Out With The New, In With The Old?
Naming some of the biggest games to come out of recent, and titles due in the foreseeable future, you will probably name some of the following titles; ’Gears Of War 2′, ‘The Sims 3′, ‘Street Fighter 4′, ‘Resident Evil 5′, ‘Tekken 6′, ‘Ridge Racer 7′…..’Final Fantasy 13′ and this is only a minute few games off the top of my head, you will no doubt have more. The obvious link between all the titles mentioned is of course the ever increasing number that follows. Like a faithful puppy companion, we know it’s going to follow, we’re quite used to it being there and most of us feel quite happy and content for it being there too, safe in the knowledge that the product it stands by, its master, is dependable, reliable, trustworthy and comfortable to what we want and expect in a video game. However what I want to know is; Do we want to keep on teaching this old dog new tricks? or is it about time to put this dog out of his misery and put him down for the big sleep?
Sequels are big business in the gaming industry, they’ve been around for as long as most gamers remember, the first game sequel appearing around the early 1970’s. (It is debatable what the first true game sequel was, but arguments abound for both ‘Spacewar’ and the fantastically named ‘Hunt the Wumpus 2′, both appearing around 1972), Sequels continued to be distributed in abundance throughout the early console years, (especially the 8-bit period,) numerous platform titles would be released on a near yearly schedule and if not follow-ups from the original developers, then near perfect clones from competitors would appear to fans hungry for more of the same thing. This was and is essentially the case throughout the following console generations, with perhaps a little less obvious grand scale plagiarism and more of a sensible, ‘lets just steal the best bits of their game/our game and add a little something else’ mentality’. The games industry was constantly reinforcing the idea unto itself that this is becoming part of the accepted normality. This brings us round to a modern day situation where the sequel to our favourite successful game is not only wanted, but expected by the gaming public, a natural progression of what came before, what once was successful, will be successful again with as little work being done to the original idea as publishers can get away with. Re-iteration rather than re-design! Is this actually what we truly want in a sequel?
If you take Capcom as an example, recently they have just released two sequels to some of their biggest gaming franchises, these being Street Fighter 4 and Resident Evil 5. These two long running game series have been round for a few generations of gaming and have spawned, numerous sequels, remakes, spin-offs and have appeared on a multitude of gaming platforms. In this time, Capcom has gained a large following of hardcore gamers who will defend and purchase new titles in their favourite series’, pretty much regardless of what anybody will say about them, or without actually seeing the end quality of the game. I wonder why it is that we do this as gamers so blindly, but also ultimately wonder why we seem to be so undecided in what we want to play in a new installment.
Street Fighter 4 is a game that is hailed as a re-invention of the ‘beat em up’ genre of gaming, universally being praised for its positive new style, retooling of familiar ground to make it fresh again, solid online support and receiving scores of 94 (PS3) and 93 (xbox 360) from Metacritic. Resident Evil 5 however, scores 86 for both PS3 and Xbox360, and is often cited as being a good game but with underlying faults, playing the game alone, often being reported as being no-where as good as the co-op system newly integrated into the series for the first time. Now the scores are not that far apart in difference, but one implies a must have great game (Street Fighter 4) whilst the other implies only a good game. It may sound like I am being harsh on Resident Evil 5, however in the modern day gaming industry, the marginal difference in scores on Metacritic can heavily affect the bonuses and royalties paid out by Publishers to Developers, thus effecting the future of the franchise and ultimately leading to money being reallocated elsewhere.
The major factor that seems to contribute to both of these games successes and failures, appears to be timing and marketing. With Street Fighter 4, Capcom have convinced the gaming public and press that an 18 year old gaming formula (Street Fighter II [2], 1991), with minimal additional content or redesign to the core mechanic, is a fresh new way to enjoy the one on one beat em up fighter. With most of the exact same characters included and button configurations used, the exact same old techniques will work again (jump, sweep, throw, still being used heavily online). I’m not saying that this is not a fun game, it is, I bought it like everyone else, I just wonder where this abundance of new freshness lies within the game. With enough time passing between the game it is essentially based on, Capcom have successfully tapped into a nostalgia market and it seems like we all bought the game knowing and wanting this game to be a pretty, modern day version of Street Fighter 2, no less, little more, much to Capcoms marketing department’s delight.
Capcom seemed to have worked this exact same business strategy with Resident Evil 5, taking the core mechanics and game engine of Resident Evil 4, a game that scored 96 on Metacritic, making it one of the top rated games ever on there and then tried to craft a near identical experience. But what is it about Resident Evil 5 that causes a 10 point drop on Metacritic? Resident Evil 5, like Street Fighter 4, added a strong online element to the series which was missing from the game that it was mimicking, but this is a feature greatly accepted in both of Capcom’s newer titles. Can it be blamed on a marketing campaign that had a large blunder by convincing the world’s press that the game was ripe with racism? Arguably yes but this doesn’t largely effect the build of the game, only public perception. A difference in the storyline of this game did split the hardcore fans, but not to a degree that would cause such a massive drop in renown. Again, the factors seems to be timing and marketing. Four years have passed since the previous instalment of the resident evil series, and so it is still relevantly fresh in our gaming memories, especially with such an impact on other titles that Resident Evil 4 provided and lead to some fundamental changes to the action/shooter genre. Gears Of War managed to take core mechanics of Resident Evil 4, then expand upon these ideas to differentiate and reinvigour, so do we as gamers now expect all titles to follow suit, expanding on old ideas whilst still being familiar?
This seems to be a conflicting stance and a very difficult goal to achieve and just shows how fickle we are at not knowing what we truly want from our sequels, we want the old and the new to be the same, we strive for consistent differences!
With the modern global financial recession, it is believed that games publishers and developers will have to play it safe and not take as many risks on new IP’s, leading to a situation and time, much like the mentality previously employed by the world’s largest third party game publisher, EA. Their old business model relied heavily on the success of numerous yearly sequels to a vast number of sports titles which is a shame considering EA’s change of direction over the last year or so. Safe sequels or updates are estimated to be on the increase globally and so we will no doubt be bombarded with an abundance of games sporting ever increasing numbers over the upcoming months and into the new year. Will we as gamers take this and buy our same games again (the higher number the better), or will we decide wisely by Investigating our upcoming purchases to see if there is anything new of worth in them that we actually want to play? I guess, only time will tell.
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