If you manage to nail a first entry of anything out the gate, praise to you. The very fact that game mechanics, storylines, intentions of the development team and budgetary concerns actually match up in a way that's not a total car wreck is a miracle every time. Every single time.
That said, once something does take off, you've got to start planning sequels and maybe even third instalments, and that's where things get tricky (just ask The Matrix). Getting a project off the ground in the gaming industry is trickier than most thanks to the sheer cost of development, let alone something like Mass Effect that was always meant to be more than one release.
You need only look to Silicon Knights' disastrous Too Human franchise to get a feel for how severely bad something can go when that initial first game doesn't land as it's supposed to - a sensation that can transfer across to the big final instalment, too.
If you can't wrap up your story and finish with a bang, that's one hell of a sour taste that in many cases ends up defining an entire franchise forever.
10. Batman: Arkham Knight
In a way, you have to feel sorry for Rocksteady. They had one unprecedented success with Arkham Asylum, then were forced to think of ways that game's X factor could be spread out in different ways - deciding to go open-world. Thing is, Arkham City, for all its freedoms around Gotham's streets, started to show that the series' gameplay is best suited to tightly-designed levels that allow for player experimentation, not free-form exploration.
Cut to Arkham Knight (because nobody ever seems to count Origins, despite it being a pretty solid tale), and they doubled down on the open-world stuff, adding the Batmobile. Personally, I love the feel of kicking in the scorching nitrous boost and tearing off down a back alley to blast perps in the face with assorted non-lethal firearms, but the Riddler Raceways and half-baked vehicle puzzles showed the team were really struggling to force its importance down our throats.
Add in the story stuff, where the titular Arkham Knight's identity actually was an established character and not "a totally new creation" as we'd been lead to believe, add a totally pointless Joker appearance that went back on his death from City, and top it off with overly-expensive Season Passes and a PC version so broken, Warner Bros. refunded thousands who bought it.
It's a crying shame that this is how Rocksteady are bowing out of their own greatest success story, but ultimately, Arkham Knight is one hell of a damp squib finale to an otherwise explosive trilogy.
9. Assassin's Creed III
No, not Brotherhood - let's take the Ezio trilogy as all being part of the second game, as it's through numbered sequels that really differentiate and categorise trilogies in the long run.
For any who played it, Assassin's Creed III started out in the most peculiar way - neglecting to put you in the shoes of Connor who we'd seen in the various trailers, but instead Haytham Kenway, an Englishman who ended up being revealed as a Templar in one of the best plot twists in gaming history.
From there on out though, it was a weird transition that snowballed into a total lack of direction for the game overall. Resource management factored into reviving a dilapidated homestead for no reason, graphics and glitches abounded as it was clear the game had been rushed out to meet an annual release, and Desmond's modern day story took a one-way trip to cuckoo land as Des sacrificed himself to save the world. Yup, that happened...
Gameplay had lost its stealthy edge as Connor was a one-man slaughterhouse, and when the narrative pull wasn't even remotely there, the downfall of Assassin's Creed can be traced back to this game.
8. Fable III
Oh man, Fable III - the name conjures up horrific imagery of an ill-designed world map you had to 'visit' to check out, menu and inventory systems that controversial developer Peter Molyneux thought would be more 'special' to walk through, and a story that was supposed to delve into the acquisition and use of power, yet devolved into an empty theatre performance of lame Monty Python references.
Actually playing it was more of the same lighthearted RPG goodness that 1 and 2 had, yet with even more simplification when it came to spells and attacks, the assumption being that Lionhead were aiming for as big an audience as possible.
Honestly, has that ever worked? Has a game simplifying itself ever resulted in anything better? Just pause for thought, as it's a worrying trend the more you analyse later instalments in any given franchise. Fable III's minimising of all the aspects we loved most was an immediately off-putting quality that defined it the more hours you played - a truly terrible end to a franchise essentially sold on the inflated lies of Mr. Molyneux from day one.
7. Uncharted 3
By itself, Uncharted 3 isn't necessarily a 'bad' video game - it's just too much of the same, coming from a series that saw a monumental step up between Uncharted's 1 and 2.
On the gameplay side, Naughty Dog mentioned that they really just wanted to see what crazy concoctions of code they could conjure up when it came to level design. Hence the overturned tanker, a ton of physics-based set-pieces like the aeroplane crash, and levels that occasionally felt overwhelming when it came to enemy placement and the amount of things happening at once.
Drake didn't receive any new abilities other than the option to kick out of an enemy grabbing him, and it ended up making U3 feel like a strange entry in the series overall. Like a tacked-on sequel in an action franchise; you knew what you were getting, but the shrug of "meh" has gone on to symbolise its existence ever since.
6. Fallout 3
Hey, hey, woah, put down the pitchforks there, stabby - you'll see reason soon enough.
So think Fallout, and you'll think of first-person shooting, character-builds and slow-motion V.A.T.S. systems, right? Wrong.
Originally, the series was in the trusted hands of Black Isle Studios, a team that had built one hell of a fanbase around the original two games' isometric gameplay, focussing on character interaction, hardcore state-progression and copious dollops of humour.
