Can a franchise lose something when streamlined/simplified?

This is just a general question, but I'm making it SMT-specific because that's what I've been thinking about recently.

I've finally started playing Strange Journey and only just finally finished SMTIV because a friend was nice enough to lend me a 3DS. And while I enjoy both (especially Strange Journey, if only because the overall narrative has some nice differences from other SMT plots, starting with the MC looking like he's in his 30s), they are also many years apart with regards to release date and refinement of the mechanics. Whereas Strange Journey is a mix of systems with primary and secondary alignments (including on the MC), demon sources, moon cycles, random skill inheritance with strict rules and a limited amount of space for your sub-apps, SMTIV allows you to go nuts, picking and choosing what skills get inherited with fusion, which seem to have just about no restrictions on what demons they can go, and unlimited app space as long as you have the points.

Even though certain features, especially skill picking, are nice QoL changes for the franchise, I can't help but feel that maybe something gets lost with such changes. These are demons after all, and the act of fusion is theoretically a very chaotic process. There is always a certain satisfaction in getting a nice team of demons set up in the older games, and it also lends them a greater sense of personality. In SMTIV, I just found myself treating demons as little more than buff centres, making sure that certain buff/debuff skills always got passed along in fusion, and having to make very little compromises. Mid to late game I was basically unstoppable, especially after getting the party MP regen app.

Am I wrong in thinking this? And what might be some other franchises that may have lost something?

As an aside, I don't lament the loss of moon cycles. In fact, transforming that system into the passing days in the Persona series is probably one of the smartest decisions they've made. I have also heard that Apocalypse fixes some of the big complaints about SMTIV, especially Smirk (seriously, fuck Smirk) and the introduction of demon affinities for skills, but I wouldn't know because that game isn't out in PAL regions yet. And it's been delayed for another week in Australia due to unknown reasons.

It's typical, right? It's not that long ago that someone made a topic titled something like "Dead Rising isn't for everyone, and that's okay" in response to simplificarions in the system. There are people that dislike how Mass Effect got turned into more of a cover shooter, or how Fire Emblem made permadeath optional and the dating more of a focus, and I'm sure that somewhere out there there are people who don't like the changes to The Witcher. My stance on this stuff is pretty simple: I hate it when they change weird stuff I like into something more paletable to the mainstream, and I love it when they do it to weird things I dislike so that I get to enjoy them. I would never have enjoyed an Elder Scrolls game until Skyrim, for instance, and I like that game a lot.

Selecting which skills to inherit sure would have improved my time with Persona 4.

Absolutely. It's particularly bad with RPGs becoming shooters/hack and slashers. I know we'll never get another Morrowind where your rank in guilds actually required you be good at guild related things but I do fear after Fallout 4 that the next Elder Scrolls will be even more streamlined to the point it has zero texture.

That said we are lucky to be seeing the rise of more RPGs like Wasteland and Pillars of Eternity where complexity isn't something to be feared.

@redhotchilimist: I'm so glad my first experience with Persona 4 was with Golden mostly because of this. Watching Jeff and Vinny go through all that fusion bullshit was kinda rough.

I'd definitely consider it a case by case thing, but yeah. Sometimes streamlining takes a little bit out of what made a game special to begin with. I happen to think the compass/fast travel and easy access map of Oblivion completely butchered the mystique and huge feel of the landscapes which were much more effective in Morrowind. They are super nice quality of life changes that made the game much more easy going and accessible largely for the better probably. But for me the franchise lost a lot of charm and felt more like an MMO where you follow the arrow to finish the thing.

I have no idea when Splinter Cell decided that being easy was the way to streamline a game. The difference between mastering levels through trial and error in Chaos Theory for hours compared to literally putting Blacklist on the hardest and only using the knife to make it challenging is crazy to me. On Normal it takes half an age to get spotted and you get like 4 flashblangs, a whole armory of other gadgets and infinite pistol ammo? Again nice changes, especially if you want some slick espionage action without being constantly frustrated by being spotted from behind and restarting the level (we all know how much that hurts). But goddamn, couldn't they at least make a mode for old school fans?

