Sunday, June 29, 2008
Growing Better, Growing Stale, or Jumping the Shark
There has been lots of what we might politely refer to as "discussion" concerning Bethesda's upcoming Fallout 3, which - at first blush - seems like a radical departure in gameplay, though setting and flavor faithfulness remains to be seen. Said dialog between the die-hard fans of the previous Fallout games and the new faithful of Bethesda's excellent Elder Scrolls series is, to quote Dr. Stephen Franklin in Babylon 5, "... the kind of conversation that can only end in a gunshot."
Sounds kinda like my own concerns about 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons not feeling like a new edition of a beloved old game, huh?
Contrasting this to the newly-announced Diablo III game and the gameplay footage that has been revealed, Solivagant has an opinion piece on Destructiod entitled, "Diablo 3 Versus Fallout 3: How To Make a Proper Sequel." In a nutshell, he claims that Diablo 3 appears a solid and faithful addition to the series, while Fallout 3 seems a force-fit that he describes as an Oblivion mod.
I'm not sure I share his opinion on this, but this really opens up a can of worms (and words) about what a sequel should and should not do, doesn't it?
In the first few seconds of the gameplay video for Diablo 3, I was a little skeptical.
Now, I have enjoyed both preceding games, though neither qualifies as a favorite RPG. I still fire up Diablo 2 from time to time and get hooked for a few weeks. Admittedly, I've never taken a character above 50th level, but I have a LOT of characters. I've even had a few "hardcore" characters, too, which was an insidious but fun perma-death mode. The nastiness of it was that it was almost impossible to die until the final boss of the first chapter, after you've invested three good hours into your character.
Watching the gameplay video, I was forced to admit that yes, this looked pretty dang fun, and yes - it looked like a Diablo... a worthy addition to the franchise. Of course, part of that is Blizzard. I haven't seen them make a misstep (well, RELEASE one, at least) since I first encountered two guys sitting forlornly at a booth at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in '95 trying to promote "Warcraft: Orcs Versus Humans." Who'da thunk?
The point is... at least, when I thought I had one... that people like sequels for a reason. They seek the comfort of the familiar, but they want it fresh. That's why they tune into the same TV shows, season after season - as long as the show can present them with familiar characters and setting so that they don't have to start over learning a new world. But the viewers want something to keep the series fresh... not just re-runs and re-hashes of the same material.
Ditto with sequels. The reason gamers are going nuts about the coming of Diablo III and the makers of Titan Quest went out of business is because Diablo is comfortable and familiar. Now it is kinda freaky that a game full of torture, death, and horror is comfortable and familiar, but there you are. But they do not just want Diablo II with better graphics, as much as some claim they'd be happy with that.
So where do you draw the line? In the battle between "fresh and new" and "familiar and comfortable," where is too far? TV writers probably battle over that question on a weekly basis, trying to keep the show from getting stale without having Fonzie jump a shark.
In this case, however, I think it is a question of intended audience. Blizzard is proceeding under the expectation that the previous audience is still there for Diablo 3. They still have a critical mass of fans, even though Diablo 2 was released back in the day where games like Baldur's Gate II was Big News and could be a major commercial success. After all, the game has spawned a host of imitators, and some of those have succeeded in successive years. So the style of gameplay is still in vogue.
I think Bethesda is laboring under the belief (probably correctly) that the audience for the old Fallout games is no longer there in sufficient numbers to achieve commercial success - at least not with today's mainstream game budgets. Like the 2004 release of "The Bard's Tale," they seem to be shooting for not so much of a sequel as a re-make... a "re-imagining" of the universe, delivering their own vision of a universe they loved to a new audience.
But the video game industry is still so young that the originals being remade haven't had much time to gather dust. Fallout 2 is "only" ten years old, which is ancient by video game standards, but it's really not much older than the Playstation 2. This is hardly the first franchise to receive a radical overhaul, particularly as beloved franchises from the 8- and 16-bit era are being reincarnated in the 3D era, and as series that have gone stale have attempted to reinvent themselves.
Metroid Prime. X-Com Apocalypse. Fallout 3. Diablo 3. Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. Ultima 8. Return to Zork. And so on. Game series do have to keep reinventing themselves, or they can grow pretty stale. Popular opinion amongst fans is that this is what happened to the later Might & Magic RPGs, for example. But at what point does a sequel "go too far"? Where does it become a remake or simply a brand name slapped on a different game series? Should we have remakes or a radical "reinventing" of a series that is a decade or less old? What is your own tolerance for change?
Discuss this on the forum thread! Or not.
Labels: Mainstream Games, Roleplaying Games
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:03 PM (Permalink)
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Excellent Franklin quote. One of my two favorite from B5 (the other is "I'm not having this conversation.")
