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Simply put: when a 3D sequel is not as well received as a 2D original, usually because a Video Game 3D Leap often requires more skill and talent than some developers have.
There are two aspects of dimensionality when it comes to games. A game can be rendered in 2D or 3D, and the gameplay can be 2D or 3D. All 4 combinations have been seen.
Switching from one of these combinations to another, especially going from 2D/2D to 3D/3D is fraught with peril. Particularly in the early days of 3D rendering, art styles that were painstakingly developed in 2D could be lost in the transition to 3D rendering due to lack of hardware capable of bringing it to life in 3D. And of course, there are some art styles that simply don't work in 3 dimensions at all.
Gameplay offers some very perplexing challenges too. A direct adaptation of 2D gameplay into 3D gamespaces can cause things like the dreaded Camera Screw. 3D gameplay, by necessity of both viewpoint and larger gamespace, needs to take things a bit slower than their 2D cousins.
Then, there's the version where developers forgot about trying to port the 2D gameplay into a 3D world, and just use 3D gameplay that is not entirely unlike what the 2D gameplay had. Freedom overload can ensue, where developers become so enamored with building a gigantic world that they forget to actually put interesting things into it. Puzzles that would have been simpler in a 2D game can become exceedingly complicated because of the changed viewpoint.
Oddly enough, for RPGs and adventure games, 3D rendering once was much more limiting than 2D. Consider a set of shelves with miscellaneous bottles on it. In 2D, this is part of the background; it costs comparatively little. In 3D, each bottle must have polygons, which means the quality of that bookshelf goes way down. You only get so many polygons per frame, so they should be spent on actual characters.
Add to this the lack of tilemapping: a common 2D technique for reusing images. Through tilemapping, it was possible for designers to create large terrain, with stuff in it, fairly easily. The time to develop one area would be pretty much the same as any other. You couldn't do that with 3D in the early days; every room had to be hand-built from scratch. You could reuse textures, maybe certain decorations (chairs, tables, etc), but that's about it: the basic blocking of each area had to be done from scratch.
What you get is that some games that had large 2D worlds seemed to get compressed in their 3D outings. This isn't as much a problem nowadays, but in the early days of 3D rendering, it was pretty widespread.
Be aware though, sometimes good 3D video-game adaptations are accused of this, mainly because the fans don't like to see their original product change. Notice that very similar games with no "2-D prequels" were often well received.
On the other hand, when this trope was common, not being in 3D could also invoke It's the Same, Now It Sucks among fans, so some game producers didn't have a real choice but to try. ( and many failed)
Examples:
Action Adventure
Action Game
- Bomberman hit the Polygon Ceiling a bit harshly with the 64 series, not receiving very good reviews in general (the N64 games still have their fan base, the same however can not be said about Bomberman Act Zero). The main problem with this is that the 2D multiplayer game is pretty much all that people ever want to play, but 3D has demanded such things as a single-player story mode or a Darker and Edgier retool whereas the multiplayer is generally the same.
- They later tried again when the Gamecube rolled around and broke through the ceiling just fine with Bomberman Generation and Bomberman Jetters, having made the smart move of giving only the single-player mode 3D gameplay while keeping the multiplayer the same as with the 2D games. It's a pity, though... they could have paved the way for a lot of remarks about why he's called Bomberman.
- Hudson Soft first tried creating a 3D Bomberman game way back in 1984. The result, Bomberman 3D for the MSX, people tend to either love or hate (as with all first person 3D games of that time).
- The disappointing reception of the two Appaloosa-developed Contra games, Contra: Legacy of War and C: The Contra Adventure, led to Canon Discontinuity and the series sticking to 2D with Contra: Shattered Soldier, Contra 4, and Contra Rebirth. Although Neo Contra was better received, likely due to the fact that it plays more like the overhead stages from Super Contra than the Appaloosa games.
Adventure Game
- Adventure Games, generally speaking, have not dealt with the transition to the 3D era well.
- The Monkey Island series fell victim to this with Escape from Monkey Island, mostly from the awkwardness of the controls and ugliness of the first-generation 3-D graphics. The script was less well-received than the previous games in the series as well.
- Similarly, Simon the Sorcerer 3D was criticised for its ugly graphics and awkward controls, amongst other things.
- Quest For Glory V, King's Quest VIII, and the more recent Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude all caused their respective series to drop in quality during the jump to 3-D.
