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Decline Reinventing the wheel every time you make a sequel

Lyric Suite

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Anybody highly annoyed by game series where each new iteration is basically the same game but made from scratch? A recent example is X4, but there's seems to be a lot of those. Civilization is probably the first thing that comes to mind, as is stuff like Total War.

It's basically the same game all over again, except it feels like everything was made from scratch and instead of improving and expanding on what was achieved previously, it feels like the damn thing was made out of nothing and with new features you also get regressions and missing parts that were in previous installments.

I don't get why those type of games need so many sequels. Maybe there's an economic incentive in releasing a sequel instead of adding expansions but that doesn't explain why they never seem to build on what they achieved previously, and why sometimes they just go backwards instead of going forward.
 

Jacob

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The economic incentive is to appeal to graphic whores. Remaking the game with "current" graphics tech and aesthetic sensibilities. It makes graphic whores happy while justifying the purchase of their new computer parts.
 
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IncendiaryDevice

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Yes, this has bugged me for many, many years, one of the first of which was indeed the likes of Total War and the Civilisation series.

It's really frustrating and boggles the mind. You can see its latest form in the Tropico 6 thread where people complain that you don't even need to play the sequels as they're all the same (apart from 2) and nothing really gets added, it's just the same shit 'streamlined' (made crappier) but in 'better' graphics. And by better graphics it just means pixel count, not actual artwork, of course.

Some examples of series that do sequels properly are things like Nancy Drew games, or the Myst series before them, in fact most adventure games of yore were good at this but ones like Nancy Drew are the only ones that kept at it for a long period whereas the likes of the Broken Swords went to shit really and Myst went out of fashion. In terms of RPGs, Vogel does it really well and fans of his stuff are delighted with Avernum 5 and then 6, each one adding new stuff and providing new avenues while also maintaining a sense of the previous.

But in the main, yes, most people really haven't a clue when it comes to sequels.
 

Lyric Suite

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Well, games that have actual content in them don't count. Of course it makes sense for a game to have sequels if we are talking about adding new levels, a new story, new puzzles etc.

But a game like Civilization? If you reached a certain level of excellence in the context of what the game is, there is no point in starting from scratch, and then make a worst product to boot (or one where some things are better but a lot of things are worse, which is even more irritating as far as i'm concerned).

This is not to say sequels to this type of games shouldn't exist, but they should be more infrequent and you have to at least make sure you are building on what you did previously, otherwise what the hell is the point?

BTW, some of the regressions just defy all logic. Like in the Total War games, where i noticed a decline in the quality of the AI as i went along, before i stopped playing altogether (which was after whatever came after Rome, i even forgot what that was). How does that happen? The basic gameplay is always the same, and just because you are improving the graphics doesn't mean the code for the AI has to be ditched and rewritten from scratch, or whatever the hell happened there.
 

Rahdulan

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Anybody highly annoyed by game series where each new iteration is basically the same game but made from scratch? A recent example is X4, but there's seems to be a lot of those. Civilization is probably the first thing that comes to mind, as is stuff like Total War.

It's basically the same game all over again, except it feels like everything was made from scratch and instead of improving and expanding on what was achieved previously, it feels like the damn thing was made out of nothing and with new features you also get regressions and missing parts that were in previous installments.

I don't get why those type of games need so many sequels. Maybe there's an economic incentive in releasing a sequel instead of adding expansions but that doesn't explain why they never seem to build on what they achieved previously, and why sometimes they just go backwards instead of going forward.

I can imagine some investor out there taking one look at Dawn of War 2 and basically swearing off any sequels that are not rehashes of the original. I think the industry is just averse to constantly struggling for audience retention with sequels if they try anything new so they're perfectly content iterating or rehashing.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
I'd be fine with games reusing more asset. Such a massive portion of game development goes towards art now.
 

attackfighter

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Civilization 4 was its own wonky hodgepodge of random expanded features. Corporations and religions especially, but even things like unit bonuses, villages -- even culture. It's convoluted without being complex.