One of the things that I think factors greatly into decisions like those is the idea of the company's view of its market, and the expectations of the people holding the purse strings. Bethesda only makes 3rd first-person RPGs, so natch they grabbed Fallout to do one - IMO probably the only reason they grabbed it. Their whole point of view would lead them to doing that, with the franchise just a convenient vehicle for doing it. Blizzard, same sort of decision - D3 is going to be "same but more awesome", because that just makes sense given their market, fanbase, and the established franchise.
Someone like you or me gets their hands on Fallout, we most likely redo it very true to the original two, since the majority of our indie market is going to want it just like that.
All just my opinion - I know I declared a bunch of that like it was fact. :)
One of the things that I think factors greatly into decisions like those is the idea of the company's view of its market, and the expectations of the people holding the purse strings. Bethesda only makes 3rd first-person RPGs, so natch they grabbed Fallout to do one - IMO probably the only reason they grabbed it. Their whole point of view would lead them to doing that, with the franchise just a convenient vehicle for doing it. Blizzard, same sort of decision - D3 is going to be "same but more awesome", because that just makes sense given their market, fanbase, and the established franchise.
Someone like you or me gets their hands on Fallout, we most likely redo it very true to the original two, since the majority of our indie market is going to want it just like that.
All just my opinion - I know I declared a bunch of that like it was fact. :)
As far as I'm concerned, the only rule for sequels is "Don't be worse than the original." Frequently that means that a sequel should not be done at all.
As any child's party magician will tell you, the chorus of "Yay, do it again!" is gratifying, but gets old fast. Characters should change, plots should evolve. That's true for any part of the game. As you know better than most, the interface is near the heart of the game. If the plot and tone of the sequel are not the same as the original, the interface probably needs to change too. Fallout's interface was great, but it did have some broken aspects that did sometimes get in the way of the story (I personally thought the NPC helper characters weren't handled well, which definitely weakened the games in my eyes) -- with a new story, those aspects could well have become intolerable.
That's not to say that I think Bethesda is doing it right -- slapping on the interface from a totally different game is much less likely to hit the mark than simply reusing the interface from the original. And while I grudgingly support their right to express their own ideas and creativity on a license they negotiated for, it's important to remember that creativity for the sake of creativity is a disease (I want to put a sign on every maternity ward in America: "Your child's name is not an appropriate outlet for your 'creativity'. Get a goldfish." A similar sign could be put up in Bethesda headquarters, Square's art department, and myriad other places. Whiners get the boot. People with the self-confidence to ignore it instead of complaining should be allowed to have their way.) Any innovation that does not make for a better game should be tossed, and anything that does make a better game should be included, regardless of whether it was part of the Original.
I guess all that boils down to, why don't we wait and see whether it works as a game before going nuts about it.
As any child's party magician will tell you, the chorus of "Yay, do it again!" is gratifying, but gets old fast. Characters should change, plots should evolve. That's true for any part of the game. As you know better than most, the interface is near the heart of the game. If the plot and tone of the sequel are not the same as the original, the interface probably needs to change too. Fallout's interface was great, but it did have some broken aspects that did sometimes get in the way of the story (I personally thought the NPC helper characters weren't handled well, which definitely weakened the games in my eyes) -- with a new story, those aspects could well have become intolerable.
That's not to say that I think Bethesda is doing it right -- slapping on the interface from a totally different game is much less likely to hit the mark than simply reusing the interface from the original. And while I grudgingly support their right to express their own ideas and creativity on a license they negotiated for, it's important to remember that creativity for the sake of creativity is a disease (I want to put a sign on every maternity ward in America: "Your child's name is not an appropriate outlet for your 'creativity'. Get a goldfish." A similar sign could be put up in Bethesda headquarters, Square's art department, and myriad other places. Whiners get the boot. People with the self-confidence to ignore it instead of complaining should be allowed to have their way.) Any innovation that does not make for a better game should be tossed, and anything that does make a better game should be included, regardless of whether it was part of the Original.
I guess all that boils down to, why don't we wait and see whether it works as a game before going nuts about it.
I think they're going in the right direction with Fallout 3. Hopefully it keeps the best aspects of the originals.
I just can't see anywhere near a big enough market for an old Fallout-style game that requires that much developer resources. Though I would love to be wrong. :)
Changing to survive in the marketplace is better than having another title doomed to the bargain bins. I'm sure some of fans would dislike the game regardless of how like the original it was because of it's developers. There was a crazy amount of hate for those guys on hardcore cRPG boards even before Fallout 3 was announced.
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I just can't see anywhere near a big enough market for an old Fallout-style game that requires that much developer resources. Though I would love to be wrong. :)
Changing to survive in the marketplace is better than having another title doomed to the bargain bins. I'm sure some of fans would dislike the game regardless of how like the original it was because of it's developers. There was a crazy amount of hate for those guys on hardcore cRPG boards even before Fallout 3 was announced.
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