What is it with the number 3 that's haunting in the videogame world

richymcdermott

Its a bit confusing but bare with me as i try to explain.

What is it whether it be a third instalment of a game or 3rd console in a company lifecycle that either never happens or fails.


for instance to have a look at the game side of things , alot of us are still waiting on such titles as Half Life 3 , Megaman Legends 3 , Shenmue 3. what is it about trilogies that should be wrapped up never are ?


and on the console side of things why do the third platform fail to live up to the previous ?

for Nintendo you had the nes , snes then the n64 and while the n64 was still a good platform to many people it was poor in sales and 3rd party software compared to snes

then you had the playstation with ps1, ps2 then the ps3 which was hard to program for for years and had games skipping the platform, bad ports. even though sitting on a 80 million consumer base is not bad by any means compared to the last 2 consoles selling over 100 million.

same goes for xbox : xbox , xbox 360 and whatever way they tried to market the xbox one.


so what is it with the number 3 many people get wrong in the videogame world ? is it a curse or just a coincidence ?

Mickeroo

Coincidence.

krudler

Mario 3, Zelda 3, Burnout 3...ehh, I'm struggling here. Halo 3 was better than 2. But yeah usually the first sequel is the best.

calex71

GTA 3 , Fallout 3 both vastly superior to the previous ones.

Angron

I kinda thought this was just gonna be giving out about HL3's non-existence. But yeah, I'd say that has a lot to do with it. Everyone wants HL3, but because it's not here, people joke about a fear of the number 3, and then focus on the third iteration of something that didn't do well, and don't think of the ones that did.

My take on it at any rate.

super_furry

A game comes out, it's popular, people love it but it has flaws.

The sequel comes out, it improves on the original, refines the concept and gets rid of the flaws. It's a huge hit.

A third game comes out, after two games that people loved, expectations are huge. But they've already improved and refined the initial concept and the flaws have been ironed out so where do they go? If they change things up they're not staying true to what people enjoyed about the first two but if they keep things as they were, it's just more of the same.

Falthyron

Some games shouldn't even make it two, nevermind three.

Penn

Metal Gear Solid 2 is considered by many to be the worst in the series whereas MGS3 was arguably the best.
Devil May Cry 2 was so bad I prefer to imagine it doesn't exist whereas DMC3 is considered by most to be the best.
Grand Theft Auto 3.
I thought Gears of War 3 was better than GOW2 (though not by much)

To be honest, for every example you could throw up for something like this, someone could throw up a counter-example. I'd say maybe some threequel games seem poor because by then the game feels too familiar and formulaic with not enough new features or surprises. And some threequel games are among the best in their series' because of flaws in the sequel that the developers fixed and brought the series back.

johnny_ultimate

If you add 3 and 3 you get 6. Three 6s make 666.

:eek:

Retr0gamer

calex71 wrote: »

Fallout 3 both vastly superior to the previous ones.

Get off my forum!

C14N

Assassin's Creed 3 and Mass Effect 3 were also considered disappointing by many.

Wossack

confirmation bias

Retr0gamer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0irL1M15DH8

Polar101

C14N wrote: »

Assassin's Creed 3 and Mass Effect 3 were also considered disappointing by many.

AC3 wasn't really the third game in the series, though. I don't see much that supports the "3" theory - but obviously some games get way too many sequels.

stevenmu

With the first version of anything you are mostly just trying to get it working and doing most of the stuff you want in a pretty acceptable manner. There's a lot of groundwork to lay, so you focus on the most important concepts and features and just get them working and get the thing shipped.

With the second version, you have most of the groundwork in place. You know what worked well and what didn't, so you can put a lot of effort into polishing and perfecting things from the first version.

When it comes to the third version, you have all the groundwork from the first version, and all the polishing and perfecting from the second version. Really you're just doing this version purely because you want to sell more stuff. But, you have to make it different enough from the previous versions to warrant people buying it. So you have to start making up stuff to do, which can lead to some great new innovate ideas, but it can also lead to some half-baked pointless additions that make a great product worse.

I'll leave it up to people to decide for themselves which 'third version' features - like PS3's blu-ray drive and sixaxis controls, or Xbox One's DRM and Kinect - fall into which category

o1s1n

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

If you add 3 and 3 you get 6. Three 6s make 666.

:eek:

Today is the 28/08/2013, ad each side by side number together and you get 10/8/15, or 10815.

10815-666= 10149.

Remove the 0 as it's a null value and you get 1149.

Rejuggle those numbers and you get 4-911.

4th of July, 9/11 - coincidence? I think not!

Retr0gamer

o1s1n wrote: »

Today is the 28/08/2013, ad each side by side number together and you get 10/8/15, or 10815.

10815-666= 10149.

Remove the 0 as it's a null value and you get 1149.

Rejuggle those numbers and you get 4-911.

4th of July, 9/11 - coincidence? I think not!

Half-Life 3 confirmed.

