Which Do You Prefer From A Sequel— Innovation or Refinement?

[IcaroRibeiro]

Innovation implies creating something new. I will rephrase your question as: You want changes or refinements?

There is not a fixed rule, however there are situations where I specifically want and expect some sequel to change or to refine

- I always want changes when the formula is either flawed to the core, stale/outdated or overused by other games that did better job

Exemple: Dragon Quest (stale), Assassin's Creed (overused) and Starfield (good in concept by flawed in game design or lack of thereof)


I want incremental evolution when

a) The game has overall good structure and design but the systems feel too simply and lacking depth
b) When they found the right gameplay concept but did quite delivered it to its full potential
c) or when the mechanics are very niche/unique with very few similar offerings in the market

Exemple:

a) Final Fantasy XV. Combat gameplay flows nicely and is fun to play, but it's too shallow. It needs more RPG elements and more tactical use of teleport. I like the semi open world and day/night structure of the game, it just needed more depth
b) Octopath Travaler 0. I like the concept of controlling the 8 party members, but the game faces severe balancing, passing and structure issues derivatived by the fact your characters have almost no personality or presence in story (you only get the characters plot-relevant really late). They can keep the combat mechanics, but they need to fix those problems
c) X Com. There is simply very few tactical games that plays like X Com, even if I'm not the biggest fan of some of its randomized structure I'd rather keep X Com as its own thing instead of turning it similar to another tactical combat game

Last edited by IcaroRibeiro - 11 hours ago