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I loathe a cliffhanger in a series {spoilers}
emnmnme
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm trying to generate a little talk about near-dead game series. It's not going to bring most of them back with million-copies-sold sequels but, come on publishers, finish what you've started. Please don't leave us hanging in suspense. Spoilers are coming up:
System Shock 2
[spoiler:b5babb1d70]A big offender is Irrational Games. They haven't been able to finish up what they've started...ever. In System Shock 2, released in 1999. Great, great game but the ending chops players off from a satisfying climax. You just killed The Many. You just 'killed' Shodan and you got out of harm's way by diving into an esacpe pod. The game ended with a scary Jason-esque moment where an inhuman sillhouette creeps up on your character, ready to pounce, and then the credits roll. Bioshock isn't going to tell us what was going on; it's a whole new story. Irrational clearly had more to tell but there will never be a System Shock 3.[/spoiler:b5babb1d70]
Freedom Force
[spoiler:b5babb1d70]Irrational Games left us with a cliffhanger in this series, too. The Freedom Force sequel has the Alchemiss floating in a void. Out of love and shame, she erased all traces of herself from everyone's memory and recreated the universe so it seemed as if she had never existed. Now she's face to face with the personification of a sentient energy. The sequel's sales weren't enough to keep Irrational independent and Irrational was bought by EA Games. So dies the Freedom Force franchise.[/spoiler:b5babb1d70]
Shenmue
[spoiler:b5babb1d70]Oh, now here's one for the ages. Yu Suzuki somehow convinced the suits that there needed to be a game series made up of 16 installments even though he only had half the script written at the time. Series failed due to low sales - poor returns on $60 million investment. Shenmue 2 had Ryo Hazuki and new friend Shen Hua inside a cave, trying to find the girl's father and get answers on that useless mirror Ryo's carried around since the first game. Turns out the mirror is magic. Ryo places it in a mechanism and, after a light show, a glowing sword floats into the room. WTF? There's no way Sega is going to make a Shenmue 3 to end the mystery. The 2 games' sales burned them too badly.[/spoiler:b5babb1d70]
Legacy of Kain
[spoiler:b5babb1d70]Now this one's an odd duck. Dennis Dyack never intended LoK to be a series. Crystal Dynamics never really thought they'd get past the sequel, Soul Reaver. But Eidos ran with it and urged more story to be written. You know what? A lot of that story turned out to be pretty good. By the end of LoK:Defiance, Raziel was 'dead' after he sacrificed himself to create the Soul Reaver...that he and Kain were already holding...it makes sense if you play out the series. Kain used the Soul Reaver to wound the Ancient. Almost all of the Council is dead. Hylden ghouls are steadily trickling into Nosgoth and the last two guys who answer questions have been either possessed by demons or beheaded by vampire hunters. How will it all end? No clue. Eidos pulled Crystal Dynamics off the series to make at least 2 Tomb Raider games and not a peep has been made recently about the final LoK chapter.[/spoiler:b5babb1d70]
StarCraft
[spoiler:b5babb1d70]StarCraft ended really well with all the loose ends cleaned up by the final 3 stages. Brood Wars is a bit more of a mess. Auir is gone, wiped clean of life in a desperate attempt to get the zerglings off the planet. Kerrigan is still running loose but now has a more focussed control of the Zerg. Half the human fleet from Earth is gone after their plan to control the Overmind backfired. Even the fine CG ending just shows the war raging on. So...who wins StarCraft? Only hardcore fan-fiction writers know for sure because Blizzard is being tight-lipped on when a sequel is coming out. Oh, there will be a sequel... maybe 10 years after the first game was originally released.[/spoiler:b5babb1d70]
Ultima
[spoiler:b5babb1d70]Ultima 9 was most (in)famous for being the deepest-yet-buggiest RPG released at that time. It remains unplayable without installing patches but the story was interesting and a lot of players trudged through its technical bugs. Now the kicker is Ultima 9 ended well and fans were privvy to a lot of the plot to Ultima 10. The Avatar from those 8 other Ultima games ascended into godhood and was powerful enough to challenge the will of the Guardian, both saving and damning Britannia. While the Avatar is fighting in the cosmic battlfield for dominance of creation, he diverts a small fraction of his attention to figure out how to break the stalemate between the two super powers; he'll guide another hero to go through the same stuff the mortal Avatar did (gather the 8 virtues) and become a god, too. That would give the Avatar the extra push to win. But Ultima 10 was scrapped by EA. Origin is disassembled. Richard Garriot is working on Tabula Rasa. We have the story and not the game - biggest cliffhanger ever![/spoiler:b5babb1d70]
Are there any more game series that ended before they should have?
