Viconia and Sarevok had no reason to be in BG3 and by choosing to use WOTCs deplorably terrible supplemental product lore as canon Larian has now cemented those character portrayals forever, which was just pure character assassination.
Is it possible that WOTC just utterly suck? Like even playing D&D for real at a table I always thought the wizard’s stuff was kinda boring. Every time our DM did something himself it was awesome.
I don’t play D&D - in fact I don’t play any TTRPG anymore (imagine having friends) - but I’ve heard a lot of criticism about WOTC’s products, yes. A lion’s share of it is about how unhelpful the official adventures are for DMs, but I’ve also heard the writing criticised from time to time.
I’ve heard good things about Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and the Curse of Strahd remake though.
Creating a d&d campaign is difficult, and publishing it in a way that communicates what needs to be known is tricky. It’s almost the opposite of a novel. In a novel you need to save twists and turns until the end. In a d&d campaign the DM needs to know them all from the start. But you also don’t want to overwhelm someone with too much information. But you don’t want someone who is following the module closely instead of using it as inspiration to “write” themselves into a corner because they didn’t know something would happen in a specific way later.
The main published modules for 5e are all a little different in how they present everything. Some may be better than others for certain DMs and certain groups.
I adore BG3 but yeah. Viconia in particular felt like a big middle finger to fans of the original games. If they wanted to bring back an OG character to be irredeemably evil, Edwin is right there!
Well, canonically Edwin gets punked by Elminster and lives out his days as a bar wench. And since they decided from the get-go to set BG3 a hundred years after the originals he’d be long dead, along with any other human NPC from the older games. Which, the fact that they started from the point of “let’s set it 100 years later” tells you enough of how much they wanted to deal with the older games. Viconia is not the only thing in BG3 that gives vibes of disdain at worst and disinterest at best for the originals. Flail of Ages is a useless trash weapon randomly sold by a vendor, for fucks sake!
I wonder how many at Larian even played BG1&2. I get such a Wiki-research vibe from a lot of the callbacks.
The asset recycling in DA2 was absolute madness. I really tried to like DA:I and finished it once but it was painful at times. Has nothing on common with Dragon Age but its name.
The first thing is that at one point many years ago we participated in Rocket League’s RLCS. Participation was completely open. We were actually doing quite well until we randomly ran into pro players and got completely demolished. It’s kinda humbling to know that even though you’re part of the top ~1% of players, pro players are still in a totally different league and absolutely unbeatable. Their speed and game sense is so much better than that of any mere mortal, it’s like we weren’t even there. We were probably low Grand Champion around the time, and we got beaten like we would beat Gold ranked players. Personally I don’t mind losing like this, it’s a good learning experience and shows you how much is possible.
At uni I also participated in plenty of LAN parties that had random game competitions. Usually they were games that a lot of us didn’t ever play before. We’d usually start playing the game a few hours in advance to get a feel for it. There I’ve found that I’m quite decent at this usually, but that there are definitely a few people who can get quite decent at a game in 2 hours to the point that they challenge people with casual experience with the game. It as always good fun though, and because I tended to put some effort into it I regularly managed to get into the top 3.
I don’t think it would be possible for a bad sequel to ruin a game I liked.
Metroid Other M has not ruined previous Metroids for me (its terrible Adam Malkovich depiction doesn’t even register when I’m playing Fusion, since the character has barely any continuity between the two).
Okamiden did not ruin Okami, it just sucked on its own and what little story it tried to change I disregard. I’d replay Okami today in a heartbeat.
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 took a direction I hated, both in style and gameplay, and it made me want to replay XC1. I did. It’s still awesome, though XC3 became my favourite.
And complete opposite of the topic : Baten Kaitos was not bad, but kind of a silly popcorn game to me. Baten Kaitos Origins did not ruin this game : it was so great and flipped the interpretation of the first game so well it made BK better.
You're right that it's hard for a sequel to retroactively ruin a singleplayer game, but they can easily ruin a multiplayer game by killing the original's playerbase.
There are also plenty of cases where the sequel may not ruin the original, but does ruin any future the series could've had. Debatable whether that quite fits OP's question, but it seems to be what most of the replies have talked about.