Sarky

Publishers get cocky, spend millions on hyping it up, they promise you the moon and the stars, and then, if there's any money left, they'll spend it on developing a game which can never live up to the promises. Duke Nukem Forever was, by some accounts, going to provide the player with not only the greatest game ever made but also free blowjobs, an end to war, a cure for cancer and a bright new dawn for humanity. Then it came out and it was a pile of rancid ****.

Too much time spent on hype, not enough on actually improving the game. Happens with the second as much as the third in any series.

Nody

I also think part of the problem is that by the third games the developers want to "change things up" to avoid it being seen as to much of a "same old same old" but by doing so they lose the original feel of the game (don't only apply to thirds but in general).

K.O.Kiki

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

If you add 3 and 3 you get 6. Three 6s make 666.

:eek:

6+6+6 = 18

F

See me after class, Johnny.

dizzymenace

Polar101 wrote: »

AC3 wasn't really the third game in the series, though. I don't see much that supports the "3" theory - but obviously some games get way too many sequels.

there is a term for that, it's known as sequel fatigue, when a franchise (often promising) tries to capitalise on theire success by making a sequel EVERY YEAR. It drives away their fanbase for they don't have the time to develope inovative gameplay etc. and opt for slight improvements, the cuplrits being assassins creed, call of duty and so on. EA were clever in this regard. to avoid sequel fatigue, they brought out a different modern millitary fps in alternating years, those being medal of honor and battlefield, this will stand to them for they were able to build battlefield on the new frostbite engine and cod ghost will still run on the quake engine (the same on since 1996).

C14N

C14N wrote: »

Assassin's Creed 3 and Mass Effect 3 were also considered disappointing by many.

I haven't really heard many people disappointed by ME3 until the ending, which I didn't mind personally as I got enough from the rest of the game and series to make it OK.

Gummy Panda

Warcraft 3 was great!

MOC88

God Of War 3 was one of the best games I ever played. Uncharted 3 wasn't far behind. Both games had a long development time though and Sony needed them to be great, so that could be the difference.

Retr0gamer

Thought God of War 3 was very dull especially in comparison to the second game. Perhaps Bayonetta spoiled me.

C14N

Deleted User wrote: »

I haven't really heard many people disappointed by ME3 until the ending, which I didn't mind personally as I got enough from the rest of the game and series to make it OK.

Yeah but the ending caused massive waves of backlash. In total contrast to everyone else, I thought the ending was fine and that it was the game up to that point that was becoming dull. I do sort of think that the 3 problem though, if one exists, is just that by the time a 3 comes out, you've played so much of the game that it's become much less exciting.

Assassin's Creed is definitely guilty of this, by the time it got the the "official" 3, the gameplay had just become a bit stale because despite throwing in some new weapons and some simple changes to movement, the game hadn't really changed in any way since the first installment. The problem is that if they were to change it noticeably, it would be hard to call it Assassin's Creed anymore. Really, the only solution is to either go out while your series is still fresh, or space out the installments so that people don't get bored.

MOC88

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Thought God of War 3 was very dull especially in comparison to the second game. Perhaps Bayonetta spoiled me.

Really??? I hated bayonetta, couldnt get in to it and its being gathering dust since I bought it. The higher the difficulty on god of war 3 it gets miles better.

MOC88

C14N wrote: »

Yeah but the ending caused massive waves of backlash. In total contrast to everyone else, I thought the ending was fine and that it was the game up to that point that was becoming dull. I do sort of think that the 3 problem though, if one exists, is just that by the time a 3 comes out, you've played so much of the game that it's become much less exciting.

My, and I think most peoples problem, with the ending was that it was so generic. Every choice you made to that point became un-important. I wasn't overly invested in it but one of my friends had completed about 50 different playthroughs on me1 and me2 just so he could "get all the endings for me3". The producers had all along stressed the choice and consequences of peoples decisions as a unique selling point and then just didn't bother with it in the ending. Decent game overall taken by itself.

SouthTippBass

Metroid Prime 3 was mostly excellent.

C14N

MOC88 wrote: »

My, and I think most peoples problem, with the ending was that it was so generic. Every choice you made to that point became un-important. I wasn't overly invested in it but one of my friends had completed about 50 different playthroughs on me1 and me2 just so he could "get all the endings for me3". The producers had all along stressed the choice and consequences of peoples decisions as a unique selling point and then just didn't bother with it in the ending. Decent game overall taken by itself.

I guess it kind of depends on what you wanted going in. I had just one playthrough, I hadn't even heard any marketing about multiple endings so I wasn't really disappointed. I agree that if you try to do multiple endings based on how you played, just changing the colour at the end is a bit of a cop-out but I only wanted one ending anyway so I thought it was fine.

Mal-Adjusted

We can always name some great third installments to series (GTA III, Jedi Outcast, SSX3) but I do agree with what others are saying, by the time the third game is out, you have your basic mechanics and your polish and really have nowhere else to go without drastically altering everything.

Maybe spacing out further installments is the way to go... at least then people wouldn't notice it as much