5 Games I Think Deserve Sequels

The cool thing about all media is that there are one offs and there are franchises. This as a structure allows for a lot of refinement where people want it and innovation where people want it. Sometimes there are also pieces of media that become franchises that were never expected to. Like how Dragon Age: Origins was initially made as a one off game which was why they made many of the decisions they did, but other times there are games that deserved to be made into a series or to have a sequel made but never got that chance. Whether because of financial failures, no real interest in sequels from the creators, or other various reasons, some games have had a future sequel snatched from them.

So today, I wanted to talk about some of those games. I’m going to go over 5 games that I think deserved a sequel, but never got one. Importantly, I think it’s worth mentioning that some of these didn’t need a sequel, and that’s completely okay. You don’t need a sequel. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t good enough to deserve a sequel. So with that let’s start with the list.

Star Wars: Outlaws

Star Wars: Outlaws (review is technically here but it’s the first one I did so isn’t as structured and I’ll likely do a re-review eventually) is the most recent game in this list and, while a sequel is theoretically possible, plans for one were canned when the game under-performed for Ubisoft who likely expected far more sales than they should have given the all time low feeling of the Star Wars brand. Yet still, Massive Entertainment, makers of The Division, made a game that puts you into the world of Star Wars and gives you what Han Solo said was always better than the Force, a damn good blaster at your side. You play Kay Vess, an up and coming scoundrel criminal who is thrust into the life of an outlaw due to circumstances surrounding a botched job. She was left behind to take the fall and managed to escape only for her to have to flee the planet she grew up on and go on a planet hopping adventure with her trust buddy Nix and, eventually, her best deadpan droid buddy ND-5.

The gameplay was pretty good, although the game at launch suffered from waaaay too many instant fail stealth sections. The characters were great, engaging, and honestly it was the best time I had exploring a Star Wars world since I was a kid playing the Jedi Knight and KotOR games. Massive understood what it takes to make a Star Wars game that doesn’t get all hung up on the fancy force stuff or the galaxy spanning narrative of the main trilogies. They were able to make me, as a player, feel not just for the characters but for the world, all without having a Jedi in the frame.

They did a really good job despite the fact that the story was, honestly, kinda dry. It was eventually a heist story but took too long to get there and when it did it didn’t have the punch of the best heist stories out there. It felt so much like a great intro to Kay Vess, to the Outlaw she became over the course of the game, and for the characters around her. The potential for more of Kay to get explored was immense. Depressingly, i think there’s multiple reasons for this (including general hatred for Ubisoft which is understandable given the companies history with dismissing sexual assaults) but what I think hits the worst to me is just that I really don’t care for the Jedi games made by Respawn. Sure they’re good but I’ve done some Jedi shit a million times in a ton of games. Outlaws gave us a game that did something different in the modern Star Wars landscape and it was damn good. A sequel would have refined the already great foundation to make something truly special.

I mean imagine if we play Kay Vess 3 years later, after the fall of the Empire during Return of the Jedi and we get to see not just how she dealt with that but how the galaxy underworld as a whole is dealing with that. Maybe she has learned to let things go and started to work with prior enemies because of the power vacuum that was created. Maybe she manages to take advantage of that power vacuum and become head of her own underworld syndicate. Maybe she finds a way to overthrow the Hutts from sectors of Tattooine with the death of Jabba. Who knows, what matters is there’s room for growth!

Tyranny

There’s a lot of criticism in modern games that RPGs need to allow you to be evil to be good RPGs. Games like Baldur’s Gate 3 allows you to literally rule the world and the illithid army that rises from the destruction around you. You can be incredibly evil. People want that in more games, but that’s more complicated than it’s given credit for and doesn’t often fit story wise. If you’re meant to be the hero of the world why would you have the chance to be evil as fuck? Well once there was a game that let loose on the idea of being evil. It was driven by the Obsidian devs with the core idea of “okay so being super evil doesn’t fit in our other games, so let’s make one where that’s the whole point”. Thus, Tyranny was born.

You play The Fatebinder, a higher up in the army of the authoritarian ruler of the Tiers, who is dispatched to put down a rebellion by siding with one of the 3 sides, 2 are the different armies assaulting the rebels and the other are the actual rebels. In this world you are allowed to be as cartoonishly evil as you could possibly want. It’s cheesy, it’s over the top, and it’s fun as fuck. Sure it doesn’t feel as dark as some parts in BG3 but that’s because of the contrast. Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t have darkness as the primary story. Instead you have heartwarming moments, you have love and happiness and compassion. You have these moments that allow for the drastic horribleness from the cartoonishly evil Baldur’s Gate 3 evil choices to stand out. Meanwhile in Tyranny, you have many, many moments that are just as evil and dark, but because there’s no heartwarming contrast in the world it feels less dark.

