Game franchises that have regressed

[Cardboardtubeknight Cardboardtubeknight]

Simply put what gaming franchises do you think have gotten worse overtime?

My answer is Yoshi. Despite Yoshi's Island technically being a Super Mario World title it still was bombastic in it's mechanics, music, everything. I even learned that it does that thing Super Mario Bros did where as you progress the time of day changes with an example being the transition from world 2 to 3.

 

[Evaccaneer Doom]

Mario's spinoffs. Aside from whatever the fuck they're doing with Paper Mario, that recent Mario Strikers game was incredibly underwhelming, Mario Maker 2 was essentially abandoned after Link and SMB2 mushroom despite the DLC potential, Mario Kart World's biggest selling point is empty and devoid of life after all we had was a Mario Kart 8 port for YEARS, and yeah

Mainline and M&L seem to be doing ok though

 

[Cardboardtubeknight Cardboardtubeknight]

I HATE that they did that with Mario Maker 2 with a passion. Speaking of Yoshi's Island I remember when MM2 came out, that blaringly empty spot next to the 3d World selection was speculated to be Yoshi's Island even.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

Sonic has gotten so bad since the Genesis/DreamCast era (depending on your take)... I'm afraid it peaked with Adventure and has never resurfaced since. It's very sad and really infuriating how they tried to reinvent a game concept that couldn't be simpler, turning it into a grandiose, nonsensical soap opera about nothing.

We had good guys, bad guys, we were clearly on the first group and we ran really fucking fast. What else was there to add?

 

[ciro64]

Mario's spinoffs. Aside from whatever the fuck they're doing with Paper Mario, that recent Mario Strikers game was incredibly underwhelming, Mario Maker 2 was essentially abandoned after Link and SMB2 mushroom despite the DLC potential, Mario Kart World's biggest selling point is empty and devoid of life after all we had was a Mario Kart 8 port for YEARS, and yeah

Mainline and M&L seem to be doing ok though

Mario was supposed to be my favorite franchise ever, it's a real shame Nintendo never uses it to its full potential.

 

[Tonberry]

Every Dark Souls game was worse than the one that preceded it.

Sonic, but it's branched off in so many directions that you can't really discuss it without needing all the planets aligning perfectly.

Kingdom Hearts. The first two main games are great, and a few of the side games are decent, but it more or less it just feels like a zombie now, since 3 had a decade and a half worth of excitement and hype to deliver on, and such a task is just insurmountable.

I was initially going to say Final Fantasy, but as someone who has enjoyed most mainline games except for a few, like 8, 13 and 16, I'm not prepared to admit it having "regressed" as it's been kind of too much of a roller coaster between good and bad.

Mario's spinoffs.

Hard agree on this one, too.

 

[deceptionfalls]

The most obvious answer is Call of Duty. Everything in the 360-PS3 era was groundbreaking, they had genuinely great titles with the Black Ops series and the Modern Warfare trilogy. Then with the new-gen titles it started going downhill, they were running out of ideas, things weren't executed as well and it kept going up until Black Ops 4 where the franchise was at an all time low.

Somehow they bounced back really well with Modern Warfare 2019, genuinely reinvented the franchise and gave even the best entries a run for their money with how well they did gameplay, story, graphics, immersion, it was the ultimate COD for me.

But then everything else was downhill again, too much monetization, obtuse skins, inferior gameplay and mechanics, subsequent entries just trying to do what MW2019 did but worse, gunplay got worse, maps got worse, skill-based matchmaking got even worse.

Nowadays the franchise is a shell of it's former self, trying to be cool and funny, like Fortnite, but lacking the actual soul or charisma that makes a game like that special. Everything looks so cheap, so carbon-copied, they can barely release a finished game nowadays, so lame and sad.

 

[Tortuga]

All of them

 

[Octopus]

I think Halo is an absolute ringer for this. Reinvented a genre for a new hardware generation when the first one came out, continued the series in the masterpieces of 2 and 3, and even Reach and ODST were still phenomenal games. Now the series is just a sad shadow of what it was. Infinite chased the open world trend for some reason and in a pretty half baked and mediocre way, 5 is best to never be talked about, and even 4 was just meh at best. It's just so strange, it's such a simple formula so why do they keep getting it wrong now?

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

Mortal Kombat started getting rot since the time Trilogy was released (actually the fifth-ever game to grace the N64 and the first one to fail), but the interesting thing is that Midway seemed to be aware of it and attempted to steer it in a different direction with Mythologies. To their credit, they did bounce back a little with Four, but this was also about the time a new generation of fighting games with an entire new focus on multiplayer action was emerging and was ready to toss it aside. Super Smash Bros outclassed it; Soul Calibur replaced it.

