Are you kidding I live for this kind of insight lol. I agree with you! What I mean is it’s just such a shame that in this day in age I see so many weird “lazy” things happening in games. I don’t want to point fingers because I really don’t want to offend someone’s favorite game, but I’m really not joking when I say “Were games in the 80’s lazy? Yeah some of them were”. But what I’m noticing is it’s a lot harder back then to notice it because it was known as that, weird period of “trial and error”. There was no real guide to making a game perfect or amazing, there were just guidelines.
Today there’s still guidelines but because of the technology I think it’s much easier to see laziness.
@_@ now we’re both overthinking, haha.
And that’s why I tagged it that way XD
But yeah, it’s sort of a vicious cycle: say, Game A is released (year and era and pixel count doesn’t matter). It’s a huge hit, everybody loves it, the studio decides to make a sequel. In this sequel, the accentuate the parts of Game A that people liked, and advertise it as such. Game B is released and is again a hit because it contains much of what made Game A a hit. They then distill this further in to Game C, then in to Game D, etc.
There’s a huge amount of “much of the same” mentality in marketing, and not just in games. After all, don’t fix what isn’t broken, right? Game A sold for a reason, after all!
And it works, too. I’m not saying that a sequel keeping with the spirit of the original is bad, or that keeping elements is poor design, or that changing things up is the only way anything can ever be good (there are always exceptions to everything in cases like these, no exceptions), but hey, Game B sells because it’s a sequel to Game A.
This does, however, create two interesting effects: one being that no matter how good a game actually is people will perceive it as being exactly the same/a rehash based entirely on its advertising. (I’m so amazingly guilty of this. See my line about war shooters in my previous post - I’m sure there’s great war shooters out there somewhere.)
The other is, in some cases, a dislike of change, regardless of the result of the change. For example, there’s plenty of people that dislike Mother 3 because it deviates from Earthbound in tone and the tightness of plot. That’s fine, and people can like whatever they want, and it doesn’t make anybody else’s opinion more or less valid. It’s just a different game. Though, to be fair, that’s not as much an advertizing or demographic thing.