Regardless, the awesomeness of Tyranny is that if you’ve ever want to let loose your inner fucked up self, you have the possibility to do it without the feeling that you’re destroying something beautiful. The game felt rushed near the end though, at least to me back in the day when I played it and I always felt like it would be a great world to have more depth in. Obsidian built a really interesting world and, with all of the darkness in the world right now, I kinda like the idea of a game that allows me to be cartoonishly evil in a controlled fashion as a form of catharsis. While BG3 allows that to an extent, I don’t think it can be as effective as a Tyranny 2 could since that would still lack that contrast. The whole point of the game is to be evil and embrace that inner fucked up you. You don’t have to have the weight along with it. It’s like a kink thing, expressing/experiencing something horrible in moments of control makes it easier to cope. So in other words, we need Tyranny 2 for similar-to-kink reasons.

Tyranny 2 could bring with it not just more evil gameplay but maybe now you’re the ruler of the authoritarian country and you’re having to send others out to do your bidding and then deal with the worry of facing the same fate as your predecessor. Or maybe the game becomes a series of games where you play a new Fatebinder who works towards overthrowing your prior character so they can sit on the throne? There’s a lot of room for a sequel to grow.

Sunset Overdrive

Screenshot from Ars Technica review, click here to read it.

In my High on Life 2 review (here) I talked about how I love me some meta jokes. Well Sunset Overdrive really solidified my love for that in games. The gameplay overall was characteristic Insomniac chaotic fun, even if the enemy variety was incredibly disappointing. You play in a world where the energy drink OverCharge has turned the majority of your city into easy to kill monsters and it was made by your now former employer FizzCo. Your Janitorial job was lost when the city was quarantined from the outside world so now you get to wander the city having weird fun and, eventually, figuring out what the fuck was in that drink so you can help everything get back to normal. This could be the set up for a more serious game but Insomniac doesn’t play like that. They made a game that is completely focused on movement. The core gameplay of the game is Third Person Shooter but that’s only the start. See, you grind on the power lines, you bounce on cars, you bounce on umbrellas, you bounce on air vents, you are encouraged to never stop going. And you do so in hilarious fashion especially when you’re playing with Insomniac’s characteristically crazy weapon design which is still here.

What really makes the game though is the fantastic humor. Humor that doesn’t just exist in the writing of the game but in the literal jokes of the world. For my best example, I would like to reference this video.

This is a video of all 18 possible respawn animations for the game after you die and it just shows that the devs of the game really had fun with it. They had ideas and they did them even if they didn’t necessarily make sense in the world, because that’s fun.

The game felt, if anything, like an InFamous 1 game. It felt like a great introduction to the idea of the world. Gameplay was established, characters were solidified, the style was known, everything was great and there was plenty of room to go for a sequel. One never came to be but I think it deserves it. The game was so wacky, it was so damn weird and fun. Sure it was cheesy as fuck and some of the jokes didn’t land (not all jokes will land when you’re throwing out so many) but what mattered was that it stood out from the pack of serious games out there when it went from something fun and dumb. It was great because of that. Sunset Overdrive 2 could have been so much more. In an age of games taking themselves incredibly seriously, we need more games that don’t. High on Life is a great series that does it but why not also have a sequel to an older game, why not also have Sunset Overdrive 2: A Sunnier Drive (or something, I’m not good at naming things).

A sequel could go all Infamous 2 and bring us to a new city where a new version of Overdrive was released and FizzCo swears it doesn’t turn you into monsters this time so it’s approved for release and then, lo and behold, it turns you into a mutants, but this time since the flavor is grape the mutants are all purple and they’ve got new abilities. Maybe we stay in the same city and just deal with the ramifications of the outbreak, maybe FizzCo goes belly up but then out of the blue a whole new company appears named Oczzif that releases a brand new energy bar that turns people into spider mutants. I dunno, none of these are the best ideas but they show that there is room for a new game to be made!

Immortals: Fenyx Rising

Immortals: Fenyx Rising is a massive failure of one thing, naming. Originally named God’s and Monsters, a pretty decent name, it was renamed to the current horrible one that exists now. You play as Greek Soldier Fenyx (hence the name) after you crashland on an island where the Greek Gods have gone all wacko. You then have to Breath of the Wild your way around the world saving the big island by going through puzzles, puzzle dungeons, fighting Greek monsters, and having some cartoony fun as well.

