Modern video games practically come prepackaged with the guarantee of a sequel.
Some new franchises even have multi-game arcs mapped out before work even begins on a prototype.
Of course, developers' hopes don't always pan out, and not every game meets with success
— especially if it's just not very good.
From veteran teams collapsing under the weight of their own ambitions, to beloved franchises
suffering surprising missteps, here are video games that turned out so bad, they had to
scrap plans for their sequels.
Too Human to hit it big
In the late '90s, developer Silicon Knights wanted to create the next massive narrative
epic.
Their ambitious project, titled Too Human, combined sci-fi aesthetics with Norse legends
and was set to take full advantage of current gen capabilities.
It promised a huge world to explore, a rich mythology to discover, and a blistering blend
of combat styles.
It's fair to say that Silicon Knights had high hopes for the title.
"A lot of people think of 'Too Human' as an action game with some RPG elements.
'Too Human' is actually a complete fusion of deep RPG, with action."
But the ill-fated game struggled from the start, suffering numerous delays and console
switches, not to mention friction between the developer and engine-maker Epic Games.
So once the title finally did release in 2008 for the Xbox 360, it really had to break out
as a megahit in order to recoup both the coin and the energy spent on it.
Unfortunately, it did neither.
Reviewers were not kind, and gamers by and large gave Too Human a pass thanks to bland
combat, oversimplified controls, and overall mediocre gameplay.
Silicon Knights had hoped to create a full trilogy out of the IP, but with the critical
and commercial failure of the title, the sequel never came to pass.
The Order was disbanded
Blending Arthurian mythology with a steampunk setting and supernatural elements, The Order:
1886 offered a unique setting along with plenty of action and intrigue.
In a way, the game came as a result of the lessons developer Ready at Dawn had learned
from working on a number of God of War games for the PSP.
With the graphical capabilities first-party Sony games are known for, The Order was set
to be the hottest new game in the PlayStation lineup.
But...
"It no longer matters, monsieur."
Reviewers skewered the game for being surprisingly limp and shockingly short.
Far from being the next God of War, The Order: 1886 became lost in the crowd, and quickly
fell out of the gaming conversation.
The rights to the series remained with Sony, which meant that even though Ready at Dawn
was prepared to expand The Order into an entire series, the franchise's fate was left in the
publisher's hands.
There's been no word of any new The Order game, and Ready at Dawn has since moved on
to other projects like the cutesy brawler Deformers and VR space station adventure Lone
Echo.
Looks like The Order's gone the way of a werewolf and taken a silver bullet to the heart.
Mass Effect: Andromeda is lost in space
When the curtain fell on beloved sci-fi trilogy Mass Effect, few gamers believed the successful
IP was finished.
Surely, BioWare would return to the Milky Way galaxy soon, even if the story of Commander
Shepard and the Normandy's crew had come to an end.
Mass Effect did indeed return, but not to the Milky Way.
The fourth game in the series would take the adventure to the Andromeda galaxy, and BioWare
really wanted to emphasize the "galaxy" part.
The initial designs called for hundreds of procedurally generated planets that the player
could explore at will.
However, these ambitious aims proved to be more than the studio could handle.
For both creative and technical reasons, Mass Effect: Andromeda had to be rebuilt and scoped
down several times, resulting in a final game that felt scattered and unfocused.
Andromeda released to scores far below what BioWare was used to — and what fans spent
five years waiting for.
The game's notoriously bad facial animations — which became something of an internet
laughing stock — didn't exactly help the doomed title.
In the end, sales failed to reach expectations.
The franchise, one of BioWare's core brands, was shelved, and all plans for a sequel were
subsequently cancelled.
Andromeda was simply the victim of high hopes gone wrong.
"Aw crap."
SiN Episodes went to hell
With the release of Valve's Steam service in the mid-2000s came the opportunity for
a new gaming model: the episodic format.
