Srs Bsns: Changing the Formula

For as long as games have existed, developers have experimented with different formulas to determine what works and what doesn't, and when a formula has outlasted its welcome they move onto something new to shake things up. But how do you decide when a formula is no long working and what to change it to?

Almost immediately the first thing to enter a person's mind when I bring this up is Call of Duty. Ever since the fourth game Call of Duty has been more or less the same game with few changes and it wasn't until even the fanbase was getting tired of it that they finally decided to shake things up. This gave us such titles like Call of Duty Ghosts and Advanced Warfare. In this instance I think most people would agree it was time for a chance, but what happens when there is no public outcry?

I'm never going to catch them all.

Call of Duty isn't the first series to take a winning formula and keep rehashing it for as long as it makes money. A lot of games have done this in the past. Take Pokemon for example. I love Pokemon as much as the next person, but when you really think about it it's basically the same game every time.

You play a kid, you go out on a journey to catch and train Pokemon. All you have to do is keep adding Pokemon and a few new features and the series will never die. Why don't we hear these complaints aimed at them? I know maybe one or two people have in the past, but nowhere near the same extent we hear it with Call of Duty.

The problems don't end there. Before Mega Man X, Mega Man was more or less the same game every time. Just with different stages and bosses to fight. Mega Man also shows quite an ingenious way to spice things up without endangering what was there before.

Capcom set Mega Man X so far into the future that it wouldn't interfere with the old games' timeline. Both games could co-exist and they did. Granted, it was confusing seeing a Mega Man X and then a 7 and 8, but it was a great idea because if Mega Man X didn't work they at least had the original to fall back on.

Then you have one of the most famous games of all: Mario. Mario was always about a little plumber who ran around rescuing princesses from castles. This formula was so popular it was used in a bunch of different games until we got sick to death of it, but despite it turning into a trope we still enjoy it from our Mario games.

Super Mario Brothers 2 changed a lot of things from the first game (mainly because it wasn't meant to be a Mario game) and it was met with a lot of hate.

Mario 3 and Super Mario World was loved because it went back to what made the first one great.

In this case people hated change and you can argue what change there have been (Super Mario Sunshine) wasn't that good to begin with.

Some times change can be a good thing, and other times it can lead to disaster. Sonic the Hedgehog was originally a lighthearted platform game about a blue hedgehog who ran around rescuing animals.

When it made the shift to 3D they started incorporating darker stories into the games doing a complete 180 from what made it popular in the first place.

This, with the additional of a bunch of other problems, led to a decline in the Sonic franchise and fans still clinging onto hope that the next game will turn things around.

San Francisco Rush possessed a great formula. All you had to do was race and explode. That was a lot of fun, but then along came LA Rush and the whole game was different.

No longer was it just a fun racing game with explosions. You had a story mode, a bunch of things to unlock, and the crashes were nowhere near as entertaining, and as far as I can tell nobody asked for that. So why change it?

Why are we so quick to jump on Call of Duty for repeating what works when so many other games are guilty of the same thing? Is it an example of the series not being able to distract from rehashing the same tired formula, or do we simply not like the games?

There's nothing wrong with that. People like and dislike different things. Everyone is different, but if that's the case why don't we just say as much? Some of the people who criticize Call of Duty aren't even fans of the genre.

Of course you wouldn't like it, you don't like first-person shooters. That's like not liking RPGs and getting mad at Final Fantasy for being different almost every other game. Final Fantasy isn't the only franchise out there that innovates.

But hey, we're all guilty of it. It's easier to see the flaws in something we hate or don't care about than something we love. Everybody has their own biases and it's not always as easy to see.

So, when should developers consider changing the formula? I think the easiest answer is when it stops working. If something is starting to tire the majority of your audience then change may be necessary to survive.

However, there's no guarantee that the changes you make will work, and that's why we get things like Capcom's having a fallout plan for Mega Man. Even though there's no plans for Mega Man anywhere in sight these days.

Yet at the same time we had the Devil May Cry reboot which was such a drastic departure from the original games that a lot of people rejected it. Maybe it wouldn't have been as bad if the creators didn't act like such complete dicks, but that's what happened.

Now DMC has two HD remasters coming out based on two different worlds and no direction on where to take the franchise next.

Hell, even if you're successful with the first change that doesn't mean that the followup will be as good. Resident Evil 4 was a financial success and received critical acclaim after it looked like the franchise was suffering. Then RE5 came out with the same formula as 4 and completely botched it.

Somehow RE5 just lacked what made RE4 good, and even after that a lot of the people who grew up with the older games rejected 4 because, like with DmC, it was such a giant departure from what they knew.

At the end of the day you can't please everyone. Some people are going to like the old way of doing things, and others are going to hate it. Your changes may be a success, or they may push you into a deeper hole than what you were in.

They may work the first time, and fail the second. Everything has a risk factor and it's only by weighing the pros and cons that you can really decide what's worth taking a chance on, and every situation is different.

I'm ToriJ, and that's my opinion.