Why do you think this happens when these developers already had a winning formula?
I mean, all series are going to have some point where they dick things up, else we’d have never-ending amazing video game series. I don’t think that the second game in the series is uniquely bad.
Some of it is just going to be luck. Like, hitting just the right combination of employees, market timing, consumer interest, design decisions, scoping a game’s development time and so forth isn’t a perfectly-understood science. Making the best game of the year probably means that a studio can make a good game, but that’s not the same thing as being able to consistently make the game of the year, year after year.
Some of it is novelty. I mean, part of most outstanding games is that they’re doing at least something that hasn’t been done before, and doing so again — especially if other studios are trying to copy and build on the winning formula as well — may not be enough.
Some of it is that most resources don’t always make a game better. I know that at least some past series have failed when a studio made a good game, (understandably) get more resources for the next game in the series, but then try to expand their scope and don’t do well at that new scope.
Engine rewrites are technically-risky, can get scope wrong, and a number of games that have really badly failed have happened because a studio tries to rebuild everything from the ground up rather than to do an incremental improvement.
You mention Cities: Skylines 2, and I think that “more resources don’t always help”, “luck”, and “engine rewrite” were all factors. When I play a city-builder, I really don’t care all that much about graphics; I’ve played and enjoyed some city-builders with really unimpressive graphics, like the original lincity. CS2 got a lot of budget and had a dev team that tried to use a lot of resources on graphics (which I think was already not a good idea, and not just due to my own preferences; reading player comments on things like Steam, what players were upset about were that they wanted more-interesting gameplay mechanics, not fancier graphics). Basically, trying to make the world’s prettiest city-builder with the money maybe wasn’t a good idea. Then they made some big internal technical shifts that involved some bad bets on how well some technology that they wanted to use for those graphics would work, and found that they’d dug themselves deeply into a hole.
Sometimes it’s a game trying to shift genres. To use the Fallout series as an example of both doing this what I’d call successfully and unsuccessfully, the Fallout series were originally isometric real-time-until-combat-then-turn-based games. With Fallout 3, Bethesda took the game to be a pausable 3D first-person-shooter series. That requires a whole lot of software and mechanics changes. That was, I think, successful — while the Wasteland series that the original Fallout games were based on continued the isometric turn-based model successfully, Fallout 3 became a really big hit. On the other hand, Fallout 76 was an attempt to take the series to be a live-action multiplayer game. That wasn’t the only problem — the game shipped in an extremely buggy state, after the team underestimated the technical challenges in taking their single-player game multiplayer. But some of it was just that the genre change took away some of what was nice about about the earlier games — lots of plot and story and scripted content and a world that the player was the center of and could change and an immersive environment that didn’t have other players acting out of character. The audience who loves a game in one genre isn’t necessarily a great fit for another genre. In that situation, it’s not so much that the developers don’t have a winning formula as that they’ve decided to toss their formula out and try to write a new one that’s as successful.
Cities skylines 2 was way more ambitious than the first game but they barely scaled up the size of the studio over the years and then pushed out a half baked product. I remember they tried to play the scrappy indie studio in defense of the games state at launch as if they hadn’t released the most popular city builder of the last like 15 years and oodles of DLC since along with niche hits in the City in Motion games
I think CS:2 was far too ambitious, and there were very strange design choices around subsidies which effectively removed any challenge from the game – at first. I just played it the other day, and frankly it has turned around a lot. Decent game now.
KSP2 was just a corporate shit show – devs were well intentioned but ultimately were unable to continue based on factors out of their control. It really sucks because KSP1 is one of the best games ever made and KSP2 had a lot of promise.
Despite common sense I bought The Hundred Line at launch, but thankfully it is indeed a very solid game. To the point I spent 25 hours playing it over 3 days. It’s more or less a Danganronpa game, so it might be too cringy for some people, but having gained enough tolerance to those things it’s wonderful. Probably better than DR, but it’s apples and oranges in some aspects.