Probably unpopular opinion but Prey is clearly on that list ! Not because the new game was bad, but they just took everything that was interesting and original in the first game, throw it away and just made it another doom-like game :/…
The original Prey wasn’t a GOTY or whatever, it just felt different and something new and original… Something I liked and they just made a total reboot with nothing in common on what made prey original/interesting !
What aspects of the newer Prey make it more like Doom than the older Prey? To me, that’s kinda like saying, “System Shock was just Wolfenstein 3D 🎶 in space 🎶”
I know the atmospheric design is doom like (aliens, weapons, paltforms…etc.) but gameplay mechanics were totally inovative and original (wall walking, portals, spirit walk) and chracter focus was also cool (native american).
I’m not saying Prey 2016 is a Bad game, I just found it sad that they totally changed the franchise spirit 😄
I don’t deny that Old Prey was an innovative game. But stating that everything that wasn’t Doom was stripped out while implying that nothing else was added in feels a bit disingenuous.
I thought the original Prey was boring as hell. It’s not like it didn’t have any interesting features, but the lack of penalty for dying meant that failure is impossible.
Prey isn’t really a franchise at all, just two completely unrelated games with the same name.
The newer one was supposed to be a sequel when it was being made by the original devs, but in the end it’s a completely separate game with no connection to the first.
I could not get into Dawn of War 2 and 3 despite pouring thousands of hours into DoW1 and it’s expansions. Why do makers of classic RTS games (looking at you EA) have to f*** with the formula?
Was the same for me too. I remember getting DoW2 and being so disappointed. Then 3 came along… I’ve given up them making a decent game again.
Even that DoW remaster isn’t looking good. I’m holding out until I see the reviews but if they’re only going with AI upscaled textures for £30 then no thanks.
This entire controversy is from 2020. Spoiler: GOG did not relist the game. Red Candle sold it on their own storefront, and both Steam and GOG retained a tally in the “bends over for CCP” column.
Death Stranding 1 & 2. I mean they are walking simulators anyway. I’m not dissing the game at all. Probably have 500 hours plus in both of them combined.
I love the franchise to death. I did a crushing run of Uncharted 4, but I don’t think I could do one of the First 3. It’s like Halo 2 Legendary where everything is an insta kill
Halo 4, kinda suck tbh. This is coming from someone who play the MMC so i basically marathon it and is able to compare it back to back, and it peaked at Reach. The gun play is wonky and no dual wield, Covenant somehow become the bad guy again after the event in 3, and none of the one that help human defeat Gravemind came back as an ally.
But it doesn’t ruin the franchise for me though, to me canonically there’s only 5 Halo game. The rest is fan fic.
It’s explained in the game that the Covenant faction you fight is a splinter faction. There’s more details in the books, I didn’t have problems when I played it.
Right, the books that also seem to constantly have continuity errors with the games. :P
Reading the books has actually taught me to not take Halo’s plot so seriously and instead just try to enjoy whichever piece of the story I’m currently engrossed in.
I never really worried to much about continuity errors. The worse is Halsey being in two different places during the events of Fall of Reach book and the game Reach. The Forerunner books actually smoothed that stuff out by explaining when huge amounts of materials pass though Slipspace or go far too fast through Slipspace(remember that crystal?), temporal errors build up and you get a timeline split. Unlike most scifi timeline splits though, in Halo, the lines can reconverge and Reconcile without most people realizing it happen. Halo 5 made a little nod to that with Halsey’s “Casual Reconciliation” line. Somewhere in the Halo universe, some bookkeep is pulling their hair out trying to figure out how Halsey departed Reach twice.
4 felt like such a cash grab to me. No deep lore or story telling like with 1 through reach. Exposition was just spoon fed to us rather than a great mystery. Still, I plugged through, hoping maybe it’d turn around.
Then 5 came out and I gave up all hope on the franchise. Spent more time playing as Locke than we did Chief, story was more compelling than 4 but the storytelling and pacing were clunky, and it was completely disconnected from 4.
Infinite just got worse. “We lost, chief” (but we have no frame of reference, we have no idea what that means , we don’t know how the rest of the world has been affected, and then we’re put against some no name character when we really just want to know what the hell is happening off world)
The only good thing about Infinite was its return to the classic art style. After whatever the art team was doing in 4 and 5, I am glad at least the art team finally got a clue.
