Just observing the disaster of Suicide Squad game, the calamity of the current Doctor Who and many other franchises along the way, it feels like we are on the eve of a purge in western media where a lot of franchises are going to die or at the very least, be put on a very long hiatus.
In my opinion, a lot of these survive off habit, you get used to enjoying a certain thing, you regularly consume certain thing and never think about it. Until they make something that breaks that habit it won't die so thought I'd list off some of those bits of media that killed off a franchise:
Command and Conquer= C&C4: This one singlehandedly killed the franchise, even before they used it's corpse for a mobile game. The complete removal of bases from the game itself was the dumbest decision ever made, but not the first time EA would remove a core mechanic from a major franchise..
Battlefield: Battlefield 2042: the other example by removing classes for 'operators' in the game probably damaged it more than just how much it was a buggy unplayable mess. It was such a bad decision that they put the classes back in but with talk of the next being a live service and even the return of operators, I can hear the death chimes for this franchise just like honourable mention the Medal of Honour series.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi: it's amazing how this single film started this franchise tanking that was bought for billions and even had people appreciating the prequels more. From the bad writing, stale acting and stupid plot, this killed the enthusiasm for a decades long series.
The potential new ones: AC Shadows and GTA6: these two in the future have the possibility to kill their respective franchises. We are finding more and more on AC that it's looking like every wrong move has been taken and with how lackluster Mirage was received, it ain't looking good. GTA6 however, there's a possibility it'll simply be another Cyberpunk in just not meeting expectations which IS recoverable.
Just thought this was interesting to discuss seeing franchises both established and barely formed (cough Trench Crusade) killing themselves in a single release especially around our current time.
I never even saw The Last Jedi. The Force Awakens was enough of a mood killer.
same
the moment poe said "do I talk first" I knew it was dead, the writers are inserting "self awareness" into something that absolutely needs to be played perfectly straight for it to be resonant and even enjoyable
My friend was a huge star wars fan and I remember the day we watched TLJ, man was optimistic at first but slowly slouch further and further into his chair as the movie went on. At the end of it he seems to have deflated and looked numb and refuse to talk about the movie for a week or so. It was funny and sad at the same time. I felt bad for him.
This was essentially my reaction, as a former Star Wars nut.
I refuse to discuss the movies with my (ravingly normie) extended family, for this reason…
I adored the EU.
I stopped watching after Rogue One.
Yep.
I would have given Mary Sue deux a chance but I'm happy to get spoilers these days because there is no way I'm devoting even 15 minutes to drivel. And the spoilers turned savers in this case.
Same here.
TFA was the first film I’d ever seen with such a proper hardcore Mary Sue. I kept sitting there with baited breath waiting for the big reveal:
Why is she so strong with the force?
Is she Luke’s daughter or something?
I bet there’s gonna be some kind of a cool new angle that expands the lore and mythology around the Jedi!
Any minute now...
*Han dies, they have a weak lightsaber fight, planet death star blows up and credits roll.
That was enough for me, I didn’t bother seeing the other two. Have only watched YouTube reviews of the sequels and all the Disney+ slop. It’s all dead to me now, I don’t care anymore.
the one hope TFA sequels had was developing Boyega's character to become a jedi, which would've been quite cool, but instead we got Ridley as a Mary Sue
I honestly was just waiting for the two of them to bone, given the obvious tension there, and then… They never did.
And so instead they set him up with forgettable Asian chick who amounted to pretty much nothing, lol…
Although I enjoyed everything till the ending and the multiplayer, it had the very negative effect of essentially normalising loot boxes unfortunately.
I still maintain the whole game was bad, but with 2 or so great moments. Most people critique the ending for being bad, and they aren't wrong.
But that's not all of it, look at its story in comparison to 1 and 2. ME1 was this great mystery being set up against this horrible eldritch foe, just one of them was barely survivable, not much was known about them, and fighting just one took out 40% of your army. Absolutely amazing stuff with jank gameplay.
2 was a bit of a filler episode, more of a side mission with some reveals about their plans for humanity and filling out the relationships with the crew, as well as extra justification for fighting the reapers. Not as good as ME1, but still enjoyable and with better mechanical gameplay than 1, and filler episodes aren't all just a waste of time, they help you get to know the characters better and in so doing, raise the stakes even further. ME2 might feel like a bit of a waste of time in the scheme of things, but it was pretty good and served that necessary purpose.
But notice what none of them had? No mention of the catalyst.
This was a mcguffin from nowhere that makes no sense because they had written themselves into a corner and not introduced anything in the previous two games. Of all media, the thing that comes closest to the creation and then collection of resources across the galaxy to build the galaxy is palpatine. As in episode 9 palpatine. Suddenly, a way to defeat the reapers appeared. And then that quest visiting all over the galaxy to get it built.
Ok yes, the send offs for mordin, and the tali and legion thing were good moments, but they were good moments that could have been a part of any larger story. The broad story they went with failed from the start, not just the ending. The ending failed because the set up at the start of 3 (and the lack of it in 1&2) failed.