One “problem” is that the game is really easy, and the whole SRPG part is mostly to enchance the story. It’s still really fun, I think that like with Kirby they intentionally wanted a game that anyone can approach. And though I’m just getting started it also does indeed appear to have 100 endings, I ended up on the romance route from my first set of decisions…
So I’ve been playing Tropico 4 for a bit, and it looks pretty good. You’re always zoomed out, so you don’t need to have more than like 8 polygons for a limb.
I literally could not run cities Skylines 2 or KSP 2 at a good frame rate. Everything was modelled incredibly well and looks great, but that doesn’t mean shit if I can’t run the game. I strongly suspect that’s a big contributing factor.
In addition to this, they’re going to against their biggest competitors: the previous game. It’s literally the same game with more content, runs incredibly well by comparison, has a huge mod library, and is much cheaper to boot. Might not be as pretty, but it actually might not matter given what you’re playing.
I think there’s probably a lot of issues that contribute to this to be honest, but it feels like at it’s core it’s a fools errand to begin with.
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.
I see a lot of people downplaying the remaster as a fresh coat of ue5 paint. I’m playing the game, having disliked the original, and I’m loving it. I’m kind of impressed with what they did with the game, basically remaking the world elements in ue5 and leaving the gameplay as it was with minor tweaks. Fresh coat of paint feels more like rip out the drywall and do it again. Just leave the structure alone. Like, the electrical and plumbing is still there and feels the same but it looks completely different.
Games like this dont come very often, so if anything, this remaster and BG3 should raise the bar on what we should expect from a new TES game.
KSP2 is a unique situation, there are no improvements coming because the studio was shut down. I’m not sure the others belong alongside it. I have the most experience with CS2 and I can say confidently, even at launch, it was better than the original in a lot of ways. It was buggy and unoptimized, and lacked content, and it deserved the criticism it got for those reasons. Since then, most of the bugs have been ironed out, performance is way better, and they’ve released a bunch of content packs, several of the most substantial ones for free. Even at launch, I never wanted to go back to CS1 just because of how much better the road tools are. Now? No contest. CS2 is a great city builder.
On the one hand, I’m glad for the pressure that people with less patience than I have are applying to these companies to release their games in a better state. On the other, I think there’s a lot of unwarranted criticism and vitriol that goes along with it that’s disappointing to see.
I was there with KSP from the early days. Squad was not in the video game business, they were a billboard advertisement company. The lead dev HarvesteR started it as a passion project. It found success with the alpha and full release in 2015.
Then in 2017 Take-Two bought the rights to the game. Squad kept working on the original, but development of the sequel was handed off to Star Theory with Private Division publishing. The game was delayed, then development was moved to a new studio, Intercept Games, which was owned by Take-Two. They also poached a third of Star Theory’s personnel, which resulted in the studio’s death. They fucked around for a few years, released the early access version, then sold Private Division, closed Intercept Games, and abandoned the game.
In short: corporate interests. KSP2’s failure had nothing to do with KSP or its developers.
Same, I am still so mad about the whole ksp2 fiasco that I block all of take twos games on steam, they ain’t getting any money from me. I am so glad I didn’t buy it in EA although it looked promising.
I’m with you. I was excited to learn the other day that some of the KSP developers are working on a game called Kitten Space Agency that might fill the void left by KSP2’s demise.
That’s exactly right. They also had managers/publishers telling them to do shit like make the rockets even wobblier than KSP1 because it made for funny viral videos that would get more PR.
Nobody who actually played the game wanted wobblier rockets than KSP1. Nobody really wanted wobbly rockets at all. Sometimes a bug can actually be a feature, but in this case, it really was just a bug. The people in charge didn’t ever care about the people who actually played the game, they just wanted sales, and they made decisions accordingly. That’s why it looks nice, but plays like shit.
Yup, and honestly even according to that anti-art logic it was a strategic failure. Funny meme gifs were part of how the game gained notoriety, but you don’t maintain a game long term on meme status alone.
Even if “haha funni physics glitches” were still the in thing - I think people got over them fast, like with any comedy style - the longevity of the game came from the deep mechanics and impressive missions people could do, and the community support.
I actually think that sequels to breakout sandbox games are always doomed to fail. Like what if they tried to release Minecraft 2? It would be awful, and I think we all instinctively know it would be, which is kind of a self fullfulling prophecy.