System Shock 2
[spoiler:b5babb1d70]A big offender is Irrational Games. They haven't been able to finish up what they've started...ever. In System Shock 2, released in 1999. Great, great game but the ending chops players off from a satisfying climax. You just killed The Many. You just 'killed' Shodan and you got out of harm's way by diving into an esacpe pod. The game ended with a scary Jason-esque moment where an inhuman sillhouette creeps up on your character, ready to pounce, and then the credits roll. Bioshock isn't going to tell us what was going on; it's a whole new story. Irrational clearly had more to tell but there will never be a System Shock 3.[/spoiler:b5babb1d70]
Freedom Force
[spoiler:b5babb1d70]Irrational Games left us with a cliffhanger in this series, too. The Freedom Force sequel has the Alchemiss floating in a void. Out of love and shame, she erased all traces of herself from everyone's memory and recreated the universe so it seemed as if she had never existed. Now she's face to face with the personification of a sentient energy. The sequel's sales weren't enough to keep Irrational independent and Irrational was bought by EA Games. So dies the Freedom Force franchise.[/spoiler:b5babb1d70]
Shenmue
[spoiler:b5babb1d70]Oh, now here's one for the ages. Yu Suzuki somehow convinced the suits that there needed to be a game series made up of 16 installments even though he only had half the script written at the time. Series failed due to low sales - poor returns on $60 million investment. Shenmue 2 had Ryo Hazuki and new friend Shen Hua inside a cave, trying to find the girl's father and get answers on that useless mirror Ryo's carried around since the first game. Turns out the mirror is magic. Ryo places it in a mechanism and, after a light show, a glowing sword floats into the room. WTF? There's no way Sega is going to make a Shenmue 3 to end the mystery. The 2 games' sales burned them too badly.[/spoiler:b5babb1d70]
Legacy of Kain
[spoiler:b5babb1d70]Now this one's an odd duck. Dennis Dyack never intended LoK to be a series. Crystal Dynamics never really thought they'd get past the sequel, Soul Reaver. But Eidos ran with it and urged more story to be written. You know what? A lot of that story turned out to be pretty good. By the end of LoK:Defiance, Raziel was 'dead' after he sacrificed himself to create the Soul Reaver...that he and Kain were already holding...it makes sense if you play out the series. Kain used the Soul Reaver to wound the Ancient. Almost all of the Council is dead. Hylden ghouls are steadily trickling into Nosgoth and the last two guys who answer questions have been either possessed by demons or beheaded by vampire hunters. How will it all end? No clue. Eidos pulled Crystal Dynamics off the series to make at least 2 Tomb Raider games and not a peep has been made recently about the final LoK chapter.[/spoiler:b5babb1d70]
StarCraft
[spoiler:b5babb1d70]StarCraft ended really well with all the loose ends cleaned up by the final 3 stages. Brood Wars is a bit more of a mess. Auir is gone, wiped clean of life in a desperate attempt to get the zerglings off the planet. Kerrigan is still running loose but now has a more focussed control of the Zerg. Half the human fleet from Earth is gone after their plan to control the Overmind backfired. Even the fine CG ending just shows the war raging on. So...who wins StarCraft? Only hardcore fan-fiction writers know for sure because Blizzard is being tight-lipped on when a sequel is coming out. Oh, there will be a sequel... maybe 10 years after the first game was originally released.[/spoiler:b5babb1d70]
Ultima
[spoiler:b5babb1d70]Ultima 9 was most (in)famous for being the deepest-yet-buggiest RPG released at that time. It remains unplayable without installing patches but the story was interesting and a lot of players trudged through its technical bugs. Now the kicker is Ultima 9 ended well and fans were privvy to a lot of the plot to Ultima 10. The Avatar from those 8 other Ultima games ascended into godhood and was powerful enough to challenge the will of the Guardian, both saving and damning Britannia. While the Avatar is fighting in the cosmic battlfield for dominance of creation, he diverts a small fraction of his attention to figure out how to break the stalemate between the two super powers; he'll guide another hero to go through the same stuff the mortal Avatar did (gather the 8 virtues) and become a god, too. That would give the Avatar the extra push to win. But Ultima 10 was scrapped by EA. Origin is disassembled. Richard Garriot is working on Tabula Rasa. We have the story and not the game - biggest cliffhanger ever![/spoiler:b5babb1d70]
Are there any more game series that ended before they should have?
emnmnme on
0
Posts
Welcome to the forums.
