobbit and around the Hobbit in middle earth. Harry Potter and the deathly Hallows P1 and P2 would have been a better example of what you were talking about, Or Twilight. I not only own but ADORE the extended cut of the LotR movie(Because it is one giant movie) and all I wanted was the book made into movie form, and it mostly delivered.

I agree, I don't really understand why people want The Hobbit to be just a single movie. Honestly, if I really want to adapting the book to just one movie, especially with the success of the LOTR trilogy, it will probably feel like a fan made movie that people never even want to mention anymore, and they will probably want more, especially about the book that explores more Middle Earth.

I don't want just to watch the Hobbit like a 'movie', I got plenty of those kind movies to think it that way. For example, a recent movie that based on a book, World War Z, how quickly it have being diminished on for being just a typical movie, because the people who make it want it that way. Other people may watch the The Hobbit and thinking it for being too long, well I don't and I want more.

 

[mad825]

So, jim, you give The Last of us a 10/10 and you weren't expecting a sequel? lolwut? You know better.

 

[Igor Yakovina]

Big fan of the show, first time commenting.

I'm normally in support of the points you make on the show, Jim. Usually there's an unambiguously illegal or at least unethical problem in the videogaming community and you take a passionate and humorous stance. This time, though, I really don't understand the vitriol. Here's my thinking, and please let me know if I'm off the mark.

Ubisoft has decided to make games with tremendous budgets. So much so, that it can't really support one story games. That might not be the most practical idea, but there's nothing outwardly harmful about that, is there? In order to make money back from these high-budget games, they've decided to hedge their bets and make all future content into series/sequels. Again, if it's wise to continue a story after a certain point may be questionable, but it's their game and their right to expand it if they want.

Believe me, I fully understand that most of the more poignant stories in any media come from self-contained books/movies/games. I get that. I just don't see why it's so wrong to decide not to do that. Not every game has to be art, and even you said sequels can be fun.

Someone mentioned Ubisoft's decision was like a hotdog stand that refuses to sell burgers, even if they'd make a profit. I like burgers, but I don't see why I should be angry if Ubisoft stops selling them. I should just go somewhere that does.

 

[Balkan]

That's why I think that the industry should have more big names rather than brands. Everyone got exited about Bioshock Infinite, but was that the case with Bioshock 2?

 

[Metalrocks]

at times i think about canceling my pre order of watchdogs and maybe even AC4. a game can be fine and all that but forcing every franchise to be a sequel means mostly bad news.
so far max payne did an amazing job that every game was really good and explained the story very well and still provides great gameplay. and of course half life.
sequels are all fine, dont see a problem there either but with ubisoft, i have some concerns. i already gave up with the GTA series since SA, dint bother to keep playing splinter cell since part 3.

some games need sequels to tell the story more in to detail, as long they dont screw it up like capcom with dino crisis 2 and 3.

 

[Piorn]

The reason I gave up on AC was because I got tricked into buying the same game 3 times. I can't be arsed to support this any longer. I can understand why they do it though, any salesman would cream his pants over the thought of selling the same product to the same person multiple times.

Sure, they need their cash cows, I just find it paradoxical that the most reliable enjoyment I get from video games are indies and smaller developers.
You'd think all the CoDs and whatever would be able to support a medium-sized Dead Space Sequel that was actually survival horror.

 

[Superior Mind]

To be fair the reason the consumer base starts asking for or suggesting sequels is because its expected now. People ask and explore what would happen in a sequel because we're conditioned to believe that one's coming.

 

[Bat Vader]

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.

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.

What about the third film though? Bilbo is already confronting Smaug in the second movie. What do we have left? Lake Town and 5 Armies? Seems like a stretch. I predict the movie will be 50% filler.

I'm assuming that it will pry show the battle of the five armies and then also show what happens between the end of The Hobbit and the beginning of the Fellowship of The Ring.

On Topic: I get that games are expensive to make but at the same time though many indie developers have made fun, interesting, and good story driven games with pretty low budgets. Heck, look at the VN Katawa Shoujo. They spent all those years making it and when it was done they gave it away for free. I think both developers and publishers can start lowering the budgets for their games and still release great games. A game that doesn't need a sequel that gets a sequel is pretty annoying.

I gotta say though releasing one shot games are good but at the same time they can also backfire like with Heavy Rain. Loved the gameplay but the plot holes and the lying David Cage did about the endings in it really kinda made me judge it harshly.

 

[Dryk]

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.

It really bugs me that we've been spending so much time and money on world building as a society and doing absolutely nothing with it. How many times will someone make a 500-page document mapping out the entire history of their world only to make a trilogy of games/movies focusing on one guy doing one thing in a few places.

It makes me wish anthology stories were way more common than they are.