The thing that carries ME3 and gives people a lot of those "its good until the ending" opinions is that the ending of some of your companion stories are incredible and many of them do well in terms of feeling like a 3 game story.
The entire Garrus finale alone is a better storyline than most games have period.
Because that's clearly what they wanted the game to be from ME2. One where the background story is mostly secondary to the character moments with your team, which is a retarded way of doing things but it shows heavily in where the strongest and clearly most in depth parts of ME3 were compared to the garbage.
Mass Effect 3 went to shit with the DLC for Mass Effect 2. It took a game that was supposedly big on choice and forces the player to be where the beginning of Mass Effect 3 wanted them to be. Then there was that awful child character that Shepard inexplicably became obsessed with. They couldn't even get a child capable of acting for that role or the retarded plot device of the "catalyst" later.
There was something hinted at with one of the side quests in Mass Effect 2. I forget exactly what, but there was a fight on a planet with a star that was dying early nearby. Apparently that was supposed to be setting up the plot of 3, but it got leaked and they changed it to the retarded faggotry we got.
It was the planet Tali and her team were researching if memory serves. I read somewhere that the plot would be centred around all of the back and forth travel through the mass relays generating too much dark matter as a byproduct throughout the universe, and causing stars to collapse into black holes or something. This would have been a justification for the reapers’ existence as a necessary evil, ie to cull the galactic races each time they became too advanced so the mass relays could lie dormant for a few thousand years and the dark matter levels would subside.
I think that would’ve been a lot more interesting than the whole, “biologicals vs synthetics” philosophical nonsense they went with in the end.
It was like a ripoff of the Terminator, except Skynet was made to kill everyone on purpose. I don't remember the exact explanation, since I played it years ago. I just remember it being completely retarded.
Good points, I'd say the worst thing they did was even after the extended cut they made the binary colour choices cannon and if you reject it, everyone dies too bad.
I still believe the theory though, that we were supposed to have a story revolving more around dark matter affecting the universe as there was set up for that in 2 with the Quarians. This got leaked thanks to journalists so they panicked and made the catalyst the new plot and mcguffin.
It almost seems like spite yeah.
Because yeah shooting that little shit is the right choice. This thing arrives and tells you that you have to press a button (for a machine you canonically do not understand, you are relying on its explanation), after explaining how it is reaper tech, and its the same kid that appears in your dreams of oily shadows?
Shoot that thing, don't let it say another word, its the only smart answer. It's reaper tech. The head of the reapers it claims. Shoot it.
Yeah I heard that too, and it was a lot better. And there was some set up for it you are right.
What did ME3 do?
Made the entire journey of ME1 and ME2 pointless in how the ending went, other than INSIGNIFICANT BATTLE POINTS in a war map.
While the ending exacerbates the problems with the game (and the series as a whole) ME1 and 2 were made pointless well before the ending of 3. The whole structure of 3 boils almost all of your decisions across the series down to "did you get enough points for the green ending? No? Go grind pvp in a previously singleplayer-only franchise." On top of that, several of your actions and choices in previous games are made completely irrelevant because they decided to lock you into a single narrative line.
Is this the thing with the blue kid being the manifestation of the evil metal space squids?
It set the stage for ME Andromeda.
“WHOM! And your goddam father!”
For me it was the last season of House of Cards on Netflix. The series was already becoming increasing unbelievable to me by that point with holes in some plots and lack of satisfying closure in others, but the last season went warp speed ahead on it. Spoiler alert: It ended with the entire U.S. cabinet becoming 100% female and standing in a line breaking the fourth wall looking right into the camera all smug and arrogantly. It couldn't be more obvious of a statement if someone in the background held up a sign reading "Women are better than men in every way possible."
Before that the messaging was more subtle but still noticeable. Like in the climate change movie (The Day After Tomorrow, I think)...in it was a very important government official who looked just like Dick Cheney denying that anything was going to happen when one of the climatologists kept warning him about the major weather disturbances.
House of Cards went to shit because Spacey got canned. Any series losing the lead will inevitably suffer.
I soured on House of Cards US quite early. Bitchqueen was too much.
I still rewatch S1 and S2 as I find them to be the best of the show. That being said, I still skip through most of the Claire sideplots. She goes full Skylar White enough to annoy the crap out of me.
House of Cards was an Obama-era show that immediately felt incredibly dated the moment Trump took office.
The show would (eg.) make a big deal about needing to have someone go on CNN to defend some policy decision, and whenever that happened I'd ask myself "Why does CNN need to be involved? Why doesn't he just tweet what he wants to say the way Trump does?"
Yea I noticed that too. I need to watch the original British version
Unless you are in it for the 'art form' don't go in expecting anything spectacular after having had the plot spoiled by the US version.
At least it had the good sense to not milk itself for multiple zombie seasons.
Oh hell no. House of Cards was already ruined by Season 2. Written by pre-Trump-era Democrats, the show runners of a series about political backstabbing didn't understand a single thing about politics.
