Sequels That Didn't Live Up To Their Predecessors

[NerfedFalcon]

The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess
Again, a bit of stretch because this was still a fantastic game.
But why. WHY. Why did they remove the music that played to your actions in combat!?
That was the most awesome idea a Zelda game added since it went 3D with Ocarina and made Wind Wakers' sword fights way more awesome then they should have been, being all cute lookin...
It really felt noticeably stiffer once it was gone.

Not to disrespect your opinion, but I found the combat stiffer in Ocarina for two reasons: I was born in 1995, and in 1998, you couldn't run around while swinging your sword.

OT: From what I hear about it, Deus Ex Invisible War would have been a much better game without the 'Deus Ex' in the title. Never played it myself, and I've only done 20 minutes of Deus Ex 1, because that game is way too hard!

 

[Bobbity]

Dragon Age 2
How do you follow up a game that was one of the most in depth RPG experience in years, PC focused, with a great cast of characters in a low fantasy setting, that got rave reviews all around and was so good that despite being a "niche" market it went on to be your number 1 selling product of all time?
Well, apparently you give your team just over a year and a half, scrap the depth and RPG side of things, focus on consoles and gimp the PC version to save you time, make half the cast insufferable Final Fantasy rejects, make 6 areas and copy-paste to save more time, make your Lead Designer rage quit and put the guy who made your shakiest title thus far in charge, insult your fans directly, make a connection between the button and "awesome", include a awful sequel bait ending, have the battle that took place go right into anime territory silliness and then finally, proceed to have it sell under half what your original title did.

Pretty much agree. I wanted so much to like that game, and I'm a die-hard Bioware fan, but I just couldn't get over the complete lack of effort...

By the way, who was this crappy new Lead Designer, and which game did he work on?

It was Mike Laidlaw, the man behind Jade Empire.
While I never played this one myself, it was also a console and action focused RPG. While certainly not hated, it's generally agreed it was Bioware's lowest point before Dragon Age 2 rolled out.

Spoiler

Aww, that's a little mean. Not the photos, I love those, but Jade Empire was a wonderful game, despite its lack of any real strategy. Admittedly, yes, it was Bioware's weakest game, but a weak game for Bioware is like a massive hit for any other de- Was like a masterpiece for anyone else. Was.

 

[Saelune]

Duke Nukem Forever
Oblivion
Dynasty Warriors 6 Empires (No death!?)
Neverwinter Nights 2
Dragon Age 2
Mass Effect 2

 

[Folksoul]

Nuts&Bolts- Words cannot describe how mad I was. There's tonal or genre shift and then theres just slapping a franchise name onto a game you thought wouldn't sell either wise. Yah, the script was funny for the hour or two I played it but the gameplay, ooh the "design your own vehicle for the entirety of gameplay" mechanic. I may never forgive Rare for this.

Phantom Hourglass, mainly because of the Temple of the Ocean King, which to quote Yahtzee can "fuck right off."

 

[AngryPuppy]

Red Faction: Armageddon
Volition has proved time and again that they know how to make a great sandbox (Saints Row 1+2, Red Faction: Guerrilla) so when they decide to take a suburb sandbox game with endless fun supplied by demolishing building out in the open world and stick the it underground and make it a linear shooter, well they're essentially taking one step forward and two steps back. It's almost heartbreaking to see that everything that made the last game a suburb box of fun has been stripped away and replaced with a dark, linear alienfest. Yes, the Magnet Gun and destruction is fun to use but it doesn't nearly make up for the sad excuse for a game that Armageddon is. At least, not compared to Guerrilla anyway.

This was one of my answers. If they would have named it ANYTHING else I probably wouldn't have been so let down to be honest. Also...

Fallout 3 & New Vegas
I'm sorry but they really were a giant let down to me for way too many reason.

Dragon Age II
This let me down pretty hard. I wanted to love it. I tried to love it. I just couldn't.

 

[AlexLoxate]

Kane and Lynch 2. A textbook example of how to make a bad game worse.

 

[Itsthatguy]

What

No Deus Ex:Invisible Wars yet?
Very little choice, no skills and some biomods are stupidly overpowered. And lets not forget the same-ammo-for-all-weapons system.

 

[The_Blue_Rider]

Have to agree with a guy further up the thread and say Crackdown 2, I loved the first one but 2 was just boring as hell, the city was the same, the enemies were boring and it just felt like a huge grindfest especially since every damn mission was the same thing and there was no real plot

 

[spartandude]

Mass Effect 2
Fantastice game, seriously its in my topten just behind Mass Effect 1 but i felt it lacked depth and was way too action focused rather than story, also all of the side missions were essentially loyalty missions

Bioshock 2
Again a good game but no where near as amazing as the first. being a big daddy took away most of the vulnerability i felt in the first one. It didnt really explain very well why the Proto bigdaddy was better than the refined ones. But also i felt it didnt touch on any political message, sure it kinda had communism but it would have made Marx eat his own beard and it turned out not to really be communism.