The game itself isn’t super inspired as it was rather similar to the core gameplay loop of Breath of the Wild but what makes it great is the humor mixed with the puzzles and combat. The game isn’t difficult and it has great difficulty settings and it’s a great time. It was made by the Assassin’s Creed Odyssey team and it shows. The Greek blood runs thick in this game. Which makes me, a person who is second generation Greek, a little biased in its favor.

Personally, I think the game definitely has flaws, but if there had been a sequel the best parts of the game could have been refined and made into a damn good experience. Best of all, this Ubisoft open world might have had a bunch of stuff on the map, but it was also not a massive map. You have a pair of wings, Icarus style, and you can pretty easily glide across about half of the island once you’ve upgraded those a lot. Plus, the armor is fun and cool looking, the weapons are interesting, there’s transmog, and again the game is just a whole lot of fun. It deserved 2 things: a sequel and a better title.

Fenyx Rising always gave off the idea that there would be a sequel with the naming. Specifically, Immortals being the main title implied they could easily make a new game that has nothing to do with Fenyx. So maybe we have an Immortals that’s focused on Sumerian mythology instead of Greek! Maybe instead of an Island of Puzzles it’s an archipelago of puzzles. Maybe the whole shtick of the series becomes taking different mythologies that haven’t had enough humor injected into them and inject some damn funny and cheesy humor into them? Sumerian was the first one that came to mind for me because it’s never really been focused on and having another Norse game would be exhausting. The whole point is there’s multiple directions they could have gone with the series whether they stuck with Fenyx or made a whole new cast of characters, there were multiple paths that they could have gone down.

Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical

Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical (review here) is the second Greek God game on this list and I swear that’s not why it’s here. Stray Gods created a world where the Greek Gods existed in the modern world and then you, as the player, had to deal with being thrust into that world that you didn’t know existed and that you were pretty sure you didn’t belong. But the reality was that, as Grace, you were able to solve a murder mystery, possibly fall for one of the gods, and move forward with a future of singing.

The game wasn’t super detailed gameplay wise. I mean it could hardly be described as having gameplay at all really. It’s far more visual novel experience but with a Bioware-like conversation twist. Grace could make people divulge themselves through singing. She used this to push and pull on their psyches to figure out whether they’re the murderer of the Muse that she witnessed die. It’s this really interesting structure where, depending on the choices you make in the conversation wheel, you’re able to determine how songs go. They can get more confrontational or more sympathetic. It’s all about finding out who murdered the Muse and that takes a lot of goading. This can, in turn, change how different Gods view you and whether they’re more likely to come to your defense later. It essentially determines aspects of the ending. That’s basically the majority of the gameplay. You can of course go to some places, use a menu to inspect different aspects of those places or talk to people there, but overall it’s a very basic experience.

This experience though has significant potential for another entry. It doesn’t even have to be with Grace as the main character, the DLC was with a different main character so it’s completely feasible a second game could be as well. That’s the beauty of Stray Gods, it didn’t just create characters that I want to see continue, it created a world with potential for more avenues for a story. Now, the game felt like a very one time thing, as the developers have since moved on to another game. But I just think that a second game could be something special. Particularly I think the biggest improvement would be changing the game from being a series of still images with the audio layered on top to be more like Dispatch where the characters actually move with their conversations. That’s a higher budget thing but I think the sequel would deserve that. Of course, it could deserve that and still not get it because that’s not how budgets works.

It could allow you to actually walk around the world in a physical space. Maybe the next game would have you play the next Muse after Grace and we just have to deal with the ramifications of something she did near the end. Maybe that next Muse has to deal with the clashing of the Gods that left the city coming back and find a way to have everyone not break out into a war. Maybe the game introduces some new gameplay mechanic besides just the singing. I dunno, I’m not the best at ideas for musicals. Regardless I just loved the world of Stray Gods and I think there’s so much more potential there that could be explored if they just scratched the surface.

The Conclusion

So that’s my short list. I had a lot of games that I wanted to go through but I didn’t want the list to be super duper long and this article to be far longer than it needed to be. Plus a lot of the games I thought deserved a sequel people have already talked about wanting a sequel to for a while so I figured I’d try to largely avoid covering games that have attracted that kind of attention, except I guess with Outlaws. Personally, I know it’s good to not always franchise everything, as I stated at the top, but I still think there are a lot of games out there that deserved sequels. I wish I could have covered more.

What about you? Are there games that you loved that you think deserved a sequel? Did any of the games I talked about interest you? And even more so, if you could make a sequel to any game, what would it be called? That last one totally isn’t me trying to figure out how I can get better at naming things. Sound off in the comments with your thoughts, I hope to read lots of good sequel ideas!

Meow,

Cat