 

[Octopus]

Mortal Kombat started getting rot since the time Trilogy was released (actually the fifth-ever game to grace the N64 and the first one to fail), but the interesting thing is that Midway seemed to be aware of it and attempted to steer it in a different direction with Mythologies. To their credit, they did bounce back a little with Four, but this was also about the time a new generation of fighting games with an entire new focus on multiplayer action was emerging and was ready to toss it aside. Super Smash Bros outclassed it; Soul Calibur replaced it.

Don't forget about Special Forces, the game even worse than Mythologies yet never really gets talked about. They came back with 9, 10 and 11 but then they dropped the ball again with MK One or whatever it's called. The story of MK, really.

 

[Viviana Santos]

Both Dragon Age and BioShock have incredible first games and, unfortunately, their sequels got worse and worse.

 

[Octopus]

Dragon Age

Oh no, someone mentioned Dragon Age; must suppress my unhinged fanboy rant.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

Don't forget about Special Forces, the game even worse than Mythologies yet never really gets talked about.

My God that looks shitty! And it's on the N64 as well? Wow XD This is actually my first time hearing about it and I can't quite comprehend it.

 

[Viviana Santos]

Oh no, someone mentioned Dragon Age; must suppress my unhinged fanboy rant.

Dragon Age II has a very good story in my opinion, but its gameplay is very weak.

---

The limited setting and reused assets is really lame.

 

[otogirisou]

talking tom

 

[job32]

All of them.

 

[ISSO1407]

Monster Hunter Wilds is a steaming pile of crap that probably killed the whole franchise for me since theyll keep chasing the sales numbers of it for the next decade+ with piss easy gameplay where absolutely everything sucks and broken beyond believe early access releases. Two or three releases like that and the franchise will be dead for good since the newcomers from world wont be there anymore to shill out and the vets are already mostly gone. Wilds has less players than World right now ffs :D Its infuriating how hard the whole ..new.. community was pushing this abomination at release, it was almost as suffocating as encountering Nintendrones or Sony fans when theyre confronted with facts and they cant handle reality anymore.

 

[Tonberry]

Dragon Age II has a very good story in my opinion, but its gameplay is very weak.

---

The limited setting and reused assets is really lame.

It was always so weird to me how they tried to make the protagonist into fantasy Shepard, instead of building on what they made in Origins. It just felt like lack of confidence for me, like a fully voiced protagonist was automatically better than any other kind.

 

[Octopus]

Dragon Age II has a very good story in my opinion, but its gameplay is very weak.

---

The limited setting and reused assets is really lame.

Half of DA2 was a good game, which is part of why I say the series has 1.75 good games; Inquisition is .25 of a good game. I have such a love/hate relationship with 2, which I guess is why I ultimately say it's my personal favourite in the series. I actually wrote 9 pages of an article on DA2 that I decided to not release, and even with that I feel like I was leaving bits out.

I'd also add Silent Hill to this discussion. I love Homecoming but it was objectively a pretty mid game at best, and Downpour was just straight up bad. That weird walking simulator was also pretty bad, I think it was Short Message? I get it mixed up with Ascension, which was that weird mixed media show thing where people could vote on what would happen next, then eventually they just dropped that.

 

[Nebulon_Galaxy]

The Sims
Holy hell how do you fuck this up so bad? Jesus Christ, we go from open-world to a isolated islands again only cause EA wants to grab as much players as possible.

 

[Stare best girl]

I will get killed for this, but Persona honestly is something that I lost the interest since Persona 3, I loved how Persona changed its gameplay in each mainline entry like MIP, P2 duology and P3 and then P4 just copy-pasted P3 gameplay and making it worse at same time, while P5 tries to bring back some MIP and P2 stuff at same time it's easy as hell as well the godawful pacing that the games have now

not hyped with Persona 6 and 0 interest in MIP and P2 getting P5 reskins

 

[zacharinolongpants]

I will get killed for this, but Persona honestly is something that I lost the interest since Persona 3, I loved how Persona changed its gameplay in each mainline entry like MIP, P2 duology and P3 and then P4 just copy-pasted P3 gameplay and making it worse at same time, while P5 tries to bring back some MIP and P2 stuff at same time it's easy as hell as well the godawful pacing that the games have now

not hyped with Persona 6 and 0 interest in MIP and P2 getting P5 reskins

I see where you're coming from with this. I think the vibes and overall package of the first two Persona games are my favorite. Weirdly enough I prefer P4 over P3 lol. I don't think they've dropped off to the point where I'd pass on em because I still find them all quite good. But I do miss a lot of things about the older ones. P2 is my fave so I hope they don't do the modern generic Shonen thing to it lol.