The best and most elegant 4x game stands as being Alpha Centauri. It has a large number of features, but those features are all meaningfully integrated with its core gameplay. From planetary governance to terraforming, nothing feels tacked on.

For what I'd prefer to see in game development but which does not happen, that would be better AI. All of the older single player strategy games I enjoy suffer from the problem of poor AI, and this is often their only problem. But not only does better AI never get addressed, often it slides backward, with newer iterations becoming even worse with ti. So newer games both suffer from feature bloat and declining quality of the one thing they could improve on.

The only games I think could be improved by feature growth are those made by small, crappy indie devs, like Mount and Blade, where they probably lacked the resources to fill out its potentiality to begin with. But even for some of them (such as Darkest Dungeon), it seems they did manage to include all of the relevant features during their first attempt, so that there's pretty much nothing for them to change or improve upon. That is one problem with art -- it becomes redundant after the initial potentialities are all achieved, at least as a consumer product.
 

Gnidrologist

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They need to make updated version for current mark of idiocracy that we have otherwise teh nu pypo won't get it or so they believe.
 

Zibniyat

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Civilization 4 is an all time classic and all the others are popamole, that's all you need to know.

:kingcomrade:

I always found Civ4 to be insufferable, boring and bland with its "proper history". Civ3 at least had some "archaic" look to it that amusingly gave it some measure of seriousness, whilst Civ4 is a strategy game meant for pre-teens.
 
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Civilization is a good example. Never played 1 (too old for me), but 2 was great, if primitive compared to modern-day standards. Pretty big for the genre.

Alpha Centauri is Civ2 on space super-steroids, and it stands up to time better than poor ol' 2. If someone made a OpenSMAC(X), the potential for modding would be borderline limitless.

CivIII had some nice ideas, but overall to me it stands as a janky, shitty game for some reason.

The harsh truth to IV is that while its better than III, its pretty much a modding plataform. Vanilla IV doesn't matter, when you think about it. Nobody plays it for vanilla. Also the move to 3D was totally unecessary and at the time meant the game was slower than it had the right to be.

One curious trend is that III and IV liberaly steal ideas and features from SMAC. Dunno if this continues in V, but I think half or a quarter of that game's innovation is stealing from SMAC. Its like "Hey, remember when we were good devs? Let's get some ideas back from when he had good developers with us!"

Also, one thing that annoyed me about Civ games since II, is getting away from realistic artwork and going towards cartoonesque art and colours.

Corporations and religions especially, but even things like unit bonuses, villages -- even culture. It's convoluted without being complex.

Religions would have been cool if Firaxis didn't completely cuck out and made them all equal from a mechanical standpoint. Something which every single big mod of the game changed.
 
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Eyestabber

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Yeah but Civ 4 DID give us that platform and the modding community is alive and active to this day. As for AI, there are PLENTY of mods that improve the AI to way-better-than-most-players-level. Including a mod that makes the AI work with the crazy stuff added with Fall From Heaven (see my sig). The development path from Civ to Civ 4 is somewhat linear. It was 5 that decided to go full retard. And I agree that III is the weakest, but you people forget how simplistic Civ 2 actually was. Strategic resources were added on 3 and perfected on 4. Religious were a nice touch, tho p. barebones in vanilla. Again, mods.

Play Realism Invictus or other big mods. It feels like a completely new game. I think the "perfect" Civ V would've been a "core game" of Civ IV released on a highly moddable engine and with full mod support.
 

DJOGamer PT

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I don't get why those type of games need so many sequels. Maybe there's an economic incentive in releasing a sequel instead of adding expansions but that doesn't explain why they never seem to build on what they achieved previously, and why sometimes they just go backwards instead of going forward.

