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

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

GTA V was absolutely awful compared to GTA San Andreas.

 

[Illumithotty]

The original Quest for Glory series is a classic, adventure games mixed with RPG elements and exploring different sorts of fables. There were some uneven ones - QFG3 was kind of rushed to fill in time between the planned out setting that became 4, and QFG5 was pulled in a dozen different directions during development. But there's none of them I didn't think was at least good; even QFG3 dipped into African myth and fable which is a rarity. QFG5 made sure to pile on previous game references; which is a little cheap but given that one of the series gimmicks is transferring your character from one game to the next, the payoff is worth a little schmaltz I think.

So, years ago, the primary designers of the game - Corey and Lori Cole - announced that they were going to kickstart a spiritual sequel. In ran into heaps of delays but eventually did deliver Hero U: Rogue to Redemption.

I fucking hated this game, and I hate that I can't even despise people that enjoy it because apparently the Coles sunk a lot of their own money into making this and they don't deserve to go bankrupt just because I can't stand this turd. I was hoping that with all the time between QFG5, the death of Sierra, and this kickstarter, that it'd be like QFG6 but with some more modern design approaches used; and unfortunately the monkey's paw twisted down a finger. It goes from being able to build your own character to having a predetermined one right away. Dialogue is slashed at every opportunity to fit in more voice acting. All the 'grinding' that was kind of a core feature is replaced by set time blocks; which is just shuffling where the tedium falls at best, in my opinion. Character, class, how you play the game, etc, are all pretty much on rails.

Apparently in the time between QFG5 and Hero-U, the Coles were spending all their time doing some kind of lame Hero University/Hogwarts RP on their website forum, and it shows. The game clumsily shoehorns in dungeon crawling and grid-based combat, because the main focus is supposed to be all these interpersonal relationships between students and teachers and grades and oh god I wish this had just been a shovelware mobile game because of the above mentioned focus on voice acting; all these interpersonal relationships are 'Hi' 'How Are You' 'Flirt' 'Snarky', etc, and you get +1 to Relationship or -1 to Relationship or whatever else with the same canned dialogue every day, and you're expected to do this every day it seems like. Worst of all, absolutely worst of all, for a game where you're forced to play a rogue and the title is about rogueing and you're in a school for rogues, there's hardly any thieving to be done. There are at least some alternate options for dealing with boss enemies, but it's no substitute for how the original games offered different solutions to problems.

 

[moocow]

Constant server outages and the always online requirement

That was especially funny once someone figured out how to trick the game into running without the server's presence and proved EA's claims that "oh the AI is so complicated it has to run on our servers" were complete bullshit -- the game ran just fine, all features intact, in offline mode.

Far Cry 3. 70% gay little story

THANK YOU! I feel like the only person on earth sometimes that can't stand FC3 because of the retarded story. Vaas fucking sucks and I'll die on that hill. I don't care how "good" people thought his voice actor was, I don't care about the cute little story about how it was a bit part until he auditioned and "blew them away" and so they expanded the character and altered the story to accommodate it. Vaas was fucking obnoxious and his much-deserved death in-game was such a cockblock (it happens during an LSD-style drug trip and you're barely involved in the action).

His presence absolutely ruined the game for me. Even Brody's dumb ass wasn't as obnoxious as Vaas. FC4's Pegan Min -- stupid as he was -- was at least entertaining, and that game is better for it.

GTA V was absolutely awful compared to GTA San Andreas.

Yup. The engine is impressive tech, but mother of god they attached an absurd "game" on top of it. And it fell right in with the standard pattern modern game development uses now: all white men are cowards, pussies, wimps, evil, insane, incompetent, etc., and only the nigger is the "good" guy.

Trevor was nuts, Michael had a decent start but turned out to be a complete cuck (literally and figuratively), but little Franklin got his "coming of age" story despite being a fucking thug running a car repo scam.

I had some hope for Michael when he caught his whore wife in bed with her tennis coach, chased his naked ass out of the house, followed him to his ritzy house and used a pickup truck to rip down his fancy balcony -- that's how you're supposed to treat any man who's fucking your woman -- but then the next morning he's immediately cucked again by Standard Procedure Mafia-Flavored Violence™ and spends the rest of the game frantically scrambling to come up with the money to repair the damage. And he lets his (likely not biologically) son get away with everything, from stealing a fucking yacht for drug money to shit-talking him in his own house.

