How can a video game series balance "keeping it fresh" and "staying true to its identity"?

This is a question that I've never seen asked before (trust me, I've Googled it). A lot of people can complain that their beloved or hated video game series is so "formulaic." But on one side there are series like Sonic and Star Fox that constantly adopt new gameplay elements that completely change the playstyle from previous installments. Sonic even does it within a single game.

On the other side there are series like Dynasty Warriors and Pokémon where the only differences are picking and choosing minor elements to take out and put in.

And then there's Mario. But I don't think people realize Mario is a very special case in that the bare minimum that a Mario game needs is to "jump on platforms" and "jump on enemies." As long as those two things are fulfilled, you can add anything to Mario and it can work.

So how can a developer keep a series fresh while still keeping it recognizable? Most other games that try to develop into a sustainable series have far more elements than the bare two elements that Mario does.

And there any series out there that can perfectly balance being different and being recognizably the same game? Particularly those that have more core elements than games like Mario?

Maybe the real solution is never make sequels, but we can't have that, can we?

This might turn into a shitstorm pretty fast, so I'll just state the obvious.

Keep the good parts in and the bad parts out. Continue to make use of mechanics that are signature to the series whilst throwing out all the Scrappy Mechanics. Analyze what people liked and didn't like. If you must tread on new ground, take it slow. Most importantly, hand out a variety of options for gameplay.

Do what Breath of the Wild did.

"Take it slow" treading on new ground?

How would you feel if Final Fantasy never had ATB? How would you feel if Mario never went from a linear platformer to an exploration-based one with 64?

There is a certain line where a game can become so radically different from its predecessors that it feels weird to call it part of the same series, but I think it's more important to be faithful to the spirit of a series (which can be reintepreted in various different ways) than be a slave to exact mechanics.

For a recent example Breath of the Wild seems more like a divergent evolution of the concept from the first Zelda game as opposed to taking from the more linear and guided experiences that branched off from A Link To The Past.

Generally speaking my opinion is that game series that don't change meaningfully over time and experiment with new systems, art directions, storytelling, mechanics, etc will get stale and become boring over time, because there's no real surprise to what you're getting anymore. This will become especially noticeable if other games are doing what that series is doing better while said franchise sticks stubbornly to conventions.

So yes, sometimes I will get mad for developers changing a system that worked perfectly fine and was better in a previous game, but I will always respect the idea of doing something new and breaking conventions because that's how the game industry evolves.

You can obviously go too far with stuff like Banjo Kazooie Nuts N' Bolts but that was arguably not even a remotely similar genre to the previous games, it's rare for stuff like that to happen. Even something like Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, which was a radically different experience from previous games in that series, was still in the same general genre.

edited 7th Mar '17 4:50:36 PM by Draghinazzo

It depends on the original concept's potential for sequels or lack thereof.

Some games work just fine doing variations on an adaptable enough core idea for a long time, others really already do everything or pretty much everything they had to do with the first installement.

Bomberman: Act Zero, Paper Mario: Sticker Star, everything in Star Fox up to Zero (heck, arguably even then), Shadow the Hedgehog, Mega Man X7...

It appears Sturgeon's Law applies to BIG, sweeping attempts to change up a series.

Radically changing the nature of the series is probably a gambit. It can end well, or it can end very poorly. Just compare Super Mario 64 with Bubsy 3D. You obviously need to invest a lot more work into making the transition successful. It's safer to take small steps in this regard, unless you have absolute confidence in your plan.

But didn't the Mega Man series peter out primarily due to always taking small steps?

Quite good, ATB was awful. Nothing fun about a battle system where for several seconds no one is doing anything coz gauges need to fill. Look at FFX's pure turn based combat and how much more fun and strategic it was with the ability to see the turn order and change it.

edited 7th Mar '17 5:15:27 PM by Ghilz

Yeah I wouldn't call it awful but ATB is not a great turn-based system in my opinion.

I think that only Bomberman Act Zero might be comparable to Nuts N Bolts, maybe Star Fox Adventures too. Shadow the Hedgehog and X7 are both bad but they're still within the same genre as their predecessors, at least.

Same genre or not, successful attempts to make sweeping changes to a series can be counted on one hand.

Not really, if anything Bomberman Act Zero is the least actually different of these games. It's Bomberman, it plays like pretty much every other Bomberman game ever made with a dumb grimdork skin on top.

edited 7th Mar '17 5:40:56 PM by RoboZombie

But the game has a really nonsensical "third person" perspective and a health system on top of that.

Is this a complaint thread? Knowing Waxing.

No, I'm just looking for the balance where a series doesn't have to be "this series need to evolve" nor "this series needs to stick to its identity."

Kid Icarus: Uprising is nothing like the original. It's the the most popular out of the series.

granted that was hardly a series at all

How To Keep A Game Fresh But Not Alienate Your Fans

1: refine aspects of the game that your fans liked but wasn't entirely developed.

say you're able to make your own weapons with unique effects and a name or something

that's good but the issue is say you can only enchant it with Basic Elemental Damage

a good sequel would take this, expand the variety more (maybe some effects can paralyze, or poison, or even heal allies), and maybe make it juuust a bit easier to access, but keeping a balance of "power VS reward"

2: cut out the bad shit

i'm gonna riff a bit on borderlands because oh boy do i have a lot to say about this series

okay so the first game was pretty good, hardly a story but i felt it didn't really need one cough-burch-cough

big issue though is level scaling causes the enemies to become disproportionately powerful late-game, and makes it far more tedious to advance

but hey, they have a sequel now with a bad writer at the forehead and more weapon variety and new levels and yet the level scaling is still an issue that's arguably even worse

and while i haven't played pre-sequel (and i thank jesus for that) from what i heard it has a lot of the problems that borderlands 2 had with even worse writing

borderlands is an example of a series that rather than actually polish a rusty coin, it just makes the already polished parts a bit shinier while said rust slowly overcomes the coin

