I'm just coming out of "finishing" Arkham Knight (I didn't get all the Riddler trophies) and immediately it made me think "Maybe they should stop trying to make everything a trilogy...". Technically this is the fourth game in the series, no matter how much Rocksteady's marketing department say - there are a tonne of references to Arkham Origins in this game that show they absolutely count that game as continuity but for this post I'm counting the Rocksteady only games.

Throughout this post I'll be spoiling the Mass Effect trilogy, the Gears of War trilogy, some of the Dragon Age trilogy and obviously the Arkham trilogy.

What went wrong?

Without trying to mention the story too much, because I think the story is too subjective of a thing that you like or not I think the easiest element to point to for each series is that they all got too big. They all added too much in or built too high. And when they did it, they didn't know what to do with it and when to stop adding.

Gears of War 3 jettisoned some of the main characters of the series away on a side quest that you never saw and it did it only to add in some other characters. Now, those other characters were either already in the games previously in different roles or they had been written into the lore through books and graphic novels but it led to the problem of there being too many people in the final story. I hope you didn't like Cole or Baird or wanted to see what they got up to. I was convinced that there would be DLC based on them going off to get reinforcements but it never came.

Mass Effect 3 suffered a similar problem. Too many characters. Most of them relegated to just standing around waiting for you to make idle chat with them. An even bigger problem it had though was bloat. As many of you reading are probably all too aware, Mass Effect 3 was sold to us with the promise that all that stuff we've been doing since Mass Effect 1 would matter. And in the end? In the end it came down to three (and after a patch four) choices of how to end the game.

Nothing you did ever mattered. Just press the the button you want, all choices are available to you. It was crap enough when Deus Ex Human Revolution also did this but at least that was just one game, not a series that was meant to be inter-weaved all the way to the end.

Now onto Batman. What went wrong with that? This is almost a weird one because I think there's actually fewer characters in Knight than there is in Asylum but Asylum was so tightly made where as Knight feels, disjointed by comparison. Knight has two big problems that made it fall a bit flat. The Batmobile (which was alright but shoehorned into way, way too many sections) and the problem of being open world and thinking that to get the most out of being open world they have to use what I like to call "The rule of three".

"The rule of three" is a game design idea that I really hate. It's that thing designers do when they make you do the same thing at least three times before you finish something. Anyone whose ever played a Lego game will be familiar that nearly all bosses follow the rule of three. Perform the same series of actions three times and you've finished the boss. In Knight - the rule of three is used for almost every side quest there is and sometimes its expended up to six, twelve or eighteen with very little if anything changing. Capture Manbat three times. Scan these bodies three times each. Complete these three races, each one has three laps. Stop these three bank robberies. Chase Firefly three times. Arkham City had a lot of this too, but it's side missions felt better and there was more of them with more variety to them. It had a lot more characters too and used them better.

Finally I'll talk about Dragon Age. I haven't finished Inquisition yet. I've put it down twice for other games (Bloodborne and Arkham Knight). But already I can see it's problems. They made it a single player MMO, rammed it full of Ubi-game collectibles and broke the story up into a manner that makes it feel a bit silly and poorly told. Every time I send someone from my war council off onto a twenty-four hour mission I just think "It's a good thing Corypheus is cool with just chilling out and not ending the world so I can find out whose been peddling bootleg copies of Varrics books." I loved DA:O and I even liked DA2 despite the changes they made to the combat and that they only modeled a handful of locations. I think it's an early indication of my overall impression of the third entry that I've put it down twice. I like it, but I don't like it.

The final hurdle and sticking the landing.

Ultimately all of these series had their best games as either the first or second in the series. Mass Effect 1 or 2 are the best games in that series depending on who you talk to and their love of micromanaging equipment upgrades. Gears 2 is the ultimate Gears game both in single player and multiplayer. Dragon Age Origins is still the best Dragon Age game. And Arkham Asylum or City is the best of the Rocksteady trio depending on if you like a metroidvania or open city. But Mass Effect 3 is not the best game. Gears 3 is not the best game. Arkham Knight is not the best game. In some cases, they're not even second best - they're the worst.

It's a problem that these story driven games seem to face. I personally feel that just adding more story and maybe tweaking and improving features is enough. There's no need to put massively overhauled mechanics into the game. There's no need to ram games full of Ubi-game.

I like all these series and there's elements of all their games that I like. But so far, there hasn't been a trilogy of games that stuck the landing. Gears has probably come the closest because they didn't mess with the mechanics too much - but then they also left a bunch fo stuff out of the story that seemed like it needed to be answered.

So what should happen? Should games stop trying to make trilogies and just make series? Look at the GTA games, Elder scrolls and Fallout. Loosely tied together but all separated and they're all great series in their own right. Should Dragon Age just be a series of games that takes place in that world? Should Mass Effect just tell stories set in that universe? Should the Arkham series just have been good Batman stories?