Saturday!
There are three kinds of sequels, really.
1) The “More Of The Same” kind of sequels. They might change the maps, they might upgrade the graphics, they might give you better music… but, for the most part, the game plays pretty much exactly like the previous one. THIS SHOULD NOT NECESSARILY BE READ AS A CRITICISM. Sometimes you finish a game and you think “Man! That was great! I wish I had another 20 hours with it! But I don’t want to just start over from the beginning…” and then the sequel comes out and it is 20 hours with More Of The Same. (See, for example, the Ezio Assassin Creeds. Good stuff all around, start to finish. But, seriously, more of the same.) Sure, sometimes it’s disappointing and makes you say “Aw, I wanted a jump ahead! Instead I just got a reskinned version of the old game…” but, hey, if you liked playing the first one, you should like playing the second one. It’s more of the same.
2) The sequels that ruin everything. Legend of Zelda 2 is probably the best old-school example of a sequel that said “let’s change everything that everybody loved about the first one!” but there’s no shortage of examples of sequels that attempted to cash in on a successful first game by rushing a sequel out waaaaay before one was ready (Dragon Age 2) or cashing in sequels that said “here’s a name that people have good associations with!” (anything Sonic from the last decade or so) or Duke Nukem 4Ever.
3) The sequels that make you say “Holy cow. The first game was just a tutorial for this one. I have to take everything I knew from the first game but build on it.” Diablo to Diablo 2, for example. Dungeon Keeper to Dungeon Keeper 2 is another one. Fallout 3 to Fallout: New Vegas was probably my absolute favorite leap from “holy cow, I love this game!” to “holy cow, I can’t ever go back to the old one…”
X-Com 2 is the third kind.
X-Com: Enemy Unknown was, itself, a reboot of a much beloved franchise from the 90’s that didn’t screw it up. They took the mechanics of the original X-Com, gave them a significant graphics upgrade, and kept the good stuff. It’s still you against an alien invasion. You still don’t know anything about the invaders so you still have to do autopsies to learn more about them (including learning enough to capture them alive). You still don’t have weapons as good as the weapons of the aliens so you will still have to do research to make better weapons (with different branches for machine guns, shotguns, sniper rifles, and grenade launchers). Oh, and armor. Oh, and medical tech. Oh, and on top of everything, you have to manage your home base back home and upgrade research facilities, power generation, satellite uplinks, and military training facilities. And all of these things are in service to the missions themselves where you have to infiltrate a place, kill all the bad guys, and not blow up important stuff. They mixed it up though… sometimes they had you go someplace and protect civilians (or 8 out of 15 civilians) with the occasional mission where you had to escort someone who is trying to escape from the aliens from the far side of the map back to the originating point of the map. On top of *THAT*, there are RPG elements where you upgrade your soldiers and give them abilities as they progress… a Sniper Captain has a lot more tricks up his sleeve than a Sniper Sergeant.
X-Com 2 takes all of those much beloved mechanics and then ramps them up to 11.
This time, you still have to deal with the aliens and you still have to do autopsies and you still don’t have decent weapons or armor or medical tech and you still have to work on your home base and do all of the stuff you had to do… but they improved everything (and, equally importantly, they gave a good storyline reason as to why you’re stuck back at square one). On top of that, they *REALLY* mixed up the combat missions.
They’ve added mechanics like ambushes. When you go into an area now, you can sneak in and, at the right moment, everybody can start shooting at the aliens at the same time so your first volley of bullets can take out the first group you encounter (and figuring out the best approach to a mission will have your nerves absolutely wracked). Civilian protection missions still take place, but they’ve added a mechanic where some of the civilians are Not On Your Side. They’ve got the escort missions, but some of them are “extract this civilian who is working with the aliens” missions and not just “get our guy out of there!” missions.
And the weapon research mechanic has been upgraded and there are now different kinds of bullets (like poison rounds or incendiary rounds or EMP rounds) and there are swords in the game (don’t worry, they’re cool) and there are new abilities that your soldiers can get when they get promoted and new ways to modify your guns (like, above and beyond moving from conventional to laser… I’m talking adding sights or auto-reloaders) and you can even do stuff like “name your gun” when you reach a certain rank and your soldiers themselves get callsigns so you are no longer playing “my sniper shoots the alien with her sniper rifle” but “Duchess shoots the alien with Migraine”.
Oh, and on top of *THAT*, the aliens have been upgraded too.
I *LOVED* playing X-Com: Enemy Unknown.
I will never be able to go back to it.
It was merely the tutorial.
So… what are you playing?
(Picture is HG Wells playing a war game from Illustrated London News (25 January 1913[/efn_note]
I finished my vanilla XCom 2 game and immediately started a Long War 2 game. It’s amazing how much more you get (for free!) in LW2.
I also added a mod called “True Conceal” which makes it so your mission timers don’t tick down until the aliens know you’re there (I.e. You can sneak around in conceal as long as you want). It’s a bit of a cheat, but far more logical, and trades off some of the “sprint across the map” stress for tactical “how can we ambush this whole group” stressReport
I’m just not good enough at this game to deal with an alien Ruler showing up during a timed mission, so “True Concealment” was a gift from the gods. Then I discovered “Moddable Ruler Turns” and “Rulers Take Normal Turns” and I was able to pretty much nerf the rulers right out of the game without losing the other stuff (mostly cosmetic) that came with Alien Hunters. I’ve been playing with the Long War mods Laser Pack, Perk Pack, and Alien Pack for ages because I want some of the stuff LW2 offers but even on the easiest difficulty LW2 is just too damn hard for me.