Minecraft doesn’t have a monopoly on the special sauce that makes their game good. It has a decade and a half of support and cultural recognition from a dedicated following. You can’t make that happen a second time. I don’t like what’s been done with the franchise commercially, but they figured out how to milk it without doing a direct sequel, which I think is part of why it’s still relevant.
I honestly haven’t stopped to consider it. The Wind in this game has a lot of detail too it, so i wouldn’t at all be surprised if the clouds were Dynamic. I’ve also noticed that the Sky can be clear sometimes to depending on weather/season. But that could be just a region of the texture or there are a few different textures. if i had to take a guess i’d say it’s dynamic though. Ubisoft cheaps out on a few things, but graphics doesn’t seem to be one of them
I would sub in like maybe Darkest Dungeon 2 over Frostpunk? Less well received but still better than any of the other three. Both were distinct changes of pace, darkest dungeon just sold its soul to the epic games store and lost the bond you formed with characters over a long campaign in exchange for the roguelite shorter runs.
I had a decent time with it and probably would’ve played a 2nd run had the game not failed me because every faction (including the rebelling one) was too happy to pass the final law or whatever. They probably fixed that by now, but it was pretty souring.
C:S2 is likely too ambitious. Doing too many new things at once instead of incremental change.
KSP2 was a management fuck up. Let’s take this IP and give it to a completely seperate studio with no experience in this kind of work while not allowing the original Devs to help despite being part of the organisation.
Let’s take this IP and give it to a completely seperate studio with no experience in this kind of work while not allowing the original Devs to help despite being part of the organisation.
The decision making behind this is incredibly hard for me to understand. Just a very, very nonsensical way to run the project, on paper. I wonder about the circumstances.
You see this a lot in project management. People go to school to learn to manage projects, and they think that all projects are pretty much the same. You define the deliverables, set the schedule, track the progress, and everything should work out fine. When the project is a success, they pat themselves on the back for getting everyone to the finish line, and when the project fails they examine where in the process unexpected things happened.
Video games are an art form. Creativity can’t be iterated into existence, and the spark of fun is more than the component parts of a good time. Capitalists believe that they can invest in the creative process and buy the value of the talent of extraordinary people. They have commoditized creation, dissecting each step and then squeezing it into a format that fits into a procedure.
Here’s a Kanban board of game features, pick one and move it to the next phase. Develop, test, evaluate, repeat. What are your blockers? Is this in scope? Do we need to push the deadline?
That can help you make something, but it won’t be art.
As an art appreciator, and someone whose professional duties include project management, I love this comment, especially “[project management] can help you make something, but it won’t be art.”
As a project manager (well sort of, but did IT projects for a while, have multiple friends in the gaming manager): Yes and no.
From my point of view: The problem isn’t the fact that games are art. While games have their creative side they also require good “brick and mortar work” in the back - as many games as went horribly wrong due to a lack of space for creativity went wrong due to a lack of “less than glamorous” brick and mortar work and overcreativity. (Most drastic example would be the reddit dragon MMO story)
This is actually a reason why people who are very invested in the subject matter of the project they manage often are horrible project managers - and vice versa people who have no clue can’t be good PMs either.
Project management has one core component: Knowing when to ask whom. A good PM knows that the dev(or dev team lead) will always know better how long “feature X” will take. Of course I can try to learn how to do things… but that wouldn’t help much as the exact dev or team will still have their individual speeds. But a good PM also will know when to ask someone else who is nore knowledgeable for advice or to confirm things. (I literally had an Dev trying to tell me a small feature would take two weeks. Fair enough. But interestingly enough two other Devs were fairly sure it takes 30min including documentation. Which sounded way more reasonable. Turned out said Dev always tried to pull these stunts with new PMs and his lead being on vacation)
A good PM will also know when to give people space for creativity - and defend this room towards the budget.
Sadly - and this is a problem existing on all sides around PM- in the end it all boils down to a simple thing: Everyone thinks they know better. The PM thinks they know the job of being a Dev(or engineer,etc. etc.) better than the actual people doing the job. And vice versa the Devs think they could do without PMs (they can’t for larger projects it’s impossible, for mid size projects often really inefficient) or know their job better.
