I would find it very difficult to write about the Robin Williams thing without getting extremely personal, and I don’t think I’m ready for that. At the same time, I’ve been thinking about it and so it must be mentioned. I am saddened by his loss, and I think that mental illness is not a topic that we (as a society) are good at talking about. I’m not sure what it’ll take for us to get better, but maybe this can be a start. It would be nice if we could talk about things without tragedy, but that’s a separate issue.

With that out of the way, I want to talk about Sequels. Geometry Wars 3 was announced recently, and so was Roller Coaster Tycoon World. The former actually has some people who were at the studio that made the first two games (but not the creator of the series), the latter does not. The game I mentioned yesterday (Sacred 3) was made without any of the team that made Sacred 1 and 2. There are probably lessons that can be learned from that going forward.

Cautious Optimism

I expect these games to deviate somewhat from their predecessors, RCT especially. (As an aside, deviating from RCT4 is likely to only be a good thing.) Chris Sawyer isn’t involved and hasn’t been involved for a long time. There has not been a game like Roller Coaster Tycoon since RCT3 10 years ago, and it’s not because people haven’t tried. That’s not to say the game will be bad, but it probably won’t be the same.

Geometry wars I’m more hopeful about, simply because there are fewer moving parts to mess up. While the quality of twin stick shooters does vary, I have some confidence that access to the IP and (hopefully) mechanics represented by the series will result in a fun game. That said, they could throw me for a loop and make it play like Star Fox, for all I know. Information isn’t exactly available yet.

I continue to insist that Sacred 3’s reception is mostly about its name, so maybe these examples should be careful. It’s too late for RCT4, but RCT World is at least being structured as a spin-off, and they’ve already said it won’t have microtransactions, so there’s almost nowhere to go but up from there. As long as the games that come out are good, I don’t mind if they’re not 100% faithful to the series.

For more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative. Take a look at Isey’s post from yesterday for an opinion on silent protagonists.