We get a lot of sequels in the gaming world, and a common criticism is when a series isn’t really innovating enough. We’re given an open world game that takes 40 hours, with DLC stretching it out 20 more, and see a sequel releasing that cut out it’s late 30 hours because players were already getting bored.
Meanwhile, there’s some other types of games where any addition in the form of “It’s just more levels in the series” is perfectly satisfying. Often, this is a hard measure to replicate since these types of series often demand the creators are very inventive and detailed with their content - this likely wouldn’t be a matter of rearranging tiles in a level editor to present a very slightly different situation.
What I’ve often seen is that such games will add incredibly small, insignificant “New Gameplay Features” just so they have something to put on the back of the box, but that tend to be easily forgotten in standard play (yet, the game as a whole still ends up being fun).
The specific series that come to mind for me with “Level-driven games” are:
Hitman - the way the levels are made naturally necessitates some creativity both from the level makers to come up with unique foibles and weaknesses to each target, and from the players to discover both the intended and unintended methods of elimination.
Ace Attorney - While they series has come up with various magical/unusual methods for pointing out contradictions in court, the appeal is still in the mysteries themselves, and it’s never needed much beyond the basic gameplay, and the incredibly detailed and well-animated characters to hook people in.
Half-Life - For its time, anyway. While its Episodes certainly made efforts to present new features, quite often the star of Half-Life games isn’t really in any core features or gameplay mechanics, but in the inventive designs of its levels, tied in with a penchant for environmental storytelling; making you feel the world was more than an arrangement of blocks and paths. For a long time, the wait for Valve-made episodes was alleviated with modder-made levels hoping to approach the inventive qualities of the original games.
Yakuza - While the series has undergone a major overhaul moving to JRPG combat mode, for 6+ games it satisfied a simple formula: Dramatic stories driven by cutscenes, as well as a huge variety of mini quests, of boundless variety and very low logic. For many of their games, they weren’t doing a whole lot to re-contextualize their core gameplay, being fisticuffs combat, and it still worked out well (plus, they’re continuing to go that route for games like Kiryu’s last game)
To open up discussion, and put the question as simply as I can: Which games do you follow, that you wish could be eternally supported by their devs, by simply continuing to release new “level packs” or their functional equivalent, with no need to revamp gameplay formulas?
I somewhat agree with you, but some innovation is necessary. There are very few games that are still fun after a dozen levels of the same thing, and most of those are either pure puzzle or pure mindless violence.
When people complain about “just more of the same”, they often are overlooking that there was some innovation in the new levels. If it’s really the same thing over and over, it’d pale pretty quickly for most people. New levels need to do something differently than the past to keep people really engaged.
There’s a middle ground between massive innovation and stagnancy, and all games that get huge sales numbers are hitting that sweet spot, regardless of what people are screaming about.
Not necessarily even innovation, but perfection. There’s always something to improve about any specific game.
Examples:
- Elden Ring’s dog shit PC port and the lack of so many basic technical stuff like fine-tuning graphics settings, functional key rebinding or so. A successor could easily be strictly superior just by improving the technical aspects here.
- Persona 5 getting so sloggy near the end due to the large areas plus constant backtracking. It’s not a problem until the end, so having some quick travel system you only unlock when the game wants to swap to the final areas would be an easy upgrade for a successor.
- Against The Storm (a game where inherently “just more” would be the point) could easily become strictly better if a successor had full modding support.
- Guardians of the Galaxy is surprisingly fun but there’s no reason it should be so glitchy or stuttery. Just code cleanup and optimization would greatly elevate a GotG 2.
Unless it’s Madden, in which case the exclusive license to use the NFL’s trademarks means there’s no competition, so they can just release a $60 roster update every year and still make bank from the people with gambling addictions to Ultimate Team.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator seem to be making their way across the world with new map DLC and I like it. I think it’s a great example of maintaining a game with new updates to older maps and the game engine, new DLC and also having an online portal with seasonal events.
Richard Burns Rally. Though that is kinda already happening. The developers are long gone, so some top people patched it up, made it really mod-able and keep updating it. So I win I guess.
They tend to innovate every major release, but, Monster Hunter. I find the games incredibly satisfying to play, and if they just extend the treadmill with more monsters and/or more increasing challenges, I am incredibly satisfied to play more of it.
Rhythm games in general. I’ll go back to rhythm games I really enjoyed and play them again and again as is. Adding more songs/stages is huge value even without new mechanics.
Some games have just nailed systems where it feels good to press buttons, and once you’ve got that down, flat adding new raw content is satisfying.
Monster Hunter is a great example of a series with quality sequels. They always add some new, interesting mechanics, trim the fat from the previous iteration, and add new content while still keeping the core gameplay exactly the same. There have been some exceptions, but generally every MH game before they split the dev teams had been an improvement on the last. Even when they cut the swimming from 3U to 4. It was a system that most players didn’t enjoy, and 4 had so many great new additions like mounting that it hardly felt like anything was missing.
That said, one of the main criticisms you’ll hear from players is the “ultimate” edition being the same game with just some new hunts tacked on. Or even that the base version isn’t worth it and the ultimate version is the “real” game. Nowadays they do expansions instead, which I think players generally find more palatable
Kind of applies to the souls series. I’d be happy with any of the games being re-released with only new levels added. I just wanna slap monsters with a sword in beautiful castles