The Most Mishandled IPs/Franchises in Gaming?

[BoredWalker]

100 posts and nobody has mentioned the Fallout franchise...Escapist community, I'm proud of you ^_^

As for my own views, my biggest mishandlement bedbug (the abandonment of the entire Megaman franchise) has already been mentioned a few times, so I'll go with something slightly more specific:

The downhill slide of the Megaman Star Force series. From a solid starting position with a good first game, Star Force 2 jumped off in several wrong directions, and Star Force 3 had no redeeming factors, while being a massive paradox of gaming. I could probably write a few pages on this, but I'll just stop here since nobody really cares about the Star Force series anymore.

 

[PhiMed]

Legacy of Kain - Soul Reaver was epic, and due to time constraints it didn't end like it was supposed to and we got a "to be continued" then some of the most complicated and ultimately unfinished plot spread over 3 more games.

Pretty much telling yourself "A wizard did it" will save you much headache from trying to follow the various retcons and paradoxes within paradoxes amidst the flowery exposition.

Siren - The second and possibly best game in the series never made it to NA. Everywhere else in the world essentially and in English but not to NA. Then they do a weird episodic re-imagining of the original game that looks prettier but is no where as good and leaves out way too much of the characters and plot that would make what they DID keep make more sense.

Fatal Frame - Going with the Wii for the 4th game was a huge mistake. Delivering a flawed game that you refuse to fix and then having Nintendo refuse to release it to NA and pretty much killing the series was also a mistake.

Silent Hill - The studios they have pawned the series off on have produced titles ranging from Good (Downpour/Origins), Bad (Homecoming) to Ugly (Shattered Memories/Book of Memories) and show no signs of producing anything vastly different or superior to the original let alone SH2.

Tenchu - 2 great games (control issues aside) followed by IMO the best 2 games in the series (Wrath of Heaven/Fatal Shadows) by From Software, then back to Acquire for the Wii game that could have been excellent but failed miserably. I chose to omit Tenchu Z and the DS game as non-canon.

Amalur - Read the news lately?

I was going to say, "in b4 someone makes a comment about how terrible DMC is before it's even come out yet," but it already happened on the first page.

But on topic. Silent Hill. How did this happen?

 

[CrazyCapnMorgan]

Just thought of another one:

LUNAR from the now defunct studio Working Designs.

LUNAR and LUNAR 2 were awesome. Great stories, awesome visuals and decent battle AI and UI. I remember meeting Kyle and Ronfar like it was yesterday...

Anyone who loves games like Alundra, Magic Knight Rayearth, Arc the Lad, Popful Mail, Vay and Vanguard Bandits will know almost exactly what I'm talking about.

 

[wadark]

Harmonix kept the same game going in varies incarnations. Lego rock band isn't something Activision has touched at all. At one point we had 3 different releases within the same month on the same premise. If you look at the timeline Activision first started spamming the titles after 2007, the same year Rock Band came out. EA and Activisions were publishing music games like it was nobodies business after that. It became more than yearly releases for both companies.

All I am saying is that it was the genre itself that caused us to be sick of it. It had to little potential and hit its ceiling to fast. It is like DDR. Once you have the dance mat and can add your own music then what? I mean you can get a new tech that sees the whole body then what? That is more or less it isn't it?

Not really mismanagement just that there wern't that many games in there to begin with, and the market itself made the feeding frenzy. Like the crazy large amount of pong consoles when that first hit the world. More Pong Consoles than you can shake a stick at was created. The market was vast and new, while the barrier of entry was low. Market gets flooded with a game without a lot of room for improvement.

Let's not forget, though, that Harmonix did a lot to help keep their franchise from going down the same road. I'm not saying they didn't put out some pointless stuff, but Harmonix allowed gamers to move their music from game to game for the most part, and did really good on supporting the game with DLC songs.

There may have been one period where Harmonix put out a bunch of stuff in a short time, but nothing like Activision was doing with Hero.

I don't think the other publishers in the genre have any bearing on whether or not Guitar Hero was mismanaged. I think its obvious that it had to be mismanaged, as even Activision has suspended the series for being no longer viable.

 

[MrHide-Patten]

I'm going to throw this one out because it has honestly been killed off through mishandle-ment, Destroy All Humans. I love the first and second game (made by Aussies no less) and then EA killed Pandemic, handed the sequels to other developers that made some truly ugly games.

Path of the Furon was leprosy on a disc, wasn't worth the $25 gift voucher I bought it with.