And what's the "lesson" the game's trying to teach? That you should just forgive and forget. Fuck that shit. He should have divorced the whore and kicked both her and her son out of that beautiful mansion, and found himself an upgrade.

 

[Absolute Ego Dance]

Mass Effect. It went from a dynamic, exciting game that encouraged movement, to a tedious slog of a cover shooter (on Insanity, which is the only difficulty I have played since 2007).

Spoiler

• You lose most of your skills, and it's even worse for your companions, most of whom require you to assume direct control over their positioning and ability use
• If you're playing as Adept, Sentinel or Engineer you're stuck with SMGs and Pistols for the first half of the game. And Sentinel is probably the best class, which just goes to show how awful the rest of the game is.
• The plot is mostly filler dealing with your squad's family trauma, and listening to them all quickly just becomes an annoyance
• Everything is smaller and less explorable
• You spend most of the time fighting mercenaries, not collectors, not reapers, not geth. The suicide mission seems a victory to you, but the collectors are barely linked to the reapers in the grand scheme of things
• The level design is atrocious and everything is in a straight line. You rarely get the opportunity to find another way to your objective. Shout out here to the Reaper IFF mission in particular, but they're all pretty unexciting.
• Harbinger is a dull antagonist
• The Paragon / Renegade system has never been good, but it's the worst in 2.

 

[NerdShamer]

That was especially funny once someone figured out how to trick the game into running without the server's presence and proved EA's claims that "oh the AI is so complicated it has to run on our servers" were complete bullshit -- the game ran just fine, all features intact, in offline mode

Yeah, too make it so funny, the AI isn't that sophisticated when you look at it

 

[lichen]

Clock Tower has had two of these - Struggle Within/Ghost Head was a hilarious clusterfuck of a game which combined a genuinely strong premise with a Resident Evil zombie disease story that had no connection to the previous games.

Clock Tower 3 got the formal number in the sequence, but was a completely different kind of game that brought itself down by trying to tie itself to the first games. It's actually a good enough game, but it doesn't make any sense as part of the series.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Dominions. Each expansion is a small DLC worth of content, priced like the last game.

They never fix the ugly graphics or art direction. Music gets progressively worse.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

The Urbz Sims in the City. The animations were cool and the places all being themed is a highlight but the Black Eyed Peas inclusion and the fact that it just feels so disconnected as a Sims game make it feel hallow. The light is on but there's nobody inside so to speak.

 

[The Ugly One]

BLOPS 2 is mediocre at best with all the new gimmicks not amounting to much. Multiplayer I won’t comment on because I don’t remember one being better one way or the other.

Mixed bag IMO. Black Ops 2 had the best perk/weapon balance in the series to this day. There were a few things to quibble with, but just about every weapon felt pretty good. The maps were just okay. Not bad, not great. The 3-lane design was starting to become a little too constrained at that point. Weapon sounds actually took a step backward from BO1, and the visuals were too cartoony.

 

[babadook]

Unreal 2 the Awakening, Blood 2 must count, probably. F3AR does too

 

[Psyduck]

Clock Tower has had two of these - Struggle Within/Ghost Head was a hilarious clusterfuck of a game which combined a genuinely strong premise with a Resident Evil zombie disease story that had no connection to the previous games.

I'll give that game some props, the very first stage has a surreal, genuinely creepy atmosphere going on. Everything is pitch black except for the lights inside the house. Even the trippier parts like finding body parts in the bathtub help add to nightmarish vibe the house has going. You could've ended the game after that stage imo.

 

[Quijibo69]

F3AR does too

That game is almost unplayable without another person. The only Fear Game I never finished.

 

[lichen]

I'll give that game some props, the very first stage has a surreal, genuinely creepy atmosphere going on. Everything is pitch black except for the lights inside the house. Even the trippier parts like finding body parts in the bathtub help add to nightmarish vibe the house has going. You could've ended the game after that stage imo.

That's true. Some of the weird design choices were poking through in stage 1, but you're right that it was a strong start and if they had kept it up it Ghost Head would have been a flawed but very good game.

 

[Level99Manchild]

Monster Rancher hasn't had a good sequel in a very long time if you ignore Ultra Kaiju, the DS games, and the Advanced series.


