Good Games With Shitty Sequels - How did they mess it up so bad?

[Thiletonomics]

Also controversially AoE3. It's mid compared to previous games, not entirely terrible but it's so mediocre that it's forgotten.

AOE3 being so much different to play than the first 2 AOE games is similar to how people disliked Hitman Absolution compared to the older Hitman games.

And AOE4, despite it also not being a terrible game, still doesn't feel as good to play as the first 2 AOE games.

Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown also did not deserve to have the Test Drive Unlimited name in it, since it only focuses on the racing part, while neglecting the lifestyle parts of the previous 2 TDU games.

 

[Judge Dredd]

If you're implying Cities Skylines 1 was a good game I would make a dozen sock accounts just to give you the number of Disagrees you deserve.

@jje100010001 explained better than I could. It's a baseline that could've been classic with a proper sequel, but that didn't happen by the sounds of it.

You all forgot Subnautica. The first game I heard was flawless with the gameplay being smooth progression, hard but fair, the audio accentuating the game being atmospheric and horrifying at times but those cuck devs thought it was a great idea to scrap all the good things in the first game and have DEI as the priority for the second game and make nonsensical story with obnoxious characters. While the sequel I think still sold well, the dev probably lost most of the goodwill and credbility.

We could easily fill the thread with DEI garbage. Saints Row Remake (and Agents of Mayhem), Resident Evil 3 Remake, Borderlands 3 (though I've never liked Borderlands), basically any AAA franchise with a post gamergate spite sequel is shit.

Dead rising 2.

I know this will get me a lot of hate, but I didn't mind DR2 or DR3. I really liked Case Zero too. Though you're right about the games flaws.


Another couple of terrible sequels.

Perfect Dark Zero
The original Perfect Dark was an all time favourite, but post Nintendo Rare put out a string of turds. Perfect Dark Zero being one of them. The games graphics are weird, but I can forgive it. The story and gameplay are dogshit, and clearly trying to chase trends of the time.

Hotline Miami 2
The original hotline miami was a violent top down shooter with an 80s theme and a focus on melee combat. Great soundtrack, fun gameplay, great fun. Hotline Miami 2 focused more on story and guns. The story has some excellent moments, but the focus on guns often means you get shot from off screen, and as a result have to result to unfun exploits to get through it. I can't be too angry with it, but still a downgrade from the original.

 

[Soi Woh Jak]

I know this will get me a lot of hate, but I didn't mind DR2 or DR3. I really liked Case Zero too. Though you're right about the games flaws.

I dont know if its me with the perfect Japdar but I could very easily detect DR2 being made by westerners. DR2 is a different game with different goals wearing the skin of DR1 and mightve even lead to DR4 with the focus on "Cool Zombie Killing" over optimizing and survival. Its a rule of thumb Ive coined, Japanese people value logical consistency over graphics and cool factor, westerners are the exact opposite. Thats why Japanese people make the best sandboxes like DR1, like MGSV, like MGS3, like BOTW while westerners can rarely/never reach that level of standard.

 

[Pinball 2000]

I think we need to bring up The Culling from 2016. It's a unique case because while the original game was pretty good, it had a terrible sequel that somehow managed to ruin the original game too. This will need a bit of an explanation, so bear with me, you need to understand the story behind this game to appreciate just how big a mess this series became.


For those who never heard of this game, I don't blame you. The Culling is a first-person combat game by Xaviant where you spawn randomly on a map, use mostly melee weapons, and try to be the last one standing. It actually deserves credit for being one of the first battle royale games to hit the market, beating PUBG and Fortnite by a full year.

It wasn’t the deepest game out there, but it was fun and had some pretty chaotic moments. The game maps were basically presented as a game show with lots of slapstick commentary from the announcer. What I remember most about it was the surprisingly deep melee combat. If you could time it right, you could block every attack, giving you a fighting chance against even the most geared-up player.

