“Forget the hype, the trailers featuring Hollywood stars, the review scores, and ask yourself this: do you want more of the same? If the answer is yes, Modern Warfare 3 should be on your ‘Buy’ list. If the answer is no, you’re better off getting your FPS fix elsewhere.”
–Mike Sharkey, reviewing Modern Warfare 3 for GameSpy.
You’re a game developer, and you’ve just hit the big time–your new game is the selling like hotcakes, and earning critic awards and accolades to boot. Don’t rest on your laurels too long. You want to please your new fans, don’t you? And besides, you have to pay off those new expenses. You’ve got another game to make. And given the success of your last project, why not make a sequel?
If there’s an area in which video game players are most often hypocrites, it’s in regards to sequels. The majority of AAA titles are new installments for old games, and just take a look at previous Game of the Year (GOTY) wins in both press and fan polls to see how not only sequels, but just a few franchises dominate the standings.
This isn’t really surprising from the business side of things. Sequels to a successful game are more likely to be successes than an unknown new property, and thus the developers get larger budgets and the publishers spend more advertising dollars, creating a positive feedback loop in regards to sales. After all, every new product is a gamble, and sequels are safer bets. As the publishers go, so too do consumers; thrifty gamers only have so much to plunk down on new games, and if Elder Scrolls IV was good, why wouldn’t Skyrim be even better?
Beyond mere money, there is a question of gaming experience. Creating a winning game is often an unlikely amalgamation of art style, player experience, difficulty curves and smart programming–whether punishing artificial intelligence, or lag-free netcode. If players discover a game that really hooks them, they are always going to be looking for a similar experience as long as that experience is still a draw. Players are *still* timing speedruns, exploiting glitches and dragging aged Xbox consoles to their friends’ houses to play the original Halo: Combat Evolved ten years later. If a developer can capture that devotion and sell them on another product, that seems a win for the game-maker and the gamers.
And yet many gamers will say they wish that there were more original ideas and original properties, and not just more of the same. It’s a hard double-standard to reconcile, but I can understand their position. I love Halo and Halo’s story, and while I want to continue to play in that universe, I don’t necessarily want the same game for every entry. The more original games, the more gamers get exposure to different styles–it’s like keeping up with modern music.
But there are also hardcore fans who don’t represent the wider gamer demographic, and I think they often want more of the same–sure, better graphics, more guns, more multiplayer modes, but the core gameplay experience should be unchanged. For some, this is a matter of continuing to use honed skills; if the developers stopped making Street Fighter games, players’ button-mashing skills wouldn’t easily transfer, even in the gaming world. There’s a reason StarCraft II had much of the same elements of the original StarCraft–players were literally making their livelihoods using their game skills to win money in pro-gaming tournaments, and to go off-script for the sequel would essentially marginalize these people and other amateur fans. It’s not just fighting games, it’s not just strategy games, it’s not just shooters; every genre has people who don’t want their skills to become obsolete. If you have fun playing one game, why not continue having fun in the next installment?
And yet this desire for sameness does lead down some dark paths. Developers or (more likely) publishers will attempt to milk as much money out of a franchise as possible. This can lead to poor games, or simply multiple games coming out so fast fans feel pressured. In some cases this alienates players (in the case of Madden and many sports games, however, having a new game every year doesn’t seem to have much negative effect.) And there is no denying that the concept of blockbuster games sometimes strangles worthy, yet smaller or unproven titles from prime spots–they simply cannot compete against the over-marketed peers. Just aiming for “more of the same” is also bankrupt in an artistic sense–and, even if it’s just to be entertaining, games are an art form unto themselves. Cynic/comic Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw blames a lot of “sequel-itis” on the fans themselves:
“Fans create sequels that hold up the predecessors as something to live up to, rather than something to improve upon. And that’s not the right mindset to take. If you’re not going to try to be better, what’s the point? To give something to all the other fans? They won’t appreciate it. The more fan-oriented an installment becomes, the more holes they find to pick in it. […] But give it to someone who isn’t a fan and they’ll force it to change, and evolve. I’m not saying that drastic changes will always produce something better, but in the long run, nothing stays good by wallowing around unchallenged in the same territory as always”.
Uncharted 3 designer Richard Lemarchand defends sequels as a way of developers to hone their craft, and in some cases that’s certainly true–in the short term. But even Hitchcock, to take Lemarchand’s analogy, started churning out poor movies when he repeated his old styles. If you give publishers an out, they will produce sequels and invariably quality will decline–the Sonic and Spyro franchises are some of the best examples. Gluts of sequels can even damage an entire genre–the rhythm game craze came crashing to a halt, according to G4tv, in part because the Guitar Hero franchise filled homes with sequels and spinoffs over the course of just a few years.
Luckily, the advantage of modern gaming is that for those who feel that the majority of sequels are a bad thing, there are outlets to simply avoid them. Because the holiday season is generally when the biggest games come out, the spring and summers of every year are a natural outlet for more niche or unproven titles. Digital distribution means that you don’t necessarily need a huge marketing budget to get the word out, and the lowered costs of development mean that the new games have a fighting chance–lower risk also means it doesn’t have to be a runaway success to still be profitable. Does the industry have a sequel problem? Yes. But the best thing you can do is vote with your wallet, one way or another, and just keep gaming.
References
Mike Sharkey & Bennett Ring (November 9, 2011). “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Review”. GameSpy. Retrieved November 24, 2011.
Ben Croshaw (September 4, 2009). “Extra Punctuation: On Sequels”. The Escapist. Retrieved November 28, 2011.
David Crookes (October 26, 2011). “Lead Video Game Designer Defends Sequels”. The Independent. Retrieved November 27, 2011.
Blake Snow (March 18, 2011). “Video Game Sequels: Does the Industry Have a Problem?” G4tv. Retrieved November 27, 2011.