Dragon Age 2
Look at my description for Mass Effect 2 except this wasnt a good game at all.

Portal 2
Again an amazing fantastic game, but essentially look at the Zero Punctuation review

 

[80Maxwell08]

Ar Tonelico Qoga Knell of Ar Ciel. Yes that's the actual title. As someone who loved the first Ar Tonelico and didn't get a chance to play the second one when I heard of this I was insanely excited until I saw it. It makes me think of the Dragon Age 2 problem as well. Take a great strategic RPG and try to make it more "accessable". The gameplay resembles a Tales game if the entire development team just got amateur brain surgery via pickaxe. The result was awful gameplay, numerous copypasted areas, not as much as Dragon Age 2 but don't worry they evened the playing field with horrid graphics, and a terrible plot with so much sexuality the game was choking on it. The worst part if the only reason this wasn't the worst RPG I've ever played was thanks to Hyperdimension Neptunia which was published by the same company and came out the month before it. People if you see either of these titles on the shelf DO NOT BUY THEM PERIOD.

 

[A Free Man]

Assassins Creed 2.

Sure, it was amazing the first time, but so hard to reply. I've gone through AC1 about 4 times, AC2 twice.

If the only complaint you have about a game is that it is dificult to play after you have completely finished it. Perhaps it is time to stop complaining haha

Oblivion

I guess you are right. But it is kind of unfair to compare to the earlier elder scrolls games since they are so amazing. Oblivion on it's own is still a good game I think, even if it doesn't manage to rise to the heights of the others.

 

[War Penguin]

NOTE: The following game is a game I still loved, but in comparison to its predecessor, it could have done much, much better.

Fallout: New Vegas
Fuck the glitches, that was not the game's biggest issue for me. What I hated was that the side quests were so boring and uninspired. They usually consisted of "talk to this guy, then talk to that guy, then go here, then go back to the first guy for reward." There was no interesting back story to it, it was just "this guy wants that, so go get it for him." Sure, maybe they gave the quest a little story, but they were so forgettable that I couldn't remember what they were an hour after I finished them. Now, sure, there were a few good side quests here and there, and the companion side quests were really engaging. But that's only a few compared to so many bad and forgettable quests. They felt like chores than actual quests.

But quests don't matter as long as you have an immersive and engaging world, right? Well, that was another problem for me: The world didn't seem as alive as it did in Fallout 3. In Fallout 3, nearly every little area had a little story behind it. Sometimes it was an epic goose chase for a cache of loot and a story found through holo-tapes, sometimes it was just a couple of skeletons in a bed, living their last moments together before the bombs fell. I found almost none of that in New Vegas. There weren't any interesting characters to talk to, there weren't any stories that made me interested in the world. It was just boring. Plain little obstacles to get me some to some loot. Sure, Fallout 3 did that a bit, but not as flagrantly as New Vegas.

Another little side note that may be a little nit picking, but I feel is necessary to mention: Half the voice acting class seemed bored out of their minds. I'm not talking about the companions or the main characters. I'm talking about the voices that you'll hear again, and again, and again. People said the cast was better in New Vegas. I argue otherwise.

Now, before you get your panties in a bundle, I'd like to say this: There were a lot of things that New Vegas did right. The main quest was fantastic, fooling you into thinking that it was a simple search for revenge story, only to find out there were bigger things at hand [small](though, it was kind of obvious that it wasn't just a goose chase story. More would have had to happen)[/small]. It gave you much more freedom and control of how you want New Vegas to be ruled. I like Fallout 3's main story, but New Vegas took the cake with that.

So, yeah, I thought New Vegas wasn't as good as Fallout 3, but it still had redeemable qualities. Still a let down, though.

 

[Byere]

Has to be said... Every Final Fantasy after X-2. While X-2 was in no way great, it's still a shitload better than XI onwards. Of course, I'm only talking numbered games, not like Tactics Advance 2 or such.

 

[Genericjim101]

Dragon Age 2, enjoyable but not great. Metal Gear Solid 4 compared to MGS3 was scary bad in the story department, allright in the gameplay. Bioshock 2 was one big nostalgia trip of a game only 3 years before it.

 

[Tdc2182]

Assassins Creed 2.

Sure, it was amazing the first time, but so hard to reply. I've gone through AC1 about 4 times, AC2 twice.