- Kings Quest Mask Of Eternity was a Franchise Killer for a series that was once at the pinnacle of the graphic adventure genre. The 3D models were downright ugly, and almost none of the characters from the original King's Quest series showed up in the game aside from brief cameos. Camera control was clunky and unwieldy, and the game suffered from Loads and Loads of Loading, even on computers more than optimized for its primitive graphics. A Darker and Edgier plot, revelling in horror tropes - in a series noted for its humour - and almost no real puzzles - in, let us remember, an Adventure Game. Attempts to shoehorn in action/RPG elements and combat due to Executive Meddling only served to drive the point home that this was a King's Quest game In Name Only.
- After an extremely successful run with Gabriel Knight, the series went through two separate clashes with this trope. The first sequel had full-motion-video gameplay in a 2D environment, while Gabriel Knight 3 went into 3D. While both sequels had strong storylines, they were very difficult to play and caused many fans of the first game to abandon the series.
- It's worth noting that many of the games above have reasons other than the 3D that better explain their failures. All of the titles above tried to distance themselves from their Adventure Game roots which had made their series famous, and this is generally the most cited reason as to why the sucked. QFG V was much more action- and combat-oriented then its predecessor, bordering towards a hack'n'slash Action RPG, and suffered from a much poorer story than its predecessors, with a setting who was not as deeply explored as that of the previous games. KQ VIII was an action platformer with barely any ties to the previous games in terms of story, while LSL: MCL was created long after most games had made the jump to 3D, and unlike its predecessor, was a collection of minigames and was more censored than its predecessors. Sierra (who made the three games mentioned above) was bought out by a larger corporation and suffered insane amounts of Executive Meddling in the form of layoffs, closures and product redesigns.
- Indeed, as a counterexample, Grim Fandango is considered one of LucasArts' best adventures, yet is 3D/3D (albeit with prerendered backdrops). It's not this trope, though, as there we no preceding 2D games, and it was still criticised for the awkward controls. Discworld Noir is a successful example of a 2D-controls, 3D-rendering adventure, although it has no particular ties to the previous Discword adventures.
Beat 'em Up
- Final Fight: Streetwise was perhaps one of the worst Final Fight games ever, since along with the natural problems of 3D polygon ceiling bestowed upon it, it also had a Darker and Edgier plot, no ability to play as any other members of the FF cast and too much ghetto brown, making it a Franchise Killer.
- The Saturn-based Final Fight Revenge wasn't much better. For some reason, Capcom had their American team develop a 3D Fighting Game spinoff to Final Fight on a platform that wasn't as popular in America as it was in Japan and wasn't known for its 3D capabilities to begin with. Aside for having ugly 3D graphics and generic gameplay (with the only gameplay aspect from Final Fight being the ability to pick-up weapons, although they manage to ruin this too by adding firearms), the game also had some of the most ludicrous Super Moves in any fighting game, with Edi E.'s Super Move having him run over his opponent in a police car that looks more like a go-kart. It has to be seen to be believed. Then there's the final boss, who is Belger from the first game, literally back from the dead. Not only do you fight a zombie version of Belger and get to use his arms as a weapon, he does the Thriller dance during the ending credits.
- Golden Axe took out co-op and added a convoluted fighting system. People didn't like it.
Fighting Game
- Most of the popular series from the golden age of 2-D tournament fighters — Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown — haven't been able to make a successful leap to 3-D gameplay, despite repeated attempts. This is largely due to the fact that Fighting Games are one of the genres most affected by the addition of a third dimension. Many of the mechanics of 2-D fighters don't translate well without a serious reworking, and such reworkings, even when successful, can destroy the sense of continuity that a successful franchise thrives on.
- There are two key aspects to this. First, the 3-D gameplay is usually slower than its 2-D counterpart, making the games less dynamic (something required for a fighting game). Second, the projectiles, which are a key element of 2-D fighters, hardly ever work effectively in 3-D.
- Street Fighter, originally had stumbled into 3-D gameplay with its non-canon Street Fighter EX line (especially and most specifically EX3). They seem to have taken another direction with the "2.5D" Street Fighter IV, which utilizes 3-D graphics but retains the 2-D gameplay mechanics. Capcom later pulled the same 2.5-D move when it was time to bring Capcom vs. Whatever from the Sprite Polygon Mix of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Capcom vs. SNK 2 to the full 3-D of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom and Marvel vs. Capcom 3.
- Actually, the EX series was also 2.5D, and shared many elements with IV (even introducing a large amount of them, or at least the basis for them) to the point that one could consider the games to be SFIV, only about a decade early. Of course, seeing as EX created a Broken Base by making the games 3D in the first place, it's easy to see why fans tend to gloss this over.
