How many Call of Duty games will we see before the franchise folds? How many different Halo games can there be? Even referring back to an earlier post (therssfeeds.blogspot.com/2011/02/who-can-catch-em-all-anymore-theres-too.html), the Pokémon franchise just refuses to quit.
I get that there are certain franchises that have a story to tell and can’t fit it all into one game. I also get that the company executives want to get the most money they can out of something that is a proven success. It’s good business for them to do so and they’d be dumb not to, but sometimes enough is enough. You can only take an idea so far before it just becomes...old hat.
You can’t sell the same thing with just minor improvements or changes either. Oh look you now have two wrist blades in Assassin's Creed 2 instead of just one. Look we added a new texture to this map, we can totally resell it as new now! That just doesn’t cut it, and yet it still happens.
This holds true for anything artistic though. If we look at the movie industry they fall prey to the same problems. There are so many times that a movie series just needs to be ended. The Fast and the Furious movies, the Land Before Time series (of which there are thirteen movies and one TV series), or the Friday the 13th franchise which has twelve now, are all movie series that have just been milked for all they’re worth. They’re not even quality movies anymore. The Land Before Time was an iconic movie of my childhood (the original being released in 1988) and to think that there are now twelve other movies under that umbrella is just depressing.
Stagnation kills when it comes to the creative field of work. If you look at some of the bands that have been around for a long time, you’ll notice an evolution in their sound. This comes from both the maturing of the artists as they age, as well as the changes in tastes of the majority of the listening base.
If you don’t evolve as a franchise you’ll get looked over and eventually left in the dust. The worst thing that can happen to you is for people to think “Oh, I’ve already experienced the previous iterations of this...I don’t need to get/see the new one”.
It does take a certain amount of guts to abandon a system that was a proven way to make money and just say “We’re going to change pretty much everything”. To me the best example of a company doing just that was the Mass Effect series. Between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 the development team listened to many of the things that the fanbase was saying and did a major overhaul of the interface of the game. They changed some of the combat, streamlined the use of extra things, and just built on the successes they’d had in the first game. It’s great to see that there’s a company out there who really does take into consideration what the fans are saying.
In doing so they created a game that was not only a sequel, but something that felt like a totally fresh game that just continued the storyline from its predecessor.
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