I believe the reason it happened, in short, is that Take2 (the publisher) were really obsessed with the release being a surprise, at the cost of far too much.
For one, this meant that basically every job listing for the game never described what the game you’d even work on was. Most of the devs they got were juniors who:
were willing to sign more restrictive contracts without the confidence to push back
did not necessarily know much about the game, or even the genre (supposedly, besides Nate, only 1 dev was an active KSP1 player and another was aware of the game but never really played)
this game was their first sizeable project
For two, it meant that a lot of management roles were taken up by people from Take2 to enforce the secrecy (who also saw KSP as having franchise potential, but that’s a rant for another day). Few of them intimately understood what makes us dorky nerds enthusiastic about KSP.
This is also part of the reason they avoided talking to the KSP1 devs; they were afraid of some of them even hinting that a sequel was in the works. As to why they continued to not talk to them after announcing the game I’m not sure. Perhaps they were afraid they’d tell the uncomfortable truth that the game was making the same development mistakes as KSP1 and more.
Not just making the same mistakes, they were told to scrap years of development and reuse the exact same codebase of KSP1. They had to start over the project with a decade plus of technical debt from a team they weren’t allowed to talk to.
Because remaking the same features from scratch was taking too long. They had already delayed the project due to covid at that point. They ended up with three games: the one they started before intercept was created (and that never saw the light of day), the one based on KSP with the upgrades and new features added (also never seen publicly), a neutered version without the incomplete new features (like multeplayer and improved heat simulation) that was launched as early access. Poor fellows were set up for failure.
The decision making behind this is incredibly hard for me to understand. Just a very, very nonsensical way to run the project, on paper. I wonder about the circumstances.
The rights were aquired by Take-Two Interactive in 2017, and they wanted a sequel to be released in 2020.
The dev studio shut down in 2023 and current status is unkown.
I never played cs1 on release, only played after it was nearly 10 years old, but my understanding is it vastly improved over updates and dlc (which unfortunately did cost more but did at least add meaningful changes for the most part).
Im curious to see where CS2 stands in 3-5 years when mods have really taken off and the devs had made most of their major tweaks.
I had it from release and honestly, even day 1 it smoked the competition in the city sim genre, releasing with features and scale than Sim City ever had.
The DLC often introduced more systems, but they did feel ‘extra’, the game was perfectly functional before parks or tourism or natural disasters etc.
The reason CS:2 felt so necessary is because the first was bloated and had underlying issues in it’s simulation logic, like unrealistically inefficient driving, or a large expansion to residential areas causing all the new residents to die of old age at the same time, crippling the city. Every part of the GUI and logic just felt clunky compared to modern, polished games.
I’d argue the DLCs did more than you imply. The extra modes of transit gave more options to move people, painting a custom park area made cities feel more realistic than premade square parks, universities could be a great centerpiece for a neighborhood. Its not like vanilla was unplayable, but the DLC defintely added more creativity for me.
Oh, the fucks up are massive. They hired a new studio, but also, they pulled the funding then the project without warning. Then they poached the devs, forcing the studio to close and sending them to a newly funded studio. But then, they forced the devs to scrap years of work from scratch, and start over the project with the old codebase and only a year as a deadline. Finally, when it became obvious it wasn’t a massive success, they cut their funding too without warning, and sold the IP without telling the studio about it.
KSP was mishandled so wildly that it should be a case study of how profit oriented management kills creativity and destroys IPs. They killed two studios and a massive IP with their shenanigans. This is why you never let the MBAs run anything.
I mean for ksp2 saying it failed cause they had “no experience with this kind of work” is kind of weird, since neither did the ksp1 devs when they started that. And they didn’t fuck it up either, let alone this badly. Remember that it was a passion project of harvester, working at a PR firm that just happened to let him do it under their roof and employment. The company did not even have any basic experience in game development, arguably even software development in general.
Institutional knowledge is a real thing and also like you said, the first KSP started as a passion project. There’s a huge difference in terms of pressure and expectation between developing your own passion project compared to developing a sequel of a highly regarded game.
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