The Escapist Bulletin: Why Fallout: New Vegas is a better idea than Fallout 4

Sequels are hard, especially when it comes to gaming, as fan expectations, technological improvements, financial concerns, and sales figures have to be juggled whilst undertaking the unique narrative challenge of constructing something around five to ten times the length of the average movie and making it interactive.

So why bother with sequels at all, if they’re nothing but trouble? Well, for one thing, they sell well. We gamers like sequels, and as much as we might like to pretend otherwise, gaming is a business. But sequels carry an element of risk as well.

Every new game in a series is potentially the stinker that derails it, severely damaging its earning potential, or is just simply one game too many in an overfull franchise.

Perhaps a better idea than trying to continue a single narrative is to build a world that can support a wealth of different stories.

Consider the upcoming Fallout: New Vegas - it isn't a sequel to Fallout 3, but it is set in the same world, meaning the game can strike a balance between narrative freedom and building on an existing brand. Admittedly, the Fallout setting wasn’t designed with that in mind, but nevertheless it can accommodate it.

This isn’t exactly a new idea. It’s something that licensed games have been trading on for years, but when you start to look at a property in terms of its setting rather than looking at its narrative directly, it opens up a much wider range of options.

BioShock was a fairly self-enclosed tale and did not lend itself to sequel, and it's a testament to 2K Marin's skill that BioShock 2 is as good as it is. Rapture, on the other hand, has plenty of scope for more stories to be told, something that the multiplayer portion of BioShock 2, set during Rapture's civil war, hints at.

We’ve never seen Rapture at its height, for example, save for a few seconds at the beginning of BioShock 2 - nor have we exhausted the tales of the people who lived there.

In particularly robust settings, the possibility for interesting stories is almost limitless, especially when you don't constrain yourself to single genre. Take Mass Effect as an example: obviously BioWare created the setting with a very specific story it wanted to tell, but it's certainly not the only story that world has to offer.

How about a tactical FPS depicting a yearlong conflict between the Blue Suns and the Blood Pack, or a Hitman-style game where you play a Drell assassin? Even a turn based strategy where you set up new human colonies is feasible - and potentially quite exciting, if you think back to Eden Prime and Feros - and all because BioWare took the time to build an interesting world.

It will always be appealing to revisit familiar characters and places, but a lot of the potential pitfalls of releasing sequels can be avoided simply by exploring the space. By making a vibrant and interesting world - and not being afraid to get creative with it - gaming can only benefit.