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?
For KSP2 the community failed it. If there was some backbones the first DLC would have been boycotted, Take2 would never have bought the IP and it would still be a profit cow for Squad. The DLC was specifically design to break the promises made to the community and it was the deciding factor for Take-Two acquiring the game, the community was exploitable.
May I ask you to elaborate on your last sentence, regarding the promise-breaking DLC? I’ve never played KSP but it looked like an interesting engineering interest-getter for future kids
They (KSP Devs) made the promise that if they were to ever release DLC it would be for actual new content and not stuff that should be in base game or was available as a mod. The first DLC was the Mission Builder, something that should exist. Along with branded ULA space parts which were great DLC. The problem was the first part, the mission builder should have been part of the game then for the DLC they should have added a few more parts to flesh it out. It was after this perceived broken promise DLC, after it was successful in the community, that the Take-Two acquisition was announced. Afterwards another DLC which was robotics parts was announced, which was literally a functional copy of a mod, another broken promise. I was there and I am adamant (cannot be certain) that the soft response to the first broken promise gave take2 the greenlight to exploit the community with mods as DLC and KSP2 being a cash grab.
If soul was put into the decision for KSP2 the developers of Kitten Space Agency would have gotten the contract for the game instead of some assholes pushing plushie merch in the pitch meeting. I blame the community enshitification because there was a few of us that actually said nah the first broken promise is bad but we got told it would be fine and to stfu cus we were assholes. And yea I am an asshole but look at the world around we should have all been assholes to the complacent more.
For cities skyline. The first game was pretty shit all things considered. The game had so many dlcs and mods were what added a lot of the good functionality.
Cs2 was way more ambitious with the simulation aspect and utilising new dev tools. Once we get more mods and more dlcs cities 2 will be looked at as an amazing city builder.
I would be inclined to agree with you, except that the simulation is one of the weakest parts of the second game.
But also part one did not have the same ludicrous number of game-breaking bugs on release.
CS2 has gotten better for sure, and will keep doing so over time, but I’ve given up on wanting to buy it because it seems fundamentally worse than its predecessor.
If they ever add DLCs for true simulation of the economy and for showing fire, police, and ambulance crews at work as well as re-adding bicyclists I might reconsider.
Yeah I know cs2 sim sucks, believe me I’m one of the biggest cs2 haters there is. On release the cs2 sim was the same as cs1, all smoke and mirrors. Except cs1 didnt promise to be calculating all these things.
Cs2 has been pretty bug free for me up until economy 2.0 added a few simulation bugs.
My wishlist is for them to remake all the vanilla assets, they look terrible. Add bikes and e scooters. Then add an industries DLC.
Frostpunk 2 is a really interesting one to me.
I LOVED the first game. Soundtrack on in the background sometimes, liked the board game (just manual meh balance FP1), got all the achievements, really enjoyed it.
The second IS a good distinction from it, it’s not just rinse and repeat the same game. Great story, epic music, different scale and problems. It’s just like… They took the second tier of ideas they had for FP1 and implemented them. It actually probably would have been a good game if it didn’t have those footsteps to follow in.
Surprisingly, a few recent sequels have been amazing. Shapez2 is an unbelievable follow up to the OG. Hades II is the same imo. Massive, beautiful, fun distinction in gameplay, but still great ideas and balanced and such.
Monster Train 2 is great in demo, Kingdoms 2 crowns is a bit less recent but is such a great follow up to what’s effectively an arcade game in the first. It’s not all downhill or anything
Also silksong wen
Big shapez fan who wasn’t interested enough in the sequel to buy it. What do you like about it?
I’m glad you asked!
I didn’t really like the aesthetic at first so I was on the fence.
It’s 3D, and most things take up more space with plenty of them taking some height as well. This makes the builds a bit more complex in a fun way. Also, the scaling is wild. You need a LOT more shapes, so you can duplicate or make more efficient things, ship them by train eventually, really makes it feel like a different game by the end than it does in the start.
They have a huge content update coming June 2 as well
A great product does not necessarily mean there is a winning formula though. We have a trash sequel when the new game does not do something that the existing game does. Even worse, the existing features are locked behind additional payment, so why would players not continue to play the existing game?
KSP 2 - Let’s forget the technical disaster. A lot of features are missing at the start. You could argue that it’s in early access, but why would I pay for a product that does less? Then we add in the many bugs and performance issues, and you know it’s game over.
