The Escapist Bulletin: Is bigger always better?

Sega’s ‘Project Needlemouse’ has been confirmed as Sonic 4, and its return to 2D gameplay without all the bells and whistles that have been added to the franchise since the days of Sonic & Knuckles can be seen as Sega finally giving the Sonic fanbase what it wants.

Obviously this is exciting news for Sonic fans - although some are treating it with caution and scepticism - but it raises an interesting question: Is it possible to make a game bad simply by trying too hard?

It's common for sequels to try and be bigger and better than their predecessors. Take the two Knights of the Old Republic games, for example: in the first, you fought against a Sith Lord with a huge fleet at his command, but in the second you fought against a Sith Lord who could destroy planets with his mind.

The desire to make a sequel bigger and better than its predecessor is understandable, but all too often this escalation can cause creators to lose sight of the essence of a project.

Look at Far Cry 2 and Crysis: both evolved from the original Far Cry, and in trying to up the ante forgot what made the original so good.

Both expanded on the gameplay of the first: Far Cry 2 stayed fairly realistic, but moved the location to Africa and gave players an enormous about of space to explore.

Crysis, meanwhile, took the gameplay of its inspiration and upped the power level, with the addition of superpowers and aliens, but hours spent wandering around aimlessly or killing people with a single super-punch didn’t make for a better experience, and both games failed to capture the tension that made the original so compelling.

Have the recent entries in the Sonic franchise been bad because their new ideas were poorly implemented, or because those ideas were an intrusion on a gameplay concept that didn't need anything else to make it work?

A little bit of both. For instance, the God of War-style 'werehog' gameplay in Sonic Unleashed was almost universally derided not just for its execution, but for being such a gross deviation from the Sonic formula.

It's ludicrous to think that Sega would deliberately sabotage its own game, so you can only assume that the addition of the werehog sections was supposed to be an improvement over previous Sonic games, something to bring more depth to the experience. Instead, it proved to be the sticking point for many critics, who fairly universally mauled the game.

Even a game that hits all the right notes can end up being overwhelming or tedious simply by having too much going on. 2007's Mass Effect had a little mini-game every time you wanted to open a locked door, had you micromanaging the inventory of every crew member, and most missions required you to drive around in a giant dune buggy.

While Mass Effect was great, it's telling that most of that has been excised from the game's sequel, marking a rare instance where developers reduced the number of gameplay features, rather than increasing them, and it improves the game immeasurably.

Having more to do doesn’t automatically make a game better, and inflating a checklist of features just to make bold marketing claims rarely results in anything but a bloated game. Only by focusing on the core experience and eschewing elements that detract from that experience can a game truly engage an audience.