Game Dev Nightmare: New Lead/Old Franchise

Visual Novel Community Anime/Otaku Discussions
#1

As games continue to produce more sequels, many of them directly related to each other, developers are increasingly experiencing a problem of creating protagonists who are too perfect. Cases in point are Devil May Cry 4 and Metal Gear Solid 2.

Originally, DMC4 was not intended to have Dante as a playable character, with newcomer Nero revitalizing the series from scratch. When the fanbase learned of this, there was tremendous negative outcry: ranging from death threats to boycotts. Despite their best attempts to explain that Nero would be every bit as great as Dante, the public could not be appeased, and the developers inevitably relented and incorporated Dante back into DMC4.

The reason for DMC attempting to “abandon” Dante in the first place is easily explained: Dante is too perfect. As seen in the cut scenes of DMC4, Dante is at his apex: unquestionably the most powerful (and badass) being on Earth. Thanks to DMC1 and DMC3, every aspect of Dante’s personality has been explored: his reason to fight, his compassion, his attitude, and even his love. We know how Dante thinks, we know who Dante can rely on when the chips are down, and we know Dante can’t possibly lose when the shit hits the fan. That’s exactly the problem. As a character, Dante has his entire story told. He has fought and defeated his only equal (Virgil), not to mention fought and defeated his only superior (Mundus). He has his true love at his side (Trish) and a respectable rival on the other (Lady).

When creating DMC4, the developers wanted to make the series more of a saga than the earlier entries. Doing that with Dante was almost impossible. Romantically we know Dante will never settle down: his ideal women are fast and wild (one only look at Trish and Lady), with a notion of love that’s really about short term gratification. In terms of personality, Dante is too stubborn for change and so overconfident that nothing phases him. Indeed from what we’ve seen of most battles, Dante holds back and plays games all the time. In short: Dante has no room for change, because change is not what Dante is about. Nero on the other hand, was created to allow growth. His past is mysterious. Despite what he might say aloud, he lacks confidence in himself. Nero is far from being as skilled from the earlier DMC veterans. His love with Kyrie is more akin to true romance. Thus Nero was molded to give DMC a new future. The problem of course, was that gamers didn’t see this. They essentially see Nero as a second rate Dante.

All said and done, after the release of DMC4, Nero was better accepted. He’s seen as fellow badass, but everyone realizes that he’s nowhere near the caliber of Dante… Trish could most likely hand him his ass. In all honesty, even Lady as well. The problem of course, is the creation of DMC5. The developers would like to continue the story of Nero ¬ñ but without Dante. Unfortunately, the Shadow of Dante casts doubt that they can go this route. Fans want to see more of Dante with Trish and Lady at his side. While the developers GREATLY appreciate the love fans have for Dante, and revel they have created such a memorable character: they lament the lack of room left to them. They cannot continue using Dante and keeping him badass forever. Overuse of the character can only result in disappointment… yet passing the torch is proving difficult.

This same problem was also evident in MGS2 ¬ñ as fans did not enjoy having Raiden over Snake. MGS3 brings an end to Snake, and major attempts were made to have Raiden become the next generation badass… but all indications show it wasn’t as huge a success as they’d like.

The question asked: How does one pass the torch for a perfect character, without ending the series and staring anew from total scratch?

#2

Much as I hate to say it, since I like story as much as the next guy, you don’t really need story in some franchises. See also: Castlevania. Lack of significant story is baggage that a lot of game series are sort of stuck with now; it makes them what they are. Trying to change it means you’d need to change so much else, the series wouldn’t be the same.

Trying to turn Die Hard into a horror movie wouldn’t work. Same as if they tried to turn it into a romantic comedy. So then trying to turn it into Kino’s Journeys won’t work either.

Ultimately, they series is defined by what came before. Change too much, then why isn’t it something new? That’s why DMC got made in the first place, it was originally going to be an RE title, then the project managers said “this isn’t really RE, but it’s too awesome to throw away.” So they made it into a new game: DMC.

If people want to see Dante being his badass self in his own series then that’s what they should get. Otherwise you run the risk of a travesty like the “Transformers” movie. If you want to create a spinoff series with a new main character and take a more measured serious approach to storyline, that’s fine, but the DMC series has always been about Dante kicking ass and taking names. If your intended storyline compromises that, then it doesn’t belong in a DMC main-sequence flagship title.

Edit: I guess the answer to your question is Mu. Instead, I would ask how you continue pleasing the fans if the story cannot progress past where you’ve taken it, and you can’t change it.

(Caveat: never played DMC2; heard it sucks.)

#3

Ugh. Bad question.

I guess you’ll have to make your perfect character die. Dying of an amazingly badass death, but still dying.

You should put some secondary characters in the cast, and slowly start to make one of them stand out more and more, so that he’s ready to step up when the main one dies.