I think it depends. If it's a convenience or quality-of-life change, it's fine. For example, being able to choose skills in SMT is absolutely a positive, since you could just endlessly re-roll anyway to get what you wanted. That isn't a measure of skill or a world flavour kind of mechanic, that's just hot frustrating horseshit.

On the other hand, if you're changing the core feel and flow of a game, that's a problem. @redhotchilimist mentioned how some people may dislike that Mass Effect was turned into a cover shooter, but that's not really what happened; ME1 was already had a heavy emphasis on cover shooting, they just improved that aspect of it. What they did to to Mass Effect, though, was remove almost all of the important RPG elements and make it into a different genre of game. There were no more overly-complicated skill trees or numbers and percentages or even any greater feeling of world and place that most classic RPGs have. It became a different experience.

We see this happening with Dead Rising, too. If Dead Rising was a game about zombies, people would be fine with Dead Rising 4. What the developer doesn't seem to understand (or maybe care about) is that Dead Rising was never really about the zombies. Dead Rising, at least for its first three entries, was always about management. Management of time, of items, of crowds, of resources. Do you carry magazines to make your few weapons more deadly, or do you choose to burn through weapons? Will you have time to rescue all three survivors or do you leave one to die? Do you run down the timer to start over at a higher level, or are you ready to push through to the next mission?

I think streamlining can be fine as long as it's in the spirit of the game.

The game that comes to mind for me is Dragon Age 2. I've never been a huge fan of the DA series, but I do know that DA2 was a huge departure for the series that ended up making the game the 'black sheep' of the family. It took a super involved action-RPG and made it closer to Mass Effect with swords (and I love Mass Effect). I don't know of a sequel that's more... Overlooked than that.

Your post immediately made me think of Mass Effect, and @the_nubster already mentioned the game (and a few others as well).

I think with Mass Effect, some simplification was for the better. The actual gunplay and powers are much easier to use in the second and third installments. They made things like incendiary/cryo ammo a power instead of a specific item that you equip, which I think made engagements much more fun. Even though I spent a lot of time with the first game, probably over 50 hours, I would always forget about ammo equipping and stuff like that. Having it be on the power wheel was much better.

On the other hand, I liked finding all the armor and comparing it, trying to find the best stuff (stats wise and appearance wise) for my crew, and the sequels just jettisoned that. The "armor" for crew mates just became skins to unlock, get as a pre-order bonus or buy through micro-transactions. The stats on armor for Shepard still had some gameplay benefits/disadvantages, but it was pretty easy to choose what you wanted to use based on your class (biotic using character vs guns, etc).

The locations also became less interesting to explore. I enjoyed all the stuff in the first game with the Mako and going down to planets, as well as the Citadel and the other mission specific areas. I honestly didn't care that there could be nothing on planets to discover, or nothing of overwhelming value. Still, it made the galaxy feel big and lived in and I enjoyed it very much as a break from the combat. It was "chill" in a way that I really liked. Obviously, scanning replaced that. You could also only explore specific places that you would find after scanning, so most planets had no real reason to visit them. Maybe people liked that they made that stuff more obvious, but I felt like it was just making the galaxy smaller and less explorable. The Citadel also became much smaller and really only a series of corridors or rooms instead of an actual place that felt big and varied and fun to run around in. I just felt like they took an expansive galaxy and made it less so. Don't get me wrong, I loved the locations they crafted for the later games (Omega, Earth at the end of 3, Tuchanka, the Quarian Fleet) , but I also liked just dicking around in the Mako looking for stuff on random planets too.

These changes certainly made the inventory easier to manage and the encounters smoother to get in and out of or made the planets easier to explore and missions easier to find, but I liked some of the complexity and even messiness of the first game versus the streamlining in the sequels.