Agreed. It could have been such an interesting concept if it was literally any other place. Zeta halo could have been so cool, but it felt so detached from the universe
Two of my favourite games of all time are Diablo 2 and Guild Wars.
Both of these games I was insanely hyped for the following games in the series and got them both on their respective releases days. Both were utterly disappointing crap when compared to their previous games and both probably contributed heavily to how I will now no longer get hyped for any game let alone buy one in their first year or two of release.
I was soooooo excited for Diablo 3. I even loved it when it came out, as horrible difficult and grindy as it was. I would have kept loving it if they just expanded on that… but nope, they took out trading and economy, the things that made item drops feel exciting for me. Without any sense of value, loot was just… boring.
I didn’t touch Diablo 4 and it sounds like I made the correct decision.
I didn’t, I remember falling asleep playing it not long after release which didn’t bode well, I wanted to like it but couldn’t. I “enjoyed” it for a while many years later as a co-op experience on a console (I forget which one) whilst getting stoned but it was more scratching an itch for that genre and playing with friends locally that really won it over in that instance rather than the game itself.
Likewise with 4, I didn’t even give it the time of day tbh, I still haven’t really seen much about it.
I’d have liked to play the remaster but I refuse to give those assholes any money and the main draw for me was multiplayer as a kid. I played the SP briefly on a pirate version but it was always about the MP for me.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of Guild Wars 2. It was not a true sequel to Guild Wars 1 but it’s a decent game in its own right. I can see that if you’re playing a great city builder game and they announced a sequel, you would be thrown if that sequel was a 4x instead. But in this analogy, it’s a damn good 4x and maybe even the best amongst its contemporaries. Plus the original game is still there in all of its charm and originality, they’ve kept the servers running this long and seem to plan on keeping on doing so until no one is playing.
But the question wasn’t give a fair assessment of a sequel to a game you like.
I realise that it isn’t objectively a bad game or anything like that and a lot of people still play it until this day and I for sure appreciate them keeping the servers up for the old game so I can still go back to play it should I choose. But the question was what sequel to a game I loved ruined it for me and anyone who played both can see they are blatantly not the same game at all.
GW2 was a complete departure from how the first game worked to a more generic MMO style, I’m sure it is a great game in its own right but for me personally, when compared to the amazing first game, it just doesnt hold a candle.
Sticker Star kind of ruined Paper Mario for me. Super Paper Mario had already gone quite weird, but in a good way - the combat was completely different but it still felt like the original and TTYD in terms of the levelling, exploration, and plot.
Sticker Star, Colour Splash, and Origami King are very linear in comparison, their lack of experience makes battles largely pointless, and the obsession with giant household objects and nameless toad NPCs is getting tedious.
The latest three games were all still enjoyable, but they’re really nothing on the first three.
Absolutely correct. Modern Paper Mario is more about the spectacle of the story, rather than the way it’s mechanically explored. They peaked with TTYD, had a weird one with Super, and the rest have been “use this gimmick in VERY SPECIFIC WAYS to explore OUR story how WE want you to.”
This isn’t to say modern Paper Mario games are bad, just that it’s blatantly obvious they threw out mechanical complexity and deeper narrative tones in favor of “watch this big thing explode, ooh pretty colors :DDD!!!” Sticker Star is definitely the worst of them though.
I really hope we get another Paper Mario game that FEELS like a true Paper Mario RPG. TTYD Remastered is incredible, and I think that by making it, Nintendo acknowledged that fans just… really don’t care for modern Paper Mario as it is.
The saddest thing about Sticker Star is that I actually think the game had very interesting ideas with its resource management-based combat, but falls apart because the player is actively disincentivized to spend those resources. There is no reward for combat, so the optimal play is to run from every encounter. And bosses have nothing going on either, just use the correct item and ypu win. So you never actually engage with the mechanics at all!
And the fix would've been so simple: EXP. Y'know, the thing RPGs normally give you as a reward for combat?
Not necessarily beloved, but I hated the tone and genre shift between Jak and Daxter and Jak 2. I hated the driving sections so much, that that’s where I put the game down. Looking back, I guess they wanted to make a different game, but had to make a sequel?
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