Of course, making the beloved hero die could as well be a suicide, with thousands of fan besieging the software house buildings with torches and clubs and evil intentions, but well…sometimes you’ve got to take some risks :mrgreen:

#4

And yet stagnation also causes fans to lament that nothing new happens. Even with Castlevania change was introduced. Simon was replaced with Trevor, who was replaced with Richter, who was replaced with Alucard, etc. Of course Dracula was usually the end boss… but there are a handful of Castlevania that do not have him: Bloodlines being the best example. The insurmountable problem being reached, is that the “perfect character” can’t get anymore perfect without his traits doing negative damage: i.e. the same tricks over and over again.

Something CAPCOM knows well. :slight_smile: Megaman died so there could be a Megaman X (the Cataclysm). Then Megaman X died so there could be a Megaman Zero (the Elf Wars). Then Megaman Zero died so there could be a Megaman ZX (the Neo Arcadian War). Yet is obviously gets old… it’s pretty much certain that ZX must die before Legends comes into play…

Inevitably Metal Gear Solid followed the same trail… Solid Snake dies.

Must death (or retirement) be the only answer?

#5

This is where it gets really hard.

On the one hand, you have to know when not to listen to your fans; sometimes people will say they want something, then when you give it to them, complain it wasn’t what they wanted after all. As long as the games are popular, it means people don’t REALLY mind. It’s only when the series starts to stagnate that you have to try to actually change it up.

On the other hand, if in 20, 25 years, Zelda games’ stories still go thru the same motions that are already tired today, then yes, this will be a very serious problem. Ultimately the entire “hero of time” thing was a bad idea then, it still is now, and sooner or later Ganon needs to stay dead. Surely there are other interesting stories to be told in a world featuring something like the Triforce.

#6

Well, there’s a few things you can do with a fan favorite character.

#1 — Go back in time.Back before any bit of the story told. WAY back, so the character is a way below where he started— OR, near start. Just have the story (or this new series) with a general arc so that something happens to the character (after the new game and the next sequel or two)— something that ends up hurting the character and leaving it in a state that, in a few years, will tie back into the first game. Head trauma for instance (giving the excuse of losing skills and memories of the time). Sure, its cheesy. But then, your fans are really demanding this sort of cheese. That’s because the perfect bad ass has no where to go in his story. What are you going to do? Many have fought (and beat) the god-creator of their universe or a dark universe threatening their little safe bubble. The only place from there is decay from that point.

#2 — Strike the character down— without KILLING him. Just put him into a coma. Have his spirit, being so indominatable, go out. Give it the ability to manifest on the physical plane — for VERY shortly. Now the character has a quest… find out what struck the character down. Find out it has a malevent force behind it. Now he needs to find a way to get his body fixed, AND stop the malevant force. You can have all sorts of things that threaten (or have to be fought with new nifty styles, new weapons, and new strategies)— other astral things that are trying to capture, feed off of, or just hunt down and play with (and eventually destroy) the character. Since the character was primarily a bad ass in the physical plane, he’s fairly weak on the mental. So you’ve got the whole “becoming a super bad ass god of astral death” angle to go.

#3 — Do a what if. Make it clear that the new story (and if popular, the new series) is a big “what if”. The fans get a variation of their hero and a tale— but it is twisted around and changed enough they can never be sure what is up.

#4 — Do a time jump, to when the character is old and feeble. Let the character kick a LOT of ass, showing off they are still the living god of war and death molded into one form— but with them being so old, they have to have their great-great-grandkid do most of the running around errands (letting the kid slowly develop), and only have the main character being the “Go to here and find this/talk to X” NPC— but throw in a few ambushes, where the old bastard gets to show off and kill everything— all while trying to keep the idiot kid alive.

#5 — the old “now you are a clone”. Character wakes up, but isn’t the super bad ass everyone remembers. This is basically a simple “what if”, but you can tie it into the main story line if you like. If you don’t, it really is just a “what if” or “elsewhere” story, but with a familar face to the fans.

There’s more then just killing the fan demanded character. There’s plenty of ways to make an interesting story that even some of the fans would like. It just depends how much room the developers have left themselves in their character and their world.

#7

I hoping they let Tomb Raider Stay buried for a few years. While I really Enjoyed Underworld, They really need to see where they want this series to go next, even passing on to a new Developer.

Don’t get me wrong I like Lara Croft and her being merely human helps. It’s just how many tombs, Ancient Ruins etc. are there? Anyway I’d like to see some of the longer running series Shaken up a bit. That’s why I think Final Fantasy does so well. It may be the same type of game but you always get new characters, Stories etc.

#8

The world is vast and human civilization has existed for a very long time. And if you want to start throwing pseudohistory into the mix, you have an effectively unlimited supply of hitherto-unknown lost cities, ancient tombs, forgotten ruins … The world is an absolutely huge place.

#9

Also, you can have them turn traitor, in an amazingly badass manor. This gives players the ability to really show their the next character can kick ass if he has to go against him, or those that follow him. However, this can only be done a few times before it gets stale.