I feel like a franchise can certainly lose something that made it unique when they streamline things. As someone with bad reflexes who enjoys turn-based systems, everybody trending to real time systems lately is a definite bummer. Witcher's combat got way harder from 1 to 3, and more like Dark Souls, increasingly revolving around telegraphed attacks and precisely timed dodges and guards. They de-emphasized the ability to pause and use tons of abilities in both Bioware RPGs, though it's arguably much more drastic for Dragon Age. Bethesda felt the need to make VATS real time for Fallout 4, despite the fact that that game's lineage is a D&D-esque tabletop system. We see a similar combat shift with the new Final Fantasy, where they're bringing battle system elements first seen in the Kingdom Hearts series and the Type-0 PSP game to the main franchise.

Many of those games are slowly losing their RPG elements as well. Character and party member customization is increasingly curtailed, both in terms of equipment and abilities. Dialogue choices are being simplified, and options for diplomatic solutions using various non-combat skills are lost. Those kinds of action-focused games are fine on their own, and it's great that people enjoy them, but those gamers are well served by other franchises that already do these things well. We don't need Mass Effect to play like Gears of War. We don't need Final Fantasy to play like Kingdom Hearts. We don't need the Witcher to become like Dark Souls. I'm not sure if it's a case of independent invention or everybody trying to follow the market leaders for business reasons.

All that said, not all changes are bad. You want developers to innovate and iterate from game to game. It wouldn't be concerning at all if their weren't an obvious trend in the same direction by many games from totally separate developers.

I played Shin Megami Tensei IV when it came out, right after like a year of binging pretty much every SMT game I could get my hands on. Keep in mind that that game works on a backwards difficulty curve - the first few hours are frustratingly difficult and the last few hours are a cakewalk. MP regen for the whole party doesn't help.

After a long period of not playing any SMT games except for Tokyo Mirage Sessions, I got SMT IV Apocalypse and they fixed some of your issues with SMT IV. You can't transfer every single skill in fusion, though you can transfer most of them, and demons do have affinities so giving Ziodyne to a guy who has a -5 Affinity for it isn't the best of ideas. It also seems to be working on a proper difficulty curve so far. I bumped the difficulty up one notch some time ago and now I'm fighting a boss that has been consistently handing me my ass.

Smirking is still in SMT IV A, though, and it still sucks. There's a skill that remove smirk from an enemy, but there's also a skill that can give you smirk.

If there's one thing that makes SMT IV and SMT IV A less complex than previous entries in the series, it's the fact that they make weaknesses and resists/nulls so transparent. In Nocturne, if you couldn't remember what a demon was weak to, you had to use Analyze and that used up a turn. In SMT IV, you just pull up a menu and you can see everything about any demon you're fighting. That doesn't work on bosses, though.

And in general, SMT IV and Apocalypse did a great job of making things way more usable without really simplifying or streamlining things too much. The developers clearly sat down and talked over what makes these games so challenging and fun and interesting and went from there.

Now, if you want some crazy weirdness with demon personalities and stuff, you could look into SMT Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers. Demons in that game straight-up won't use some skills, or they'll rebel against you if you don't keep up certain things, etc. I don't really remember much about that game because I didn't play that much of it, but if you're looking for an SMT game that trades usability for weird mechanics that sound insane in this day of clinical design decisions made for the masses, look into Soul Hackers.

It depends I guess.. the above-mentioned Mass Effect and Dragon Age are really good examples. The latter was much worse for the streamlining, while the former I think is a mixed bag outcome. There's also the Fallout 1-2 / Fallout 3-NV-4 gap. While the changes their have just as much to do with genre & approach as they do streamlining, I've never really felt that the two Fallout sagas are really all that similar.

I might take your question in the opposite direction also and ask how franchises lose something by becoming more complex, and point directly to the (somewhat exaggerated) death of (AAA) arcade sports in lieu of more simulation controls. NHL 97 was a simple ass game. NHL 2017? Not so much...

