Developers doing something different

Yo Duders,

I got a new PC not too long ago and have been catching up on a shit-ton of games I've missed out on over the past 6-7 years.

I've been playing a fair bit of The Talos Principle - which is amazing by the way- and during the Steam sale I also got Serious Sam 3:BFE.

Both of these games are made by Croteam and I found it so surprising that they made such a tonal jump from the over the top Serious Sam corridor shooters to The Talos Principle.

I guess another example of this is Hello Games. They have gone from Joe Danger to No Man Sky. Once again just a massive shift in scope and tone.

You guys have any other examples of developers making such a transition?

I just finished The Talos Principle last night and that game is just amazing. I haven't enjoyed a puzzle+story game that much since the original Portal. The soundtrack, the atmosphere, the secrets, all just awesome. And I extra enjoyed using the Serious Sam voice pack DLC that was given out for free a couple months ago for some additional humor thrown into the mix. I haven't been so pleasantly surprised by a game in a long time.

Anyway, for developer hard turns, a current one is Obsidian's Armored Combat: a studio with a long history of making well-written RPGs is suddenly making a free-to-play tank combat MMO.

Lost Winds for the Wii, it was a cutesy motion platformer made by the same dude who made the Elite space sims.

• Juju from Flying Wild Hog, creators of Hard Reset and 2013's Shadow Warrior.
• Telltale - They flip a lot between deathly serious and completely goofy.
• Double Fine's entire catalogue is all over the place, although, most of their games do lean into comedy in some form.

The Talos Principle is indeed amazing (SS3 is pretty good too). To be fair though, Croteam hired several external people to work on The Talos Principle's writing.

Larian Games. All they've really done is Divinity, but there's so much variety and experimentation within that series that they may as well be a bunch of completely-unrelated games. Divine Divinity was a Diablo-like, the next few games were character-action-RPGs, Dragon Commander was this weird political sim/RTS hybrid and Original Sin is a throwback to more traditional CRPGs.

Naughty Dog has their moments too. Jak 2 was surprisingly different in tone compared to Jak and Daxter and the Crash Bandicoot games. The Last of Us is another significant jump further into the dark.

Platinum games always mixes it up.

Also, let's not forget Bioware's gem, Sonic Chronicles.

id Software went from Commander Keen to Wolfenstein 3D.

I personally think it happens a lot. Creative developers don't like retreading the same ground over & over. After all, Kojima has been itching to quit making Metal Gear and work on something else for years.

(Speaking of which, Metal Gear to Snatcher.)

Commander Keen to Wolfenstein 3D
Jazz the Jackrabbit to Unreal
Duke Nukem to Duke Nukem 3D...
What's with the jump from sub par platformers to genre defining legendary shooters?

I think what you are calling a huge shift in tone used to be about par for the course. Look at the difference between Zelda 1 and Zelda 2 on the NES, for example.

The whole concept of a developer making one kind of thing and sticking with that until they go out of business is really incredibly new. The first time I really recall it happening was with Polyphony Digital and Gran Turismo. They pretty much came out and stated that they weren't going to do anything else. Maybe Tiburon and Madden was similar scenario. But, yeah, in the 8 and 16 bit days, studios would jump around all the time and make vastly different games.

I think smaller teams is really the impetus for it.

I think it has to do with developers knowing what makes a good game from their work with platformers and translating that into the new environment. Wolf (you can tell I'm an old DOS user because I perpetually refer to it as Wolf and people look at me like I'm trying to start some new dumb nick name. That's what it was called in the directory structure... ), Doom, and Duke were all heavily influenced by platformers in their design, and that's what made them successful. Collectibles, secrets, level structure... it was all right out of Super Mario Brothers.

FPS games have gotten worse as we've lost that.

Sure, Duke Nukem 1 and the first 3 Commander Keen games are subpar; but Duke Nukem 2, Jazz Jackrabbit, and the second Commander Keen trilogy are all pretty great.