A great product does not necessarily mean there is a winning formula though. We have a trash sequel when the new game does not do something that the existing game does. Even worse, the existing features are locked behind additional payment, so why would players not continue to play the existing game?
KSP 2 - Let’s forget the technical disaster. A lot of features are missing at the start. You could argue that it’s in early access, but why would I pay for a product that does less? Then we add in the many bugs and performance issues, and you know it’s game over.
Cities Skylines 2 - Again, you can’t do everything you already can in CS1. Plus, the first game is supported by a huge number of mods. There’s really no reason to play the new title. Again, it does not perform any better.
This is a weird take but I think remake or remastered these days are more like sequels than sequels, just because they keep the story and mechanics.
I find that game developers or many businesses try to reinvent the wheel when there’s no reason to. Say the Subnautica sequel, why waste money on voice over, add a land mass, cut the beloved submarine, shorten the story and overall map size, all that. I will never understand and sincerely hope the next Subnautica title does not reinvent the wheel.
I wouldnt go that far. Skylines 2 has a new game engine. If it wouldnt have turned out to be incredibly slow, it would have been a very successful launch.
And I cant imagine anyone buying Skylines 2 if it used the same engine as Skylines 1. Then it truly would have been no point. The new engine was supposed to make cities more beautiful and more realistic. They just didnt manage to make it fast.
I unfortunately bought the game for 50 dollars in launch day and I have just 3 hours in it. I cant bring myself to play it because of the sluggish feeling.
You are absolutely right. The vision for sequel can be good but the execution has to be equally sound too. In the ideal situation, I guess CS2 needs to be a rebuild of CS1 with a new engine, so it can fully replace CS1 right from the start, if not do something extra. They did a few things praiseworthy though, like baking in road lane customisation, which was done by mods in CS1.
But then, we are not too fair. Simulation games are different from RPG. Story has an ending and we want to see how it continues to develop. For simulation games, I don’t think players want anything to be removed on a sequel, unless they are absolutely bad design. Even so, players expect QoL here and there to make their lives easier, which alone can be the single reason to buy the sequel.
Cities Skylines 2 - Again, you can’t do everything you already can in CS1. Plus, the first game is supported by a huge number of mods. There’s really no reason to play the new title. Again, it does not perform any better.
CS2 looks and performs better than the original now that a lot of the bugs have been squashed and optimizations are in place (in my experience, anyway). Its memory management in particular is way better than CS1. I don’t get the simulation slow down to the same extent that I did in CS1 as the population increases.
The new road tools alone are reason enough for me to never go back to CS1. The service building upgrades are an added feature that’s a big plus as well. I also find that the economy is a little more functional and transparent than in CS1 (again, after multiple patches).
I don’t find the lack of bike lanes, quays, or modular industry to be so important as to ruin my enjoyment of what is otherwise a state of the art city building game.
Yeah, I don’t want a sequel for sequel’s sake. If you don’t have an artistic or consumer perspective vision on why a sequel is needed or wanted you should be focusing on something that can be justified like that.
Story and exploration games have this built in. Why do players want a sequel? To have more story, to explore more, to return to this world once they’ve tired of the previous game. Rpgs are expensive, slow, and risky, but you basically never have to justify your next game.
The games mentioned here struggle there. KSP does what it does well. Any sequel comes with huge questions of why people would want another space program simulator, and it’s clear that corporate just assumed that people would buy it because they loved the first one.
And that’s not to say games that don’t feel like a sequel is warranted can’t benefit from one. Roguelikes are about as anti sequel as city builders and there are two roguelike sequels I love. Rogue legacy 2 was the devs reimagining the concept of the first game and making a higher budget (especially in gameplay) game that doesn’t just feel like a cash grab. And Hades 2 is similar in many ways, but different enough to feel warranted and clearly made uncynically. It clearly exists because the leads felt there was more to do with the premise that didn’t belong in the first game.