Absolutely, though there's a big difference between streamlining something with quality-of-life improvements, and simplifying to the point of ruining whatever it is I liked about that particular series. I'm not going to complain too much about Fire Emblem having a casual mode and trying to cash in on that sweet, sweet anime waifu money as long as they keep the strategy parts interesting for nutcases like myself.

Weirdly enough, the Mass Effect example the rest of you are slinging around is one of the few examples of streamlining and simplifying that I was okay with. Maybe it's because I already thought Mass Effect 1 was a watered-down action-RPG hybrid with clunky action and boring RPG mechanics, so them giving into the temptation to make it more "mainstream" and just turning it into a Gears of War clone with powers didn't bother me too much. I think that Mass Effect 2 created some dangerous precedent that has led to Bioware falling a lot in my eyes, but the game itself is still pretty great, and if we're talking about them kneecapping their own franchises under corporate oversight a far better example is what happened to Dragon Age.

Dragon Age and Mass Effect are both examples that I like better after the turn. The first Dragon Age has combat that is... I hear it's great on the PC, but even there I've heard there are mods explicitly to remove the big dungeons, so not that great apparently. I thought it was awful on the 360. Meanwhile, I'm way into open world action-RPGs, so while the combat in Inquisition isn't that hot I actually did finish it instead of peter out around Denerim. Similarly, while I could complain about Mass Effect 2 and 3 for hours, I thought Mass Effect 1 played pretty poorly and was a bore for the majority of its runtime, and 2 and 3 certainly improved on that, although I miss having a vehicle around to break up the shooting. I'm not saying you guys who prefer the first ones are wrong, but I was with the mainstream on that one. I've been reading a blog for like a year that's all about the thematic and story changes from 1 to 2 onwards. I'm sympathetic to that, too, but I still prefer playing 2 too 1.

I'm trying to think of other examples. The Thief reboot totally tanked despite aiming itself at a larger market, right?

Yes.

Burnout is a brilliant series. Burnout 3 and Burnout Paradise rank among the best racing games ever made, in the eyes of many, for its incredible sense of speed and risk/reward balance. However, Burnout 3 and onward are dramatic departures from Burnout and Burnout 2: Point of Impact (onward to only be referred to as Burnout 2, since Burnout was an interesting proof-of-concept that had really bad race tracks). In all Burnout games, you accumulate boost by driving recklessly without crashing. When boosting, the game purposefully turns up the sense of speed so high that your risk of crashing increases dramatically, making it much harder to continue to accumulate boost while boosting, so in in Burnout 3+, you typically boost for short bursts.

BUT, in Burnout 2, you can only USE your boost when your meter is completely full, discouraging short boosts since you can't just pop it whenever you want for however long you want. Once you start using your boost, you acknowledge that you'll have to cap out the meter again before you can use it again, making its implementation extremely strategic. Additionally, if you use your entire Burnout meter, this is called a "burnout", and this almost always (in combination with the Burnout points you've accumulated in your boost by driving extremely fast or passing cars) refills your boost meter, so you can continue to hold the boost button down. This can go on for many sequential Burnouts, essentially encouraging you to boost for as long as you possibly can before you crash or give up. This mechanic is completely gone in the newer Burnout games.

I found this mechanic super thrilling, and the level of strategy and commitment required in order to race effectively in Burnout 2 was a very different kind of gameplay than that which we now find in Burnout 3 and beyond. Don't get me wrong, Burnout 3 is objectively a better game with more mechanics and greater variety, but the sensation evoked by the Burnout mechanic in Burnout 2 was fucking crazy. Few other games make my heart stop like it would when in the middle of a Burnout X5 chain in Burnout 2.

Does placing all of the vendors in Dark Souls into a hub world for Dark Souls III count as streamlining? I thought was just a nice thing for the players. I don't think the game lost anything through that.

DA2 is a good example, as mentioned above, although DA Inquisition was a much better game. Supreme Commander 2 lost almost everything that drew me to the original game, mostly due to the extreme over-simplifications that resulted from throwing it on consoles, alas.