 

[Deleted member 7989]

The most obvious answer is Call of Duty. Everything in the 360-PS3 era was groundbreaking, they had genuinely great titles with the Black Ops series and the Modern Warfare trilogy. Then with the new-gen titles it started going downhill, they were running out of ideas, things weren't executed as well and it kept going up until Black Ops 4 where the franchise was at an all time low.

Somehow they bounced back really well with Modern Warfare 2019, genuinely reinvented the franchise and gave even the best entries a run for their money with how well they did gameplay, story, graphics, immersion, it was the ultimate COD for me.

But then everything else was downhill again, too much monetization, obtuse skins, inferior gameplay and mechanics, subsequent entries just trying to do what MW2019 did but worse, gunplay got worse, maps got worse, skill-based matchmaking got even worse.

Nowadays the franchise is a shell of it's former self, trying to be cool and funny, like Fortnite, but lacking the actual soul or charisma that makes a game like that special. Everything looks so cheap, so carbon-copied, they can barely release a finished game nowadays, so lame and sad.

This is one that pisses me off to no end. I mean, say what you will about COD, but those old games were so awesome for what they were. I still remember getting my first 360 (the Halo 3 Master Chief armor variant) and loading up COD4 for the first time. First action game to really hook me the way it did. That mission where you are chasing Zakhaev's cousin or whoever he was through a firefight in some run down alleyways is still one of the greatest FPS moments for me. 7 year old me could NOT put the controller down.

MW2019 was so freaking cool to get after having nothing but boring campaigns since Advanced (although I really liked Advanced and Black Ops 3) and they had to go back on their idea for the new story since it ran into controversy with the terrorism plot. So instead of writing around that and coming up with a cool, calculated, new villain, They decide to instead re-hash OG MW2 and 3 but with way worse writing. Never been so disappointed in my life. Don't get me started with how unnecessarily hard they try to make the new Black Ops games all mysterious and with twists that are worthy of some of M. Night Shyamalan's absolute worst.

It's like the new writers just don't understand what made those old COD campaigns so effective. Idk who they got writing the series now but damn man. I could sit here and bitch about the various other problems with COD, but the campaigns were always what I would be most excited for. I mean, even Zombies had a storyline, that, while not always as well written, kept me hooked enough to see what would come next. Now everything they write has that shitty modern Hollywood style to it where they think they are writing actual Shakespeare level shit, when in actuality that wasn't what made COD stories so good.

I think I'm gonna go through 2019 again shit.

Post automatically merged: Jun 25, 2025

Monster Hunter Wilds is a steaming pile of crap that probably killed the whole franchise for me since theyll keep chasing the sales numbers of it for the next decade+ with piss easy gameplay where absolutely everything sucks and broken beyond believe early access releases. Two or three releases like that and the franchise will be dead for good since the newcomers from world wont be there anymore to shill out and the vets are already mostly gone. Wilds has less players than World right now ffs :D Its infuriating how hard the whole ..new.. community was pushing this abomination at release, it was almost as suffocating as encountering Nintendrones or Sony fans when theyre confronted with facts and they cant handle reality anymore.

I'm not a classic MonHun fan. The one I've played most is World. But idk, I don't think they've matched the same level of quality that game brought. I realize that World was already a bit cut back from the older games, but that game was still really fun. Not to mention, Capcom seems insistent on using the RE Engine for open world shit that it can't handle, nor was made to handle. That engine was made for smaller scale, linear experiences, that focused heavily on artstyle and graphic fidelity. The recent games that have been made on it, primarily Dogma 2 and Wilds, have terrible performance, that is most likely due to too much overhead on an engine designed for a complete different type of game. I'm glad I refunded my pre order of Wilds. I had a feeling it would be rough.

 

[Viviana Santos]

It was always so weird to me how they tried to make the protagonist into fantasy Shepard, instead of building on what they made in Origins. It just felt like lack of confidence for me, like a fully voiced protagonist was automatically better than any other kind.

Half of DA2 was a good game, which is part of why I say the series has 1.75 good games; Inquisition is .25 of a good game. I have such a love/hate relationship with 2, which I guess is why I ultimately say it's my personal favourite in the series. I actually wrote 9 pages of an article on DA2 that I decided to not release, and even with that I feel like I was leaving bits out.

I think Dragon Age II is an 8/10 overall, I really like that game's story, Dragon Age: Inquisition is an incredibly mediocre game and Dragon Age: The Veilguard is easily one of the worst games released in recent years.