#sequel development

As you said, taking things away from players generates really bad feelings from the most engaged players. Everything that has been released and obtained by players must be supported forever for those players for the remaining lifetime of the game. However, the passage of time is inevitable and the game eventually loses its sustainability over time as player attrition causes engagement to inevitably go down. Even the most entrenched players will continue to age and external life events will occur that pull them from the game - they’ll play other games, they’ll graduate from school, they’ll start careers, they’ll get married, they’ll have kids, and so on and so forth. For many of these players, the amount of money and time spent on a game eventually becomes much less important. When you’ve suddenly become a father and have to take care of the baby, the shiny new raid or game mode often becomes a much lower priority in the grand scheme of things. Even the longest running live service titles like World of Warcraft see significant player attrition over time. 

In addition to this, the passage of time causes stress on the technology. Certain assumptions made early in the project (often technical) eventually become untenable for a live service to change or manage, primarily because of how much stuff is built on top of those assumptions. This can be things like how the user database is set up, how the hardware is assumed to work, or how the development tools to create the content were built. Things that worked just fine when there were only a thousand different item IDs in the game to load may no longer work as well when there are a hundred thousand different item IDs in the game. The team working on new content doesn’t have room in the budget or schedule go back to upgrade all of the prior content or technology. 

Eventually, the combination of these two major factors - player attrition and outdated technology/design - and their associated ongoing costs dictate that no further development should occur and the game should be quietly allowed to die. However, there are still a lot of fond memories among players who played the game and still a lot of general interest in the IP. This is when we decide to build the sequel for it. We can throw out the old crufty bits and start fresh with modern tech and design paradigms while (hopefully) retaining the concepts and ideas that made the previous game good. A new game will also be able to pull in new players who were interested in the old game but either bounced off due to things like complexity built up over its years as well as old players who lapsed due to some of those aforementioned life changes. 

We don’t always get it right for a variety of reasons, but many publishers have been able to establish community migration even with entrenched communities. The annual new sports title rollover, for example, is commonplace. Fighting game franchises like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Dead or Alive, and Tekken have generally been able to transition their communities to new game iterations. Even some FPS franchises like Call of Duty and Battlefield are (generally) able to make those transitions. Overcoming the bad feelings of abandoning sunk cost is definitely a thing, but there are definitely ways do it properly.

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One of the reasons to make a new stand-alone game (when it is pretty close to the old game like the examples you mention) stems from needing to significantly change or outright remove/replace major old systems. In a live game that’s got continued support, there’s already a well-established audience of players who are already invested in what’s been released. Players absolutely hate it when we take something away that they’re already invested in because it feels really really bad, so we try to avoid doing that as much as we can.

This is most often game systems we’ve designed (e.g. we changed how combat works, we changed how crafting works, etc.), but it can also extend to technical or art changes. For example, imagine that we build a brand new animation system to enable all sorts of new stuff like partial animations, better terrain traversal, more elaborate combat moves, etc. Unfortunately, the new animation system won’t work with a bunch of legacy content that wasn’t built with that new animation system in mind, so much of that old content breaks. Going back to update that old content is cost- and time-prohibitive - we’d rather create new and cool content instead. Calling the project a new game allows us to bypass any player expectation for that old content, while bringing the animation system into the old game would trigger the bad feels from taking things away or leaving in broken content.

This certainly isn’t the only reason we would create a sequel game, but it is one major reason to do so. Large changes usually invalidate or break old previously-supported content, and one well-established player expectation is that “if it’s live, it will continue to work until all of the game’s support is shut down”. Making a new game allows us to break those expectations and that’s important if we want to continue improving and evolving our games.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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You’re making a big assumption here - that the sequel is built using the previous game as a base and has all of the old features immediately available. Most of the time, sequels are not built that way - they might salvage some parts of the same foundation (rendering, physics, back end server interface, etc.), but they don’t necessarily maintain all of the gameplay systems that came before them. Old systems often can’t be ported over because of technology issues - the new engine does X instead of Y, but the old crafting system assumed that it would always be done with Y. Think of it like trying to connect an old game console to a new HDTV that lacks old cable ports.

This is especially true if there’s a big engine change in between titles, like from the Sims 3 to the Sims 4. Old animations don’t work with the new rigs, old textures don’t map right to new models, old UI was built for a different resolution and feels dated, old behavior systems were replaced with new and different ones, so dropping in things built with old assumptions often doesn’t work.The devs didn’t go through Sims 3 code and rip out all of the old gameplay systems for Sims 4, they had to rebuild all of the core systems from the ground up. After they rebuilt the core, they reconstructed each of the game modes that the fans wanted over time. 

The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work.

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That’s certainly a bunch of questions. Let’s see if I can tackle all of them.

Is it profitable for a company to piggyback off the popularity of a certain game type or mode?

It certainly can be. League of Legends supplanted Dota as the premiere MOBA game. World of Warcraft was certainly not the first MMOG, but it is certainly the biggest. Also, there have been very successful other MMOGs that came after WoW. GTA3 was the first big open world 3D sandbox game, but we have successes in Saint’s Row, Just Cause, Infamous, Horizon Zero Dawn, etc. That said, it isn’t always the case - I’m sure you can think of plenty of failed MOBAs, MMOGs, team-based shooters, fighting games, and other types of games built to follow a genre leader. It really just depends on whether the new game can carve out enough of an audience to sustain itself. I think the answer to that is statistically about 50/50.

Can companies even implement modes that fast because of a trend?

It depends on a lot of factors - their technology, the amount of content they need to build for it, how much money they are willing to dump into it, etc.  Epic was able to pivot quickly with Fortnite because the engine was built to be extensible with lots of possible types of gameplay. You can compare this to something like the Frostbite engine, which is notoriously difficult to make do anything that isn’t a FPS game. Scope is the largest determining factor of turnaround time. Mobile games are notoriously easy to turn around quickly, but MMOGs are almost impossible due to just how much total development and content is needed for release.

Is the accusation that Anthem is only a thing because destiny is popular even a reasonable one since it’s been in the works for years?

Anthem has been in development for a very, very long time. Its design has certainly changed over time, but the general idea has always been there. I can’t say that Destiny hasn’t had an effect on it, but I know for a fact that the idea of Anthem as a multiplayer cooperative science fiction shooter has been in place since at least early 2014, before Destiny was released. You also have to realize, Bioware’s been working on MMOG content and technology since ~2008; they’ve got a lot of experience building that sort of thing. 

This week we continue the Design Phase of the FANTa Project!

[What is the FANTa project?] [Git the FANTa Project]

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