I think the Total War series is a good example of streamlining that reduces the strategic complexity of the games, and substitutes busywork upgrades to create the illusion of depth.

To illustrate: compare an invasion of Roman Italy from Carthaginian north Africa in Rome 2 and Rome 1. In Rome 1 you need to get your troops across the Mediterranean, so you recruit ships from your port cities, load your troops, and ferry them across to a landing zone. In Rome 2 you no longer need to recruit ships, simply telling your army to cross the sea makes it spawn a fleet from whatever coastal point you depart from.

Upon reaching Italy, you need to capture cities to defeat the Romans.

In Rome 1 armies without mobile siege units (catapults etc) need to spend at least 1 turn sieging an enemy city to build ladders/towers/rams before they can assault it. In Rome 2 an army can always attack a city on its first turn and will spawn ladders to do so. In Rome 1 an invasion will spend a number of turns beating up field armies to free up enough strategic space that so they can spend a turn without being attacked setting up a siege. In Rome 2 you can just ignore field armies and rush their cities.

This leads to more "streamlining". In Rome 1 depleted units can only be reinforced in the settlements that can produce that unit. In Rome 2 all friendly units can auto-replenish over time while in friendly territory. So after taking your first city in Italy you can just hang out for a couple of turns and all your units will be full strength again. In Rome 1 sustaining your invasion force means you will have to merge depleted units to create full strength ones, recruit from the local mercenary pool, recruit whatever junk units you can get from the tier-one buildings you scramble to set up in your new holdings, and ferry depleted elite units back across the sea to be reinforced in your recruitment centres. All while constantly fighting for control of sea lanes to maintain your production towards the front and keep both your beachhead and your home safe from flanking landing parties.

In Rome 2: Fuck it. Take a city, get all your troops back. Who cares where they are coming from or how they got here. Logistics? Never heard of it. At least there is a "tech tree" and "army upgrades" of boring +1% stat upgrades to fill your attention that used to be spent on actual tangible strategic choices.

Yes the BF series use to be more tactical and have a slower place and encouraged more teamwork ever since Bad Company series came along the series has gotten worst over the years. Now it's just COD with vehicles alot old great PC games where dumbed down mostly FPS after COD4 came out to me it's the most damning thing to ever happen to the genre.

Mass Effect definitely comes to mind. Assassin's Creed as well. The first game felt like an actual stealth game. A different sort of stealth to complement Hitman and more traditional stealth games. 2 onwards were basically just action games.

@paulmako: If your referring to the "hub" of DS3, then not really. Demons Souls had a very similliar hub with all the vendors as well.

The Thief reboot is kind of a weird case, in that one of that game's problems is that it is torn between a more Dishonored-esque mainstream thing where you have a supernatural power that allows you to highlight relevant objects (and several other things that I honestly didn't use that much but are similarly "modern"), and offering a classical sneaky-ass stealth game where getting caught isn't really all that great and there are optional difficulty modifiers to make the game deliberately tougher (like disabling aforementioned supernatural power entirely.) While I am one of approximately 3 people who actually liked that game, it definitely suffers from identity crisis by trying to please everyone, which makes a lot of sense when you throw in all the hearsay about its troubled development.

Quality of life changes are always positive the way I see it, overly complex systems aren't as good as many people think they are. There's also needs to be a limit on the random chaotic nature in games. Picking what ability gets transfer over in Persona sounds good, way better than re-rolling over and over wasting the player's time.

I think Mass Effect actually got better after ME1, sure I liked chain tossing 8 abilities with the sentinel and essentially break every single encounter by disabling all enemies at once, but the level system is just saturated. The "speech" tree shouldn't have mix in with combat. In the beginning you only work towards each path's break point anyways there's really no need for the in between just a slightly higher number boost. ME3 actually got deeper with the fame system along side the paragon and renegade. The equipment load and abilities recharge also became a thing. Although I like it less since it severely limits what I am willing to bring, perhaps for balancing, but I ended up never using most of the weapons in the game.