I really love that Firaxis embraced the mod community for XCOM2, which gives us the freedom to pretty much turn the game into whatever we want it to be. And I see that War of the Chosen is now available for preorder on Steam, too!Report
I don’t have any of the DLC. I should have bought it during the Steam sale, but didn’t. Now, well, trying LW2 on Commander is plenty.Report
Oof. Much respect. Right now I’m struggling to make it through on Veteran.Report
Premature for that. I certainly feel like I’m a nostril above water at best.Report
That sounds like a really good mod!Report
Yeah. I’m generally opposed to the “mods that make life easier” category, but there’s a fundamental nonsense to the idea that my squad somehow snuck into an area where the aliens are about to blow up valuable technology even though they don’t know I’m there.
That, and setting up for the initial salvo is one of my favorite parts of the game, but so few missions are actually untimed.Report
I’m about 30 hours into The Witcher 3 now.Its a good RPG, the combat is a bit fiddly for me, but with the difficulty turned down that’s not a problem.
I really see what Extra Credits were getting at by describing it as a Hard-Boiled detective story set in a medieval fantasy world. In that regard it has a bit of a Dresden Files / Burn Notice feel to it.Report
I loved the original Witcher, but I didn’t get into W2. My problem is that with kids, it’s hard to guarantee the chunk of time I feel like an RPG generally needs to get rolling.
My Steam sale purchase came down to XCom 2, one of the Fallouts, or W3. Is it amenable to playing in smallish chunks?Report
@nevermoor
I couldn’t get into Witcher 2 either, the combat system required better timing than I have, and the first compulsory stealth section was a deal-killer for me.Report
Yeah, the first time I played Witcher 2, I did the combat test thing and lost quickly. The game recommended that I play on “easy”. I said “okay, fine!” and did some research and learned the mechanics and this time I lasted several rounds and managed to beat a good, solid number of guys.
The game recommended that I play on “easy”.
I thought “You know, I never got around to beating the first one…” and then never got around to playing the 2nd one.
I approve of the third one but haven’t bought it based on my experience with that.
If you can get into 3 when you couldn’t get into 2, that’s kind of a good sign for me… that and all of the stories I hear about Gwent just might be enough to push me over the edge the next time the GOTY version gets on sale…Report
The sequels that ruin everything. Legend of Zelda 2 is probably the best old-school example of a sequel that said “let’s change everything that everybody loved about the first one!”
I call revisionism. Zelda II was actually a pretty solid game, and was received extremely well at the time. It wasn’t just the critics; all my friends liked it, too. It even inspired a clone in Battle of Olympus.
Back in those days, in the Nintendo world, at least, we didn’t really know what to expect from a sequel. Super Mario Bros. 2, which was nothing like the original, had just come out, and Zelda II was released on the same day as Castlevania II, another radical departure from the original. Nowadays, people expect it to be a bridge between the original Zelda and Link to the Past, and dislike it for not being what they expected, but back then it was a cool new thing that in many ways improved on the original, and AFAIK nobody really questioned its legitimacy as a sequel.Report
Hey, I remember sitting down to play it and thinking “WHAT THE HECK IS THIS” at the time.
Personally, I think that Super Mario Bros. 2 captured the Marioish je ne sais quois. Zelda II felt like they said “let’s make a Castlevania kinda game”.Report
Ah, all right. Your opinion is valid, but it wasn’t the consensus at the time. Personally, I think it’s held up better than the original. The “puzzles” in the original were just tedious trial and error, made worse by the fact that bombs were consumable and until 2/3 of the way through the game you could only burn one bush per screen.
The sequel is still a fairly enjoyable action-adventure game, though.Report
Zelda felt rich and *HUGE*. Remember the original Might and Magic? It felt somewhere around *THAT* big. Every map felt like an excavation. “How will I ever beat this?”
(I just googled. They came out the same year.)
Link felt dinky. It felt like Castlevania.Report
There’s a fourth category of sequels:
The ones where everyone’s bloody forgotten the first.
Persona 3
Star Control 2
Wing Commander 3.
School Days.
The first of a ton of series’ were completely forgettable, in comparison.Report
I’ve been thinking more about the framework for this post. I wonder where the Civ series goes. Some are definitely #3. I certainly couldn’t–and didn’t want to–go back to Civ once I’d played Civ 2, but I think some are a fourth category: where the previous installment is just a tutorial, but you wish it was a tutorial for a different game. I don’t think you can play Civ 2 after Civ 3, for example, but that didn’t mean it was, necessarily, better.Report
Nevermoor,
Civ is a remake, of a remake, of a remake.
Civ 2 is playable simply to watch heads explode.
… if you haven’t watched heads explode, play again now.Report
The problem of evolution. There are so many different directions that a game could evolve in… and, sometimes, the designers choose “real time strategy”.Report