”It is a good game, it just isn’t a good [series] game”

>Jak and Daxter is a good example of this. Jak 2 is a fine game but it's not a good Jak game.
Then it's a fine game that happens to be part of a series, ergo it is a fine [game franchise] game.

Perfect body type. shame they're a guy

dark souls 2

she will be a top model soon

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Have you never played Assassin's Creed Odyssey? Because that game is Assassin's Creed in name only.

>.gif

Only people with the shittest of shit taste say that I swear to god. Like when you can't really put your finger on why you don't like a game, it's got something to do with how hard you were fanboying the old titles and can't handle any change whatsoever, and you begrudginly have to accept that a game doesn't do anything "wrong" on any particular level. Like Oh Shit MGSV is an open world game, and it's got tight mechanics and everyone loves it, but, the other MGS games were not open world so like if I squeeze my eyes a little it's hardly even a MGS game at all. Phew.

>new game in series doesn't try to play like the originals to begin with
>fans are only able to view the new game through the lens of the old games and judge it accordingly, instead of judging the new game on its own merits

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Dark Souls 2

Because the series has set expectations. Yakuza 7 is doing exactly that and has already turned off countless people because it's now a JRPG out of nowhere when it was originally a brawler. If you're not exclusively calling it a spinoff people expect a certain thing from your series, and even in the cases of things like Breath of the Wild it might as well be an entirely new IP for how drastically they've thrown everything to the wind.

Expectations have nothing to do with the quality of the game. If it's a good game that happens to be part of the series, then it's a good series game. This shit becomes even more muddled in series where each mainline game or generation of games constantly changes up the gameplay, like Doom, Quake, Ys, TLoZ, Final Fantasy, and Resident Evil, where the series has multiple camps of what style of gameplay they want the series to go back to.

It's a phrase that's applied when a game meets the expectations of a genre, but not a specific franchise.
Example, Hitman is a venerated series of stealth puzzle games focusing on covert and elegant assasination of targets. Hitman Absolution was built as a stealth action game instead where many of the levels don't even have anything to do with assassination at all and are instead "Get from A to B" and strongly encourage you to get involved in gunfights, which is the opposite of what the serie's always been about since the second game matured the formula.
Another example, look at Final Fantasy VII and XV with action-based combat. Even if you like them, how the HELL do they fit in a franchise of turn-based RPGs?
Another. The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. Apparently it was a rather alright third person shooter with vaguely tactical elements to its combat. Now tell me what the hell does that fit in a franchise of turn-based isometric squad tactics?

That said, and here's the thing, that rule isn't absolute. The last example, The Bureau, after the new XCOM games came out,was very much rebranded as a spin-off side game. Similarly, Final Fantasy Tactics is as wildly divergent to what Final Fantasy mainline games do as Final Fantasy XV was, but the difference is that it's, again, an obvious side game, so nobody really minds and everybody is free to celebrate how great it is.

The point of a franchise is an implied set of expectations that your product is meant to follow that will differentiate it from the rest of the market, even other games in the same genre. Thus, since you can obviously say there are many good franchises in a genre, it's possible for a game to be good, but not fulfill the expectations of its franchise

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>game tries to do something new but fails
>instead of criticizing the implementation of the new mechanic, people criticize the mechanic as inherently shit because the genre the game's in is so fucking stagnant that everyone treats the best game in it as the golden standard and anything that remotely deviates from it must be shit, instead of recognizing it as just a different direction
>devs: "oh, the people don't seem to like NEW THING, they just want OLD THING with a new coat of paint they have already played over a thousand times, so let's make that"

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>Thus, since you can obviously say there are many good franchises in a genre, it's possible for a game to be good, but not fulfill the expectations of its franchise
only what happens is that fans will criticize any deviation of franchise expectations as an objective game design flaw (unless it completely changes genres) instead of recognizing it as something different but not up to their tastes

>If it's a good game that happens to be part of the series, then it's a good series game.
No, it's a good game that shares the name of the series but drops all of its conventions just to reinvent the wheel to a fanbase that never asked for it in the first place. It's like selling people steel and you get copper instead but you can't complain because it's still metal when everything about the metal is completely different when it comes to how to use it, how it's made, how it functions, etc. No one gives a shit if you call it a spinoff or a side game, it's when you start creeping into the mainline of a series that it becomes an issue.