Probably Kingdom Hearts or Pokémon, if you?re looking for more mainstream examples. Kingdom Hearts has had one too many spin offs (should?ve just made 3) and Pokémon just kept on adding more Pokémon as opposed to say experimenting with the Gameplay, but no, just the same tired rock-paper-scissors turned based grind fest it's ALWAYS been.

 

[solemnwar]

100 posts and nobody has mentioned the Fallout franchise...Escapist community, I'm proud of you ^_^

Still hasn't been mentioned! I was expecting it on the first page, considering the rash of FO related threads...
I don't care what anyone else says, 1 and 2 are kind of shit >> I don't /mind/ playing them but I have a lot more fun with the T/FPS it was turned into. Turned based combat when there are a million creatures around you? FFFFFFF-


OT: Uhhh... all the games I own turned out fairly well. I even enjoyed Dragon Age II a bit (despite being rather dissappointed). Um... I'm just going to say Assassins Creed because they could have done so many interesting things with it, but no, we get three games with the same guy. *flip table* And they seem to have decided we must only go forward in time. Can we go back a bit please guys? Maybe find out some secret from a much older ancestor in like Egypt or Mesopotamia or something? Please? ... no?

 

[Pr0]

Master of Orion.

Quite simply its MOO3 "reboot" destroyed its franchise so horribly that the concept got taken and fractured into an inordinate handful of games designed by other studios that were trying desperately to build on what the original MOO/MOO2 had, but none of them really got there either and the entire 4X space sim market has been little more than a niche market ever since.

So...Master of Orion, cause it didn't just kill itself, it strangled an entire genre of games that have come after it too.

I'd also like to nominate anything Peter Molyneux does well the first time, its a sure fire bet that the second time will kill its franchise, and the third...well, you know how it goes with Peter Molyneux.

 

[Monsterfurby]

Every time someone mentions Shenmue, I shed a tear.

Edit: Call me mad, but I actually LIKED MOO3... I liked the fact that it reduced micromanagement and actually made me feel like an interstellar leader, not the intern who was left in charge of everything because it's cheaper that way (go build a farm, now design the newest battleship, and while you're at it, answer the mail and make coffee - oh, also command our battlefleet and work out a decent colonization plan for planet #15893B!)

 

[Dandark]

I would say Assassins creed. Now the series hasen't been bad, it's actually been quite good but it would have been great if they actually explored different settings with their magic plot device machine. We had one in the crusades which was great, I love the crusades as a setting. We then had one in renaissance Italy which was also pretty cool as it's a good setting.

Then we had another one in Italy with the same character.....Ok that's alright but then it went to another similar setting with the same character again. But whatever, they were just cash cows to milk the series because Ubisoft wanted more money so those don't count.

Except now it's going to the American Revolution of all things and so far the marketing has put it out as being MERICA **** YEAH!!!!! and Freedom and liberty and blah blah blah......


To be honest I would prefer they make games in some older settings, one among the Mongol Horde could be great. Perhaps you could be one of the Mongols or maybe you were part of an assasins guild among the chin when they were conquered by the Mongols? It could even be set after the reign of Genghis, perhaps in Russia as they advance into Europe? And that's just the Mongols, there are so many more periods they could go for which would be unique or interesting but instead it's the American revolution.........

Im pretty sure im not the only one who is dissapointed.

 

[Dandark]

Why did someone get a warning for saying Resident Evil? The latest RE game just got panned by reviewers, so why the warning? Some mod a huge RE fan? That is some very sad moderating, something the Escapist forums are known for.

They just said "Resident evil" so it was a warning for low content. The mods will give out warnings for posts that are really small to stop things like posts that are just

"Yes" or "+1".

It wasn't actually to do with what he said, just that he didn't say enough.

EDIT: Sorry, just realized I did a double post.

 

[Gatx]

I'll say Force Unleashed but not in quite the same way that has been previously mentioned. I thought conceptually it was stupid. I mean you can't fool me with the "you can pull a Star Destroyer out of the sky, or grab Tie Fighter" crap because even from the beginning it sounded like a glorified gravity gun. When it did come out though, I was actually pleasantly surprised by what it offered. Starkiller is like this bizzaro Luke, with the various elements of his hero's journey made more "badass" (i.e. Kota instead of Kenobi, Proxy instead of 3PO, pulling a Star Destroyer instead of lifting an X-wing, etc).

That was great, not as bad as I thought and even made me like it. Then for some reason they decide to churn out a cash grab sequel that's supposed to lead into another sequel showed that they were going to milk it as a franchise and the result was just... shit.