When Bethesda bought them out and acquired the license back in 2007, the in-progress Fallout 3 (codenamed Van Buren) was canned as Bethesda used Oblivion's GameBryo engine to completely remodel the franchise into more of a first-person shooter. Ever since then, fans have been divided; you've got the old-school lovers of Black Isle's work who adore the top-down exploits of fleshing out every aspect of their character (and now enjoy the Wasteland series for doing the same), and you have the 'new' Fallout fans, who came in when F3 went massive and adore what Bethesda did.
Either way, what Fallout 3 was pitched and eventually released as, are two completely different games.
5. Jak 3
In the run-up to Jak 3 coming out, we were always a bit cautious about Naughty Dog taking the sci-fi style world of Jak 2's Haven City, as a ton of the appeal was mixing flying cars with your own slick hoverboard, kick-flipping over guards' heads as you drank in the exemplary world design.
For J3 though, almost all of that was gone in favour of a Mad Max-style tale of plodding through the wasteland. The focus was on unlocking bigger and more gnarly-looking rides, with some really disappointingly floaty physics backing up the handling of the cars themselves.
It didn't help that exploration was discouraged by bands of marauders who'd blast your behind to Kingdom Come if you ventured too far out, either, and although Jak's abilities were fleshed out to include contrasting Light and Dark Eco paths, it felt too disconnected from the series' highpoint that was the second instalment.
4. Hitman: Contracts
Weirdly, all Contracts had to do off the back of Silent Assassin's brilliant game engine was tighten up the screws. Animation needed a spit n' polish, the alert system that seemed to sporadically go crazy definitely needed overhauling, and for the most part, fans just wanted more levels.
Well, they delivered on that last point, but didn't remedy a single thing about the previous two - in fact, your movement in Contracts felt even more stiff and weird, with the notorious 'skating' effect happening if you pushed too many directions at once, seeing Agent 47 glide everywhere instead of walking.
The ragdoll animations were as explosively weightless as ever, mission designs only had the occasional standout moment (taking down the Meat King in his abattoir), and it mostly felt like like an additional mission pack, rather than anything truly substantial. Again, this would've been totally fine, but only if IO Interactive had listened to the negatives, rather than just the positives.
3. Doom 3
There's a good reason you haven't heard from Doom in 12 years; the last time iD Software attempted to continue the legacy of John Romero's legendary franchise, they - for want of a better word - 'ballsed it up somewhat'.
Critics appeared to love it, despite mentioning numerous issues such as being hampered by switching between flashlights and firearms, or feeling like the change in tonal direction from FPS to slow corridor-crawling shock-fest wasn't what anybody wanted to see.
It turned into one of those expectation bubble-bursting games that the fanbase just couldn't get on board with, not when the previous two entries had made their name off the back of weapons like the 'Big F*cking Gun', or had you slice your own name through enemy hordes with a chainsaw.
Doom 4 looks to be restoring the old, arena-based thrills and gore-drenched spills of the originals later in 2016, so here's hoping those 12 years have served the developers right.
2. God Of War III
God of War's base hack n' slash formula felt immediately timeless back in 2005, in a really "Why didn't anybody else do this?!" sort of way. Quick-time events and square, square, triangle combos rang true for the hefty 20-plus hour adventures that were God of War 1 and 2, with the latter hitting a high-point thanks to the perfect marriage of violence and a pacy narrative that saw Kratos' motivations match up with the Gods he was vying to take down.
Then... God of War 3 happened. Kratos had become a caricature of himself, an angry bald idiot who'd gut and flay all around him if it meant he got his way. The game had you throwing slaves into whirring cogs to solve puzzles, sleeping with another imprisoned man's wife and then killing him when he found out - across the board it was aiming for some sort of ultimate power fantasy, yet falling down at every turn.
At this point in the series' history we were all but completely desensitised to things being torn in half or innards flying everywhere, so it fell to GoW 3 to attempt to wow us through spectacle alone; a graphics-first approach that ended up being its downfall when you realised what was at the core, had been devoid of life for quite some time.
1. Mass Effect 3
The Grandaddy of Disappointment, the Emperor of Emptiness and the Lord of Letting You Down (or something), Mass Effect 3's story is one for the history books.
Every gamer knows of its ridiculous final 20 minutes, where we went from a fairly grounded (in its own reality) tale of a multi-racial force uniting to battle an unstoppable threat, only to find a childish AI was controlling them the whole time. However, the reality behind why it was so utterly broken remains fascinating for all the wrong reasons.
Firstly, Prothean character Javik (someone with literally all the answers, being he'd fought the Reapers before) was initially intended to be on the disc, alongside a ton of additional story content later released as DLC, as EA forced Bioware to get the game out far sooner than their development schedule actually required.
This marked the first time a high-profile publisher had meddled with a vested franchise in such a manner, and the results were catastrophically bad for all involved. Bioware saw their reputation in tatters as fans mounted several petitions to demand the 'real ending' (which they caved and expanded on), and EA were publicly voted the 'Worst Company in America' by Consumerist for what was now public knowledge of their actions.
Mass Effect 3 went down so badly, so severely and so violently, that even though Andromeda sounds absolutely fantastic - the amount of negativity it has to surmount is unprecedented.
What final entry in a given trilogy left you completely at a loss? Let us know in the comments!
No comments:
Post a Comment