The devs clearly didn’t know what they were doing, though, because the game was notorious for drastic balance patches every couple of weeks. The game's meta would change considerably, and their subreddit was constantly spammed with posts like “please stop fucking up the game balance.”

When PUBG blew up on Steam, the devs decided to halt work on The Culling to invest all their time and resources into releasing The Culling 2 in 2018, and holy hell, was this game a disaster. Among other issues, they went from a game that was 95% melee combat in enclosed environments to one with guns and giant open spaces. In other words, pretty much the opposite of what the original game was about. It felt like a knockoff of a mobile knockoff of PUBG: the guns and weapons felt awful, and overall, it was a rushed trash fire of a game. It barely broke 200 active players at launch and dropped to fewer than 20 in less than 48 hours.

If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend watching this guy’s video about it, as he goes into much more detail than I will.

In a rather surprising move, Xaviant announced shortly afterward that they would pull The Culling 2 from storefronts, refund everyone, and revert The Culling 1 to its day-one patch as a free-to-play title. Basically, play as much as you want and optionally spend money on cosmetics like clothing and loot boxes. It did okay on Steam for a little while, but the devs weren’t making enough to keep the servers running, so they shut it down a few months later.

...Except that’s not where the story ends, because two years later, Xaviant decided to resurrect The Culling 1 AGAIN as The Culling: Origins. This version even got an Xbox One port, along with one of the most insane monetization schemes I’ve ever seen in a free-to-play game: you could only play the game for free one time every day. If you won, you could play again for free, but if you lost (which you probably would, since it’s a battle royale), you had to either wait 24 hours or pay for tokens or a subscription. After literally everyone pointed out how ridiculous this system was, the devs changed it to ten daily tokens. Still, Origins lasted about five months before the game was completely abandoned, and by that point, Xaviant had few, if any, employees supporting the game.

I know people rightfully hate on Concord for being a game that nobody wanted and that shut down almost immediately (and they should hate on Concord, don’t get me wrong). But The Culling 2 happened back in 2018, a full six years before Concord. I guess it's true what they say: Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

TL;DR: It was a brutal, melee combat-based, Bloodsport-inspired murder fest with countless ways to kill players, ruined by a sequel with gameplay so bad it retroactively hurt the original game. Now it's just a memory. Hopefully, something similar comes along again, but nothing quite compares to it or the crazy moves some players managed to pull off. Sadly, it's gone now.

 

[TheHarbinger]

Controversially, StarCraft II. I hate it cause it's 25 gb, no map editor, skirmish sucks.

Not really controversial anymore. Starcraft II's story retcons almost all of the first game and Brood War and seems to be one of the biggest criticisms from the community. And there was massive backlash from the Brood War fandom when Blizzard began pushing tournament organizers to entirely replace the game with Starcraft II only events (and also push Warcraft III Frozen Throne off the map on purpose as well). Both the story and single player based players and competitive players have leveled tons of negative evaluation at the game.

It's one of those games where it seemed to have alienated its original fanbase and replaced them with a new group of players who never really liked the original game in the first place.

 

[Oliver Onions]

Jak II: Renegade. Supposedly it was pivoted last minute after Naughty Dog saw GTAIII doing gangbusters so they turned it into a dogshit rip-off. It especially didn't help that it had to stand against Ratchet & Clank 2: Up Your Arsenal, which not only outclassed it by every conceivable metric but is still one of the best games of all time to this day.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 was also a complete fuck-up and the devs should have been hanged for taking the premise of putting Dracula in the modern day and completely fumbling it by making him a pussy who has to constantly hide from everyone in the worst forced stealth missions of all time.