 

[Deathlyphil]

Snip.

I'm not sure how new areas, Pokemon, abilities, moves, type combinations, triple battles and Dream World is sitting and letting it go stale, but each to their own.

On topic, Assassin's Creed is the big one for me. That they've only explored 2 characters/time periods over several games (not just including the main games, but the smaller handheld versions too) is a bit disappointing. I'm not a fan of the "Ones Who Came Before" plot either, seems like a forced attempt to up the stakes for Desmond and turn him into this ridiculous chosen one destined to stop the apocalypse - personally I much preferred that he was this coincidental everyman who was thrown into a secret war because of his ancestors.

But the whole present-day story line for AC goes along the lines of:

Ancient race creates civilisation on Earth with funky doodads (Pieces of Eden). Then gets wiped out by a massive solar flare. Somehow they manage to pass on this information to Desmond(through his experiences in the Animus). Now he has to collect all the doodads in the present in order to stop another solar flare from wiping out humanity.
Meanwhile, the Templars are also searching for the doodads so they can control the world. And then get killed by the solar flare they don't know is coming...

 

[Deathlyphil]

On topic:

C&C - for all the reasons listed above. Red Alert 2 was the last Westwood game, and also my favourite.

Diablo - I enjoyed Diablo 3, until I hit the level cap. Now I don't see any point in playing. Why would I play for hours and hours and hours to maybe get an item that is slightly better than the one I have? I might try and finish Inferno, but as I'm only doing 18k dps I have a lot of gear to acquire.

Warcraft - Again, I have spent days and weeks in Azeroth, but enough is enough. Bliz, put the pandas down and make a new game. Please.

Mirror's Edge - had a few flaws, those could have been ironed out in a sequel.

Prince Of Persia - the series has been dead since Two Thrones. The arty remake was nice, but far, far to easy, and the inserted sequel was dull. Somehow they managed to make it flow worse too. I don't know how that is possible. How can a game one generation on feel worse than the game it is remaking?

There are more, though they escape my mind at the moment.

 

[SayHelloToMrBullet]

Has the Splinter Cell franchise been mentioned yet?

Also Command and Conquer. Honestly the forth one decimated the story that had been built up over a decade, and it basically killed the franchise. But then they announced Generals 2 and I got really excited. The creators said that they had this interesting story for the single player campaign, and that the game would run on the Frostbite 2 engine. I was so hopeful.

SO WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?

Suddenly it's now just called Command and Conquer as opposed to Command and Conquer Generals 2, the single player campaign has been ditched in favour of multi-player, and now the whole thing is free-to-play which just makes the game look cheap and incomplete when compared to what we've gotten in the past.

And I had such hopes...

 

[havoc33]

Wipeout

As what is the case with so many of Sony's first party games, they spend next to nothing in promoting them, and as a result, they don't sell as well as they should. This is exactly what happened with Wipeout. One can only wonder what heights this series could have gone to with the proper budget and support behind it.

Silent Hill

What more is there to say? It's a travesty. 1-3 contained some of the most awesome and horrifying gaming moments of my life.

Shenmue

Can we please have the HD remakes, and can everyone please, please, please actually buy them so that Sega will go ahead and make the final chapter?

Metroid

Seriously, I cannot believe how Nintendo continues to drop the ball (no pun intended) with this franchise. First they follow up the success of Super Metroid with no Metroid game at all on the N64. Then we get a glorius comeback with the Metroid Prime trilogy, only to have Team Ninja totally fuck it up all over again.

Secret of Mana / Final Fantasy

First off, Square made sure they killed the Mana series with the disastrous outings on the Playstation One and 2. Now they seem to be well on their way to destroy the FF franchise as well.

 

[The_Lost_King]

Ultima, though I will say it started with Ultima VIII. They had one of the great early RPGs, then EA came in and added platforming that did not function, and enough bugs to devour an elephant. Overall, the game was simply unplayable.

Honestly, whenever this topic comes up, I am perplexed as to how anyone -in light of the failures like Ultima- could actually say that an unreleased game could be the downfall of a series. . . you have not played it yet, so stop whining about DmC and Silent Hill: Book of Memories.

Frankly(from what I heard about it) Silent hill died waaaaayyyyyy before the upcoming spin-off.

OT: I am going to have to go with Battlefront as well. It was soooo fun and I really don't see why you wouldn't make a sequel because there would be so much hype. It could be the Skyrim of fps's(except it would live up to expectation). It would have gotten so many sales and people would have copied it rather than CoD and the world would be such a better place.