3 gets flak not only for the graphics (the Jell on the left is the MR3 version. The Jell on the right is from MR4), but also changing and removing a lot of stuff people loved from the first two games. Breeds will change to their subs depending on where you raise them (e.g. a Mew will look more like a frog if you're in an aquatic area), and you had to search for special items in an exploration event to get or improve skills. Monsters have shorter lifespans in 3, and the only way you can "combine" them is to use the heart of your dead monster on the baby, hoping you get decent stats.

MR4 tries to fix 3's mistakes (e.g. the graphics), but it made its own mistakes. You could have more than one monster on your farm, but it felt overwhelming at times. MR4 gives you Dragon, Joker, and Henger from the start, but you have to unlock Mocchi because of retarded story reasons (It ran away before/after Phayne got expelled from the academy or some other gay shit). MR4 tries to be more like a virtue pet game with a story (you have to go through dungeon levels and beat arenas to progress through the game), but the graphic novel storytelling was awkward at times. Newer monsters like Garu and Antlan had more of a Pokemon look, and Tecmo USA ruined MR4's translation to shill shit like GamePro (they've done it in older games, but GameProbot was insulting af).

Then came Evo, and Evo killed the franchise. You had to perform in a circus to build your monsters, and the circus mechanics weren't fun to do. There was more focus on the story, and you didn't unlock anything cool in the end. We wouldn't see another MR game until the "remakes" of MR1 and 2 came out, and we also got Ultra Kaiju MR. Fuck Lisa Shock and Moosebone.

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'm still disappointed from playing LoS1, but looking at spoilers it's safe to say they did Simon and Alucard dirty.

It's not really a sequel, it's a remake, but Conker: Live and Reloaded is absolute garbage compared to the original. The graphics, while they might be objectively more technically impressive, have none of the charm of the N64 original (particularly the horrible way they rendered fur) and all the cosmetic changes made to the levels are for the worse (the obvious one for me being turning the water in the Spooky level to blood - so fucking lame).

View attachment 6627974

Also, they took the multiplayer, gutted it completely, taking out all the unique minigames, and just replaced it with a gay, generic, Squirrels vs. Tediz Team Fortress ripoff, again, to chase the trend for online multiplayer at the time.

The N64 version is the best version. Xbox niggers will never know.

There was more focus on the pvp than the original game, and to add insult to injury the load times on L&R were pretty bad. Sure L&R looked impressive, yet the models felt soulless (thr characters showed more emotions in the N64 version).

 

[NerdShamer]

No idea what really happened, though I suspect in part that the developer at some point realized that outside of a relative few (but high in postcount) dedicated people following him on his forum there was apparently very little interest in the sequel after a few years, and basically just half assed it to get it out the door. Just immensely dissapointing all around.

Looking around, the vibe that I got with it is that it's just another example of how not all good games regularly sell well at launch. I'm not sure if it could have been saved, though.

 

[Oliver Onions]

I'm still disappointed from playing LoS1, but looking at spoilers it's safe to say they did Simon and Alucard dirty.

At least they didn't make Alucard have gay sex like in the anime. So progressive!

 

[Sargon's wife's son]

Homeworld 3 basically get rid of all the things that made homeworld somewhat believable the sci-fi setting and replace it with a bunch of generic sci-fi nonsense and a game that looks really good but actually ruins the entire setting of the series I'll still say that the uh expansion for the original game is still one of the most horrifying sequels legitimately the alien space monster which is literally infecting the machines of all the intergalactic species is generally terrifying.


Sport never got an actual sequel just a bunch of terrible spin off games great concept for video game I don't know how they could make sport too

 

[Tequila Jong]

C&C Red Alert 2. The gameplay mechanics were great, but compared to TibDawn/TibSun and Red Alert, the tone of the game was cartoonish and terrible.

People have already mentioned Half-Life 2 and I agree. The engine and gameplay itself were phenomenal when it came out in 2004, but the setting and storyline were absolute garbage. The first game managed to have a superior storyline with absolutely no backstory.