2. Red is brutally hard on the eyes to read, especially on the color scheme of this message board.
[spoiler:5fe9235cd6] they are all screwed [/spoiler:5fe9235cd6]
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Cykstfc
Use Sploier Tags for fuck's sake, you get the same effect with out all the eye-bleeding.
Anyway, cliffhangers do piss me off, but they can be done right. For example, Half Life and Half Life 2 did a really good job with their cliffhangers. You didn't feel like there was anything you should know by now but didn't, and it didn't feel like an abrupt cut-off point in the story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock_3 (it will suck though..I guess)
Anyway. For some reason it doesn't really bother me if a series ends with a cliffhanger. I am not entirely sure why but yeah it doesn't really bother me. It does bother me if a book series ends in a cliffhanger. (i.e. Dune.)
The only game that really really needs a sequel is Beyond Good and Evil for me. Seriously. The end of the first one. I need the sequel now.
AniList
Guess what? The forum also has an edit button.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
dun dun dunnn
The forum also has emoticons.
see?
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Cykstfc
Hey, back in the Sega CD days, I would have spilled your mother's blood to get an all-snowboarding sequel to that game.
The movie sucked though.
AND TO STAY ON TOPIC:
Sumbitches need to get going on more episodes in the Sin series.....and yes, I know that's never gonna happen because death strikes everyone, even companies.
Just use the spoiler tags. They are easier really.
AniList
The posts alternate between a shade of purple and a shade of grey. You'd either have to find the correct hex code for the colors to use in the [color].
It's easier to use spoiler tag.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Why taunt us like that Nintendo? Why?
[spoiler:1f75bbd111]And don't say Mother 3 or I'll just cry even more everyday that we don't have it in english.[/spoiler:1f75bbd111]
No God please no! Not the NES version!!!!
The game was ported to the Sega CD, and was just as terrible, except that every other level was a 3Dish (like Space Harrier or Worldrunner)snowboarding level that kicked unlimited amounts of ass. My friends and I played through that game at least a hojillion times just for the snowboarding levels.
9 - 10 years later, SSX finally filled the gaping hole that Cliffhanger on the Sega CD left in my heart.
[spoiler:9fd20249d8]SHODAN wasn't creeping up on your character, she had taken over the girl who had escaped with her lover, and her lover was the person being surprised. Doesn't SHODAN say something to the effect of, "Like what I've done with my hair?" I don't think this is a huge cliffhanger; SHODAN is the System Shock series, so she's going to escape at the end of every single one of them.[/spoiler:9fd20249d8]
I'm sorry
[spoiler:8e4257d3f8]In the final mission about 80 Shivan Sathanas-class juggernauts surrounded the Capella sun and cause the sun to go supernova. Just before it goes supernova, most of the Juggernaut fleet enters subspace and flee to an unknown location, with the remaining Juggernauts going completely dark just before the star explodes. This leads to the question of why the Shivans caused the supernova. One theory is that they were trying to produce some type of subspace portal in an effort to get home.[/spoiler:8e4257d3f8]
It'll be great if a sequel was made that would answer some of the most pressing questions of the series including:
[spoiler:8e4257d3f8]what happened to Earth after it was cut off from the rest of the galaxy in Freespace 1[/spoiler:8e4257d3f8]
but I see that as unlikely to happen.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/BlindProphet
Oh man I forgot about Freespace. A third part would be great but topping Freespace 2 will be hard.
Did you know that Derek Smart wanted to create Freespace 3 a while ago. Every Freespace fan skinned him alive. It was glorious.
AniList
[spoiler:e5b4929def] What happened to Crono and gang? How did Guardia fall? Who was the man who tainted the Masamune? How did Porre rise to such a military power? So many important questions left. [/spoiler:e5b4929def]
If not, i think we're due another Freespace thread.
I wonder who owns the IP considering that Interplay is no longer in business.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/BlindProphet
Technically HLP. But they won't do shit without Volition helming it.
Oh, and it's freeware now. Google Hard Light Productions.
EDIT: And they made it all prettyfull and awesome. They're redoing all the ship models and textures, and are also updating the engine to use pixel shaders and the like.
(They have the source code)
Freespace 2 was released for free.
It wasn't. The EULA however says you can share the game freely with friends and people you know if you don't make them pay for it.
So yeah. People share the game a lot with friends.
AniList
The source code was released.
http://fs2source.warpcore.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/cvsweb.cgi/fs2_open/COPYING?rev=1.2&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup
HLP thread for FS2 download links
I personally used this one, since it comes with all of the graphical improvements those guys made. The main part is a pretty huge torrent (2 gigs) though, so you might have some trouble with that.
EDIT: Technically, the downloads are illegal, but I think it would be a bigger crime to allow such an awesome game to be forgotten.