If the game ends up being good that's great, but it ends up splitting a fanbase, brings in issues that weren't issues before, it brings in concerns of the series' image and future going forward, it segments the fanbase or causes even more arguments due to the changes, and it gets rid of what people originally enjoyed the series for. There is no reason to take something that has been making people happy for years and then drastically change it out of nowhere while throwing away series conventions for one specific aspect that you personally believe is what the series is all about. The series is the sum of its parts, and to change so many parts will piss people off regardless of how good or bad it is.

Look at how the Zelda fanbase is incredibly split on the BotW situation. Dungeons are now gone and replaced for big walking shrines that are smaller and less involved, sub items that gave you new ways to explore and unlock new things are now gone, there's nothing special to unlock like you could in older games, there's now a bunch of issues that were never issues before. But with Zelda the series is known to reinvent the wheel constantly. You don't just call Gears of War Pop "Gears of War 6", that's retarded. Even if it's a good game it's not a good Gears of War game. Fallout Shelter is a good game but not a good Fallout game.

There are obvious cases where it can be muddled, yes. Like for example, the earlier example of Metal Gear Solid V. What are the expectations of the Metal Gear Solid franchise that we're supposed to consider core to its experience? "Linear gameplay progression" surely can't be it, there's nothing inherently negative about the adoption of a more open-ended level layout. The fact that it doesn't take place in enclosed, small industrial spaces, like a tanker or a military base? That can't be it, Metal Gear Solid 3 took place in vast swathes of jungle and no exclusively within military installations. Its gameplay systems, in so far as you are interacting with encounters and navigating through the environment, seems to be faithful enough to the previous games, so there's no real deviation there. The sparse story compared to previous games? Would a Metal Gear Solid fan say that a dense and constantly advancing story is an integral requirement to a proper Metal Gear Solid game? I wouldn't be able to say.
To me, it looks like a game that does not offer any fundamental betrayal of the series' established structure, the elements are all there as they should, they're only watered down and misused. Too little story for too much playtime. Too much play area for too little relevant content. Not to say that the game is good (or that it isn't), but to say that if it is bad, it's for reasons that are closer to "It doesn't do things well" than "It doesn't do things you'd expect"

Pretty much every game released by Square-Enix based on IPs that belonged to Square-Soft.

Nothing wrong with this faggot

>If the game ends up being good that's great, but it ends up splitting a fanbase, brings in issues that weren't issues before, it brings in concerns of the series' image and future going forward, it segments the fanbase or causes even more arguments due to the changes, and it gets rid of what people originally enjoyed the series for. There is no reason to take something that has been making people happy for years and then drastically change it out of nowhere while throwing away series conventions for one specific aspect that you personally believe is what the series is all about. The series is the sum of its parts, and to change so many parts will piss people off regardless of how good or bad it is.
For game critique this is completely irrelevant

If I don't have any experience with the franchise at all, the argument that it's not a good series game is completely pointless to me, meaning said argument can't have any objective value when it comes to determining whether the game in question is actually good or not
Too many people insert their preconceived notions of how a genre or series SHOULD play out as an objective standard, and treat any deviation from it as an objective game design flaw, even if said deviations result in objectively deeper (and thus more engaging) gameplay

The hubbub about expectations has more to do with marketing and appealing to player preferences than actual game design. The phrase "it's not a good series game" often carries that connotation as if failing to appeal to fans is an objective flaw with the game and that the developers should just go back to traditional gameplay; only the worst case scenario here is that you end up with something like arena shooters which have stagnated to death because they're all basically the same game with a few minor changes, but any significant change to the formula has resulted in massive pushback from the fanbase

>it gets good 8 hours in

I like to think of it as kind of a weird pseudo-social contract situation. You, as a player, should care about whether a game follow the reasonable mean expectations of its fanbase rather than betraying them to cater to you, because at some point you will also have a franchise you enjoy and would hate to see the devs throw what you love about it to the wolves to chase new money. In a perfect world, there should be this unspoken agreement where players don't reward devs for screwing other players, and that makes the point regarding franchise coherence integral to discussion about the product's overall design.
That said, I don't think we're anywhere near close to seeing widespread discussion where that kind of argument gets thrown around to discount incremental gameplay changes. I'm not seeing people making points like "Oh, the new Gears of War threw out the timed reload mechanic but retains all else, that means it's a good shooter but a bad Gears game". Normally I only see it used to refer to REALLY big breaks. Even the Metal Gear example where I was unsure on how to qualify it and ended up settling against it being applicable, I still at least admit that it's a case where the discussion has at least a right to exist. To see it applied to something like the Gears example would be ludicrous