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Developers Who Didn't Know What Made Their Games Great

Sarathiour

Cipher
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Jun 7, 2020
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The better question would actually be which developer realized what made their game great.

I don't remember playing a sequel of a game from the last ten years that did consolidate on the strength of the previous title.
 
Joined
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50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
The better question would actually be which developer realized what made their game great.

I don't remember playing a sequel of a game from the last ten years that did consolidate on the strength of the previous title.
ATOM guys
other than difficulty(arguably due to character import), Trudograd was an otherwise all around improvement over ATOM which was already great.
 

vok3

Barely Literate
Joined
May 14, 2022
Messages
1
Age of Wonders 3.

I have a ten thousand word (okay, 9563 at last count) dissertation on each and every design error in that game that I add to every time I forget and try playing it again and get pissed off again. By the time I finish touching on everything (there's still a lot of outline notes, each of which will be worth a few paragraphs) it might well hit 15K-20K words. Shadow Magic was nearly perfect except for one thing (one appallingly idiotic thing, but still just ONE thing) inherent in the combat engine. All they needed to do was fix that. Instead they kept it and ruined everything else.

When you see people online talking about AOW3 and saying they like it, it is always people who have not been playing the game very long and/or also say things like "Wow, I had no idea that mechanic even existed!". Or "The AI is pretty good!"

The custom player-made content made for AOW3 is about 1% of the quantity of what was made for Shadow Magic, which proves that everybody else who matters agrees with me and I'm totally right.

Also, SWTOR. Now you will say "but SWTOR was never good" and you'd be right, but SWTOR did reach a point of passable non-goodness, from which it steeply and precipitously declined and has continued to do so for about a decade. SWTOR's dev team seems to have set for themselves the objective of checking off from a list every single possible mistake it is possible to make in running a MMOG, several of which they have repeated in dramatically stupid fashion. I could write another dissertation about this but I don't care enough. Someone should, though.

How about sequels produced by new people who clearly didn't understand the originals?

I'd say Star Control 3, except that Star Control 3 is a model of respect and reverence for the original compared to Brad Wardell's lawyer-happy nonsense. "Small be our resolution, but large be our resolve!" is one of the great classics of SF dialogue.
 

Serus

Arcane
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Small but great planet of Potatohole
Seems like OP isn't asking about developers who turned to shit, but rather made a game that missed what made the original so great.

Ignoring the obviously bad titles, Fallout 2. Basically every Fallout title after the original sort of forgot what the setting was supposed to be, which was not the '50s, but scifi, but rather a '50s style take on the future, then the apocalypse. The humor and then modern pop culture references I can take or leave, but without that original take, feels considerably shallower.

Fallout 2 was not made by the same people as Fallout 1.

The people who made Fallout 1 went off to found Troika and made Arcanum, which improves upon many of Fallout 1's aspects and has a similar overall tone.
They also made Temple of Elemental Evil and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, which were different games but also good in their own right.

Fallout 2 is a case of new people making a sequel to a game made by other people, and not grasping the essence of that game.
Yes and making a game that is as good as the original. They sure didn't knew what they were doing, if that's "not grasping" then let everyone not grasp anything.
 

Ysaye

Arbiter
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May 27, 2018
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Australia
DW Bradley arguably is in this category - did some really good/great things with Wizardry 5- 7 and also Wizards and Warriors, but he also killed off really good things from Wizardry 1 - 5 in the process, and then he jumped off the deep end thinking that the main thing players wanted was mobile / facebook games....just didn't seem to understand why his successful games were successful, or otherwise just was not interested.
 
Joined
Jan 26, 2007
Messages
522
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Germoney
The better question would actually be which developer realized what made their game great.

I don't remember playing a sequel of a game from the last ten years that did consolidate on the strength of the previous title.


Considering a lot of sequels set out to move even bigger numbers / reach more people than the original, that may sometimes not be a question of developers not understanding their own game, though.

But rather one where the primary question pondered about is one of moving units, as opposed to making an even better game / deepening the experience the orginal provided.

Sequels a good chunk of the time are done for purely commercial reasons in general (and be it for the safety net of catering to an already established audience) -- in the movie industry, which gaming quickly aped, until the age of blockbuster cinema had arrived, they consequently were rather uncommon.
 
Last edited:

Sarathiour

Cipher
Joined
Jun 7, 2020
Messages
3,262
I have a ten thousand word (okay, 9563 at last count) dissertation on each and every design error in that game that I add to every time I forget and try playing it again and get pissed off again. By the time I finish touching on everything (there's still a lot of outline notes, each of which will be worth a few paragraphs) it might well hit 15K-20K words.

Post it instead of teasing.
 

Chippy

Arcane
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Joined
May 5, 2018
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6,037
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Not sure if this has been covered, but was thinking about glaring examples of developers who made decisions that didn't ruin their games completely, but made another game, or a sequel, and had no idea what the main draw of the first game was. Or just made decisions that soured their next game.

Primary example of this is BG2. Imagine (minus the faggotry) RA Salvatore wrote the Drizzt books with his companions and then just killed them off or ignored them in a follow up book. That's what Bioware did. Then they missed the opportunity to make smaller DLC where they could have at least given them a send off.

The main draw which made BG1 great (tip: it really wasn't) was... Khalid?

Thou art gay.

The problem is however I respond to this; it might give Larian ideas in the future to swap Jaheira with Khalid if they do a remake. So, erm...I'm more into dwarves? Yeslick and Korgan for example were just ignored.
 

samuraigaiden

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2018
Messages
1,954
Location
Harare
RPG Wokedex
Jeff Vogel, no doubt about it. Just look at Queen's Wish.

He's been posting a lot about Elden Ring and it's funny to see him try to rationalize the success of FromSoftware. It sounds like he really thought that streamlining and watering down his games was the route to mainstream success.
Link?

https://bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/elden-ring-is-fair-and-just-except?s=r

https://bottomfeeder.substack.com/p/the-last-pile-of-thoughts-about-elden?s=r
 

Grauken

Gourd vibes only
Patron
Joined
Mar 22, 2013
Messages
12,787
Were the same people who made Deux Ex responsible for Invisible War? If yes, I nominate those
 

Bigg Boss

Arcane
Joined
Sep 23, 2012
Messages
7,528
Invisible War was ok if you never played Deus Ex 1, and your PC sucked, so you had to play it on console (twenty years ago), only to find out when you return to school to tell your friend about how much you like it how wrong you are. Oh so wrong. I can't even look at it now. Even with mods it is horrible.
 

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