Last few years I’ve been excitedly waiting for sequels from several small-to-medium sized studios that made highly acclaimed original games—I’m talking about Cities: Skylines, Kerbal Space Program, Planet Coaster, Frostpunk, etc.—yet each sequel was very poorly received to the point I wasn’t willing to risk my money buying it. Why do you think this happens when these developers already had a winning formula?

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[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 61 points 3 days ago (20 children)

C:S2 is likely too ambitious. Doing too many new things at once instead of incremental change.

KSP2 was a management fuck up. Let's take this IP and give it to a completely seperate studio with no experience in this kind of work while not allowing the original Devs to help despite being part of the organisation.

[–] lockhart@lemmy.ml 29 points 3 days ago (3 children)

C:S2 is likely too ambitious. Doing too many new things at once instead of incremental change.

And C:S1's bar to clear was SimCity 2013. C:S2's bar to clear was C:S1 with several years worth of content updates

[–] FireRetardant@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I never played cs1 on release, only played after it was nearly 10 years old, but my understanding is it vastly improved over updates and dlc (which unfortunately did cost more but did at least add meaningful changes for the most part).

Im curious to see where CS2 stands in 3-5 years when mods have really taken off and the devs had made most of their major tweaks.

[–] Khrux@ttrpg.network 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I had it from release and honestly, even day 1 it smoked the competition in the city sim genre, releasing with features and scale than Sim City ever had.

The DLC often introduced more systems, but they did feel 'extra', the game was perfectly functional before parks or tourism or natural disasters etc.

The reason CS:2 felt so necessary is because the first was bloated and had underlying issues in it's simulation logic, like unrealistically inefficient driving, or a large expansion to residential areas causing all the new residents to die of old age at the same time, crippling the city. Every part of the GUI and logic just felt clunky compared to modern, polished games.

[–] FireRetardant@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

I'd argue the DLCs did more than you imply. The extra modes of transit gave more options to move people, painting a custom park area made cities feel more realistic than premade square parks, universities could be a great centerpiece for a neighborhood. Its not like vanilla was unplayable, but the DLC defintely added more creativity for me.

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