And there’s the thing, I think that ksp probably did have a sequel in it. Something like a space colony sim where you’re a space station having to build and manage ships and colonies, or something else may have been warranted or good. But it would’ve come from a creative lead wanting to do it rather than what clearly happened of a corporation purchasing the game and deciding that since they owned it they had to make a sequel to use the ip
KSP does what it does well. Any sequel comes with huge questions of why people would want another space program simulator
I think that there were pretty clear ways to expand KSP that I would have liked.
There was limited capacity to build bases and springboard off resources from those.
I’d have liked to be able to set up programmed flight sequences.
More mechanics, like radiation, micrometeorite impacts, etc.
The physics could definitely have been improved upon in a number of ways. I mean, I’ve watched a lot of rockets springily bouncing around at their joints.
Some of the science-gathering stuff was kind of…grindy. I would have liked that part of the game to be revamped.
I don’t think that graphics were a massive issue, but given how much time you spend looking at flames coming from rocket engines, it’d be nice to have improved on that somewhat. I’d have also liked some sort of procedural-terrain-generation system to permit for higher-resolution stuff when you’re on the ground; yeah, you’re mostly in the air or space, but when you’re on the ground, the fidelity isn’t all that great.
Just to clarify one thing while i agree with you on some stuff this is not a remake it’s a remaster. the OG game engine is running underneath and UE5 for just the updated models and terrain. The fact they are charging so much for it is what kills me. What this should have been is a $30 game of the year edition and maybe an discount or a free upgrade of you owned the original like they did with doom and quake remasters that nightdive did.
Assassin’s Creed Rogue was a hidden Black Flag 2 that came out when Assassin’s Creed Unity came out (Unity was a new engine for new consoles, but Rogue was a throwaway remix of the older game for 360 and PS3).
I recently went back through Black Flag because Ubisoft added Steam achievements to a select list of their old games, which I’m a sucker for. The game was fun to play again, tons of fun, so I’d imagine Rogue would be good, too. Although I have a friend that likes Black Flag that swears that Rogue was boring.
Although, a warning, Ubisoft cucked me in getting achievements because they actually removed DLC from the clients. You actually cannot play them without modding, and even then I’m struggling to get content that I paid for. That’s a small portion of the game if you don’t care about achievements, but it’s still something to watch out for, ESPECIALLY if you plan on purchasing the game. They sell Freedom Cry, one of Black Flag’s DLCs, separately now (might/might not have sailing in it).
As a lifelong windows gamer I’ve just switched to cachyos and honestly it’s been fantastic. Performance seems on par (or within 5 percent) and it’s super customizable. Haven’t had any issues getting things working, including non-steam alphas. Went into it thinking I’d probably switch back, but have no need currently. You definitely need some troubleshooting skills, but nothing too crazy if you already tinker a bit in windows.
Edit: I’m also running triple monitors at 144hz and it’s been completely fine (and I’m on Nvidia).
I bought a new computer a few years ago that has 11 on it. With how the Steam Deck has seemed to really promote Linux for gaming, I’m seriously considering it on my next build.
It is very obvious to me that Windows is becoming increasingly subject to enshittification.
They need to fix their launchers on all systems before the do anything else. I’m happy to support them in their mission of game preservation, but they really don’t do a good job at providing a high quality service.
Also, I’ve purchased things from them that were never provided, and they refused a refund (warcraft 2 battle net key). I know it was likely Blizzard’s fault, but they could have at least responded to my emails with more than “no refunds, we are working on it”.
Has been since the 2019 mass layoff i guess. Their galaxy development was questionable at best since then. Only noticeable action was marketing. I see CDPR/GOG pretty critic with their new billionaire CEO nowadays, sadly.
My daughter wanted to wear my headset when I was playing battlefield once. It was so funny listening to those losers rage because they Were getting stomped by a 5 yr old girl. Now days she still puts it on from time to time and it’s still hilarious.
Having grown up with the PS1, it’s been fun revisiting old classics and see what has aged well and what hasn’t.
Platformers like Spyro, Crash, Rayman, Abe’s Oddysee and Ape Escape have aged like fine wine (although Crash 1 is a lot more janky than the others). But that back into the past, some games also showed no signs of proper playtesting aimed at kids, which means overly difficult levels, annoying completions and such - I remember spending months playing Tarzan, The Emperor’s New Groove, Croc 2, Kingley’s Adventure and others to 100% them, and some of them I could never finish. I only recently 100% Croc 2 for the first time, for example, and yeah, it wasn’t really that good.
