Which game has removed the most features in it's later titles? - Because less is more, according to game developers and producers.

[NerdShamer]

Probably late, but...
View attachment 5616017

Out of all of those, rematching random trainers hurts the most. The rest were mostly regional gimmicks, but we all know how lazy the company has been.

 

[std::string]

Went from games like Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 and Planescape: Torment where you had tons and tons of different dialogue choices, each choice often branching off into another large branch of choices that really shaped your character and affected choices and events in the game and their relationship with other party members.

One major thing games seemed to move away from is party members that just hated each other and would try to kill each other, sometimes for no good reason. BG1 had a bunch.

Fast forward to Dragon Age where you can make Wynne a blood mage and she doesn't care. Characterization took a massive back seat to gameplay.

 

[Mad_Dog]

I'll never forgive Kojima for removing a playable Snake for 90% of MSG2. 22 years later I'm still pissed off about it.

 

[Level99Manchild]

It boggles my mind how Tekken's customization got worse after 6 or Tag 2 if you want to be nice. Yea, it took a patch or two to add more items in 7, but 7's customization was still a joke. 8's customization looks even worse with the generic clothes and being unable to mix costume pieces.

 

[CptnSnshn]

Going from Disgaea 5 to 6 feels like going from Disgaea 5 to 2, 6 has so little content, and got rid of so many mechanics, it was very disappointing.

At least 2 has a fun story and good characters, 6 has nothing.

 

[Thiletonomics]

Valve changing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, to Counter-Strike 2, was similar to how Blizzard changed Overwatch into Overwatch 2, and CS2 also had its fare share of features removed as well, i.e. not being as custom server friendly, I think. The fact that people downplay CS2 being a disappointment and removing features, because other FPS games shit the bed even harder, i.e. Battlefield 2042 as a whole, Halo Infinite as a whole, Call of Duty still being its stagnant self, Overwatch 2 shitting the bed so hard that it is now the #1 worst rated game on Steam, VALORANT adding the spyware (and yet Riot calls it an anti-cheat) Vanguard, Rainbow6 Siege adding more and more DIE operators and toning down tactical gameplay, and Fortnite removing rarities from cosmetics, is also disappointing.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

EA is so greedy. Fuck knows what they're thinking with thr Sims

 

[Thiletonomics]

Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown, while it has Test Drive Unlimited in its name, is missing most of the lifestyle features that the previous TDU games had. So that means that TDUSC doesn't have:

• Purchasable houses, as the Solar Crown hotel is your only "home".
• Mission events such as Delivery and Ridesharing (?).
• Clothing and Plastic Surgery shops in the World, since they are both all in the Solar Crown hotel.
• Casino, although Nacon has said that it will be re-added in Summer 2025, assuming the game isn't given up on or shut down by then.
• Offline Mode, since the game is Always-Online. The always-online also means that you can't pause the game mid-race even if you're racing against only AI drivers. You also can't restart races against only AI drivers, as you have to abandon the event and then start it again.
• Police, because obligatory ACAB comments.
• A large map, since Hong Kong Island is noticeably smaller than Oahu in the past TDU games.
• Pedestrians, because car companies refuse to license their cars to games where you can harm them.

TDUSC is also missing a lot of features in other open-world racing games, including:

• Sharable Liveries
• Cross-platform and cross-region play, since the game is both Platform and Region-locked.
• External car customization, i.e. widebody mods and spoilers, and the game has a limited amount of wheels available.
• A wide variety of cars, since the game only has about 100. Most of the cars are European Sports Cars, Supercars, and Hypercars, and is missing a lot of car brands, especially the Japanese, with Honda, Acura, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Subaru, Lexus, Toyota, and Infiniti all missing. Other missing brands include Buick, Cadillac, Chrysler, Genesis, Hyundai, Kia, Lincoln, and Volvo. The game is also missing a lot of newer cars from the 2020s on.
• Customizable license plates
• AI difficulty slider, out of all things that are missing.

