J03bot said:
Silva said:
They make the same game over and over again with slightly evolved controls, guys, and you keep buying it. Face the facts.
That's... that's true of any series. At all. Ever.
Nonsense. There are exceptions. Look at
Resident Evil 4 for a mainstream example. I find it arbitrary to find more examples because it's just so easy to do - are you really kidding yourself that gaming is always so standardised? A hint: try the independent industry, not just mainstream stuff.
Also, why should you lower your expectations on the basis of how things are in the first place? Other mediums can often provide great variety between installments in series, gaming is capable of it too. By lowering your expectations, you do not improve the quality of the product you are buying. You're simply accepting a less impressive product. Knock yourself out if you like doing it, but it's not going to stop me making sharp criticisms when I feel a franchise needs them in order to improve.
Same game, different story (might be a sequel, might be a prequel, might just share thematic elements), different character names.
That's kind of what makes it a series.
Actually, you don't need to have the same elements to have something be part of a "series". All you need is a continuing plot - that's all. Characters can be different (they can live thousands of years in the past or future of the preceding game and we can still consider it a sequel or prequel), location (within reason, even in a different universe) can be different, gameplay can certainly be different (there are series that change their entire genre halfway through and still get considered part of the franchise or series, controversially yes but we still buy them if we had the last game - WoW for example wouldn't have been successful without the preceding RTS series).
You can have the loosest connection in the world between games, even just a similar name or a generic numeral after the first one's title, and it will be considered a sequel by the consuming audience. Often, a serious, well-accomplished revolution that reinvigorates the gameplay will be richly rewarded in sales. Look at what happened when Mario made his first steps into 3D with
Mario 64. This wasn't just an evolution of graphics - it fundamentally changed the action of the game and brought everything into a much more modern style, yet retaining old charms.
CoD - change from shooting Germans in the trenches, to Russians in Washington, to the Vietnamese in Kowloon.
Pokemon - catch critters in Kanto. Catch different critters in Johto. More beasties in Hoenn.
Street Fighter - fight. Fight with different character roster. Fight some more
Devil May Cry - Kick some ass as the son of the devil and/or a similarly powered randomer. Do so in weird locations against freakish monsters.
It's funny that you bring up
Pokemon and
Devil May Cry. Both of these series have done much more to create change and recreate themselves with each iteration.
Yes, there's similarities between the games. But does CoD have any equivalent to the hundreds of new Pokemon that have come out with each step that series has taken? No.
Has CoD, since the
Modern Warfare watershed commercial victory, gone through any Renaissance like DMC did on
DMC3, improving the flow of fighting very greatly? No.
Has it provided new abilities for you to use in battle that change outcomes considerably (like Nero's glove, or any of the huge array of new weapons Dante has wielded throughout the course of DMC)? No.
It provides the same realistic battle setting with more guns that shoot bullets, alongside the odd rocket launcher and claymore. Nothing interesting, nothing risky, nothing sci-fi or fantasy to shake things up, nothing that isn't seen in the real world. It has limited itself to taking no risks, providing the same game over and over again in a different setting with slightly improved graphics. It'd be great if this realism gave the game something, but mostly I think it'd be improved by stepping away from that a little bit. Except with regenerating health. Sorry, that's still crap.
I don't really see what you're getting at, basically. Are you saying we should only buy one game from any given series? And then only if it differs significantly from other series on the market?
No to the first (try buying the franchises that have really tried to reinvigorate themselves, and encourage when they do so is my advice) and yes to the second.
I'm also saying: buy what you want, but at the same time I'd like to point out how stupid it is to continue paying full price for games that barely provide changes to the engine on which previous installments were built, to the gameplay
or to the plot. Polishing something and packaging it as more entertainment of the same is not a practice that I feel consumers should reward that highly. If we want the games industry to improve then we should not reward bland remakes and sequels which provide no serious ingenuity.
