Spiritual Successors

Anyone else get a kind of sinking feeling when they see those two words?

Before I go further, I just want to clarify something: I'm talking spiritual successor as a design choice. From a marketing perspective I have no problem with it. You make a game and you advertise it by saying "If you liked this old game, then you'll like my new game too!" That's fine. No, I'm talking about it as a design concept. I'm talking about going into the game design room saying "Man, I feel like that old game was awesome, and nothing really since then has been like it. We should make something like it!"

What's wrong with that? That seems pretty awesome, right? At least for me, I know that sort of thinking used to get me really excited.

And yet I feel as though it just doesn't work. Games that are specifically made to be like other games almost always just end up feeling... joyless and inorganic, like it's all been stitched together like some sort of virtual Frankenstein's monster. All the pieces come together but it ends up as just a soulless zombie.

Beyond that, to me I feel like if I want to play a game, I play that game. RPG in particular is not a genre where people tend to say "I used to love that game but I just can't go back to it now," and if they do say that then it's usually a remake that they're clamoring for. In other words, if I want to play Arcanum then I go play Arcanum, I'm not going to look for a new game that's Arcanum-ish but isn't Arcanum. Now I know that only goes so far, because there are some games that are massively enjoyable but you just get burnt out on them because there's only so many times you can play the same content over and over again.

But, I dunno. I feel like trying to take something that's already been done and re-doing it just isn't going to end well. I'd rather see people trying to go their own way and break new ground rather than making worse versions of games I already have.

 

Strongly Agree

Well, problem here is crowdfunding relies on that familiarity, the nostalgia hook. CRPG players are specially susceptible to that shit. The only original project I remember was that Ars Magicka game, and guess what it failed to get funded.

 

Absolutely, that's the issue. It's a small enough genre that you really need something big to reel in enough people to make it worthwhile. That nostalgia hook is often the only thing.


Though come to think of it Arcanum is maybe a bad example since it's technically a spiritual successor itself to the Fallout games, but I consider that one a bit different (as it was due to people trying to carry on despite losing their IP, rather than trying to dig up nostalgia).

 

It's not just spiritual successors and it's not just video games. Whenever you are creating some work of entertainment or art, you can certainly draw inspiration and ideas from previous material, but you shouldn't try to recreate it. That's what made the period in the late 90s and early 2000s so good, so many games tried absolutely new stuff. I think that was my first post on the codex actually, that although I was glad developers were going in the direction of older games compared to modern popamole, ultimately, the genre should always try to innovate. Don't try to make the new Fallout or Baldur's Gate or Gothic, try to make a game that is as much of a leap forward today as those games were in their day.

 

Absolutely. I actually first had this thought about music, rather than RPGs. But with the recent wave of everything getting a spiritual successor on Kickstarter, it seems relevant.

 

Depends on how its used. If someone says Wasteland 2 is the spiritual successor of Wasteland, I am ok with that. Since its meant to convey that no they will not be using the same game system, but yes they do want to capture both the atmosphere and some aspects of the original game system. Maybe they succeed and maybe they don't succeed but that is their goal. The term itself is very wish washy but is useful as a mission statement but should always be taken with somewhat of jaundiced eye as even an extremely competent and trustworthy group of people may simply fail to be able to do it. It is important to understand that attempts at a spiritual successor can and often do fail or come up short. This does not always result in a bad game. Sometimes the decision that made it come up short as a spiritual successor was in fact the right decision for a better game. But when some group is using this term it must be taken with a fairly large grain of salt.

But yeah a lot of times is all just marketing bullshit to latch on to some previous success and fairly good indication that these people have no real creative spark they have any real confidence in.

It is important to note that developers who are not also aware and communicate to their fan base that "large grain of salt" should probably be assume to be the second less savory option. There is the possibility that they are honest but not taking into consideration how wish washy all that is and IMO are then extremely likely to fail at creating a spirutual successor and this would display to me that they are also unlikely to have requisite awareness to produce a high quality game, possibly an enjoyable game, but not high quality.

 

I assume this is a thinly veiled Pillars thread, but anyway I disagree.
If the game feels joyless, it's because it's a shit game, not because the designer based his work on something from the past. There might be a higher chance of developer failing, because he mindlessly copies things without thinking how they fit into his project, but that is his own fault.