- Mortal Kombat is particularly guilty of this, with the gameplay and fatality systems being rebuilt with almost every new game.
- After Midway went bankrupt and got absorbed into Warner Bros..'s game department, they apparently took this into account, and decided to make Mortal Kombat 9 in 2.5-D, using a 2D gameplay with 3D graphics and full gore. It succeeded.
- Mortal Kombat 4 was a weird case. Even when it was fully 3-D, the gameplay was not greatly altered from the previous games (with only one limited way to move on the Z-Axis), making it very faithful to the original 2-D games.
- The 3D entries weren't that bad to begin with; Deception was a decent fighter and Deadly Alliance before it helped inject new blood into the series. Most of Armageddon's complaints were about the story, the fact that they crammed Loads and Loads of Characters in for no apparent reason, and the removal of character-specific fatalities. And after that the Story Breaker Team Up-induced Bowdlerising for MK vs. DCUniverse...
- There were also franchise's attempts at breaking into a new genre, mainly Beat 'Em Ups; while the 2D Mortal Kombat Mythologies Sub Zero wasn't too bad (the controls were rather awkward, but it looked and felt distinctly like an MK game should), but the 3D Special Forces was atrocious, and their attempt at "retelling" MK2 with Shaolin Monks was painful in its sheer amount of not caring about the storyline; however, its gameplay was praised by the critics.
- For Special Forces, it probably doesn't help that the creative team behind it (including series co-creator John Tobias) quit Midway midway through development, thereafter the remaining brood rushed it to development.
- One Must Fall Battlegrounds attempted to do jump to 3D but failed due to many functionality problems. It was one of the most promising games ever made, but the bugs, lack of pilot/robot progress, inability to go through the arenas fast and awkward controls made for a big disappointment.
- The King Of Fighters got around this with a "2.5D" subseries a la SFIV (in fact, predating it), the Maximum Impact line. For those who still aren't comfortable with the idea, it is explicitly an Alternate Continuity; the main games still use sprites. In a strange inversion, KOF XII, which is sprite-based, proceeded to bomb. One of the reasons is how they scaled back on everything - half of the roster had been cut, and the main gameplay mode was nothing more than a glorified time trial.
- SNK's 3D hardware (the Hyper Neogeo 64 system) was abandoned after a couple years despite passable graphics and the system having a handful of competent games. So Okay It's Average fare just didn't pique enough interest to justify the expense, and other hardware out there at the time was more powerful with more titles. Essentially consigned to 2D in a world gone gaga for 3D games, SNK went bankrupt (for a time). You could say that the entire company was a victim of the Polygon Ceiling; most of its franchises hit it at some point.
- Nintendo's platform-fighting game series Super Smash Bros. was 2.5-D (3D models moving on a 2D plane) from the start.
- This article by Seth Killian, who would later become Capcom's adviser for all things Street Fighter, pretty much explains why 2D has remained viable in the face of 3D.
- The cult Wrestling Game series Fire Pro Wrestling has had exactly one 3D installment, at Sony's insistence. It was so incredibly bad, and sold so very poorly, that Human Entertainment, the makers of the game, vowed never to take the series into 3D again — a vow that is still held to this day.
- With that said, Spiritual Successor series King of Colosseum did a far better job of bringing the Fire Pro Wrestling formula to 3-D, generally being described as "What the 3-D FPW should've been."
Platform Game
- As the biggest shining example in gaming, Sonic the Hedgehog was originally one of the most beloved and popular franchises in the business, standing with the venerable Mario as a symbol of the early-to-mid-90s Console Wars. While there are a lot of reasons why the series has fallen, some of the commonly cited reasons are the unusual control and camera problems of the 3D games (which have experienced their ups and downs throughout the series). It was dodged at first (or, at most bumped very lightly) because Sonic's first adventures in 3D were still loved by fans, but after that things started to go downhill. It is still a top selling franchise, so it hasn't crashed and burned as much as some might have you believe — but hitting the Polygon Ceiling has certainly hurt its overall reputation (Despite the better quality of the games these days, there is still a lingering negativity toward the franchise among the gamer crowd) and Sonic's days of being in direct competition with Mario are over (as if Sega dropping out of the console business and these games didn't have anything to do with it, also).
- Mega Man X 7 tried to take the existing series into 3-D, and hit the polygon ceiling hard. X8 wisely returned to 2-D gameplay with polygon graphics, save for two highly annoying 3-D vehicle levels.