Some JRPGs are also as great today as they were the day they were released (Final Fantasy IX, Xenogears, Chrono Cross, Star Ocean and even lesser known ones such as Legend of Legaia, Threads of Fate and Wild Arms), and are arguably better than many of their contemporary competitors. But you sometimes have to stomach one too many random encounter, overly distracting old/early PS1-era graphics, bad translations, or all of the above (I’ve never been an omega-fan of FFVII, and let me tell you, revisiting it in the pandemic really didn’t improve my opinion of that game).
The slow gameplay afforded by the console really allows action-horror games such as Resident Evil, Dino Crisis and Silent Hill to shine, but those that attempted to be more action-oriented, such as Siphon Filter, really show the signs of age. Dino Crisis 2 is the exception here, being very action-heavy, but also distinctly “modern” in many of its design choices.
Stealth games such as Metal Gear Solid and Tenchu are also great, although very limited in scope by today’s standards, and the latter’s low render distance is something that may annoy players accustomed to modern gaming.
FPS games (Medal of Honour being the biggest title) really have no place in any contemporary gamer’s playlist. The same can be said about Race/driving games, unless you like revisiting the catchy tunes of the Gran Turismo 2 soundtrack. For example, I found CTR - Crash Team Racing quite dull and too easy even at max difficulty, but had a blast collecting all achievements in the remake (shame it never got released on PC - I wonder why).
It’s probably the same about fighting games: modern entries are much more fluid and dynamic, have better AI and allow for a greater skill ceiling. I say “probably” because I suck at fighting games and I’ve never played them extensively, aside from a few sparring matches with my brother on Tekken 3.
There are other cases where I found the original game “good enough, but not worth your time over the most recent entries”. For example, as a kid I spent countless hours crossing the skies of Ace Combat 2, but all the titles that came after it are just better. If I had to chose only one game for this post, AC2 would probably be it. I loved it and I still do, and its soundtrack is bonkers (seriously, it’s really good), but yeah, I’d take 4, Zero and 6, or even Project Wingman, over it any day.
Great comment, lots of examples! I agree with pretty much everything you listed.
Regarding CTR, have you tried Crash Nitro Kart? I always loved that one more than the original. It had a few improvements over the first game, so I wonder if it aged a bit better.
Unfortunately, I haven’t! I didn’t have a PS2 growing up, I went straight from the PS1 to the X360, so I missed on a lot of titles from the sixth gen. I eventually got back to play some of them (.hack games, Ace Combat titles, and a few more), but I don’t have as much free time as I did when I was a kid and I’m still missing a ton of stuff.
That being said, the CTR remake did have all the Nitro Kart levels in it and they were a true joy to play. I liked them even more than the original’s levels, which I certainly did non expect as I had a lot of nostalgia for the OG. Let me tell you, if the remake had been released on PC with cross-play, me and my brother would still be playing it to this day lol
On the subject of fighting games, its true that modern games are more fluid and dynamic and obviously visually superior, but they are also chopped up into a thousand microtransactions and dumbed down. There are six games in the Soul Calibur series now, and SC2 is still the peak there. I’d also argue the best games of both the Mortal Kombat and Dead or Alive series lie somewhere in the middle. The latest entries in all three of these series are honestly disappointing, as well as absolutely riddled with microtransactions.
That’s sad to hear. I was aware of some of them MTX-heavy, but I thought it was compensated by the base game being more feature-rich than their predecessors.
I appreciate the correction, I really am ignorant when it comes to this genre.
Depends on the game I think. Guilty Gear is doing better than ever with Strive and actually has a decent population base for the first time. I do take some issue with the DLC character seasons but it’s hard to fault them too much for following what has become standard practice, and they’ve been continually releasing high quality content in every update. Their netcode needs some work but the game part of the game is pristine, it’s my favorite fighting game by a mile and as they continue to add in the rest of the old roster there’s becoming less and less reason to try and play the older Guilty Gear games.
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