Sequels Part 2

Last week, our esteemed panel took at appear at videogame sequels. This week, with more than a little irony, we bring you the sequel to that piece.

Jim Sterling
I think we disagree on Silent Hill 3, Eastern Samoa I found it narratively quite interesting as well as superior gameplay wise. As a more direct continuation to the best game, I call up it tired its predecessor on both counts. I wish tally, all the same, that it's real nice to see someone other with respect for Uncommunicative J. J. Hill 4. Unbelievably flawed, but I adore it for the creepy little game that IT turned bent be. As to your point about seemly in fetters to a property, I fear that may be where compromise is a necessary evil. I think some developers recognize that the best way to push bold new ideas is to dress their wolves up in wool and sneak them out to the public under a familiar diagnose. It's not ideal, I know, but when has ideal ever been inside easy reach?

At the rattling least, we quieten let the PC to save us when we want new Information science that doesn't compromise. I highly recommend that you give E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy a go. It's decorous quite favourite on Steamer right now, and it's an perfectly perfect exercise of a new IP that just wouldn't appear anywhere else. While sequels are still craved on PC, it's still a wonderful aura where new ideas can flourish. They assume't all work, but bless that metier for the quirky wonders it can produce. Unfortunately, when IT comes to the retail infinite, publishers just tail end't be quite so bluff.

To persist in the price word, I fully revalue that on that point's an obstacle at that place, concerning the inferiority misconception. Unfortunately, that's not a mentality that will change while people do nothing or so it. Again, I feel titles like Call of Duty is dominating while the games of Suda 51 and his eccentric ilk disappear without a describe. You simply cannot cast a spirited like Shadows of the Damned on a store shelf for $60 and require information technology to fly off the shelf. I'd love a human race where it did fell off shelves, merely that's not realism. You say it's risking its potential profit if it releases A a lower price. I'd say the risks are far greater when a publisher expects people to pay the same amount of money for Shadows of the Damned as they would for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Which one of those titles will gamers wait to see in the bargain bin? It South Korean won't be the one with random firedrake spawns.

MovieBob
This kind of gets to the ascendant of the trouble, though, doesn't it? What incisively constitutes a sequel – as opposed to just something that's part of a dealership – in gambling, and is that lack of clarity what's causing some of the problem?

Look at the Call of Duty dealership. Hardcore CoD devotees and multitude who follow gaming news are mindful that there's the Modern Warfare games, the pre-MW WWII games and the stuff that gets made in-between MW games now and that the style/quality/development doesn't follow a straight progression… but does the broader interview? Wherefore is the recent Mario Kart called Mario Kart 7 when information technology's neither the 7th back nor a direct continuation of the previous installment?

Information technology's as though the problem is inferior about sequels and more about how the sequel designation gets used equally an excuse to continue releasing the same basic game. I crapper understand the impetus for that to a certain degree – if I could get away with Activision's business fashion mode, you bet I'd do it. Only it's possible that its taking away from the good things game sequels could otherwise treat association – at some point eve the thickest consumer is going to get knowing this, and it's not going to be Call of Duty: It's The Russians Again that suffers for it.

As to pricing, I'd suppose we'Ra LONG overdue for the unscathed pricing structure to get looked at. The fact that we even HAVE a uniform toll-structure is laughable – this is the antepenultimate form of retail where that still flies. I'm convinced that this, more than anything other, is what's making life hard for the 3DS – takeout gambling jumped into digital distribution in front consoles, and the effect is that people are MUCH less willing to drop $40 happening a possibly. It's also hurting the perceptual experience of otherwise righteous games that don't deserve it. Off the top of my head, I'd call Epic Narration and Domestic ass Kong Country Returns both jolly damn close to perfect in terms of what they are… yet I still recall impression bitter at shelling out $50 for what are essentially SNES games, which isn't really average to them.

What's messed up is, publishers HAVE to know that selling the right product at an individual unit loss can lead to turning a earnings overall, particularly if you're realistic about your initial pressing. You KNOW that people have recommended this at board meetings for this operating room that game, but we never see it happen. Would information technology surprise ANYONE if it clad that varied publication side bosses had a gentlemen's accord going to make sure that this never happened, lest the whole house of cards topple over? With all the crap that goes downwards in this industry, would we even bat an eye at price fixing?

Jim Sterling
Oh, of course publishers have it away. Did you get it on that St. John Riccitiello once said that the $60 pricing model was something that had to interchange within the next five old age? He said that in 2007. Here we are, in 2011, and EA has its have service in Origin where it can set any price it wants … and it's charging $60 for digital copies of games it could sell far cheaper, and likely should if IT wants to compete with Steam. Ea's own Chief executive officer said, four years ago, that prices needed to lower, and when the company had a probability to let down those prices, it didn't. In fact, since Microcomputer games are usually ten bucks cheaper, it in reality brought prices up. That is some amazing compartmentalization mighty there.

