Is the annualization of videogame
franchises really to blame for franchise fatigue? It is a plausible answer and
one that I have heard told repeatedly from much of the gaming press, so, for a
while, I believed it. However, just because everyone keeps saying it doesn’t
mean it’s true and recently I’ve started to seriously doubt this explanation.
Let’s hop back a bit and think about
last generation (the PS2’s). I don’t
know about you, but for me personally there were a bunch of games that I would have been overjoyed to only have to wait one year after having beaten their predecessor for. In fact I would
have probably beaten the games faster in hopes of getting the follow ups
sooner. How many of us would have loved to have gotten Kingdom Hearts 3 back in 2007 (one year after KH2) instead of still waiting for it and complaining about it
online as I am inadvertently doing right now? I know I would have. Here is the
specific personal example from that era that makes me question the idea of
annual releases alone being responsible for franchise fatigue.
Jak and
Daxter
was one of my first PS2 games and
because of that I played a lot of it, even though I didn’t love it. I
eventually beat it and when Jak 2
came around I passed on it. I heard some really positive reviews for it and for
its follow up Jak 3, but continued to ignore it for months. I eventually found
it heavily discounted and decided to give it a try. I beat it in three or four
days and eagerly went to the store a few days later to get Jak 3. I took it
home and beat it with in roughly the same amount of time as Jak 2. I had a half week break rather
than an entire year in-between the games and yet I loved Jak 3 even more than Jak 2.
After beating Jak 3 I was conflicted
because even though I had an awesome time playing both games I knew from the
way the story ended that there would not be a Jak 4. I really wanted a Jak
4. If Jak 4 had released that
following week, and if I had the money for it, I would have ran out and bought
it. So, how does it make sense that when Assassin’s
Creed Revelations was announced I, a fan of the series, wasn’t the least
bit excited for it to be coming out less than a year after I had beaten Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood?
Blaming the time frame of the
releases alone doesn’t make sense to me. Let’s look at it from another angle. How
many times have you heard people say that before the latest installment in a
franchise they love comes out they intend to replay either the previous game or
the entire series? If the one year gap between Brotherhood and Revelations
was assumed to hurt the experience by not allowing enough breathing room
between games then, by that logic, playing Halo
1, 2, 3, ODST & Reach over a few months leading up to
the release of Halo 4 must have
destroyed that experience for anyone who did so. And yet I haven’t heard one
complaint about this and I know multiple people, including myself, who thought
to do this. Why on earth would anyone want to play catch up on or revisit a
series before its latest installment comes out if this were the case? Are they getting
ready to ruin the experience? And if this can hurt the experience how and why
does it do so?
Some might say that it isn’t the
close proximity of the releases per se that are responsible for franchise
fatigue, but the one year development cycle brought about because of it. Most
big games both this generation and last took between two and three years to
develop, so restricting the team’s time to work on the game in order to get a
title out every year hurts the quality of the game. There really aren’t enough
big games that get made in one year to be sure of this; after all, they could
allocate enough resources to the project to make sure that they can put out a
great game in a shorter time span (especially if they choose to use the same and engine and assets). Jak 3
is my personal favorite in its series and it was built in only one year, while Jak 2 was built in two. Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and Revelations were both well received in
spite of the short development time. Whether they are the worst or best games
in the series is up for debate as there are advocates for each game in that series. Also a number of annualized games like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed 3 spend at least two years in development as they have multiple studios working on different titles concurrently.
What I think is far more responsible
than annual releases or faster development cycles for franchise fatigue is a
lack of innovation or real sense of change. I think the two best ways for
developers to prevent or counteract franchise fatigue is to either experiment
with distinct, new ideas or to continue on with a story or set of characters
that are interesting. Assassin’s Creed
Brotherhood and Revelations felt
way too similar to Assassin’s Creed 2,
so they became more and more boring as I went through them. They didn’t change
up the environment or the gameplay enough to keep things feeling fresh and the
story wasn’t really moving forward as you were still Ezio and still not dealing with the present day threat of Abstergo. The only times I liked Revelations was when I was going through
the Masyaf Key levels. When getting
the keys you were going through really well designed and interesting levels and
once you used the key you would play as Altair
with the Apple of Eden, which is
quite different from your usual weaponry. These sections kept me playing the
game and the ending was strong enough from a story standpoint that I was
actually excited for the (at the time) yet to be announced Assassin’s Creed 3 that I knew would only be a year away.
If developers want us to keep being
excited by and enjoying their games they have to be willing to give us new
experiences within them. It is hard to get excited for a nearly identical
gameplay experience three or more times in a row. If they can’t do enough with
the gameplay systems, either because it only caters to a very specific set of
actions or because they feel it is so good that messing with it would upset
fans, then they have to give us something to latch on to. That can either be
really unique and interesting worlds or a good story that gets us invested. I
know that if they can keep me invested in the new gameplay experiences, the
evolving story or the world then they can keep me investing my money in them
even if I have to pay every year because the more interesting and enjoyable
experiences I can get, the better, regardless of when they come out.