 

[jje100010001]

EA is so greedy. Fuck knows what they're thinking with thr Sims

I have no idea since their latest attempts at the Sims 5 appear to be stillborn, and the Sims 4 is running on its last legs due to the massive technical debt it has accrued from all the expansions and starting off on the wrong foot.

That being said I’m sure they’re still dead set on making the Sims 5 live service and trying to tap into all those juicy modding community FOMO dollars like Second Life. But for now, it seems like their current strategy is to squeeze a few more expansions out of the Sims 4.

 

[30+GameOvers]

I'm not going to go thru 6 pages just to check if it was mentioned, but Fallout series is a perfect example of removing features with almost every title. Go from F1/2 to 3, then 4 and then 76 and you will that each one gets dumbed down every time. There were exceptions of course, Tactics actually evolved the combat mechanics of the game and added a new skill(Driving) but that came at the cost of removing speech skill and speech options altogether. While 3 took the series into 3D, it also heavily casualized the game, altho New Vegas tried to minimize the damage and turn the series into a proper RPG again. Too bad that 4 came right after and only made things worse from 3, with the game barely resembling an RPG anymore. Then, we have 76 which finalized the process and now the game isn't an RPG anymore but a looter shooter with perk customization. If we look at the future of the franchise by taking a peek at Starfield, Bethesda's latest game/flop, we see that even SPECIAL might be removed soon and be replaced with perk trees entirely.
This series really can't catch a break, can it?

 

[Thiletonomics]

Game developers have also started calling their newer versions of games with various marketing words like "Re-imaging", "Reboot", "Revamp", "Rework", being "Built From The Ground Up", and "Going Back To The Roots". However, games with those marketing terms usually end up having less features than their previous versions, and the said marketing words are used by the developers as the "justification" for it.

Samurai Warriors 5 is one example of that, as it has a smaller character roster than the previous game (39 characters total, with only 20 returning ones, compared to 55 in Samurai Warriors 4, 56 in 4-II, and 61 in Spirit of Sanada, so over half of the old characters were cut), and the story focus was narrowed down to just mainly Nobunaga Oda and Mitsuhide Akechi. Even the cover character in the previous SW games, Yukimura Sanada, was removed from SW5, that would be like a Dynasty Warriors game (also made by the game company, Koei Tecmo) without Zhao Yun! And the smaller character roster in SW5 didn't result in much better quality of the characters, as some characters had cloned movesets, and the personalities of some of the characters were butchered, i.e. Nō being changed from the femme fatale she was in previous games to an emotionless woman. Granted, Koei Tecmo has been cheapening out on their later Warriors games, i.e. DW8 not having full English voiceovers, and SW4 and onwards no longer have English voiceovers, so seeing SW5 turning out this way wasn't a huge surprise, after the disaster that was Dynasty Warriors 9.

Dynasty Warriors 6 had some aspects to a "reboot", albeit on a smaller scale. Some characters from the previous games were removed (i.e. Daqiao, Xingcai, and Zuo Ci), and Koei changed the combat system from button combos to the hated Renbu system. The Renbu system was hated to the point that Koei returned back to the button combos in DW7 and 8, until deciding to change the combat system again in DW9. Cloned movesets were also added to the game, i.e. Sun Shangxiang's famous wheels being replaced with a bow. And 6 also removed the Xtreme Mode from DW4 and 5, which was the DW roguelike game mode, before roguelike games became commonplace, and that mode hasn't returned in later games.

Koei Tecmo is also "rebooting" the DW franchise with the upcoming Dynasty Warriors: Origins game, which features you playing as a nameless male protagonist, only some of the previous game's characters are playable on a limited basis, and the timeline that Origins takes place in is on a small part of the Three Kingdoms era. And while it's been getting positive response to the demo and hype is building for the game, it still doesn't excuse all of the things being removed from the DW games of old.

 

[Wesker]

MGSV.