Seems like now a days with companies like Activision, EA, Ubisoft, and Capcom, games get sequeals more and it's not often a company either gives us consumers room to breath and enjoy our new game or continue to make only sequals without ever releasing a new IP. Of course in my opinion when you crank out a sequel each and every year especially something that has multiplayer, than it already feels like a feudal effort to ever get good at a game or invest any kind of money or time into it because it just feels like there's no longevity. Don't know how else to explain it.
Depends on the game. I don't think Assassin's Creed has particularly suffered from it, as the games remain great they just also remain "the same". But when we get to yearly FPS games, well, since those generally aren't very good in the first place we have a different matter.
When companies start shitting out titles to meet yearly necessities, their shit starts to stink. No matter how great a concept is, when you start hammering that shit through the ground, it all starts to goo together into a forgetable experience.
When you're focused on turning around the next title so fucking quick, you barely have time to complete it, test it, debug it, ship it in time. And you have a fairly hard date. Almost none of your attention is focused on improving anything. Just making a tweak here and there. And most stories are so poor that they don't justify something new.
Not to mention, there isn't enough fucking time. Give me some mother fucking space and time to breath. I can't do Forza, Assassin's Creed, COD, Skate, and every other fucking game every god damn year. Even every other year is sometimes pushing it, but I can deal.
Take Assassin's Creed, for example. We're all busy wetting ourselves over it, but let's pause for a moment and recognize what a trivial and stupid story it really has and what a fairly needless addition Assassin's Creed 2 Part 3 is. It doesn't really add much to the series either by story or gameplay. Yeah, it adds a couple new pieces to the gameplay, but it's the same engine on the same platforms with 95% the same everything. You couldn't say that it was an absolute money-grab, but you could certainly say that there's no reason it couldn't have waited another year. Or simply not existed at all and waited for Assassin's Creed 3 Part 1, next year.
And that's the other part of it. Give people some fucking time. You always want to leave people wanting more; not getting tired of your ass. I was counting down the days and hours until BF3, Skyrim, and Starcraft 2. When it comes to Assassin's Creed 2 Part 3, I just kept saying that it seems like I just played Part 2 yesterday and that it was crazy yet another iteration on it was out again.
I don't like those options. I think it depends on the game, the amount of people working on the game, the funding the game is getting, and the overall creativity behind the game. Creativity doesn't necessarily have to be fostered over a 1+ year period.
Depends how you do it. Activision has the right idea with Call of Duty, I think. Since there are two teams (perhaps now 3 if Sledgehammer gets to make its game), developers are given a whole hell of a lot more time, than, say, EA Tiburon, which has to crank out EVERY Madden.
It depends on the game and how much time devs are willing to put into it. I personally hate the idea as it forces people to churn out more of the same every year to make a deadline instead of trying to come up with something cool. I wish games had at least a two year cycle. That way the devs have time to think of ideas, the audience has time to forget and start wanting a new product in the series, and the devs have time to make the game better. My feelings on this are a lot like like Adam Sesslers when he says, it's hard to miss ya when ya never leave.
i think that it is bad for a game to have an annual release. i didn't buy modern warfare 3 because i felt like it was the same game like black ops and modern warfare 2. i think that it gets bad when it's that it's the same game. i'm a little disappointed with forza 4 even though that is not an annual release. they changed it and made it easier. the game comes out every couple of years.
I honestly don't annual releases if the quality is good enough- 11 months is plenty of time for me to get over that 'assassin's creed fatigue' and want more.
I've accepted the fact that Fifa (and other sports titles) will receive an annual release and I will almost certainly buy it each year. I would appreciate it more if the developers supported the game in at least a minor way while developing their next iteration (perhaps by fixing small annoying issues), though that would probably make the distinction between each annual release a lot less noticeable. Again, it's unfortunate, but I've come to accept it.
On the other hand, I consider the annual release of Call of Duty to be quite exhausting and rather annoying. Though I admit there's something wrong with that. Firstly, the variety between each CoD game is fairly significant (if only in terms of the setting; consider World at War versus MW, or even Black Ops versus MW3), especially compared to the distinction between the annual release of sports titles. Secondly, as pointed out by YukoAsho, there is more than a single team working on the release of each Call of Duty which results in more development time being available for each title. I still don't like it though. Very odd. Maybe I should reevaluate something here.
Depends on the complexity of the game and the size of the team. LucasArts had no problem cranking out a top notch adventure game every year back in the day, but they had multiple teams, different franchises and heavy engine reuse to keep things easy and interesting. Today on the other side it often feels that whenever a publisher stumbles up on something successful, they'll try to make as many successor as they can, as quickly as they can. With todays complexity however that often leads to to much recycling and running out of ideas, so you'll get five "ok" pieces of a franchise, instead of three amazing ones.
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