Well no, for me at least I've reached the point of "Franchise Fatigue". I'm getting tired of watching the same old circus horse being paraded around the ring, even if the horse gets a new fancy headdress every time, and even if it *is* very impressive for a horse to be able to jump backwards through a flaming metal ring while reciting Edgar Allan Poe.
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| "No no, this is completely different from Brotherhood. Look, you have a *hook* in this one! Madness!" |
I think the realization struck me a few days ago as I was starting up Assassin's Creed: Revelations.
Assassin's Creed 2 was probably one of my favorite games of 2009 and I also liked Brotherhood a whole lot. But after just a few hours of Revelations I was just not enjoying the game at all. The story didn't grab me and the gameplay felt decidedly stale.
I realized that it was not really the game itself that was at fault. Assassin's Creed: Revelations is a high quality game that, at least in my opinion, is as good of a game as its two predecessors.
The problem is that I've already played this game twice before. Sure, I'll get to visit a new city and I'll get to add a couple of new gadgets to my already terribly overburdened Assassin, but it's very much the same game that I played last year.
I had a similar feeling with Uncharted 3 and Batman: Arkham City. I recognize that both of these games are, objectively speaking, very well put together and represent some of the highest quality gaming experiences of 2011. But in both cases I felt a horrible sense of deja-vu when I played them, to the point that I lost interest and gave up on finishing either one of them.
Gaming sequels are of course nothing new to this industry, and I've certainly played and enjoyed my share of them throughout my 20+ years of playing video games, but it seems that right now we're going through an unusually large patch of them.
Off the top of my head I can name these big name sequels from 2011: Gears of War 3, Uncharted 3, Batman: Arkham City, Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Portal 2 and Dead Space 2.
I think there are probably two reasons that we're seeing such a large quantity of sequels at the moment:
1) The cost of developing games is continuing to grow bigger and bigger.
As the price of developing a triple A game goes up, so does the financial risk that publishers and developers are exposing themselves to. When your game has set up back 10+ million dollars you really need it to do well in the market.
Taking a risk and making something completely new, either creating a new IP or making drastic changes to an existing popular IP, is not exactly what you want to do when a failure can mean a serious blow to your company.
2) This console generation has been unusually long
The Xbox 360 has now been around for more than six years, which is an eternity in terms of technological development. New console generations are often the time where we see new franchises being created, just like this generation saw the launch of Uncharted and Gears of War.
The launch of a new generation is a time where there are a lot of people picking up new hardware and are looking for games to play on it. Therefore it's the perfect time to experiment with something new, because it's not going to drown in a sea of thousands of other huge games that have already established themselves on the platform.
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| "Nathan Drake gets in over his head and makes witty remarks. Originality!" |
The first point is probably something that we are going to have to accept as an unavoidable fact of games development. Triple A games are becoming larger and larger projects to undertake, and while we'll continue to see plenty of indie games like Minecraft, which manage to break through and hit it big on a shoestring budget, having a very large sack of money behind you is something that you're going to need if you want to compete with the big boys.
The second point is obviously going to resolve itself sooner or later. Right now it looks like we'll be stuck with our current Xbox and Playstation until sometime around Christmas 2013, though this is all rumor at this point in time.
The question is though, is the extended lifetime of this generation just a one-time fluke phenomena, or is this going to be something that will happen again with the Playstation 4 and the Xbox 720?
I think that it's very likely that the next generation of consoles will live even *longer* than this one, as the cost of creating and marketing a new gaming console is also increasing, and the leaps in technology are getting smaller from year to year, so it's becoming less of a necessity to keep launching new hardware every 3-4 years.
Looking at the two previous paragraphs it sounds like the franchise fatigue may be a state that I'm just going to have to live with, then.
Honestly, I can't really blame game publishers and developers for creating games that they know there is already a big established market for. That's just good business sense.
I also recognize that I am probably a lot more prone to burn out on these franchise games, as I play a heck of a lot more games than the average Joe CoD, who buys 2-3 games a year.
But even a hefty bout of franchise fatigue has not stopped me from being crazy excited to play Diablo 3 or Mass Effect 3 later this year, though!
How about you guys? Are you still looking forward to seeing Halo 4? Is the prospect of Assassin's Creed 3 in time for the Holidays making your wrist blades shiver with excitement?
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