The Quality of Game Sequels: The Sequel
Posted on Mar 14, 2011 in History and attached to The Quality of Game Sequels
After a discussion I had on the topic of last week's post, I want to talk about what makes a great sequel. Last week I talked about some good sequels, but never really went into much detail of what makes a sequel a good sequel. There are several different types of sequels, and each type has different conditions to work right.
Anatomy of a Sequel
The first game in a series is usually to test the waters, and see how appealing a game is in the market. As such, they usually have a very tightly packaged plot which is nicely resolved at the end. This is so that if the game flops at retail, there isn't a half-finished plot hanging around or an unresolved cliffhanger. The best example I know of which screwed this formula up was SiN Episodes - which was planned to have nine episodes. Only one was actually released. Yeah, they didn't go so well.
The problem is that you can get too engaged with a story before the series actually sells to an audience. The first SiN Episode actually got decent reviews - but only sold enough to make up expenses - not enough to create the next 8 games in the series. So it just...died. Now the series is owned by, of all things, a casual games company. And obviously they don't have much of an interest in FPS games, but they have said a few times that they wouldn't be opposed to the idea.
One of the worst things I can imagine is for something you created to be cut short. This is one of the reasons why the first game is usually the play-it-safe game that is testing the waters for future games. If the first game is a success, you are able to put a bit more effort into the second game, expanding on deeper and "riskier" plot progression. Basically, the first game is creating a market, and the second game is exploiting that market.
To make up for the nicely packaged storyline, games usually add a "sequel hook" into the end of the game. Often, they are just before or after the game credits roll. These silly little hooks are also common in movies, but games don't seem to be able to pull them off as well. Even Half-Life, as well as the the sequel, which is in last week's list of 'good sequels', has such a hook. Of the games I've played, a lot of them have the same hooks, especially big-budget releases.
The sequel hooks are sometimes in the form of the characters being assigned a new task just as the game ends (Battlefield: Bad Company 2). Another example is a glimpse of a far greater enemy than you have just beaten to end the game (Mass Effect 2), or in the form of a news bulletin, report, radio transmission or overheard conversation that hints that there is another enemy out there (Dead Space 2). There's the glaringly obvious ending to Halo 2 that literally tells you that there's more to come. And then we have the rather straight-forward hooks that simply tell you that there is going to be a sequel.
I find these sequel hooks to be pretty tactless - some of the best sequels I've played are to games that have barely any hint of a sequel (as you'd expect for a testing-the-waters first release game), but still leave enough openings for further sequels with very little additional effort required. The first three Ace Attorney games do this brilliantly. Myst has a huge void for a sequel, but never specifically uses a hook. Half-Life 2 took the minimal story from Half-Life and fleshed it out to give it life. Hell, even Portal 2 is expanding a game that had a pretty solid conclusion (that is, until a year ago).
I'm mostly talking about story-heavy singleplayer games here, but we also have games that are sequels in gameplay alone. These games usually have a strong, defining (often multiplayer) gameplay that carries across into new games without having to transfer characters and story across. Some examples would be the Unreal Tournament series, Left 4 Dead, Grand Theft Auto, and Pokémon.
Yet another type of sequel is one with recurring themes and characters, but not much in terms of recurring plot. Instead, they start a completely new plot with the same (and new) characters, and the same gameplay. These are games like Last Window: The Secret of Cape West, Uncharted 2, and Sam & Max.
Sequels to Sequels!
Again, I've gone on longer than expected. I'll have to do one more post next week to finish up this trilogy of sequels - this will be my list of sequels which I believe are not very good, sequels that are just silly, and I'll wrap up with games that currently do not have sequels, but should.
Posted on Mar 14, 2011 in History and attached to The Quality of Game Sequels
Follow-Up Blogs
- The Quality of Game Sequels 3: Sequel Harder [Apr 1, 2011]