 

[Lightknight]

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

I think Deathfish15 just made a list of franchizes he/she doesn't like. If you really go through it and figure out what game types/franchises aren't in there, you'll find what their preferred games are. It'd be like saying that I don't like horror movies so that genre needs to stop.

Although I agree with you on most games, FUCKING GTA?! Fallout (it's a miracle you didn't add The Elder Scrolls)?! These games frankly get better 100 fold with each new installment

I wouldn't say they get better. They certainly get more impressive. But it's hard to get better when you're already starting with a bar set as high as Morrowind set it.

I agree, I don't really understand why people want The Hobbit to be just a single movie. Honestly, if I really want to adapting the book to just one movie, especially with the success of the LOTR trilogy, it will probably feel like a fan made movie that people never even want to mention anymore, and they will probably want more, especially about the book that explores more Middle Earth.

I don't want just to watch the Hobbit like a 'movie', I got plenty of those kind movies to think it that way. For example, a recent movie that based on a book, World War Z, how quickly it have being diminished on for being just a typical movie, because the people who make it want it that way. Other people may watch the The Hobbit and thinking it for being too long, well I don't and I want more.

You don't want to just watch the Hobbit like a movie? It is a movie. Not sure how else you'd watch it.

The problem isn't that it's more than one movie. The problem is that it's three 3-hour-long movies that are trying to include just one much smaller book. Originally it was going to be two movies which would have been plenty. If the movies were two hours long, it would be about the same as just two movies. But as is, the movie feels drawn out and spread thin. That's not what should be wanted.

 

[DarkhoIlow]

fantastic episode Jim and I couldn't agree more.

The greed of getting more money along with the games being so expensive to make will eventually turn them most of the franchises we love into sequels being milked annually. I hope against hope that this will not be the case, but I'm very curious to see if Ubisoft will do that to Watch Dogs.

Guess we are lucky to still have those indies that will not succumb to big publishers and still release full games without any sequel baits.

 

[Raso719]

I want to be clear for a moment. People actually complained about the idea that all games should be fun? As in there are people who would make that argument because they actually do not believe that all games should be fun? As in there are people out there who do not believe that games should be fun?

Wow. Just wow. The hell is wrong with you people? Why would you play a game that wasn't fun or that you did not enjoy? If you are enjoying the game that means it is fun. Even if you are not enjoying the game it doesn't mean it's NOT fun you're just not having fun with it. What possible reason could anyone have to believe that games should not be fun.... unless you're just mindlessly parroting what you heard some developer say in an effort to make it THAT much easier to make soulless, over budgeted garbage designed from some sort of algorithm.

And people wonder why the industry looks the way it does today....

 

[Lightknight]

And yeah, about Fallout...

While the fanchise does indeed have lots of potential for sequels (America is big and there are plenty of Vaults left), Bethesda butchered it. Badly.

The transition from an isometric RPG with tactical combat to a post-apocalyptic shooter was indeed an act of heresy. Dull characters, large scale environment recycling and the boring story did the rest. Don't get me started with the bugs, Bethesda being Bethesda and all...

New Vegas on the other hand was made by the people who did the old Fallouts before. They had more in mind than just reskinning Oblivion, and it shows. They realized many of the ideas they had for Van Buren, put lots of effort into story and characters and took their time for the environment. The landscape is full of small little details.

The question is if you work on a game because you overflow of creativity and the drive to realize your ideas or if you just watch the clock, hoping you get this shit done in time to go home at six.

Highly subjective. Allow me to explain as someone who is currently wearing a t-shirt that combines Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail with Fallout New Vegas (which clearly gives me authority on the matter )

http://shirt.woot.com/offers/condition-fleshwound

Fallout 1 was a great game in its day but it doesn't translate well into today's market. This was the way that the game could exist and be successful. I, for one, really enjoyed Fallout 3. Would I like another top-down fallout game? Maybe. Fallout 2 was awful or perhaps I'm thinking of Fallout tactics. But I'd point out that according to metacritic, Fallout 3 has a slight edge over New Vegas in metacritic score (91 to 84) while New Vegas has a slight lead over Fallout 3 in user score (8.2/8.0). They are very evenly matched with people on very opposite sides. Your position that one is better than the other is strictly your personal taste. I say this knowing full well that I loved New Vegas but I also loved Fallout 3. Both had a great setting that felt real, both had great characters and memorable storylines. They're so similar that you do one disservice by denouncing the other.

Scores of old games are also usually higher for nostalgia purposes. For example, FO1 got a really high user score but I doubt even half of them replayed the game through today's eyes to score it. It's a difficult game to play today. Would I like a modern version of that style of game? Maybe, but I know that the current two FOs are my favorite so far.