- Although the 3-D Mega Man Legends games were quality games in their own right, they sold poorly largely because they didn't "feel" like Mega Man games. Series developer Capcom has indicated no plans to revisit any Mega Man series in 3-D, preferring to stick with portable releases along with occasional 2-D outings on consoles (both of which invariably draw cries of Capcom Sequel Stagnation). Well, until September 29, 2010 that is...or so it seemed.
- Earthworm Jim fell victim to this trope heavily, as it abandoned almost all of the gameplay elements (not to mention many of the series' characters) in its jump to 3-D. It also didn't help that the series creator, Doug TenNapel, was completely excluded from its development.
- Bubsy the Bobcat's original 2-D games have their fan base and are generally considered a Love It or Hate It, but the series' only 3-D entry, Furbitten Planet, was so bad that it put the bobcat out of his job.
- Platform classic Prince of Persia had a highly unsuccessful and forgotten sequel called Prince 3-D, which received savage panning.
- Five or six years later, the series was re-designed in 3-D with a greater emphasis on combat and differently-implemented platforming, leading to the successful Sands of Time series; the franchise hasn't looked back since. It even brought Le Parkour to video games.
- The richly designed and smoothly animated platformer Flashback was followed up with a stiff, boxy, Third Person Shooter titled Fade To Black that felt like wading through a bog.
Puzzle Game
- Lemmings 3D. Lemmings Revolution kept the 3D graphics, but reverted to 2D gameplay.
- Pariodied in one minigame in Looney Tunes Duck Amuck, where Daffy Duck wants to be in a really advanced game "with graphics up the wazoo", and becomes a very blocky collection of polygons.
Role-Playing Game
- Dawn of Mana already deviated from formula by turning a successful 2-D action-RPG into an 3-D action-platformer with minimal RPG Elements. It went on to have one of the worst camera systems for a PS2 platformer, and mission-objective arrows that pointed directly at solid walls. It also stripped you of all your upgrades at the end of a level, making what few RPG Elements it had entirely pointless.
- Ultima IX. Shrunken world, idiotic dialog, a complete reversal or ignorance of previous games. But it's 3D, it'll sell!
- The first eight Might & Magic games used sprites for NPC's, monsters, trees, etc (in a 3D world in 6 thru 8) and were quite good. M&M 9 was fully rendered. It was also full of bugs, had ridiculous looking characters with flat faces, trees with a few 'blades' of leaves, and a UI with a fraction of the functions of its predecessors. Its creators were already going broke on its development, and the product made sure they stayed that way.
Shoot 'Em Up
- The nearly-forgotten Solar Assault Gradius. It's a perfectly fine game, but it's arcade-only and hard to play using emulators. All subsequent entries in the ((Gradius}} series went back to 2-D.
Simulation Game
Sports Game
Third Person Shooter
- The first Oddworld games — the 2-D Abe's games — are considered the best by fans of the series. Not only did the transition to 3-D affect the quality of gameplay, due to such things as an inability to see the entire environment, the dark tone of the first two games was lightened in the storyline of Munch's Oddysee, making it "not as good as before". The apparent solution was a Genre Shift, with a First-Person Shooter (Stranger's Wrath) and an eternally delayed Real Time Strategy (The Hand of Odd), but not long after, Oddworld Inhabitants left the game industry.
Turn Based Strategy
- Worms 3D is a great example of this trope. New dimension adds only frustration and makes the game look worse (nice sprites vs. bad, low-polygon models).
- That Hogs Of War had come out some time earlier, adding a bunch of stuff to the formula besides the extra axis of movement and getting Rik Mayall to provide most of the voice-acting, cannot have helped either.
- To their credit the developers did address most of the key issues in Worms 4. However, the damage had already been done by the previous game and Worms 4 flopped so badly that it nearly bankrupted the developer. After that, Team 17 promised that no matter how powerful consoles or computers got, there would never, ever be another 3D Worms game (although they have also admitted that they're still experimenting with 3D internally, just in case they come up with a set of working mechanics, but it's extremely unlikely to ever be turned into an actual product).
- After the success of Reloaded, they published Worms Mayhem, an Updated Rerelease of 3D and 4 bundled together. It has to be seen if they have really managed to rework the mechanics, or if they're just scraping the bottom of the barrel (around the same time, they have published a Worms minigolf game).
- Scorched Earth was a fun, easy to play 2D artillery combat game. Freeware sequel Scorched 3D added the third dimension, making gameplay a whole lot harder and more frustrating.
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