 

[DickMain]

AssCreed 2 going into 3. Either it should have taken place in England or even France during the same time period, or have just been set in the French Revolution a little later. You can't tell me going from the beautiful, masterful, architectural marvels of Europe to log cabins in the woods was supposed to be exciting. Don't get me wrong, the American Revolution is an interesting piece of history to explore, but so much of the fun in those early games was just jumping off of tall shit. In terms of the history the game adopts, it was a missed opportunity to explore the war as it was in the British Isles, something I can't say I've seen any game ever do. Hell, make John Paul Jones an assassin or at least some kind of accomplice gallavanting around and executing pirate tactics (they were already trying to lean into the naval stuff at that point anyway, so why not).

Rainbow 6 Siege. Setting aside the cheater plague, and any thoughts on how you might feel about the gameplay itself, the spriit of R6 was just lacking on this one for so much of its life up until somewhat recently. The art direction at first was exactly the kind of tacticool globohomo task force you'd want out of the setting, but eventually designs started to devolve into operators being straight up anime characters (I'm of course not referring to any sort of elite skins or anything like that; just their base designs at face value). Thankfully they only tried the tranny shit once and shut the fuck up about it since, and the designs of the operators have, slowly, been trending towards that less-scifi military look altho not entirely.

To this day I'm baffled the original squad you played as for so many of the R6 games straight out of the novel were not in the game from the moment it launched, and are not in it to this day, but at least I don't have to see Chavez get turned into an anime OC. Another point is that Clancy's corpse has frozen over a dozen times by this point, so why are we still beholden to his wishes of 'never playing as the bad guys'? The game's whole premise of "it's all a training simulation" with all this high school football/esports drama between members becoming grating (they are, again, at least kind of trending away from this). This is a Rainbow game where we're not fighting terrorists in some way, and it's bizarre.

Honorable Mention: GG Strive. I can't really speak on how I feel about how it plays compared to older entries, it's just a totally different game, but holy shit the pozzing of the series makes it absolutely impossible to listen to people talk about the game and follow discussion without losing my mind. I either get lost trying to parse important information buried in a sea of 'they/them' unable to tell who's talking about what and referring to who, or listening to a character's name being repeated a dozen times in a couple sentences (really this is only an issue for a small amount of characters, but it's extremely annoying). There was always a little bit of degen DNA in its very soul, 'everybody is gay for Bridget' probably goes back longer than some farmers have been alive, but at times it's just plain annoying to figure out what's meant when people are talking about who's interacting with what. None of this is to say anything about showing up to tournaments and sitting shoulder to shoulder with some dude with crusty smelly hair/kneesocks/skirt over jeans.

 

[Idiotron]

Resident Evil 1-3 on the PS1 were these cool horror puzzle games with action elements.
Atmospheric stuff that was an homage to 80's and 90's B-movies.
They even set the fixed camera angles to get cinematic shots and jump scares.

Then RE became a franchise of shitty action games.
Now there's werewolves and shit... what the hell?

 

[WULULULULU]

Oh goodie, a thread where I can rant about game devs and the retardation post-2010s.

XCOM 2 --> XCOM: Chimera Squad. How to destroy the original premise.

When you hear XCOM, you think "oh I control an army to kill aliens", which sounds awesome and badass. Now imagine you are making a sequel, then chuck away the core premise of the game and voila, you have made a game that is antithetical to XCOM: a game where you control aliens and XCOM has been transformed into some sort of quirky police squad. From the artstyle, to the gameplay changes, it felt like it was made by people who hated XCOM 2's cynical direction and wanted to make a "family friendly" version of it. The fact that XCOM 2's modding scene is still alive while Chimera Squad's modding scene is dead-on-arrival already shows just how bad it tanked the name of XCOM, just like Enforcer and The Bureau.

Darkest Dungeon and Frostpunk --> Darkest Dungeon 2 and Frostpunk 2. How to release something "different".

