Spare Some Change? - Franchises Switching Genres

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Posted February 6, 2012 - By Adam Rosenberg

Syndicate

In a few weeks from now, console gamers will be playing Syndicate again. Only it's not Syndicate, not the way longtime fans of the series know it. Starbreeze Studios applied its trademark talents to turning the old school tactical strategy game into an RPG-lite first-person shooter.

This is a familiar tune in the world of video games. Franchise X is being revived, but with a new approach that effectively brings it back in a completely different form. In the case of Syndicate, what once was strategy is now all about the action. Even the game's co-op campaign, which features missions built on the foundations of what you played in the original, embraces this new action bent.

What's behind it? Is it simply the experimental nature of the interactive art form, the taking of one idea and molding it to fit inside a different kind of framework? A lot of people will try to simplify it by saying that "first-person shooters sell better." They're not wrong. They're not completely right either.

If they were, how would we explain the existence of Halo Wars? MotorStorm RC? Tomb Raider: Guardian of Light? Or how about XCOM, a game that switched from its tactical strategy roots to FPS with 2K Marin's upcoming release and then back to tactical strategy with Firaxis' recently announced XCOM: Enemy Unknown?

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A More Compelling Mousetrap

It's best if we start by thinking about what made the genre-switched games popular in the first place. Halo: Combat Evolved introduced a lot of new concepts and presentational ideas when it was released, leaving behind a legacy that continues to influence development studios around the world even today. For any warts, the game was and is a lot of fun. That's not what made Halo endure for so long, however.

Bungie Studios introduced a marvelously detailed universe in Halo: CE, one with a deep story that continues to evolve even today. Plenty of fun games are released each year, but Halo fosters a deeper investment. It's the same kind of detail-oriented creation that's helped grow Star Wars into the world's most successful transmedia franchise. Every release in the Halo series adds to the larger fiction, creating an ever-growing hook for fans and would-be fans to latch on to.

Whatever you want to say about the quality of the actual game, Ensemble Studios' real-time strategy Xbox 360 title Halo Wars speaks to that. It broke away from the FPS framework and took on a more epic warfare sort of scale as it related a formative story in the series' history.

Was the RTS gameplay necessary? Not really. The entire series is about epic-scale interstellar warfare. Halo Wars' Battle of Harvest could have just as easily zeroed in on a single squad, just like FPS releases Halo: Reach and Halo: ODST did. There's more then to this genre-flipping puzzle. A well-developed universe may hook a dedicated fanbase, but it doesn't explain why a developer might want to stray from a proven formula.

Dirt Showdown

Casting A Wider Net

I think we come back now to the experimental and continually evolving nature of interactive entertainment. Remember that this is still a very young medium, less than half a century old. The best developers will occasionally put their mad scientist hats on and brew up something completely different that they can then put a familiar name on.

DIRT: Showdown, MotorStorm RC, and Burnout Crash are three racing games that immediately come to mind. All of them take a big step away from their core franchises. In the case of DIRT, it's a straight-up branching out. Codemasters has dealt with criticism after each release in that series, sometimes from fans that crave more of the simulation that made the first release such a success and sometimes from fans who just want to get back to the arcade style of DIRT 2.

Showdown is a not-at-all-subtle effort to appeal directly to that latter group. At the same time, Codemasters has been very clear on one key fact: this is not DIRT 4. That game will be coming eventually, and it's supposedly going to bring the sim supporters back into its loving embrace.

The Burnout and MotorStorm spinoffs both differ from their predecessors more on the presentational side of things. Both franchises were born and continue to live as arcade racers. Crash took that idea to a whole new level with its bizarre puzzle/pinball approach that uses a top-down perspective and pushes for players to constantly go after higher and higher scores. We've seen less of MotorStorm RC, but it, too, moves even closer to a coin-op arcade mentality with an isometric perspective on the action that is reminiscent of a classic like R.C. Pro-Am.

That sort of experimentation also isn't limited to genres that wouldn't necessarily support a first-person take on things. Tomb Raider: Guardian of Light and the upcoming PlayStation Vita title Silent Hill: Book of Memories both seem to take a page from the handbook of coin-op classic Gauntlet.

Note that all of these franchises have their own dedicated fanbases as well. The racing games don't have the narrative depth that a Halo does of course; they've always just been embraced as quality titles for one reason or another, and they've built up their own followings as a result. As for Tomb Raider and Silent Hill, just like Halo they both exist in their own, elaborate universes.

The larger the audience that's dangling from a franchise hook, the more attractive it is to take chances. Not only do you expose existing fans to something different, you also maybe attract a new audience in the process.

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Dollars And Sense

There's one more significant piece to this puzzle that it would be foolish to ignore: dollars and sense. Like it or not, action games sell. It's true that the Interplay-era Fallout games would be a poor fit on consoles in their original form, but there's also the bare fact that plugging the series' post-apocalyptic universe into a first-person open-world RPG framework is pretty much a guaranteed hit.