It was now possible to spend a fraction of a traditional game's development time making
smaller, bite-sized "episodes" of a single game that would be released over time.
Developer Ritual Entertainment put this idea to the test and got to work on a follow-up
to their 1998 shooter, SiN.
The result was SiN Episodes: Emergence, released in 2006 exclusively on Steam.
Running on Valve's own Source engine, the game had the graphics and mechanics of a triple-A
title, but was produced for only a fraction of the budget.
"Tell me: How do you expect this to end?"
Unfortunately, the game never caught on because of poor design and stale gameplay.
In the end, Emergence only managed 150,000 sales, only barely enough to recoup the costs
of development.
Ritual had originally intended to continue releasing installments of SiN Episodes — but
they never did.
Shortly afterwards, Ritual was acquired by MumboJumbo, a company known for its point-and-click
hidden object mystery games.
No official statements have been made about the future of SiN, but we're betting it's
gone back to the pile of bad ideas whence it crawled.
Wet dried out
Bethesda Softworks has released some of the biggest hits in history, including The Elder
Scrolls and the Fallout series.
But these titles were all produced internally.
In the late 2000s, Bethesda decided it was time to start publishing more projects developed
from outside the company.
One of their early pickups was a game called Wet from developer Artificial Mind and Movement.
Wet was a kind of video game equivalent of the Kill Bill films: a bloody revenge story
featuring a female lead as adept with a gun as she is with a sword.
Unlike Quentin Tarantino's homage to grindhouse cinema, however, Wet is all style and very
little substance.
Unfortunately for Bethesda, the game released to poor reviews, and its reception was hurt
by its subpar graphics, relatively short length, and poor controls.
Despite this, the studio was excited to announce a sequel was in the works in 2010… but nobody
else shared their enthusiasm.
Bethesda later publicly stated that they would not be publishing the sequel.
Without commercial or critical success to buoy it — and, now, without a publisher
— Wet 2 basically went up in flames.
The Thing stopped spreading
Despite directing The Thing, celebrated filmmaker John Carpenter never returned to the director's
chair for a sequel to his alien body horror flick.
So maybe that's what drove developer Computer Artworks to come along twenty years later
and make one in the form of a video game, also called The Thing, in which the player
takes the role of a military commander sent to investigate what had happened at the isolated
facility in the film.
Naturally, things go bad.
"I don't know what kinda game you're playing here, but it ends — now!"
And bad they went — but not for the reasons you might imagine.
The designers tried to work in the group-paranoia of the film as a fear/trust AI system, in
which other characters might suspect you of being an alien yourself, but it wasn't refined
enough to be very interesting.
The game was also faulted for a poor control scheme and a short playtime.
Unlike its namesake, it could not pull itself out of mediocrity.
Nevertheless, Computer Artworks did want to move on and make a sequel.
But The Thing just wasn't enough to keep the company afloat.
The studio went under, and with it, any hope for a new game.
In principle, Universal Interactive, the owners of The Thing, could have given the sequel
to somebody else, but they never did.
"Game over!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA."
Call of Duty: Ghosts was exorcised
Set in a near-future ravaged by nuclear conflict, 2013's Call of Duty: Ghosts introduced a team
of covert operatives desperately trying to fend off an invasion of the United States
by a coalition of South American nations.
Featuring the fast-paced action and persistent multiplayer rewards that had turned Call of
Duty into a juggernaut, Ghosts seemed like it would be a smash hit.
And indeed, it was — only, it didn't do as well as the developers had hoped.
The game played like a sequel mandated by corporate need and not artistic passion — even
for a Call of Duty game.
After the disappointment of Ghosts, a new narrative director, Taylor Kurosaki, was brought
on board to help guide Infinity Ward's next project.
Instead of developing a direct sequel to Ghosts, the team started from scratch and created
an entirely new game, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.
Consider these ghosts busted.
Thanks for watching!
Click the SVG icon to subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Plus check out all this cool stuff we know you'll love, too!
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét