The Glade 4.0

I ran out of room in the title, but I want to add " . . . Should Be Discontinued/Evolved And Why?"

Personally:

Halo -- The Chief's story is told. The franchise has made its millions and left its mark. It's time for Bungie and MS is move on to something fresh.

Metal Gear -- Kinda see above. The journey with Snake from the original Solid through 4 was one helluva ride, but the honeymoon's over. Kojima needs to put MG behind him and focus on new/revisit other projects.

Grand Theft Auto -- The shock factor has worn off, and the game style has lapsed into rehash territory. Evolve it or let it die.

*Fill in the Blank* Hero / *Fill in the Blank* Band -- They exploded in popularity too much too quickly. Expansions that milk you for more money could otherwise easily be accomplished as add-on downloadable content. What's next -- Guitar Hero: John Denver? Rock Band: Hanson? All with new guitar controllers you have to buy, of course. Make it stop!


(I'll probably get in trouble for the ones below, but so be it)

Metroid -- The 2Ds are classics, and Prime was an awesome evolution. But it's starting to get stagnant. The Prime formula can only work for so long before /snore.

Zelda -- At this point, Zelda is riding the waves on its namesake. The 2Ds are part of gaming heritage, and Ocarina is beloved by many. But somewhere a ways through Wind Waker, I stopped caring. Hard to put a finger on, but the short time I spent with Twilight Princess pretty much solidified with me that the magic was gone.

Mario (/duck) -- See Zelda above, but with different game names. I never really got into 3D Mario like so many others did (2D Mario 4 Life!). And really Nintendo -- must every other game you make have Mario somewhere in it or on it? A bit of an exaggeration, but not too much. I know many will disagree, but it's just not there for me anymore.

Sonic -- Another evolve or die franchise. 2D Sonic stole many an hour away from me. 3D? Not so much. The 3D leap just didn't stick for Sonic like it did its competition.

Final Fantasy -- Seriously. Why even have the word "final" in it? There's like 8 billion FF installments at this points. Their formula has stagnated into: spiky-haired main character wielding immense sword (or sword-gun combo) with cast of quirky but lovable supporting characters, does huge flashy ultimate moves against screen-filling bosses while carrying the player through a long, twisted, nearly incomprehensible Zen-like plot.


Anyway, that's my list. It's not that I feel that any of the above franchises are necessarily "bad" or poor quality, just that at this point, they have become cows fed through IVs while kept sedated and constantly milked by their publishers/platforms. Let them fade away, go out with a bang, or evolve into something better. Just stop letting them become bloated shadows of their former selves that no one cares about anymore.

Any and every team sports game, and most "extreme" sports games. Is there any reason whatsoever that we have to have a new game (multiple new games, sometimes) for each and every sport every single year? Aside from the obvious financial reason on the part of the publisher, is there any reason this bullshit can't just be handled through downloadable content?

I think this one is actually being used well. The last couple games have had nothing to do with the chief, and they're exploring other types of games of different types. This is the way a franchise should be handled, imo.

I've never been able to "get" Metal Gear games. For the most part I like story heavy games, as long as it isn't incomprehensible. Unfortunately, that fits the last couple Metal Gear games to a T.

Another one that I never quite have gotten. I love me some sandbox games though. I think Crackdown is one of my favorite games. But I'll agree as to the whole shock value and everything. It's gone, try something different.

I like these music games, but they're put out far too often. An updated version every 2-3 years would be fine. Everything else should be dlc.

I really liked the new control scheme that they used on the wii, but agree that the series is stagnating. They definitely need to expand here.

One of my favorite game series, it's pretty much the archetype of my favorite kind of games. I can understand why you may think this way though.

Mario games mostly survive on nostalgia, of course. I've heard really good things about the new sidescoller on the wii though, and I really liked galaxy other than the fact that I wish it would have been a little harder.

Never really liked this series, and I've heard nothing but bad things since it moved to 3D. Haven't played a sonic game in years.

The items you speak of do persist through all the games, but FF does actually change quite a bit from game to game. Mostly this is in the combat realm, but every single game has had differences in the combat (the meat of the game anyways) since what, 6? Maybe even earlier. My only gripe with FF is that they've messed up their numbering system by having the online ones numbered in with the others. Yeah, it's petty.

This would be my big one. If you're going to talk about milking customers, sports games should be at the top of the list. This is similar to the music games mentioned earlier: It should all be done through dlc, with real updates taking place every 2-3 years, possibly longer. I'm not a huge fan of sports games though, so I don't really buy them to begin with.

I'll add the lego games to the mix. Yes, they're enjoyable and fun, but they're getting to be too much at this point. We need a few years in between here or something.

The Sims. God, get rid of this crap.

What needs to happen, and this would be massively ambitious, is an entirely massive Sims World MMO. The game would have different modules ala Sim City 2000 but they would all interface with the same world.

Some people would play the urban planner game (classic Sim City). Some could choose to play the Sims and interact at a personal level. As a Sim, you should also be able to do stuff like in the Street of Sim City and Sim Copter. You could walk into towers that people who are playing Sim Tower created.

Obviously, these individual concepts would have to be majorly reconceived in a way that makes them synergistic, and there would have be greater fleshing out of the modules, but I think this could be awesome. Sell the modules for like $15 to $20 bucks.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

I'm with you on Halo, Mario, and Zelda. Not so much the others.

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The Dude abides.

Not that I'm a sports fan or anything, but apparently ya'll just don't get it.

You have to have a new iteration each year to keep up with franchise changes. Not saying that couldn't be DLC, but I don't exactly put "sports fanatic willing to buy Madden 20xx every-year" and "understands how to work DLC" in the same sentence, normally.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Hey now, let's not get all sports fan stereotype up in here DFK! For the record, Madden's got quite a bit of DLC as it is.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Disagree on the Nintendo titles and FF titles, while I more or less agree on the Metal Gear front. I shall also agree with the overall sentiment here about DLC.

I think as far as the Nintendo titles go, they are exempt because they're franchises in the true sense. Mario in particular. He's a character, and there are supporting characters, and some basic rules of how things work (mario jumps on things! coins are involved. etc) but the actual gameplay can be wildly different from game to game, especially throughout the years. This isn't the same as something like Metal Gear which at its core has been the same since MGS back in the Playstation era. If Metroid was just the Prime series and kept releasing game after game like that I could see the appeal for moving on, but it's more than this. Besides, Metroid had to make the jump to the Wii -- the controls put a whole new spin on it which made it refreshing. :p Final Fantasy is largely the same way. Political intrigue and/or plot to threaten the world + some spell standardization and some sort of special presence of summon type creatures is the mainstay, but everything else has been changed up many times over the years.

I also think a lot of my above sentiment also has to do with story. Mario, Zelda, FF etc are not sequels as far as plot goes. Metroid only loosely is -- the Prime trilogy definitely is, but outside of that the game is more of an episodic, self-contained thing. Even then, the gameplay was switched up a lot in Prime 2, and the control scheme at least made 3 interesting to play even if it was pretty closely the formula from the first game. A sign for me that something should end is when you get so many "...but wait, look at this strange twist!" plots for sequels that weren't necessarily planned to begin with. Each Final Fantasy (X-2, the only true sequel, aside) is a completely new world, new characters, etc, and it's kept pretty fresh.

I haven't played the GTA or Halo games really, so I shall refrain from saying whether or not I wish to deny fans more of the games. :p

Ultimately you can always say "but just imagine if they had gone off and made a totally new game", and it's hard to argue against since it's such a vague unknown, but so long as we're accepting the concept of franchises in general I find my above sentiments to hold!

GTA4 was one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had in my 25 years of gaming. Had nothing to do with shock value or any of the other things GTA gets media attention for. It was all about the gameplay and, especially, the story.

(And I had absolutely no interest in GTA games until last year)

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

I saw the thread title and the first thing that came to mind was the Final Fantasy name.

The only one I take issue with is Halo. The last two games had nothing to do with the Chief. It is a huge world that they can explore.

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Raell Kromwell

It's not so much the fact that the Halo series centers around the Chief, as it is the fact that the formula is starting to wear on me. Guys in the same armor with the same weapons fighting the same aliens in the same world setting. Hard to put a finger on, but I just lost pretty much all interest after Halo 3.

Jocificus:

Pretty much. At this point, characters like Mario, Sonic, and Link are vestigial. They are symbols of a time when their respective systems and the game industry as a whole needed mascots to help bolster their image. Now they are recognizable faces that can be slapped on games to get numbers, regardless of the actual quality of said game.

Metal Gear is over, as is Halo.

Nintendo titles will go on infinitely, and I'm okay with that. As will FF titles, and I'm okay with that too, because they're all different. Who cares if the word "final" is in the name.

Oh and Mario games have been traditionally some of the most innovative games. :p Though it's ironic that the recent trend has been towards retro gaming, I suppose. Nostalgia is definitely part of that, though if the games are still great outside of nostalgia then I don't know that you can argue against it.

I think this thread would benefit from a clear discussion on the benefits of dropping a franchise before we go and say which ones should be dropped. Putting myself in a developer's shoes, at the point of the news that my company's core franchise has been discontinued... what does this gain me? It varies from company to company, or even from franchise to franchise I suppose. What are the possible benefits?

I'm foreseeing some answers like "the story is finished; forcing more can't be of the same quality" or "I have these new ideas that don't fit our current franchise". Definitely good reasons. Are there others? :p It can be enlightening discussion!

I'm trying to think of some of the discussed franchises in this light, and I'm not so sure I get positive results. I see something like Galaxy as a good example. Miyamoto or whoever had a pretty cool idea about putting all 3 dimensions to great use in Galaxy. I will say at its core, Galaxy is about that weird 3Dness, running around little planets, along with a fairly traditional game concept of collecting items (stars). They could have easily made this a non-Mario game... in fact, it was quite a stretch to do the opposite and make it a Mario game. Mario in space? It's kinda weird, after all. So from a developer's point of view, what is the benefit to taking this idea and using it in a new franchise versus the benefit of keeping it in the established franchise?

The same can be said for the other franchises I mentioned. FFXII's combat was radically different from any previous Final Fantasy, and the storyline was even pretty different being a pretty standard fantasy political struggle story with a Magical Artifact of Power involved... quite different from the previous normal FF game, FFX. Effortlessly easy for Square Enix to use the same mechanics and the same story under a different name, dropping the FF appellation. They wouldn't have been tied down by nearly nonexistant constraints of the franchise (that many other franchises do have) or what-have-you. Would they have benefited from breaking off from the franchise?

Or maybe more importantly, if you're talking from a purely gamer point of view not caring about the business side of things (which is a very viable viewpoint), would gamers themselves have benefited from the franchise being dropped?

It also raises an interesting discussion about franchises. Mario is a particularly bad and prolific perpetrator of showing up in random places, namely the 8927323472934 Mario games along the lines of Mario Tennis or the recent Bowser's Inside Story. Final Fantasy has had its share of occasional spinoffs. I'm not so sure much is gained outside of trying to milk marketing when taking these very different games and putting a familiar name on them. Maybe Mario can be excused as a mere mascot with a 2+ decade history, but it's a rampant issue throughout video games and other media. So while I support the core games of franchises that haven't gone stale or forcing stories to fit their established worlds, there comes a point at which a franchise sort of breaks away from what made it in the first place. I can support parts of the franchise, but not other parts.

I would totally pay for a Folk Hero game. It should come with violin (ahem.. "fiddle"), banjo, tamborine, and accoustic guitar controllers, and support multiple singing parts.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I would have to agree on Sonic at the very least. Each time that the team tries to reboot the character they never stick to the formula of what Sonic is. He's fast, people play Sonic games because they want to go fast. The dev team always adds some cheap gimmick which pulls you away from speed and ruins the game for most people.

