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[Bal]

Sequels, love 'em or hate 'em, are the cornerstone of the industry. Nearly every big project that comes out is a sequel, and even the new IPs are born with the hope that they will spawn a franchise. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. There are a lot of folks who just flatly dismiss sequels as the cancer killing all the beautiful and creative snowflakes out there, but the fact of the matter is that people, including myself, like games that are like the games they like. They like characters and settings that they already know.

I got to thinking about this because I just finished playing Crysis 2 (a very good FPS campaign if you're looking for one), and it got me thinking about things people do in sequels that I don't like, because of a few things that Crysis 2 does that I will describe. Crysis 2 is a game that is trying to bring in new players, first and foremost. To do this they've done some pretty obvious things, like make it available on PS3 and Xbox in addition to the PC, and streamlined the suit mechanic significantly (to the benefit of the gameplay, actually. The old suit was a bit unwieldy with it's powers), and that's fine. It also tries to something that a lot of sequels try to do, and usually fail at doing, and that is make a story that can stand on its own without having played the first game. Ideally, when doing this, new players should feel welcome, and returning players should feel like what they did in the first game is informing what's going on in the second game.

Crysis 2 gets the first thing right, but so much so that throughout almost the entire game, in the back of my mind, I was thinking "What the fuck does this have to do with the first game?". There is exactly one returning character, and it's not even the protagonist of the first game. The setting is different, the alien M.O. is completely different, the mood is completely different. The only thing that's the same is you've got a nano-suit, and somewhere to go. Again, I stress that all of the things I just listed are really, really well done. Apocalyptic New York is beautifully realized, with the same kind of staggering vistas you'd expect from Crysis in the middle of Manhattan, and if I had never played Crysis I would feel like I knew why I was there, and what it all meant, but having played the first game I just find myself with this constant little cognitive dissonance buzzing away at me all the time.

I can honestly say that this is the first time I've ever played a sequel that is functionally better than the first game, but somehow made a worse experience for having played the first game. It makes me think they should have just not called it Crysis. In fact, I think they might not have were it not for the fact that they still wanted to use the same basic nano-suit mechanic. I guess the question becomes "When is a sequel no longer a sequel?". Would it have been all right for them to do something like Final Fantasy, and just have a similar theme, keep the nano-suit, and disconnect the narrative completely? Because, barring a few hints here and there, that's practically what they did, and I almost wish they'd just gone all the way with it.

This became more about Crysis 2 than I intended, so I'll try to bring this back around a bit. This year I am looking forward to a number of, what I hope to be, fantastic titles. All of which are sequels or follow-ups. Portal 2, The Witcher 2, Dark Souls, and Mass Effect 3 to name a few. Dragon Age 2 and Crysis 2 just came out, Gears 3 is in the pipe as well, it just goes on and on. Is this too many sequels? The question gets asked every year. So many sequels, where's the new stuff? Are the sequels burying the brilliant new ideas that must be hiding out there? Honestly, I don't really think so, at least not to a huge degree. Yes, it's harder to get a new IP published than it is for an established franchise, but those franchises get established for a reason. How many new IPs out there are really that good? One in ten? And that's from the ideas compelling enough to get through to be published to begin with. Not to mention that, even if your new game is good, there's no guarantee that it will sell. Take Mirror's Edge. Great game, extremely strong first entry in a potential franchise, but it doesn't sell. Game companies aren't charities, so the sequel gets delayed indefinitely in favor of more Battlefield games, which are proven sellers. Proven further by the fact that Bad Company 2 actually does sell extremely well, so we get Battlefield 3.

So we get sequels, and more sequels, and will continue to get sequels, but most of the time, I really don't mind.

[patito]

I think 2 or 3 sequels is perfectly reasonable, in fact most of the games you mention I'd consider new IPs in their own right.