It is the economic incentive. Even if none of us likes this practice, big budget annual games like CoD, AC, MH or sports games keep coming out each year, because each year they are immensely profitable.
As for not expanding on gameplay, it's quite simple. Why bother? The game will sell well regardless of any change to gameplay they could do. So instead of wasting money and time, to come up and test new mechanics, it's best for them to use that money for marketing purposes and improve more superficial details to make it more appealing.

However when talking about console games, I don't think the reverse of this situation (only making sequels if you can do anything to improve the gameplay) being good, is necessarily true (and I'am now going full TL;DR so be warned...).
To give an example, Nintendo's case.
Nintendo, aside from their big IP's (Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, Smash), never ever makes another sequel to an IP, unless that sequel has something new to bring to the table that the other didn't have (even in a those 4 IP's I stated earlier, they always try to spin things up a bit). This as lead to many of their IP's to just stop being made, even tough there still is a huge interest in those franchises.
And if they don't have any new idea for them, they won't revive the series no matter how much fans might beg for another one. This is mostly because for Nintendo developers (specially Myamoto - the dude that created Mario and Zelda), the idea of making a sequel without trying to make any new big change to it, is inconceivable.
So a series like F-Zero won't get another title, because the gameplay of that series peaked in the last entry (F-Zero GX). And there is simply nothing that can be made to improve GX's gameplay, because gameplay wise GX is perfect, it's the best game of it's genre.
So Nintendo response to the fans about a new F-Zero is: "We already made a game like that, go play it".
However I like I said in the begging this is mostly a console problem, here's why:
F-Zero GX is from 3 console generations ago. You cannot just go to a shop or a website, and just buy a brand new GameCube and GX copy. And consoles nowadays aren't compatible with such old games (so even if you have a PS1 copy of Tomb Raider, you cannot play it on a PS4). To make matters even worse for Nintendo, their online shop sucks and doesn't even have GX, and many other games, on sale.
As such, the only option for anyone without console X left to play it's Y game, is emulation. And everyone knows how much console developers hate that (specially Nintendo, they are fucking relentless when it comes to that).
So really, Nintendo's response is bullshit, and the only legit way to play another one of those titles would be either trough a remaster or a sequel.
 
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This is mostly because for Nintendo developers (specially Myamoto - the dude that created Mario and Zelda), the idea of making a sequel without trying to making any new big change to it, is inconceivable.
So a series like F-Zero won't get another title, because the gameplay of that series peaked in the last one entry (F-Zero GX). And there is simply nothing that can be made to improve GX's gameplay, because gameplay wise GX is perfect, it's the best game of it's genre.
So Nintendo response to the fans about a new F-Zero is: "We already made a game like that, go play it".

Same thing with Starfox. We'll never get another good one after Starfox 64 which was amazing. There was potential for it with the Wii U version but Miyamoto mandated that they "innovate" by only making the game playable via the worst control scheme ever conceived, for the reasons you mentioned. Letting us play the game with a normal controller would have been "more of the same" and therefore not worth his time. I guess he can be proud of the fact that it flopped massively.
 

HansDampf

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So a series like F-Zero won't get another title, because the gameplay of that series peaked in the last one entry (F-Zero GX). And there is simply nothing that can be made to improve GX's gameplay, because gameplay wise GX is perfect, it's the best game of it's genre.
A decent online GP mode, track editor, and non-retadred physics would be a good start.
 
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Anybody highly annoyed by game series where each new iteration is basically the same game but made from scratch? A recent example is X4, but there's seems to be a lot of those. Civilization is probably the first thing that comes to mind, as is stuff like Total War.

Ehh? Haven't played Civ 6 but from the looks its just Civ 5 with more dumb crap. Total War is using the same awful engine they've had since Rome 2, with all of Rome 2's shitty design ideas carried over (not being able to split armies, the awful province system, cavalry being useless, etc).
 

octavius

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For games like Civiliaztion what they really should have concenrated on was making a better AI, instead of adding bloat.
The poor AI and the games becoming too predictable is the only reason I don't play Civ 2 and SMAC. I would rather play the simpler and less predictable Master of Orion instead.
 

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