Both Darkest Dungeon and Frostpunk are known classics that have earned their reputation, be it the atmosphere, the gameplay or the brutal difficulty of both games. Now what happens when a developer wants to "expand" the name and try a different approach? You get two "sequels" don't even feel like the first games and are different games entirely. Between Darkest Dungeon 2's attempt at Slay The Spire (of which card-based indies need to fucking die already) and neutered difficulty, to Frostpunk 2's heavy emphasis on politics and lawmaking instead of actual city building-survival, the games have essentially did what Joker 2 did and said "fuck what made the original good, lets spin the name in a different direction", rather than building up from the first games and adding improvements like a sequel would.

PAYDAY 2 --> PAYDAY 3. How to torch an old playerbase.

Now PAYDAY 2 had a rocky, yet venerable reputation, between being caught red-handed doing a CSGO-esque microtransaction system skin economy, to a hefty amount of DLC and lack of optimization, yet the chaos of the game allowed different ways to play through the game, some better than others, but many were able to experiment however they wish. Then came PAYDAY 3, which already started in a shit foot when the devs announced that it would be online-only, already putting the playerbase off. Then came the release, when players couldn't even play the game because of the broken servers, up to downgrading and oversimplification of the gameplay, all because they wanted to be more inline with Payday: the Heist, the one game where there was little players to even speak off compared to its sequel.

CS:GO --> Danger Zone Update + CS2. How to double-down on the game's worst aspects.

You would think that a game of such legacy like Counter-Strike would get a new game that would take the foundations from GO and 1.6 (including moddable aspects from Source) and improve on that right? Wrong. Instead Valve double-downed on the skin economy by adding more expensive skins and decided that the old guard was not enough, thus releasing the F2P update that worsened the cheater epidemic of the game, to the point that players were fed up and went to an even shittier clone of it. CS2's release was mired with bugs and glitches, most of which saw it as the game being unfit for competitive, yet they pushed MORE skins rather than fixing the game's stability. This only made CS2's release all the more glaring and thus, more people just jumped ship to different games.

Notice a trend in all these cases? Almost all the devs post 2000s have somehow changed for the worse. Between hating their own legacy, becoming woke, doubling down on microtransaction slop or just being fucking retarded during the development process, they just can't focus on making a good game. The worst part is that any attempts to replace these games with new IPs just end up being shit in their own way, if not worse, than these sequels. (Case in point: Valorant to CS, GFL2 and Fire Emblem Engage to XCOM, $Fairgames to PAYDAY and so on and so forth).

 

[Make America Dumb Again]

Arkham Knight to Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

Now before all those certain individuals come and say that it’s not a sequel, but a spinoff, I will say that it could be considered a sequel because of the timeskip.

For all the faults mentioned previously, least Arkham Knight had a stellar gameplay. Fear takedown was definitely the best addition imo. The combat felt fluid, the predator section had more options to fuck with your enemies, and the graphics were absolutely kino for a 2015 game.

Unfortunately, Rocksteady colluded themselves with Sweet Baby Inc and created an abomination that contradicts so much of the Arkham lore (Deadshot I’m looking at you). Not only that, the gameplay is so generic as it devolved from a looter shooter (don’t get me started on the HUD). The final nail in the coffin tho is the fact that Harley, a villain that failed to kill Batman multiple times, actually managed to pull it off after making a moral grandstanding.

Are they stupid?

 

[NerdShamer]

From the artstyle, to the gameplay changes, it felt like it was made by people who hated XCOM 2's cynical direction and wanted to make a "family friendly" version of it.

You know, an lot of shit was either watered down so it'll be more appealing to an wider audience or just went full retard by listing to an few consultants instead of their fanbase. But at any rate, it's letting shit like Xenonauts run uncontested

 

[Meth Dick]

Are they stupid?

 

[Bubble Ba'ath]

Yeah, this one still pisses me off. Blood deserved at least a few good sequels before being cut off at the knees. The silver lining is that map packs and mods by fans are still being made at least but most other dead IP's can claim that there's at least a couple of good games rather than just the one and two expansion packs.