As far as sequels doing narrative throwbacks to their prequels, I'd say that's really nice but I don't think that should be a requirement. I'm on the camp that improving on gameplay should be a priority for sequels. Take Half-Life 2 for example, a really good game and it has recurring characters (i.e. Barney) but it's a completely different game in a completely different setting. Valve really just took advantage of name recognition to sell a pretty good game and I can't fault them for that but I wouldn't recommend doing that.

RPGs sequels probably suffer more from changing details from sequel to sequel, since RPG fans are pretty anal about consistency in their settings. For my own part I was a bit annoyed by the change in the way ammo worked from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2, but I learned to accept that as just an improvement on gameplay.

Going back to narrative, as you progress through the story in Saint's Row 2 you do get to meet characters from the first game, a fact the game conveyed pretty well, since I was able to figure this out without even playing the first game. However the game also makes a pretty big change for the sake of gameplay, since it allows customization of the main character, there's also some lampshading about that at some points in the game.

I was also gonna go on small rant that maybe Crytek has no idea how to make consistent sequels, since Far Cry 2 is pretty detached from the first one, but wikipedia has informed me that they actually had nothing to do with it. So Far Cry 2 is just very obviously also just a cash in on the name recognition. Which is something that does tend to bother me with sequels. The new X-Com for example falls in this category, and that's even a game that won't benefit much from the name recognition, in fact it probably hurts it. I'd say the new Deus Ex to a certain degree, but as it turns out that might not be a terrible game, hopefully.

[Bal]

Half-Life 2 is a good comparison to bring up in this case, actually, because, while it is very accessible to new players, the story is has everything to do with Black Mesa and Gordon Freeman. Half-Life story telling being what it is, you don't necessarily have to pick up on that, but everything that happens is as a direct result of the events of the first game, and the establishment of Gordon Freeman as a symbol for the rebels is based entirely on the legend of his exploits in the opening days of what for pretty much everyone turned out to be the apocalypse. As a player of the first game you don't feel like Half-Life doesn't matter, you feel like it does matter and you're hungry to know exactly how.

Calling it a completely different game is pretty misleading though. The gunplay is almost identical, with the exception of the plot gun, and the overall feel of the game, despite the different setting is very similar. It's still a corridor shooter, they just made the corridors invisible for most of the game. Half-Life 2 is a prime example of how to do it right, perhaps because they really had no interest or need to attract new players.

[Pacobird]

Well, there are really two things at work, here:

One is brand marketability: video games don't generally have the sort of media blitz marketing that you see in film (not just ads, but endless interviews with actors and directors) so they need another, cheaper way to signal to consumers that this is something they might like to buy, especially since a video game is a pretty substantial investment of time and money as purely consumptive entertainments go.  A video game spawns sequels for the same reason as a Stephen King novel has "Stephen King" printed on the cover in larger type than the actual title: brand recognition.  It makes sense, too; if I buy a Final Fantasy game, I'm doing it because I liked other Final Fantasy games and I want to play another one by they guys who made them.  Until recently, I could be reasonably assured this would be the case, despite the various games in the series having next to nothing to do with each other other than more branding (not just the title, but also red mages and blizzagas and what not).

The other problem (and this is the fault of developers and consumers alike) is that video games have had a very difficult time making the transition from entertainment to artform, so creative bankruptcy is not necessarily a career-ending condition.  I'd argue the best we've gotten is a structural/design sort of art, like architecture or music, which is fine and good but unless narratives actually move beyond the purely descriptive there isn't much incentive to make new IPs.

[Bongo Bill]

I like sequels. Most gameplay benefits from being expanded on.

[Brentai]

Every first entry to a franchise is rough and exploratory for a myriad of reasons.  Sequels give the developers a chance to apply the lessons they learned the first time and do it right.

90% of the time they do it HORRIBLY wrong, then take the lessons they learned from THAT and make a stellar third entry.  The beauty of sequels is somewhat that one has a chance to learn from one's successes and very much that one has a chance to learn from one's failures, and still try it again.

[Thad]

I'd say even Mario and Zelda followed that formula (provided we're talking about the Japanese SMB2).  And the original Mario and Zelda were, of course, awesome.