Use a character with different skills. Unless your character is truly the god-of-every-skill-in,-has-been-and-ever-will-be-in-existence then there is something that someone can do better than him. At first it may be specialized thing, but you can broaden it out.

You can move him to a sideline story. Apollo Justice did this with Phionex Wright. They kept him on as a major character, but not as the protagonist. This requires more slow easing out, but it is ultimately the most successful long-term aspect to move from one character to the next.

There are other ways.

The best example I’d have to say I can think of is Star Ocean 1 → Star Ocean 2. The male protagonist storyline was about getting out of his father’s shadow, ie the very problem characters face out of game, he faced in-game.

#10

I’ve been straining my brain for a few days now trying to come up with a character from a game that was exclusively for PC or originally started on PC that suffers from this issue, and have yet to come up with anything. In thinking about this, I have noticed that of the recurring lead characters in PC games that immediately come to my mind (Gordon Freeman from the Half-Life series and Garrett from the Thief series), the games they are in are less about them than they are about the machinations of greater forces in the world around them in which they are agents of change. On the other hand, on consoles it often seems to be more about the lead character (Mario, Link, some Belmont, Lara Croft), with a recurring villain often times (Bowser, Ganon, Dracula) and maybe a secondary character (Princess Peach, Princess Zelda).
I apologize if I’m oversimplifying things, since, as I’ve stated many times, I am primarily a PC only gamer.

#11

Baldur’s Gate.

#12

Thank you Jinnai! I knew there had to be some game series on PC that had suffered from this problem. Unfortunately, since I still haven’t gotten around to playing through Baldur’s Gate 2 with the Throne of Bhaal expansion (I’ve only played through without the expansion), it didn’t come to mind. Hmm, since I recently received a hand-me-down laptop, I may put the Baldur’s Gate series on it for when I’m not using it to play eroge.

#13

I don’t think that’s really the explanation for this. There really isn’t a fundamental difference between the PC world and the console world in the nature of lead characters. There might be one on the basis of game genre (RPGs versus FPSes, I think there would be a strong case to make there; but RPGs don’t usually have direct sequels keeping the same cast.)

It seems to me the main difference is that there aren’t any PC games I can name that have had nearly as many entries as consoles have. Mega Man, Mario, Zelda, Metroid, even (relative) newcomers like Ratchet and Clank or God of War. PC games just … don’t do that. I am not that big of a PC gamer (especially lately … SecuROM can kiss my ass), so there’s a chance I might be wrong here … But there’s been a lot more churn, I think, in the PC market than in the console market.

History can account for most of that. There are very few game companies still around, period, from twenty years ago. Most of the ones that HAVE survived are now more of a publisher than a developer. Activision was the first third-party developer for the Atari; now they’re a publisher. So there are very few properties that have even had the opportunity to have this issue, since the problem is one that only really manifests itself after a series has continued for awhile. One of the biggest companies that survived for a long time, and still makes games? Nintendo. Some of the biggest offenders in this area? Nintendo IPs.

Also during the transition from 2D to 3D, many IPs were abandoned. There’s this neo-retro “kick” the industry’s going on right now, but a lot of series that might have run into this problem ended.

#14

King’s Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, all of which had 6, 7, 8, or more games released, just to name a few. Though, King’s Quest didn’t use the same character through all it’s titles, and two later(Or rather recent) releases of Larry are using his nephew.

#15

The Unreal series also falls in to this category, seeing as how there is a bit of continuing story through the games.

#16

I loved SNES’s Shadowrun. It was really fun. I wanted to get Genesis’s Shadowrun. I overheard that it was hard to find.

I did not play Xbox 360’s Shadowrun yet. Several posters claimed that it was bad.

#17

Space Quest and LSL were comedies and thus in some sense continuing on with them for a bit longer is easier because it’s about getting laughs and that the person being the butt of the joke is the same doesn’t matter. They don’t power-level or anything. For those games its more of a problem of getting to the point of new material to work out. In fact Al Lowe basically said he ended it where he did because he had done everything he wanted to do (within the constraints he placed upon or were placed upon him).

#18

Oh, no arguments there. I was mostly pointing out that there were computer games that had a large number of titles. But if we’re going strictly based on same characters building up and getting stronger, I’ll mention Quest for Glory which had five titles all using the same character. I’m more then certain there are others out there as well, but these are all mostly things of the past, and I’m gonna feel old saying this but, “They just don’t make games like the old days.”

#19

QfG actually felt a bit strained in the last one and even there they realized their hero was getting too powerful and tried to end it.

#20

The reason QFG V:Dragon Fire felt a little strained had nothing to do with the character being too powerful. My biggest complaint about V was that they tried to put too much stuff from the previous games in there, instead of telling the main story. Granted V was going to be the end of the series anyway, and they wanted the fans (I’ve played them all) (Also this game wouldn’t have been made at all if the fans hadn’t pestered Sierra to make the last one) to get their money’s worth.