I would agree that the MMO FF games shouldn't be part of the numbered sequence as there are many collectors out there that don't want to buy the MMOs but it's a way to move more copies so I don't see it stopping.

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"Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes."
- George Soros

And spoon solo!

Don't forget the mouth harp! I just don't want to go second.

As far as risk vs reward for dropping franchises goes -- realistically? High risk, low reward for the bigger franchises. They know if you slap the well-known character/title on it, they will come, regardless of quality. Ideally? I would love to see venerable franchises bow out gracefully in their old age instead of whithering away.

For smaller franchises that don't have as much muscle behind them, however, the reward may very well outweigh the risk. They have more leeway to drop struggling game series and move on to something more innovative.

In other words, drop the Final Fantasy series, and millions of people cry, regardless of how good S/E's next project is. But drop, say, Prince of Persia, and you have a smaller backlash, but potentially more to gain from a new IP.

I see no reason to drop the Final Fantasy title. Considering that almost none of the games have anything to do with another, they are all basically stand alone games. It wasn't until very recently that they decided to tie certain games in the series together(the wold of Ivalice) which I think added more to the game.

I also wouldn't mind them retiring the Halo series...if they would stop ending their games with cliffhangers. I don't count Halo Wars or ODST since they are boring side stories with unlikable characters that I wish had died instead of lived(seriously, the Rookie is the only tolerable character in ODST).

Metroid is finally going back in the right direction. Twilight Princess finally brought the Zelda series back to awesome after horrible games(though, the next installment is taking us back to the crap, though it is more of a side game being on the DS and I wouldn't count it as a major installment). I've never liked Mario games(I played Duck Hunt more when we only had the one cart back in the 80s) but I know they'll never drop him ever. Same with Sonic(never liked Sonic, either).

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I'd play it. As long as I go to sing:

"Well........
There's a puppy in the parlour
And a skillet on the stove
There's a smelly old blanket
That a navajo wove..."

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Zelda and Mario may seem like they should die simply due to the fact that they've been around for decades, but I don't think they should. Nintendo would be nothing without Zelda and Mario. Why do you still get premium resale value at Gamestop for a Zelda game that came out three years ago? The rest of what the Wii has to offer is a bunch of garbage games that resemble a bunch of bottom of the barrel iphone apps, in terms of quality. Those franchises can't and won't die. Also, just look at the quality of the last titles released for those two franchises. Both titles were incredible.

As for GTA, the last game was incredible as well. GTA4 was the best GTA yet. Why kill it now? As others have stated, it's not even about the shock value of it anymore. Look at WoW. It's not really that fresh or original, but it's fun. The concept of an MMO doesn't have that shock value anymore to me, but they're still fun. GTA needs to stay. It's not like they are popping them out every years. There's years in between releases.

MGS is an awesome franchise. The games are incredibly fun and captivating. The entire stealth genre is really lacking these days. Without MGS, it basically doesn't even exist. Even the new Splinter Cell looks like it's going to be more action oriented than stealth. MGS needs to stay. Innovation is needed, sure. If MGS does die, the stealth genre needs desperate help. There's nothing out there anymore.

Halo does need to die, I'll agree on that. We need a new story. If they'd planned to make the franchise longer by stretching it out over five or six games rather than just three, it'd be a different story. Since the story is finished, it just seems like it needs to go now.

The last one I'll touch on is the Fill in the blank-Hero games. There's one exception to this list for me. DJ Hero is great, in my opinion. It keeps the same formula, but it's fresh and new. Minus DJ Hero, this genre needs to slow down a bit. Releasing a new Guitar Hero game every 8-9 month seems ridiculous. It's not like they ever get that innovative with the new game; it's just a bunch of new tracks. That can be handled with dlc.

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I dunno, I'd still rather have a physical disk.

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Ron Paul 2012

Keep your hands off my Zelda.

signed a proud maniac since 1986

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Agreed. I actually quite enjoyed Twilight Princess.