When Halo 4 was released last October, gamers were faced with a unique experience within the first few minutes of the game’s campaign: After the Chief wakes up from cryosleep, he climbs up a broken elevator shaft and comes face to face with an enemy he hasn’t fought since midway through Halo 2 — an Elite.
It’s a moment that’s supposed to be a return to form for Halo, the monstrous snake-head shoved in the player’s face, almost a grotesque “Welcome back!” to a universe filled with giant spectral rings, glassed planets, and monsters shouting “wort wort wort.”
But imagine what it’s like in the Chief’s head for a moment, especially after he opens the blast windows and looks out to see a whole fleet of Covenant Carriers surrounding the Forward Unto Dawn–four years after he supposedly won the war against the Covenant. Shouldn’t it be something like “Will this stinking war ever end?”
“I just freaking saved the galaxy, went to sleep for four years, and woke up to an elite screaming in my face! WTF!?”
That sentiment was on many of the reviewer’s minds when discussing Halo 4. Even positive reviews of the game tend to use phrases like “familiar” or “not a masterpiece.”
Though many have praised the introduction of the Forerunners as a villainous force, the return of the Covenant, which is only explained within the game’s narrative with a throwaway reference to this group being “religious fanatics”, just didn’t add that much to the ongoing narrative.
In fact, it might be a violation of some of the very ideas that guide game design, and an example of why the AAA game industry needs more innovation if it’s going to be able to maintain its biggest franchises. In designer Jesse Schell’s book “The Art of Game Design,” he argues that one of the key things games has to offer is the sensation of completion.
“Completing all the goals in a game gives a special feeling of closure to players that they seldom get from solving problems in real life. In many games, this is the ultimate reward — when you have reached this point, there is often no point in playing the game any further.”
But what happens if a game’s sequel overrides that sense of completion? If it fails to add anything new to the narrative or challenges of the game while still breaking problems the player feels they already “Fixed,” how do players respond to that?
Well, you can take a look at the sales numbers. Though Halo 4 certainly didn’t underperform in its opening week, selling 2,428,644 copies in the United States, that’s not a big increase over Halo 3′s record-shattering numbers in 2008. (2,420,125 copies in the US, and setting a record for highest gross of an entertainment product within 24 hours of its release.) And in a world filled with AAA shooter competition from Call of Duty Black Ops II and Borderlands 2, the idea that the new Halo is “more of what you’ve done before” doesn’t necessarily scream “day one purchase.”
But Halo isn’t the first game or even piece of entertainment to fall victim to the idea of sequels that undo the achievements of previous stories.
Alien 3 infamously killed off the surviving cast of Alien 2 in the first few minutes, Metal Gear Solid’s kept its villains alive over multiple installments despite how many times you keep killing them, and of course, there’s the obvious “plots” of Super Mario Bros, Crash Bandicoot and Sonic the Hedgehog. It’s why Mario games at this point don’t even focus on the quest of rescuing Princess Peach as much they do finding new ways to build new iterations on gameplay while delivering mostly on Nintendo Nostalgia.
With the news yesterday that EA was pulling Medal of Honor from its development rotation, joining the ranks of Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero as big-name franchises milked into oblivion, it’s clear that gamers aren’t interested in doing the same thing over and over again, especially when new challenges override a previous sense of accomplishment of accomplishment.
This exists at a mechanics level too, even without any story elements to create a narrative of “neverending war.” Zynga’s rapid rise to the top of the Facebook Charts was built on games that literally made you do the same thing over and over again, and as their Chief Game Designer leaves the company, and Candy Crush replaces the “Ville” games as the top Facebook game, the obvious becomes apparent–Gamers want, and even need these new experiences.

The trick is, of course, how to pull this off while maintaining gaming’s biggest franchises. Gamers and Game Developers alike still WANT to go back to the worlds of Halo, Metal Gear Solid, and others, but with both “brand awareness” and high-quality storytelling on the line, where can developers look for examples of how to reinvent their old franchises?
Perhaps the answer lies with last year’s critically acclaimed title Spec Ops: The Line? For those who don’t remember, Spec Ops was actually a mid-level shooter franchise from the late 90′s/early 2000′s. It was fairly underwhelming, and with competition from titles like the Tom Clancy series, wasn’t able to deliver a great alternative to the “realistic shooter” genre.
Ten years and some ownership changes later, Spec Ops crashed back on to the scene last year in June 2012 with a mature and gut-twisting story about the horrors of war, using the same third-person shooter mechanics that mashed up Vietnam-era war themes into a modern day combat setting. It had the same name and basic mechanics of its predecessors, but it used those mechanics in a whole new way to deliver a new experience.
The thing is, many of these big gaming franchises have taken risks like this in the past. Halo famously tried its hand at real time strategy with Halo Wars, while the subversive Paper Mario series helped introduce new characters to the Mario Universe and parlay new experiences to players who just wanted to play as their favorite plumber.
Konami seems to be on the ball with this idea right now, with Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance potentially giving players a new way to fight the series’ infamously insane boss characters.
But for whatever reason, these titles don’t often become new directions for the franchise or even sustainable spin-offs. Even though Paper Mario has lived on to the 3DS, it’s become more like the main Mario games—a safe, iterative run through of expected worlds with a few unique puzzles to keep it form just being “Super Paper Mario.”
The responsibility of re-invigorating the medium is falling into the hands of newer, indie developers who in many ways couldn’t be any more willing to oblige. Said Minority Media’s Vander Caballero in an interview with us late last year:
So far in the game industry, game devs have challenged players through gameplay. Unfortunately, it has brought the medium to extremes where only 30% of players actually finish games…We (the game industry) are so bad at giving closure to people that they don’t expect to get anything from a video game that’s going to help them cope with life.
If Game Publishers want to keep gamers’ loyalty (and spending dollars), they’re going to need to find ways to turn these experiments into more than just experiments, otherwise in the next few years, we’ll be reading about how yet another big franchise has been shipped to the farm up north.

Logan Huffman wants to know who is posting comments about him online and asks Jace for help. Meanwhile Joe Flanigan is caught again flirting in the V costume. Jace heads to the set of Law and Order: SVU to catch up with Ice – T and Coco and the Starcraft II team gets “rushed” by World of Warcraft Lead Designer, Jeff Kaplan.
Jace has decided to take advantage of his co-hosting duties at the Sony Online Entertainment Fan Faire celebration, by showing his new music video to the thousands of EverQuest players in attendance, much to the dismay of the crowd. That didn’t stop one enthusiastic guest from doing something radical.