Game series' that went downhill - What are some series' you think fell from grace?

I'm surprised Dark Souls hasn't been mentioned yet. You can argue one was a buggy mess at certain points and I'd agree with you but I could not for the life of me ever get into two with its unsatisfying combat and lore that tries to be its own thing while still being connected to one. Three was kind of a return to form but suffered from poise being disabled, magic and miracles not being viable in any way, bland level design, and an ending to the series that didn't really leave any closure. I have yet to play the DLCs but I doubt they can fix any of the problems I had with the base game.
 
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Empire Earth. Me and my mates still occasionally got it out in 2013/14, which is like 12 years after it was released and about 5 years after EE3.

EE1 was basically Age of Empires but it had 16 epochs. You could go from being stone age person to being a futuristic robot overlord in one (very long game). In the later games you could still go from stone age to the future but you did it in only 4 epochs. To go from having a game with something like 16 epochs to fight in to 4 was hard to take.

In the original the difference between a stone age guy and a medieval guy was huge, and the difference between them and a giant war robot was even bigger. If you could rack up an advantage of a couple of epochs you could literally conquistador your opponent, using a charge of medieval knights to squash a bunch of grunting cavemen or a line of musketeers to massacre a phalanx of greek hoplites. You could use biplanes on red coats.

You could drop a literal nuke on a shaman.

And you could still do that in the later games but because the difference between these units had gone from about five epochs to one epoch it meant less. Also, naturally, as there was only one epoch difference the damage difference between an assault rifle and a bow and arrow wasn't as dramatic.

It's a load of hairy dogshit.
 
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God of Nothing said:
I'm surprised Dark Souls hasn't been mentioned yet. You can argue one was a buggy mess at certain points and I'd agree with you but I could not for the life of me ever get into two with its unsatisfying combat and lore that tries to be its own thing while still being connected to one. Three was kind of a return to form but suffered from poise being disabled, magic and miracles not being viable in any way, bland level design, and an ending to the series that didn't really leave any closure. I have yet to play the DLCs but I doubt they can fix any of the problems I had with the base game.
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AOA was kind of a letdown but personally I think The Ringed City was a pretty good conclusion the series.
 
Remember when Rockstar would poke fun at bullshit trends and add it to gameplay in an ironic fashion but not a way to piss everybody off? Well, Take-Two made sure all that irony went down the drain with GTA Online, which its sole purpose was to lay the conceptual groundwork for games like Fortnite/PUBG years later!
 
Quake:
  • No one remembers 4 or Quake Wars except the former's Stroggification scene.
  • Live tried to be more accessible with its Steam release by letting you choose a weapon to spawn with, ends up losing both casual and core playerbases. Luckily most servers disable it but what's done is done.
  • Champions tries to mix hero shooter elements with Quake 3's gameplay, is criticized for this, glitches, imbalance, and a lack of many features from Q3/L, struggles to have a bigger playerbase than Live.
 
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Who can forget Dawn of War 3? Their attempt to turn it into a competitive eSport was a total disaster because strategy fans were turned off by the simplified gameplay and emphasis on micromanaging hero units while the DOTA and LoL fans were already playing those games.

Relic stopped supporting it within a year because more people were playing the nearly fifteen year old original than the brand new one.
 
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Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. Jesus Christ was Gates to Infinity bad (Massive drop in difficulty (Which was one of the main appeals of the series), went from having a tone that was dark but at the same time child friendly and not cringeworthingly edgy to a generic and cringy tone about "winning through the power of friendship", and somehow less recruitable Pokemon despite being a generation ahead of Time, Darkness, and Sky) , and Super Mystery Dungeon was okay, but it didn't change enough from Gates to Infinity to bring the series back to its former glory.

Mass Effect. It's basically well known at this point that Mass Effect: Andromeda killed the entire series because of how shitty it was.

Star Wars Battlefront. EA literally turned one of the most unique FPS series on the market into a clone of Battlefield. The lootboxs in EA Battlefront 2 also really don't help their case.
 
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Half-Life pretty much killed itself due to two parts hubris and two parts poor planning.

The first game was great, and the expansions added some interesting lore and gameplay changes.

HL2 started off as a good continuation, but the Episodes is when the writing was on the wall, especially because they confirmed what a lot of people were suspecting about the story:

They were trying to wring a plot out of what was started in the first game and ran out of ideas once they mined the first game for anything they could wring any additional lore out of, then it took a long, long time for Valve to finally confirm they just gave the hell up.
 
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Forza Motorsport or just about any racing game today.

Back then, you had to play the game in order to unlock the cars. But now it's *cough cough* MICROTRANSACTIONS IN A $60 GAME. Oh and if you get tapped even just a tiny bit (like a tap to your bumper), you're fucked.
 
Command & Conquer hit the wall around the time of the jump to 3D. C&C 3 was okay, if a little bland. Red Alert 3 was massively unbalanced and C&C 4 just shat the bed.

In the same genre, you'll never convince me that Blizzard made a better RTS than Warcraft II (I feel like they increasingly made their games hero-based RPGs where your ordinary units were there to be chopped liver).
 
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