Exactly. Cryptic Passage is as good as the best parts of the core game and the fan community did it justice for years.

 

[Dean Pentel]

God of War Ragnarok was an absolute joke

Are you saying you didn't enjoy the unskippable cutscenes of magical women and niggers telling the white gods how dumb they were and how they should be effeminate cucks to evolve into super speshul boys?

TEW 2 was more mediocre than outright shit, but it was still a massive, boring downgrade that had barely any horror. Still baffles me how it got such positive reviews

I wonder if that had to do with simply having less jank and a more tonally consistent story. It plays well enough but I agree with you it's entirely average.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 was also a complete fuck-up and the devs should have been hanged for taking the premise of putting Dracula in the modern day and completely fumbling it by making him a pussy who has to constantly hide from everyone in the worst forced stealth missions of all time.

I liked the first game. I thought it worked well as a Castlevania adjunct and it could have made for a decent duology if the writer's hadn't started smoking Fucking Retard crack.

My thread contribution is whatever Final Fantasy 16 is a sequel/continuation of. Fucking movie games are some bullshit. Sure, it's not preaching about niggers are better than everyone and we should all suck the girl dick the same way other movie games have the last few years but still, fuck that game and everyone involved in its development should die of ass cancer.

 

[Oliver Onions]

Are you saying you didn't enjoy the unskippable cutscenes of magical women and niggers telling the white gods how dumb they were and how they should be effeminate cucks to evolve into super speshul boys?

It's hard to choose, but I think my favourite part of Ragnarok was when you play as Atreus and take the DEI chick to go free the giant dog then immediately play as Kratos to lock up the giant dog again. It's actually absurd how many of the story quests in that game are absolutely pointless, all in service of a story that basically amounts to 'sorry I killed your son lol'.

 

[frozen_runner]

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 was also a complete fuck-up and the devs should have been hanged for taking the premise of putting Dracula in the modern day and completely fumbling it by making him a pussy who has to constantly hide from everyone in the worst forced stealth missions of all time.

I mean, it's not as if the first Lords is Shadow was that great, either. The storytelling was godawful (which was especially embarrassing with the voiceover cast they had) and they couldn't even get the tone right. You want to do gothic horror with your game, but then you've got other random pagan deities showing up looking like they're from a Jim Henson/del Toro joint? Pick a tone and stick to it!

It's funny that the least noteworthy thing about the game is the gameplay, too. Oh boy, another tepid God of War clone! Exactly what I want in my Castlevania...

I will never understand the praise certain people gave to the first game. Another example of a western dev not "getting it. "

 

[Oliver Onions]

I mean, it's not as if the first Lords is Shadow was that great, either.

I hated it on release, but it's grown on me over the years. It has a lot of frustrating elements but I think by the sum of its parts it's worth playing. It's actually a game I think is worthy of a remaster because some quality-of-life polish would help the good parts shine and eliminate a lot of the annoyance.

I can't remember anything about LoS2 except the shitty insta-death stealth sections and their embarrassing attempts to shoehorn in dialogue from Symphony of The Night.

 

[Checkerboard Hero]

This might be controversial but I never liked Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. The original SMW was fantastic in every conceivable way while SMW2 changed the art-style, changed the protagonist, changed the controls and mechanics, and introduced cry.wav inside the cartridge. I will say the music in the game is good but that's about all it has going for it.

No shade on Yoshi though, Yoshi Story 64 is some good ass shit.

 

[NerdShamer]

SimCity 2013

Yeah, as decent as this one was, EA really shat the bed with this when launched: Constant server outages and the always online requirement. And you're arbitrarily restricted to own an random plot of land

Mario Party was always an bit of an ticking time bomb if you counted the fifth and sixth ones. Nowadays, it's just exists as an excuse to help sell the consoles.

 

[Quijibo69]

Outlast 2, that game blows chucks. I remember getting it a week early and getting super disappointed. The DLC was better and it was almost better than the first game.