3) new and interesting features

before making a sequel you really have to ask yourself whether the new toys you're adding either add to the experience or take away from it, and if so, why

like say you have this new combat system in place where now if you hit the enemy with a Super Special Attack you can stun them to deal even more massive damage

this is a cool idea but there are things that can go wrong with it

a) the ability comes too late in the game to really matter and mastering it is a waste of time

b) the ability is underpowered and the damage fallout from waiting to use it isn't worth it, or maybe it's just too slow, and it's better to just chip at the enemy's health the whole fight

c) the ability is overpowered, and either the damage you get from doing this is so high that you need literally no other strategy in the game, or it's so easy to pull off a braindead baby can do it while his hamster is nibbling at his limbs (although this is actually acceptable, but only if the ability takes a lot of practice to make worth using, so the player has a little skill to get good with, parrying from dark souls for example)

as an addendum to this, if said ability also overshadows a lot of other beloved features from the earlier game, then fans are going to be a bit salty

like Batman Arkham Knight's vehicle sections and how they take such a precedence to a lot of other features that the series was known for (like all the fucking boss fights that take place in this car for instance)

also it controls like ass but that's just whining

TL;DR

making a good sequel requires you to actually listen to your goddamn fanbase

on the topic of revamps: they're a big risk but fuck if they aren't worth it when they work

i mean look at Jak to Jak II

controls and gameplay are similar but the setting is entirely different, the format is different, new features up the wazoo, tons of variety, and a far darker tone

i aint gonna start a jak argument but i do feel that Jak II is a Giant change done right, and every game in the series after that, barring Lost Frontier, would keep to this sort of format, because goddamn it worked

i spent 20 minutes writing pointless dribble AMA

I believe the Atelier series does this best.

The entire series is centered around one core mechanic: the alchemy. The specifics of how the alchemy works, and the core mechanics surrounding it, change every time they change the setting (which is every 2-3 games). The first that uses the setting does something rather barebones with its mechanics, which are then refined and reapplied to a very different game structure for the next 1-2 games. Rinse and repeat.

And, with the exception of an unusual period for 5 of its PS 2 games, the games are always about a girl on an adventure of personal importance, never something grand.

It has worked for 18 main series games and some spinoffs thus far. You can pick up Totori, Escha and Firis, recognize that they're all clearly from the same series, yet also notice that they play nothing like each other.

edited 8th Mar '17 7:24:05 AM by burnpsy

both of which are confined to a separate mode. Granted it's the first mode listed after multiplayer, but it's perfectly possible to play Act Zero with mechanics identical to the previous games.

Zero is interesting because it's a game you could accuse of being both too experimental and too safe.

On one hand: Zero played and looked hell of a lot like Star Fox 64, but repulsed the nostalgic grognards it seemed to aim for by being designed around an unusual motion control-based control scheme. Generally, nostalgic grognards don't like motion controls. At all. YMMV on how well the scheme itself worked (personally I liked it) but for a series needing a knockout game after three divisive and underselling games, it probably wasn't the best decision commercially.

On the other hand, the game recycled heavily locations, set pieces and a lot of lines from Star Fox 64. The ending is identical. This felt very underwhelming when the previous Star Fox game was already a very faithful remake of SF 64, and a smaller segment of the fanbase was offended by the complete jetisonning of any elements from the post 64 games. Other fans and some journos also didn't like the return a short score-attack focused forumla instead of something more tuned in with modern mainstream gaming trends. You could say "Star Fox Zero was too experimental" and "Star Fox Zero kept it too safe" and you'd get different nod from different people.

edited 8th Mar '17 9:38:17 AM by Glowsquid

Don't make sequels because everyone knows a sequel is never as good as the original!(with exceptions of course..)

Oh and don't change the team ever if you make a sequel..

Zero did pretty much the opposite of what most fans would have wanted in terms of old and new. They should have kept the control schemes and mechanics and made up a whole new story.

It depends on the person, so there isn't a concrete answer. Demon's Souls for example was considered a great game right off the bat, even if it was flawed and experimental. Then Dark Souls came out with the same core gameplay and made improvements to what worked while weeding out what didn't. The result is even more praise from both the Demon Souls audience on PS 3 and the Xbox/PC crowd who were just introduced to the IP.

Another example of sequels with the exact same core game play with moderate improvements are the jump from Persona 3 to Persona 4.

I'll also agree that Zero took the wrong approach in making it feel like 64.

Conversely, the jump from 2 to 3 was dramatic, largely because of the change in development team, but it put the series, and arguably Shin Megami Tensei in general, on the map. The core of the game was still there: an RPG where young people summon anthropomorphized facets of their psyche to fight demonic entities, but everything around it was completely revamped.

The big difference there was that the franchise was also extremely obscure before the change, so it wasn't seen as taking a risk as much as it was just experimenting as the SMT devs are wont to do, at least, until they found their winning formula. It's a lot harder for something like Pokemon or Call of Duty to make sweeping changes like that without meeting a lot of resistance. See how many fans threw a fit at the space and futuristic elements being added to the latter, even if those are arguably unique and innovative.

The Persona developers have struck a very nice balance of old and new in general. While 3 through 5 are more similar than 2 is to 3, they make a great effort to introduce new concepts, mechanics, settings, and themes with every game - no one's going to call their formula stale, even if it's ultimately pretty familiar, while at the same time, few people gripe about the changes from one game to another.