Reviving Success

Long awaited sequels to popular games are quite a rarity nowadays due to many companies churning out a sequel to a popular franchise yearly. So when you do get a sequel to a popular franchise or just one that hasn't gotten much love in a while it can be a pretty exciting thing. Examples of this range from Street Fighter 4 to Diablo 3, although the former has since gone on to close to a yearly model of updates for the series. One of the interesting things about these long awaited sequels is the hype and expectation fans have for them. When a sequel to a game takes longer then a year people may loose interest at first, but they tend to keep an eye and ear out for any tidbits of info about the game. They never stop wanting the game as long as the game isn't teased to early in its development.

The other interesting aspect of long awaited sequels is the design aspect of these games. The game has to evolve, innovate, and overall bring something new to the series. At the same time though they must be true to their original source and prequels. This is a fine, and very tough, balance game developers must find in order to bring in new fans while still pleasing their original fan base. This sort of thing typically leads to the popular casual vs hardcore gamer debate that I won't go into on this post, but the fact remains that game companies as a business can't or won't design games just for the original fan base because it's less profitable.

I want to believe that developers want to please there current fans as much as possible, but can be limited sometimes by the work they need to do to make it playable for everyone. My philosophy is a game should be easy to pick up hard to master. Many games seem to have their difficulty dumbed down so that anyone can pick up and play. This may seem great, but it completely alienates the fans who have been playing the series already. A game should be made to teach the player how to play and why certain things are done, and not just generic tutorials of how to move. Let's face it games have gotten more complicate since the Atari and that has driven some people away from gaming, but making games play like Atari games is a backward progression. Simplifying controls isn't a bad idea as long as you introduce mechanics that play on them for traditional gamers to learn and master so that the game doesn't become boring. Hopefully this will be the direction game designers take in the future.

Whether its Half-Life 3, Diablo 3, or any other sequels to long awaited games, you can bet there will be aspects of these game that will have changed for better or for worse. The question is will these games have the same long last appeal that their predecessors had? I guess we will have to wait and see.