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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[–] Baggie@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago

So I've been playing Tropico 4 for a bit, and it looks pretty good. You're always zoomed out, so you don't need to have more than like 8 polygons for a limb.

I literally could not run cities Skylines 2 or KSP 2 at a good frame rate. Everything was modelled incredibly well and looks great, but that doesn't mean shit if I can't run the game. I strongly suspect that's a big contributing factor.

In addition to this, they're going to against their biggest competitors: the previous game. It's literally the same game with more content, runs incredibly well by comparison, has a huge mod library, and is much cheaper to boot. Might not be as pretty, but it actually might not matter given what you're playing.

I think there's probably a lot of issues that contribute to this to be honest, but it feels like at it's core it's a fools errand to begin with.