Cities Skylines 2 - Again, you can’t do everything you already can in CS1. Plus, the first game is supported by a huge number of mods. There’s really no reason to play the new title. Again, it does not perform any better.
This is a weird take but I think remake or remastered these days are more like sequels than sequels, just because they keep the story and mechanics.
I find that game developers or many businesses try to reinvent the wheel when there’s no reason to. Say the Subnautica sequel, why waste money on voice over, add a land mass, cut the beloved submarine, shorten the story and overall map size, all that. I will never understand and sincerely hope the next Subnautica title does not reinvent the wheel.
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.
Cities Skylines 2 - Again, you can’t do everything you already can in CS1. Plus, the first game is supported by a huge number of mods. There’s really no reason to play the new title. Again, it does not perform any better.
CS2 looks and performs better than the original now that a lot of the bugs have been squashed and optimizations are in place (in my experience, anyway). Its memory management in particular is way better than CS1. I don’t get the simulation slow down to the same extent that I did in CS1 as the population increases.
The new road tools alone are reason enough for me to never go back to CS1. The service building upgrades are an added feature that’s a big plus as well. I also find that the economy is a little more functional and transparent than in CS1 (again, after multiple patches).
I don’t find the lack of bike lanes, quays, or modular industry to be so important as to ruin my enjoyment of what is otherwise a state of the art city building game.
Yeah, I don’t want a sequel for sequel’s sake. If you don’t have an artistic or consumer perspective vision on why a sequel is needed or wanted you should be focusing on something that can be justified like that.
Story and exploration games have this built in. Why do players want a sequel? To have more story, to explore more, to return to this world once they’ve tired of the previous game. Rpgs are expensive, slow, and risky, but you basically never have to justify your next game.
The games mentioned here struggle there. KSP does what it does well. Any sequel comes with huge questions of why people would want another space program simulator, and it’s clear that corporate just assumed that people would buy it because they loved the first one.
And that’s not to say games that don’t feel like a sequel is warranted can’t benefit from one. Roguelikes are about as anti sequel as city builders and there are two roguelike sequels I love. Rogue legacy 2 was the devs reimagining the concept of the first game and making a higher budget (especially in gameplay) game that doesn’t just feel like a cash grab. And Hades 2 is similar in many ways, but different enough to feel warranted and clearly made uncynically. It clearly exists because the leads felt there was more to do with the premise that didn’t belong in the first game.
And there’s the thing, I think that ksp probably did have a sequel in it. Something like a space colony sim where you’re a space station having to build and manage ships and colonies, or something else may have been warranted or good. But it would’ve come from a creative lead wanting to do it rather than what clearly happened of a corporation purchasing the game and deciding that since they owned it they had to make a sequel to use the ip
KSP does what it does well. Any sequel comes with huge questions of why people would want another space program simulator
I think that there were pretty clear ways to expand KSP that I would have liked.
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There was limited capacity to build bases and springboard off resources from those.
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I’d have liked to be able to set up programmed flight sequences.
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More mechanics, like radiation, micrometeorite impacts, etc.
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The physics could definitely have been improved upon in a number of ways. I mean, I’ve watched a lot of rockets springily bouncing around at their joints.
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Some of the science-gathering stuff was kind of…grindy. I would have liked that part of the game to be revamped.
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I don’t think that graphics were a massive issue, but given how much time you spend looking at flames coming from rocket engines, it’d be nice to have improved on that somewhat. I’d have also liked some sort of procedural-terrain-generation system to permit for higher-resolution stuff when you’re on the ground; yeah, you’re mostly in the air or space, but when you’re on the ground, the fidelity isn’t all that great.
Nothing went wrong. Remember the era where every sequel was straight to DVD? Who remembers The Lion King 2? How about Brother Bear 2? Sonic Adventure 2?
It’s difficult to iterate on a piece of media that was written to be a standalone entity.
The only exceptions really are when stories are split into multiple games (such as halo 1-3)
Lion King 2 was pretty good. Also, direct to VHS
Uhh…there was a Brother Bear 2?
I forgot who or what it was who said this, but it was about musicians making albums. The first album they make was made with ideas from their entire lives before that point. The next one they only had a year or a few.
The same could be said for great movies with shit sequels: first movie is a ball of fantastic ideas, anything lesser probably gets taken out… To be put in a crappy sequel. And then the next movie has to come out in only a few years. That just isn’t very much time to read and experience the world and innovate and stuff.
Sure, it happens, but extremely rarely. And when it does, those are the truly special people worth following and giving loyalty to, in any platform or format or product or medium.