Morriwind and Oblivion attribute leveling system is a shit show. A blight in an otherwise organic learn by doing system. Glad to see it gone. Skyrim while isn't great it is at least manageable. Fallout 4 definitely took care of some redundancy issues. Attribute tied guild quest in Morriwind cuts both ways, sure it is reasonable for the character to be skill and it serves as essentially a level requirement/difficulty indicator, but it relies on the crummy leveling system.

I don't think RPG going the action route is a central part of streamlined and simplified discussion since I find a lot of the more action-y elements to be way more complex and skill demanding.

But hey who knows, lots of people are into terrible shit and demands everyone else to suffer with them.

I think in most cases (as long as the games remain good and fun) its mostly just a shift in what section of the fanbase will enjoy it more. Stuff like DA2 where the simplification was at the same time as a inferior and rushed game it becomes easy to blame the simplification as the reason it was worse. But stuff like Mass Effect 1-2 is an example of 2 good games where most people still liked both but who liked which one most depended on personal preference in game design.

The SMT series is a curious beast because most people have not played anything previous to Nocturne. Having gone back and played previous games (after Nocturne being my first experience in the series, including Persona spin offs) I can say that simplification has HUGELY made that series much better, and it is still on the complex side where it stands now. Nocturne was a major break in the series that greatly simplified pretty much every system, but in a good way that got down to the core of what was interesting or fun and left out the annoying chuff that just needlessly confused and got in the way. SMT IV id say didn't mess up by being more simple really, it honestly isn't much simpler, it messes up a bit by not balancing itself very well and not having a nearly as interesting premise or world to explore. Nocturne (even with its flaws) still is the best distillation of what that series is about overall, pretty much all of its game design is complementary and is in service of its plot points as well. IV and even Strange Journey to me get bogged down in a bit of disconnect between gameplay systems and story, they dont feel as natural or easy to understand as pieces to a puzzle and also are far more exploitable in general. Nocturne like the Persona 3 and 4 found a pretty great balance, even if more hardcore, of where what the game is asking of you is mostly very clear and understandable.... they introduce you to relatively simple systems that it expects you to absolutely use at all times to finish.

Rainbow Six 3 was a superb tactical shooter. The Vegas games were naff covered based crap.

Fallout 4's SPECIAL-centric perk tree completely butchered the RPG system that series is known for. The removal of skills was a bad call. Basically, they artificially limited themselves to 70 perks and made each one have to have a SPECIAL stat requirement for no really good reason. You have to dump into Charisma if you want to engage with the base building, regardless of your playstyle. The crafting system required stiff investment in SPECIAL ranks in addition to perks, again, regardless of your combat style. Charged-up and banked criticals using the luck stat breaks the game just as bad as stacking sneak attack bonuses did in FO3/NV. Speech checks are RNG again and use nothing but the Charisma stat, reducing the granularity on those checks from 1-100 to 0-10. They totally chucked the karma system, rather than try to do anything interesting with it.

Don't get me wrong, Fallout 4 wasn't a bad game, but it's flaws are much deeper than the voiced protagonist.

Yep. Final Fantasy was much better with a giant overworld, airships, exploration (even if it was almost meaningless) etc etc. Then we got the linear, smouldering trash heap that is the XIII trilogy. The irony of more cutscene and less actual character. I'll reserve judgement on XV until I play it (which probably won't happen until we see a PC release.)

An odd one this happened to that was a real bummer for me was the Wonder Boy franchise. Monster World 4 was a linear platformer with barely any RPG or Metroidvania aspects at all. Disappointing. Especially after the brilliant Monster World 3.

I've actually been reading your posts, so thanks for the feedback.

I think for me what the problem is is that simplified game gives you far less to master. If you really get into a game you want there to be something that you can get really proficient at, such as mechanics and systems.