I'm gonna be honest, Assassin's Creed 2 is one of the only games to expand upon it's predecessor in literally every single way. I have no idea where you are coming from.

Then again, it did take longer than to get into then the first one. But at least it didn't fall victim to that god awful "losing all your weapons" bull crap.

Matrix revolutions.

/thread.

Also this.

I think it had something to do with pretty much making Neo a cyber-Superman, which pretty much ruined all the tension from the fight scenes.

I couldn't help but tell myself "I don't care I don't care Idon'tcareIdon'tcare" throughout the entire story.

My choice?

Splinter Cell: Conviction.

I don't know what they were thinking, but they really fucked up an otherwise perfect stealth series.

The mark and execute was the most overpowered thing I have ever seen in a video game. It got up to the point where it literally gave you 6 executes on the easily upgraded guns.

And even if you chose not to use it, the game still was way to easy. It was very strange how it encouraged aggressive gameplay, but didn't really make any effort to make it seem smooth. What were they thinking?

Also, the got rid of probably one of the most innovative and genuinely fun multiplayer modes I've ever played. Spy's vs. Mercs was the shit.

The only real upside to that mess was the Co Op mode, but that relied on you taking out all the equipment and making sure your partner didn't use the Mark and Execute, and actually taking time to look through the different outfits you can put on your guy.

 

[No_Remainders]

FALLOUT 3 FALLOUT 3 FALLOUT 3 FALLOUT 3 FALLOUT 3 FALLOUT 3 FALLOUT 3 FALLOUT 3 OH GOD FALLOUT 3 BY FAR!

It's a victim of what I hate the very most when developers do. "We're fans of the original" and "we just gotta make it more accessible". The fact that Bethesda is by far one of the laziest and most incompetent developers out there doesn't change that either. The story was uninspiring, the characters were boring and VATS was a terrible system that you could either choose to use or have to go through the worst combat in a game I have ever suffered through. They even had the same voice actors as in fucking Oblivion, but I suppose getting Liam Neeson to say a couple of lines is far more important than making anyone else in the game worth listening to. The wasteland was the by far most boring surrounding ever to explore, I couldn't bring myself to even try doing it for more than 5 minutes. Oh and while we're at exploration and surroundings, the fucking subways, they were fucking horrible to go through. Annoying, repetitive and just fucking boring.

Yes, I hate Fallout 3 with a passion. Gonna give New Vegas a shot once my friend who recently bought it has finished the game, I've heard that it's supposed to be alot better so thumbs crossed.

Pretty much exactly what he said. And yeah, New Vegas is more fun.

Apart from that? Hmm...

Bioshock (It's the virtual successor to System Shock 2, so I'm counting that!)

 

[Vivi22]

Assassins Creed 2.

Sure, it was amazing the first time, but so hard to reply. I've gone through AC1 about 4 times, AC2 twice.

I'm surprised to see anyone saying this actually. Not only that Assassin's Creed 2 is somehow disappointing compared to the original, but that anyone played the original more than once. The original will always be a game that had lots of potential but failed to deliver in almost every way. Combat and sneaking were usually annoying more than fun and the whole game was so repetitive that by the time I finished I wanted to toss the disc out a window. I got the second game just recently though, and even going in having heard all of the praise since it's release I was utterly shocked at how much better it was. I have never seen a sequel so completely and utterly improve on every aspect of the original. The series went from a game I will probably never play again because it's just too painful to slog through it to a game of the year quality title in the span of one sequel as far as I'm concerned.

As far as sequels which disappoint, I'll throw in Deus Ex: Invisible War as well. I haven't even played it that much yet. I got it last week on Steam for $2.50 and am only about a half an hour in and it's pretty bad. I was expecting it to not live up to the original as I've heard that being said about it for years, but I figured I'd check it out for under $3 and see how bad it really is. I'm not sure where to even start as it's objectively a terrible game so far. Itsthatguy mentioned some of the good ones, but I'll toss in that in the half an hour or so that I've been playing I have no real idea of what's going on or why I should give a shit about anything that's happening in this game. That to me screams poor writing and design.

I'll also toss in Gran Turismo 5. About the only thing they got right was having a large number of cars, and I'll even break from usual complaints and say that the majority of Standard vehicles actually looked quite good. But there is so little content in this game otherwise. Many tracks from older titles aren't there, the majority of the track count is made up of variations on a few different tracks, you can only win prize cars once, and there are so few race series to even do that you'll fly through them pretty quickly. At least until the leveling system cuts you off and makes you grind heavily in the late game to do anything new. Considering the length of development and the hardware they had to work with none of these things are acceptable. I believe there are actually fewer races to do in GT5 than there were in 3 and 3 was literally half the game that GT4 was.