I genuinely don’t think the wrapper impacted much one way or the other (the sequels got tons of praise in any case), but it’s definitely way more cumbersome than it needs to be. Especially when they went from 1 to 2 and they started doing this thing where you needed to transfer not just your saves but the entire first game over to the second game as DLC to put it all in the same place.
The thing is I actually preferred how the first game was released as an episodic thing in the first place. To me that sort of justified having a big wrapper to launch each episode. I get that keeping the wrapper going across the sequels then allows to have seasonal missions and user generated missions across all maps of the franchise, which is pretty cool, but they just never found an elegant way to handle it and without the episodic cadence there is just less of a reason to mess with all the live content anyway.
What I don’t think is that the games are too similar. If anythingI think more games should be like Ryu Ga Gotoku/Yakuza, where they just keep using the same tools to pump out a ton of games with the same tech and leave the iteration for the story and the level design. Games are too expensive and consistent anyway, you really don’t need to reinvent the wheel from scratch every time.
Don’t need a massive platform launcher to consolidate all of it, though. If anything, once you’re moving at that speed the game itself rolls back to becoming the seasonal content.
I genuinely don’t think the wrapper impacted much one way or the other (the sequels got tons of praise in any case), but it’s definitely way more cumbersome than it needs to be. Especially when they went from 1 to 2 and they started doing this thing where you needed to transfer not just your saves but the entire first game over to the second game as DLC to put it all in the same place.
The thing is I actually preferred how the first game was released as an episodic thing in the first place. To me that sort of justified having a big wrapper to launch each episode. I get that keeping the wrapper going across the sequels then allows to have seasonal missions and user generated missions across all maps of the franchise, which is pretty cool, but they just never found an elegant way to handle it and without the episodic cadence there is just less of a reason to mess with all the live content anyway.
What I don’t think is that the games are too similar. If anythingI think more games should be like Ryu Ga Gotoku/Yakuza, where they just keep using the same tools to pump out a ton of games with the same tech and leave the iteration for the story and the level design. Games are too expensive and consistent anyway, you really don’t need to reinvent the wheel from scratch every time.
Don’t need a massive platform launcher to consolidate all of it, though. If anything, once you’re moving at that speed the game itself rolls back to becoming the seasonal content.