Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Season of the Sequel!

During a recession it’s easy to see why companies want to stick with successful intellectual properties, and we’re certainly still mired in financial turbulence as a world and an industry. Even so it seems like late 2009 and early 2010 are heavy with blockbuster sequels of a combination of tried and true properties and breakout hits of yesterday. While a certain amount of sequelage is to be expected, especially while Acitivion continues their tradition of releasing a new Call of Duty game each year, it feels to me as if winter of 2009 and 2010 are especially heavy with high profile sequels.

Of course some of the credit should rest on 2007, which had a staggering array of top shelf releases. 2007 remains a golden year in my mind, which feels wrong to me. It’s not even a prime. Why should it have had the likes of Bioshock, Modern Warfare, Metroid Prime and Assassin’s Creed? And 2008 was an incredible year as well, with Left4Dead reshaping the concept of multiplayer games by taking what used to be an optional mode of play for certain games and making it into an entire game, Fallout 3 changing the way stories were told and Grand Theft Auto 4 meeting expectations, if just barely. Of course, it’s worth noting that two of those examples were themselves sequels, and one of those sequels was released during the 2008 holiday season as well.

But something about the more recent slough of releases seems more pervasive, less like a celebration of previous titles and more like attempts to make money with safe bets on existing intellectual property still vibrant in public memory. Some of them, like Left4Dead 2, received massive public outcry, some of it quite reasonable. A sequel to a game which could’ve been called out as content light and, when considered in light of its roots, really is little more than a repurposing and repackaging of the same technology behind Counterstrike.

But since it has emerged most of the criticism for Left4Dead 2 has stopped. Cries that there wasn’t enough content to warrant a $50 price tag were stilled when users saw that the game was much, much more than a reskin and a retooling of existing content. It’s difficult to articulate the way that Left4Dead 2 reshaped the concepts laid out in Left4Dead without making the differences sound facile. But the manner in which the new finales work, the balance of the new weapons and new weapon mechanics, new healing items and the new game play modes like Scavenge all add a layer of depth to the game that it really lacked before. Paired with the addition of user created content, Left4Dead 2 took the foundation that Left4Dead had laid and expanded it in both reasonable and totally unexpected ways. It elevated what the first title had accomplished without ignoring the problems facing the original Left4Dead. It did exactly what a sequel should do.

It wasn’t the only high profile sequel to do so. Assassin’s Creed 2, for example, both expanded the world of Assassin’s Creed and the control scheme in response to criticisms that the first game had been clumsy and content light in its treatment of combat. It also, reportedly, involved an incomprehensible story twist later in the game, continuing the first game’s tradition of meaningless story twists, throwaway characters and visits to various places of historical significance without any real context. But for every game like L4D2 (which I type here solely because it resembles R2D2) you seem to end up with a sequel like Modern Warfare 2.

MW2 represents the worst aspects of sequels, to me. It fails to innovate the design of the original game, often cribbing from it in order to gain mileage from the amazing qualities the first Modern Warfare had without deconstructing why those elements worked or attempting to develop those elements into a more refined, controlled framework for play. Instead it simply expanded elements of the first game wildly, throwing killstreak perks, weapon attachments and new equipment at characters without considering how or why these items worked in the original Modern Warfare. It is a testament to the strength of the first game and the shorthand that Modern Warfare 2 borrowed from it that I’ve spent as much time playing and enjoying it as I have. I do so almost reticently, gritting my teeth as I try to unlock my thermal scope on my Vector, because I feel as if I’m playing a crappier version of Modern Warfare which still enthralls me with its incredibly addictive leveling system. The single player, of course, is something to be abandoned by the wayside as quickly as possible. It is difficult to overstate how thoroughly Infinity Ward missed the point of what worked and didn’t work in their first game and how ham-handedly they translated that into their second.

Which is still not to say that sequels are bad or that Modern Warfare 2 is a bad game for being a sequel – it is simply a bad sequel, a sequel that fails. Perhaps some of this stems from Mackey McCandlish replacing Keith Arem as design lead, or perhaps it came from the increased attention or pressure from Activision that Infinity Ward received after the immense commercial success of the first Modern Warfare. Whatever the explanation truly is, Modern Warfare 2 is a bad sequel, and it makes me worry for other high profile sequels. Mass Effect 2 has already fallen under some quiet criticism on the blogs of a few critics, even before the pre-release embargo on reviews has lifted, and Bioshock 2 has an unsettling lack of designers who worked to make the first Bioshock such an incredible game.

And this is what worries me about this sort of sequel-crazy design approach. People purchasing these games won’t have a clue whether or not they were developed by different teams. Instead they’ll just purchase them based on the strength of the first title. That means they’re both guaranteed to sell like hotcakes, but it could prove disastrous if either of these games turn out to be bad. Bioshock 2 is something I’m especially nervous about in this respect, because a Bioshock 2 flop could mean a black mark on Irrational’s reputation, despite their total lack of involvement with the game.

The other downside is that we’ve seen fewer risky new IPs emerging this year. Games like Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space, dark horses with no known quantities involved in their production and new ideas (or in the case of the latter, the appearance of new ideas) about their genres aren’t appearing this holiday season. Instead we have safer fresh faces like Brutal Legend and Dragon Age, which aren’t risky in the slightest. Even Borderlands, which was the holiday season’s biggest unknown quantity, came from a team of veteran developers and enjoyed an aggressive marketing campaign leading up to and following its relief. It’s a little disappointing to see this new kind of risk-taking emerging, to see the focus fall on making money from titles instead of establishing remarkable titles and to let the cash flow based on that, and it’s more unsettling to see it centered around so many of the best titles from the last three years, but I suppose I shouldn’t cry foul before these games come out.

The trend of recent sequels, even when it disappoints, hasn’t actually been a bad thing for gaming. Even poor sequels, like Modern Warfare 2, generated pretty good games, and some of the sequels, like Left4Dead 2, completely changed the atmosphere surrounding their genre. Bioshock 2 and Mass Effect 2 remain risky in every sense but the commercial one, however, and that represents an unsettling trend that companies are taking away from focusing on the content they produce and concerning themselves more with issues like branding and marketing. It’s a bit immature to cry foul about it, games are certainly a business first and foremost for publishers, but I can’t help but feel somewhat justified in my concerns so long as sequels are created less than two years later by completely new sets of developers and enjoy marketing lead ins which can take us much time to sift through as the games themselves. We’ve been lucky with the sequel glut so far, but so long as we aren’t trying anything new we’re threatening to stall ourselves as a community, and it would be a shame to see that happen as we push closer and closer to a new golden age of gaming.