Once More With Feeling: Building Game Sequels and Remakes

One of the games I’ve worked on that I’m most proud of was the first Orcs Must Die! game. It was a modest title built by a small team that achieved commercial success and great user reviews. 

Orcs Must Die! started life as a prototype built from the bits and pieces of another scrapped project. Inside the studio, it was a real redemption story.

Robot, one of several companies that rose from the wreckage of Microsoft’s Ensemble shutdown, had its share of challenges early on – both internal and external. We were a studio made up of a bunch of experienced developers, but, like Ensemble before us, we struggled to put to rest the legacy of real-time strategy games and agree on a new direction. 

Creating brand-new intellectual properties is hard, even for experienced teams. Successful studios get nervous; it’s tempting to fall back on what worked before. With Orcs Must Die!, Robot not only managed to get past its real-time strategy legacy but found success in an entirely new space.

My contribution was significantly smaller after the franchise’s first title, but I regard Orcs Must Die! 2 as the near-perfect model for a sequel. After the first game’s release, customers clearly had an appetite for “the same, but bigger.” That’s exactly what OMD2 delivered, to even greater commercial success and comparably glowing critical reception.

OMD2 was a longer, more meaty game that added more complex levels, more traps, and more challenges – more of everything that the first game offered, plus a strong new hook in a cooperative mode that lets you dismember thousands of orcs with a buddy. It didn’t rewrite the formula and it didn’t need to – it delivered exactly what the fans wanted and expected.

Third Time’s the… Charm?

If a new game is a success, a sequel is a no-brainer for a studio. All the hard questions are answered. Core mechanics have been proven out; the team knows how to build content; asset pipelines don’t need to be reworked. Good execution becomes more important than innovation.

By the time a studio gets to a third game – a second sequel – the process gets riskier. The core engine has aged; key developers might have moved on. The rest of the team starts to get restless. Developers are a creative bunch; they don’t like to stay stuck in a rut, doing the same thing over and over as if they were on an assembly line.

Still, it works – at least commercially – for some franchises to crank out an endless string of straightforward sequels. Think of the incremental model that EA has adopted for its sports games. 

Madden may be mocked by gamers for its by-the-numbers “make exactly three major changes every year” model of iteration, but it sells. The fans keep buying, more for updated team and roster content than anything else.

For many game franchises, though, the customers will eventually tire of the same thing. You might have a favorite meal at a restaurant, but that doesn’t mean you want to eat it every single night. Playing the same game eventually gets boring, even if incremental improvements have been made along the way.

Little wonder, then, that most studios give franchises a periodic break. After the incredible success of Age of Kings, Ensemble stepped sideways and built Age of Mythology before returning to their core franchise with Age of Empires III. Robot too tried something different with Orcs Must Die! Unchained, a free-to-play game with an emphasis on competitive multiplayer.

But even relatively minor pivots carry risks for a successful franchise. Though Age of Empires III was a huge hit, the setting and new features didn’t fully recapture the same level of fan passion that Age of Kings had achieved. 

Orcs Must Die! Unchained was an even further sidestep than Age III, changing the fundamental focus of what fans had loved about the first two games, to less-glowing critical and commercial results.

A Breath of Fresh Air

Even the strongest franchises have to be nurtured or they’ll wither and die. Like a transplanted mature tree, they need a periodic dose of care, feeding, and careful pruning. The balance between delivering what the audience expects from a sequel and innovating so that a series can keep going as the audience changes is a delicate one.

Sometimes, as with Orcs Must Die! 2, “more of the same, but bigger and better” is all that’s needed. For a first sequel to a successful game, that’s not only a safe path – it’s one that the audience wanted. 

But it’s not the only path. Bethesda, with its long-running Elder Scrolls franchise, has significantly mixed things up to great success over the years with every iteration. 

If you play Daggerfall and Skyrim back-to-back (as I recently have), other than the robust lore, you’d never know they were part of the same franchise. They emphasize entirely different aspects of gameplay and deliver different experiences.

The original System Shock was followed up by System Shock 2, which shifted the feel of the franchise from the original combat-heavy immersive sim to a more RPG-focused horror experience. And Arkane’s fantastic Prey (2017), which owes a lot to System Shock 2, is loosely connected to the 2006 game of the same name – but you’d never know it.

If a franchise lasts long enough, it opens up the possibility of a nostalgia-tinged remake that appeals to both original fans and a new generation. One of the most recent examples is Nightdive’s fantastic System Shock remake – a title that stays incredibly loyal in both feel and content design to the original while updating the engine, systems, and user interface for a modern audience.

Building a Legacy

So where does that leave a team when they’re designing a sequel to a successful game? How do they strike the right balance between innovation with simply executing what they know how to do well?

Maybe it’s a cop-out, but I think there’s no one right answer.

It’s safe to say that the more popular a first game is, the better off a team will be doing at least one direct and comparatively safe iteration. As Orcs Must Die! 2 demonstrates, as long as the team delivers on great execution and polish, the sequel will likely be carried to greater heights by positive word-of-mouth and a dedicated core fanbase.

But even for second games in a franchise, there are counter-examples. System Shock 2 bears little resemblance to the first game but achieved greater success and influenced so many great games that came after it – a testimony to the vision and creativity of the team that built it.

By the time a team gets to a third sequel and beyond, it pays to question assumptions and take more risks. Gamers are a fickle bunch and tastes change; entire genres might fall by the wayside. 

Franchises that don’t evolve will eventually wither and die – but so too will sequels that completely ignore the elements that made their predecessors popular in the first place.

New Scree Games blogs appear on Tuesdays.