To me right now is the first Red Dead Redemption. Finally I’m able to play it, I’ve wait for over a decade. No spoilers, zero youtube gameplay videos, zero questions about the game to my friends. It gotta be me, and the game, it happened, and I think it sucks.
Maybe you thinking in “well, you shouldn’t play the second first”. I did not. My first Red Dead game was Red Dead Revolver, I was able to play it a few years ago when I could buy a PS2, but I couldn’t get a PS3 nor a Xbox 360 to play RDR1. It grinded my gears because we got the prequel in PC. When RDR1 came to PC it was so freaking expensive, yet today, I think it is expensive. I was able to buy the game some weeks ago while there was a Steam Sale, and well, I regreat it now.
I don’t like its exploration, its missions, its characters, its world, its secondary missions. its wanted system, and nothing but less important: has a lot of bugs.
That’s my experience in a few words.
What’s the game that you wanted to play but it was a total mess?
Its vastly different than 1 by taking everything that waa good and tweaking it to be bad. No dash sorceries, cursed items changed and theres now some weird curse room, enemies are boring, unqiue art is now bland 3d, it is far more sluggish than the original, the persistent rewards lack any feeling of being rewarded. I can just go on and on. Not to mention the original had like 2 DLCs worth of free updates while the devs were still supporting it. All they had to do was rehash the dungeons and make it truly online. They could have released nearly the same game, with the same art, and if they just made it natively online co-op I would have bought it and blown the back out of it too. But its just lesser in every measurable way.
The bland-ing of the art and the sluggishness were the things that hit me most. The snappy action and well-matched visual art/hitboxes were key to my enjoyment of the first one. Also, really hate the voice acting. At no point playing the original did I think, ‘man these generic filler text lines would be so much better if they were being unskippably forced into my ears as audio.’
It just doesn’t make sense. Something happened. Because in 2002 this would easily have been shipped the next year with nearly the same things but “more”. 4 player co-op and more maps\items. Thats it. What happened in the decision department? I know the game sat for a bit after the updates stopped and then changed hands but I cannot fathom how this came to be. Okay, rants over I think the last demon on the subject came out with me on that one.
Seems like an obvious answer. Changing hands. The original creator of a thing is usually obsessed with it. Someone hired by a publisher to milk an IP is usually just there to work. I’m sliding more and more toward just assuming any game that isn’t basically 100% made before publishers get their mitts on it is going to suck.
But wouldnt be easier to basically releass the same game rather than make a new one? Thats what I dont understand unless they had no acces to 1’s source code and only got rights to make 2. Even then it seems it would be harder ro make something new.
Yes and no. I’d be amazed if any code from the original was/could be used for the second. One was unity. Two was unreal. C# vs C++.
The other thing is money. It doesn’t get the second dev team paid as well to spend a figurative 5 minutes polishing an old game when they can milk 5 months of pay out of the publisher by making a de-make. If the publisher is paying they might start from scratch just to have it take longer. I can’t say for sure, but I would bet real-life money the contract on the second was much more beneficial to the publisher vs the devs on the second than the first.
Then there’s marketability. Offer people the same game from 2016 and they’ll want to pay the same price as the game from 2016 and many of them won’t want to buy it at all because they still have the old one. Offer them something that looks like an upgrade (‘Look! It’s 3D now, and higher resolution.’) and milk people’s nostalgia for a game they loved ‘in the before times’ and you can squeeze modern inflated prices out of them.
Oof, somehow missed that the 2nd was made in unreal. I mean yeah this all makes sense but it doesn’t make me happy lol I feel like most players on the Steam community actuslly did want more of the same, just with built in online. Shame.
Yeah. There is unfortunately a lot of media being made as just a cynical attempt to milk people via nostalgia. Remind everyone you can: just because it has the same name as something you once enjoyed doesn’t mean it will be good. Nostalgia marketing is always a lie.