RDR2 is another one. There's a thousand things I could say about it, but the storytelling was the worst sin. Take the opening scenes from both:
In RDR1, there's a bunch of people getting off of a boat in Blackwater. There's a musical sting when you see the protagonist John Marston with a Pinkerton on either side of him. From the look of Marston, the Pinkertons, and the musical sting, you know almost exactly what is being set up even before the "Rockstar Games Presents".
In RDR2 they give you text on screen, "THE YEAR IS 1899 AND OUTLAWS ARE BEING HUNTED DOWN AND THE WEST IS BECOMING CIVILIZED OMG". Combine that with almost every third story mission consisting of Arthur Morgan saying some variant of "THE TIMES FOR FOLKS LIKE US IS PASSED" or "WE'RE THIEVES IN A WORLD THAT DON'T WANT US NO MORE" and it really starts to grate. It's so on the nose and lazily done. I totally understand Dutch going mental from nothing but the sheer nagging from Arthur alone. On a similar note the antagonist, Micah, is so comically evil that it's impossible to take him seriously - He fucking hisses like a snake at one point.

 

[Javier]

Greetings.
I would like to preface this by saying that the sequel here isn't 'shitty' per se. It's lackluster compared to the first entry on many levels, but by itself it's still an alright experience.

The games that I wanted to bring up here are AI: The Somnium Files and its sequel, AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative. They're both mostly visual novels with point and click elements to get right interactions, however they are done in first person proper. Meaning you can very much look around yourself, not just on the flat surface that you would usually have in games like these, and the main character's model (whenever you're able to see it) is actually turning its head around, which i found cool. There are also titular Somniums, which function as your "Puzzle rooms" with a lot of absurdism, as dreams can be non-sensical at times. If you're rolling your eyes at LGBTQ+ stuff, these games might not be for you - there is a lot of direct and indirect implications that some characters are homosexual or that some are "allies", especially one moment where your kind-of sidekick adopted daughter drops a several dialogue box long spiel about how she supports that community. Kotaro Uchikoshi, who is responsible for the game's storyline, is where that sort of dialogue comes from. Thankfully I have tolerance for these things, hardened for years by the internet.

The first game, barring what I mentioned at the end of last paragraph, is done incredibly well story-wise. It's a murder mystery where almost every character you get to see is suspicious or behaves in a way that implies some malicious intent and, in my opinion, each person's behavior has a good explanation by the finale of the game. There are moments the game tosses you into that make a lot of sense in hindsight. Uchikoshi in general is someone who offers very ambitious stories, but their scale and insanity might be a hit or miss (Zero Escape trilogy by itself is a good example of that). This time it was executed very well, amplified by the mystery gaining increased personal investment from the protagonist. Character interactions might be a bit on the millenial side, but I personally did not mind it. It's the puzzle solving where things get slightly more dicey. Considering this is the first game, it's understandable to expect something a bit rougher on the edges than in a tried and tested series, however even for an environment as abstract as people's dreams, these are some unintuitive puzzles. They support each character's personality and their struggles, but gameplay-wise they're definitely a lot more polished in the sequel.

Second game is Uchikoshi's miss in terms of plot, but a miss I have to respect regardless. It's a very ambitious idea and there was a lot of care put into making sure holes in story are covered by the moment things are revealed, but that sadly doesn't mean it was enough. The more you think back about it, the more things start falling apart. It also doesn't help that the stakes are less personal, that some key characters from the first game were handled well (in some cases their presence or absence is explained terribly) and the new characters... they're memorable to some degree, but they feel a bit blander. Usually it's only the ending that can drag down the experience, but in this case it's a little bit of everything you experience. Except for puzzles - they were more streamlined, made more reasonable to understand and correspond to people they're tied to incredibly well. Pretty much every instance of Somnium is a huge bundle of foreshadowing, however done in a way that you're only able to understand after the game ends.

I tried to avoid any specifics, in case someone wants to try both titles out. In general, I'm a fan of visual novels, but i know this specific genre isn't for everyone.

Hope you all have a wonderful day or night.

 

[Snekposter]

Sword of the Stars 2.

Imagine, if you will, taking a cohesive, focused, combat-oriented 4x game like Sword of the Stars, which had expansions that added on to the 4x aspects while not becoming overly complex or difficult to manage, and also boosted the combat while sticking to its simple, easy-to-understand mechanics. Everything is abstracted as much as possible to focus on you, your planets, and your fleets of conquest and extermination.

And then you throw all that out the window in favor of a ridiculous micro-managed hell that makes a Paradox game look sane on the strat layer, while also making what was a relatively simple and easy ship building process equally hellish, complete with prototyping and random flaws before you can even build a ship, combined with adding admirals and wonky fleet mechanics.

Now imagine being such an ass to work with not even Paradox feels like publishing your shit anymore.