This has happened twice, newly. Bethesda's Sweeney Todd Howard said the average videogame Mary Leontyne Pric ought to exist around $19 and Twined Metal director David Jaffe aforementioned $60 was a "shit ton" of money to ask from a gamer. But are they reducing their ain prices? Nope! Accordant to them, their games are worth the $60. This is the matter right thither — developers and publishers who clearly know that the $60 average MSRP is to a fault high, but are too vainglorious to admit the initiative because they deserve to charge that much. Atomic number 102 way anything's going away to convert with that kind of bivalent think exit connected.

Yahtzee Croshaw
I think pricing is a bang-up topic, information technology just isn't our current one. And so grant me to steer this wayward party boat back to port wine.

I guess my other problem with subsequence culture is that information technology taints even original games. With the expectation that sequels could be on the cards, ensuring that everyone still has a occupation after the project's polished, there's a quite upsetting eagerness to not conclusion games properly. Both Crysis and Crysis 2 end on dissatisfactory cliffhangers to name but two. God of War 2 seems to decide at the very last minute to end connected a cliffhanger and so God of War 3 realised too late that it didn't give birth enough plot to carry a whole game and fair-and-square faffed around for six hours. The ending to whatever experience is the just about fundamental part of IT, because it's the thing you carry away and will remember the clearest. Steady if you'Ra not into game stories that practically, tell Maine you've never been disappointed by reaching the end of a campaign and being told that you're not going to get any payoff just yet because they want to do a sequel (surgery, god help us, DLC). It's worth remembering that Wizard Wars: A New Hope, contempt being left open up for sequels, managed to have a self-collected level with a commencement, mediate and oddment.

This is why I own tremendous respect for Sucker Punch for what they did with Notorious. Infamous had its own story but left a very clear subsequence hook, then Disreputable 2 was exactly the sequel secure, which ended the story definitively with no boost hints of continuation. Mind you, I wouldn't set down it past Sony to go for a third one anyway. And and then we'll end sprouted with a Bioshock scenario where the needless continuation level manages to taint the original retroactively past untidily nerve-racking to sprain a stuffed-stop into a comma with a big stout eternal marker that isn't even the right colour.

I once jokingly suggested that complete sequels should be banned. Perhaps that should be tried for a bit. It wouldn't solve all problem and IT'd mean sacrificing the in reality expert sequels, but it'd definitely glucinium an interesting few years.

MovieBob
Oh, utterly – if I could, I'd wee it a rule that you are NOT allowed to end connected a "to be continuing" without A.) Already learned where its going and B.) Having a okay initial payoff storywise.

I suppose a big problem with this is that serious play – whatever the fuck that is at this point – has sort of internalized the idea that because gameplay comes forward straight TALKING virtually story-select is verboten. If a game has a bad story, you're dealings with a HUGE segment of gamers WHO put on't care and some other HUGE segment that would sooner it didn't make a story at entirely – and thinks the very act of discussing it somehow taints the purity of the medium – versus a relatively small segment that likes narrative and wants it to be better.

Jim Sterling
It's funny — we hate on sequels a luck, and people complain about cliffhangers, as if they're a major problem that is holding videogames back, and then I consider the fact that I don't think I've read a idiosyncratic book in the quondam cardinal years that has had a conclusive ending. They've all been part of a serial, close to of which run the risk of outliving their writers. I'm sure a fair few of them are better planned than videogames (they'd deman to be, since story is all they have) just still, I think at that place's an automatic aversion people induce to cliffhangers, like they are inherently a rubber thing, which I disagree with. I'm pretty tolerant of them, and if it's a good cliffhanger, I'm all for IT.

Sometimes a cliffhanger can be a satisfying payoff in its have right. Again, I bring in books, specifically the Song of Ice and Fire serial. Some of those books end with cliffhangers so good intense that they are worthy endings in and of themselves. I Don't mean games have pulled those off quite yet, but I am sure they could. Infamous, as much as I felt the overall plat was halting, does come close. I wouldn't go so off the beaten track as to banning all sequels, but a law that says you can't have one if you didn't write an impressive and satisfying sequel hook in the live crippled would by all odds cause a few people to sit up straight and pay attention.

MovieBob
Again, I maintain that the job is not so much sequels as it is the means sequel designation is used to market what are very glorified expanding upon packs.

We wont to joke about Capcoms 50 million SFII revamps, but at any rate they didn't examine to deal "Champion Edition" or "Turbo" as Street Fighter 3. Today, they could perfectly drive away with that – Activision got away with it with Madden fans booming price for a yearly roster update. Is IT whatsoever wonder people groan at any "Contribution 2" title that doesn't come with the Valve/Miyamoto/whoever grace at this point?

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/sequels-part-2/

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/sequels-part-2/