It doesn't hurt of course that Fallout 3 managed to strike a perfect balance between faithfulness to the core values of the series and embracing new ideas that would appeal more directly to present-day audiences. Bethesda Softworks didn't even take a lot of chances there, beyond the basic idea of pissing off old school fans. The two Elder Scrolls games that preceded Fallout 3's release were very clear inspirations on the franchise reboot's development team.

The same can be said for the first-person XCOM, though that game is not as black and white an FPS as some seem to think it is. There's a very definite squad-based strategy level to the moment-to-moment gameplay that was evident in last year's E3 preview, as well as an overarching meta-game in which you develop the series' alien-hunting organization.

The new approach being taken with Syndicate is also very likely meant to be casting a net out at a wider audience. While Starbreeze is the developer on that game, the IP still belongs to Electronic Arts. It's very likely that the publisher approached the studio with the belief that the team behind The Darkness and The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay could turn out a respectable first-person take on the cyberpunk-styled franchise.

It's easy to be cynical and simply say that all genre-flipped franchise games are fueled by a desire to make more money. That's certainly true to an extent. Making video games is a business, after all. The people who pay for those games to be made are constantly on the lookout for new potential sources of income.

Syndicate At Long Last Confirmed By Electronic Arts And Starbreeze Studios

Game Changer

You've hopefully seen by now, however, that things are quite a bit more complex than that. After all, if publishers went purely for the lowest common denominator appeal at all times, we'd see nothing but different shades of FPS hitting store shelves week after week. That's just not the case.

Oddly enough, this discussion of genre-flipping franchise games really points back to one of the medium's oldest and most tiresomely enduring arguments: do games qualify as art? What do you think? We're seeing increasingly adventurous risks being taken as video games continue to evolve at an astounding rate.

For all of the less risky plays, like Syndicate's move from isometric strategy to FPS, we're still seeing a lot of great ideas, and a lot of new ones, coming from all corners of the development scene. The better question we all ought to be asking at this point is: where will this ever-changing art form take us next?

Tags: Features, Videogames

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clayw

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Posted: February 21, 2012 8:11 AM | Reply | Report

+1 thumbs up thumbs down

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neslover4ever

plz remove my second post on here , i did not mean to repost this all of this info so many times

Posted: February 20, 2012 6:41 PM | Reply | Report

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neslover4ever

here is a youtube glitch video that i just found of a game called syndicate that is not even out yet in the u.s. or out even in other countries,but yet there are still people playing illegal copies of this game.

here is the youtube link for that illegal info of the game called syndicate http://youtu.be/u5us3QywB8I so that i hope the game studio and the game developers can plz do something about this illegal and misuse of the game that they have made to sell in stores.

Posted: February 20, 2012 6:24 PM | Reply | Report

+1 thumbs up thumbs down

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neslover4ever

here is a youtube glitch video that i just found of a game called syndicate that is not even out yet in the u.s. or out even in other countries,but yet there are still people playing illegal copies of this game.

here is the youtube link for that illegal info of the game called syndicate http://youtu.be/u5us3QywB8I so that i hope the game studio and the game developers can plz do something about this illegal and misuse of the game that they have made to sell in stores.

Posted: February 20, 2012 6:21 PM | Reply | Report

+1 thumbs up thumbs down

0 Replies
dukeletoatreides

Great article. reminds of 'Your FPS and and RPG made a baby!' (Borderlands)

Posted: February 7, 2012 6:59 AM | Reply | Report

+4 thumbs up thumbs down

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ONE.MAN.ARMY

Take two great games and mix them and see what you get

Posted: February 6, 2012 1:22 PM | Reply | Report

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wolfman2010

Very interesting take on cross-genre franchises. It has been interesting to follow the development of the XCOM game by 2K Marin, and while I feel it's not the best use of its material, it's not the first attempt either, so I still hope to be pleasantly surprised. And with Firaxis creating an updated version of the original X-Com, I will be interested in whatever awaits us when these two are released.

Posted: February 6, 2012 12:18 PM | Reply | Report

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lowkevmic

Great article, although I feel that the reason why games may switch genres, is to speak to the demand at the time, or to better tell a story they might not get with it's current genre. Halo Wars is a great example of that. Given that it is a FPS, the story itself is always hinting how the scale of the war is bigger then just Master Cheif, and what he's doing at the time. So with Halo wars, rather then play as a lone hero, you are actually in command of an entire unit, which play as a idea of what everyone's role was during this massive war, rather thn just one character. Plus I thinkHalo Wars filled a void on the 360 in the form of RTS, that we would usually only see on PC. Which was the biggest reason why I picke up that game, I wanted to play starcraft, and since there isn't a starcraft game for the 360...Halo Wars gave me that fix.

Posted: February 6, 2012 10:25 AM | Reply | Report

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