You can't come up with new things all the time, nor you should. Iteration is good.

I also don't quite understand this. If you like Arcanum, you would like to play more games like Arcanum, no?

 

Usually these words are meant to lure players, who didn't really played the original game, but heard that it was good or had a cult status. I don't like this kind of thing, as it generally provides false hope and advertisement. Pillars of eternity can be considered as the only good exception to this, as of late.

 

Any examples of spiritual successors that were better than the original? Or even equally as good.

 

Heroes of Might and Magic

 

There are some:

Arcanum (to Fallout; superior in some ways, inferior in others, overall still great)
Bayonetta (to the original Devil May Cry)
BloodBorne (to Demon's Souls / Dark Souls)
Crysis (to Far Cry)
Fallout to Wasteland
Dragon Wars (to Bard's Tale - not sure if counts, since it was developed as a sequel)
Heavy Rain (to Fahenheit/Indigo Prophecy)
Heroes of Might and Magic (to King's Bounty)
Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer (to Planescape: Torment)
Risen (to Gothic 1&2)
Supreme Commander (to Total Annihilation)
Vampire: The Masqurade - Bloodlines (to Deus Ex)

Also, in my personal and very biased opinion:

Alan Wake (to Max Payne 1&2)
Brutal Legend (to Giants: Citizen Kabuto and Sacrifice)

 

I don't think there's anything wrong with it per se, if by "spiritual successor" we mean a work that takes the ideas and themes from another work as a base and makes use of them, whether it's to expand on them, provide a different take or perspective on them, or simply pay homage to them. This is common throughout all creative media (King Lear as a base for Kurasawa's Ran; the themes of Heart of Darkness re-iterated in Apocalypse Now; Under Western Eyes as a different take on the ideas of Crime and Punishment; Stardust Memories as an homage to 8 1/2; and, in gaming, various examples mentioned in this thread - I think The Magic Candle is another good one as it shows that one can still innovate while making heavy use of another's ideas) and is vitally important to the development of any medium.

The only problem I see is in the term itself. I've mostly heard "spiritual successor" used in relation to games but, in most cases, the new work doesn't succeed the old in any respect other than chronological, yet I think the term is used with deeper connotations in mind. There's a sort of arrogance amongst many game developers where they often think that a new work renders its ancestors obsolete (this is the new shit!) simply by virtue of its age, and a lack of due respect or reverence to the genre classics that the newer game draws from (remember the Diablo 3 dev who called the original Diablo creator a "loser" simply because the latter disagreed with the direction D3 had taken?). However, if a developer wants to make a spiritual successor to something and treats the subject with proper respect (which doesn't have to mean worshiping the original game - the dev may well dislike its ideas or their implementation and want to provide his own take on them), then I see nothing wrong with that as long as the result is a good game.

I argue the opposite of this. As I said, as a design concept it's fine as long as the result is good, and innovation and borrowing ideas need not be mutually exclusive. Spiritual successors from a marketing perspective are often cynical ploys, however, where only the superficial elements of the original are copied while its deeper ideas are ignored, butchered, or wrongly interpreted. I need not name names here

 

I am making spiritual successor to Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Mass Effect, Diablo, Planescape Torment, Ultima 8, Darklands, Dungeon Siege, Fallout, Jagged Alliance 2, Fable 3, Grimoire, Painkiller, Skyrim, Xcom, Redneck Rampage and Dark Souls.

Give me your money or you can feel responsible for this masterpiece never seeing the light of day and even worse - you'll be the biggest enablers ever seen.

 

Nope.

This doesn't even compute.

 

Spiritual successors can be an easy way out when the original IP is out of reach for a number of reasons.
For me a good spiritual successor must have certain elements to be considered a worthy effort: they kept at least more than a half of the original devs, they kept key gameplay elements, and also they managed to give a certain identity to the new product which makes it stand out on its own. Arcanum/Fallout is a good example of this. A bad example is when the janitor promoted himself to president because everyone else had left at a certain point (Bioshock/System Shock).

 

Civ Beyond Earth is the best example of this, trying to make a copy of a beautiful stone statue using cheap plastic