Last few years I’ve been excitedly waiting for sequels from several small-to-medium sized studios that made highly acclaimed original games—I’m talking about Cities: Skylines, Kerbal Space Program, Planet Coaster, Frostpunk, etc.—yet each sequel was very poorly received to the point I wasn’t willing to risk my money buying it. Why do you think this happens when these developers already had a winning formula?

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[–] Konraddo@lemmy.world 23 points 1 day ago (3 children)

A great product does not necessarily mean there is a winning formula though. We have a trash sequel when the new game does not do something that the existing game does. Even worse, the existing features are locked behind additional payment, so why would players not continue to play the existing game?

KSP 2 - Let's forget the technical disaster. A lot of features are missing at the start. You could argue that it's in early access, but why would I pay for a product that does less? Then we add in the many bugs and performance issues, and you know it's game over.

Cities Skylines 2 - Again, you can't do everything you already can in CS1. Plus, the first game is supported by a huge number of mods. There's really no reason to play the new title. Again, it does not perform any better.

This is a weird take but I think remake or remastered these days are more like sequels than sequels, just because they keep the story and mechanics.

I find that game developers or many businesses try to reinvent the wheel when there's no reason to. Say the Subnautica sequel, why waste money on voice over, add a land mass, cut the beloved submarine, shorten the story and overall map size, all that. I will never understand and sincerely hope the next Subnautica title does not reinvent the wheel.

[–] SwampYankee@mander.xyz 11 points 1 day ago

Cities Skylines 2 - Again, you can’t do everything you already can in CS1. Plus, the first game is supported by a huge number of mods. There’s really no reason to play the new title. Again, it does not perform any better.

CS2 looks and performs better than the original now that a lot of the bugs have been squashed and optimizations are in place (in my experience, anyway). Its memory management in particular is way better than CS1. I don't get the simulation slow down to the same extent that I did in CS1 as the population increases.

The new road tools alone are reason enough for me to never go back to CS1. The service building upgrades are an added feature that's a big plus as well. I also find that the economy is a little more functional and transparent than in CS1 (again, after multiple patches).

I don't find the lack of bike lanes, quays, or modular industry to be so important as to ruin my enjoyment of what is otherwise a state of the art city building game.

[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, I don't want a sequel for sequel's sake. If you don't have an artistic or consumer perspective vision on why a sequel is needed or wanted you should be focusing on something that can be justified like that.

Story and exploration games have this built in. Why do players want a sequel? To have more story, to explore more, to return to this world once they've tired of the previous game. Rpgs are expensive, slow, and risky, but you basically never have to justify your next game.

The games mentioned here struggle there. KSP does what it does well. Any sequel comes with huge questions of why people would want another space program simulator, and it's clear that corporate just assumed that people would buy it because they loved the first one.

And that's not to say games that don't feel like a sequel is warranted can't benefit from one. Roguelikes are about as anti sequel as city builders and there are two roguelike sequels I love. Rogue legacy 2 was the devs reimagining the concept of the first game and making a higher budget (especially in gameplay) game that doesn't just feel like a cash grab. And Hades 2 is similar in many ways, but different enough to feel warranted and clearly made uncynically. It clearly exists because the leads felt there was more to do with the premise that didn't belong in the first game.

And there's the thing, I think that ksp probably did have a sequel in it. Something like a space colony sim where you're a space station having to build and manage ships and colonies, or something else may have been warranted or good. But it would've come from a creative lead wanting to do it rather than what clearly happened of a corporation purchasing the game and deciding that since they owned it they had to make a sequel to use the ip

[–] tal 2 points 20 hours ago

KSP does what it does well. Any sequel comes with huge questions of why people would want another space program simulator

I think that there were pretty clear ways to expand KSP that I would have liked.

There was limited capacity to build bases and springboard off resources from those.
I'd have liked to be able to set up programmed flight sequences.
More mechanics, like radiation, micrometeorite impacts, etc.
The physics could definitely have been improved upon in a number of ways. I mean, I've watched a lot of rockets springily bouncing around at their joints.
Some of the science-gathering stuff was kind of...grindy. I would have liked that part of the game to be revamped.
I don't think that graphics were a massive issue, but given how much time you spend looking at flames coming from rocket engines, it'd be nice to have improved on that somewhat. I'd have also liked some sort of procedural-terrain-generation system to permit for higher-resolution stuff when you're on the ground; yeah, you're mostly in the air or space, but when you're on the ground, the fidelity isn't all that great.

[–] 1984 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I wouldnt go that far. Skylines 2 has a new game engine. If it wouldnt have turned out to be incredibly slow, it would have been a very successful launch.

And I cant imagine anyone buying Skylines 2 if it used the same engine as Skylines 1. Then it truly would have been no point. The new engine was supposed to make cities more beautiful and more realistic. They just didnt manage to make it fast.

I unfortunately bought the game for 50 dollars on launch day and I have just 3 hours in it. I cant bring myself to play it because of the sluggish feeling.

[–] SwampYankee@mander.xyz 1 points 4 hours ago

When was the last time you played it? It's a hell of a lot better now.

[–] Konraddo@lemmy.world 2 points 19 hours ago

They just didnt manage to make it fast.

You are absolutely right. The vision for sequel can be good but the execution has to be equally sound too. In the ideal situation, I guess CS2 needs to be a rebuild of CS1 with a new engine, so it can fully replace CS1 right from the start, if not do something extra. They did a few things praiseworthy though, like baking in road lane customisation, which was done by mods in CS1.

But then, we are not too fair. Simulation games are different from RPG. Story has an ending and we want to see how it continues to develop. For simulation games, I don't think players want anything to be removed on a sequel, unless they are absolutely bad design. Even so, players expect QoL here and there to make their lives easier, which alone can be the single reason to buy the sequel.

[–] EowynCarter@lemm.ee 3 points 1 day ago

Last patch was an other gap performance wise.

Progress is slow, but it's getting there.