Last few years I’ve been excitedly waiting for sequels from several small-to-medium sized studios that made highly acclaimed original games—I’m talking about Cities: Skylines, Kerbal Space Program, Planet Coaster, Frostpunk, etc.—yet each sequel was very poorly received to the point I wasn’t willing to risk my money buying it. Why do you think this happens when these developers already had a winning formula?
I wouldnt go that far. Skylines 2 has a new game engine. If it wouldnt have turned out to be incredibly slow, it would have been a very successful launch.
And I cant imagine anyone buying Skylines 2 if it used the same engine as Skylines 1. Then it truly would have been no point. The new engine was supposed to make cities more beautiful and more realistic. They just didnt manage to make it fast.
I unfortunately bought the game for 50 dollars on launch day and I have just 3 hours in it. I cant bring myself to play it because of the sluggish feeling.
They just didnt manage to make it fast.
You are absolutely right. The vision for sequel can be good but the execution has to be equally sound too. In the ideal situation, I guess CS2 needs to be a rebuild of CS1 with a new engine, so it can fully replace CS1 right from the start, if not do something extra. They did a few things praiseworthy though, like baking in road lane customisation, which was done by mods in CS1.
But then, we are not too fair. Simulation games are different from RPG. Story has an ending and we want to see how it continues to develop. For simulation games, I don’t think players want anything to be removed on a sequel, unless they are absolutely bad design. Even so, players expect QoL here and there to make their lives easier, which alone can be the single reason to buy the sequel.