Sin #1 -They had the Bernie-Socialist recoiling from freezing the government too much?? Any self-respecting Commie-dipshit would be jerking off to how much damage their strike was doing, not clutching their pearls in horror. These writers fundamentally didn't understand how progressive activists think.
Sin #2 -The Putin-Dictator being a metoo-rapist and anti-feminist makes him a hero to the 2014-2016 viewers. The writers had the big bad Russians on one side, the super oppressed Feminists on the other, and backed the wrong horse. Anyone with a clue would have been neutral to the Russians and made the Feminsits a joke.
Sin #3 -The Main Character gets away with everything, all his enemies are retarded. Doesn't this take place in Washington DC? Shouldn't that place be infested with completely insincere backstabbing Democrats? The fact that every other character in the story other than Frank claims to be "one of the good ones" and "doing the right thing" is a clear misunderstanding of how corrupt that place is. The entire city is crawling with Frank Underwoods. He shouldn't be able to open his mouth without being interrupted by three or four knives being thrown at his back.
I always laugh at the Liberal fantasy of the Cowboy-Doctor, or the Hero-Lawyer, who is the Director of some multi-culti-corporate institute or firm that can stand firm against the rabble when his principles demand it. LOL. That's NOT possible. You rise up the ranks by bending over and taking it up the ass and never taking risks. You don't also get to be the individualistic maverick when you want to. The action requires a Right wing personality to perform. The Cowboy Doctor is like the Anti-Racist Frank Underwood - it's a joke.
Sim City was a step down in every way, from its limited areas to forced internet connectiom it killed Maxis
Good god yeah. That was in 2013. Has there been another game under that name since? Anyway there has been more time since that shit than there was between Sim City 4 and it.
No, they have not attempted to revive SimCity after that suicide. I remember it in real time. What a clusterfuck was that game.
The other thing was you could tell there wasn't as much effort put into that Simcity, even the soundtrack as it was ok but this one track got me to have no regrets buying Simcity 4
The jazz, or whatever, is excellent. If you want equally as good music look for the Sim City 3000 soundtrack. The files are playable from the game directory but you might want to convert them from ADPCM into something more convenient
The Force Awakens. It actually killed all franchises. I haven't seen a movie since that disaster.
Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. They had something going with New Order and Old Blood, but then 2016 happened. Their marketing team decided to use current political commentary i.e. Punch a Nazi to ADVERTISE their fucking game, they made complete caricatures of the cast instead of actual compelling characters, and the gameplay itself was poorly thought out.
People may say Youngblood killed the franchise, but IMO it was just the final nail in the coffin.
New Order was ridiculous bullshit to begin with. The anti-White hatred was pretty blatant in that one
Was New Order the first reboot? I played it and found the gameplay good, but there was one part in particular that was hilariously stupid. As you may recall, the premise is that the Nazis won by using incredibly advanced technology, but of course, in current year, no sort of intelligence or competence can be ascribed to them.
Thus, about halfway through the game, it’s revealed that actually, all this technology was stolen from a Jewish secret society that then spent the rest of the war dithering about whether to level the playing field by giving any of this tech to the Allies, until it was too late.
See? We totally owned the Nazi chuds! The Jews were smarter than them this whole time. Please don’t think about what this story would imply about the Jews and their secret global society dedicated to hoarding their utopian technology.
That's the one.
I don't even care about the Jewish angle. It still has really blatant diversity casting. Your primary NPC/allies are:
There's a scene where a masked black guy called 'J' (obviously a stand in for Jimi Hendrix) sacrifices himself so the main character can get away. It is pure and utter cringe, black savior bullshit dialed to 11.
The game is also glorifying anti-White violence & hatred in it that should be off-putting for any normal person.
For example (IIRC) the game has a B-plot villain Frau Engel, who is a stereotypical German mad-scientist with blonde hair, blue eyes, and (ironically given PC messaging) is a sexual degenerate.
There's a sequence in the game where the protagonist basically rips half the woman's face off in a series of quicktime-events, just so the game can purposefully show the face of a German woman being progressively destroyed & mutilated by the main character. It's grotesque and uncalled for, the type of thing that would be completely off-limits to do for any ethnic group except Whites.
It's a Nazi game, and it's core conceit is basically cartoonish super soldier guy doing super soldier things to stop the Nazis. Fine. I'm not expecting a nuanced or informed political take in a shooter game about shooting guys. There's tasteful ways to do that, and there's just sick glorification of violence for the sake of it. The game leans hard into the latter and you can see that with how the 2nd and 3rd game played out. Same trajectory, just a few years on.
Mass Effect Andromeda killed off Mass Effect though it was ropey after 3s ending.
Homeworld 3 will probably, hopefully kill off Homeworld for long enough that the woke mob grow up or die off.
Last Jedi. I was annoyed that Disney got rid of the EU but was still willing to give Disney a chance. After last Jedi I didn’t care as much about Star Wars and now I tell people I’m strictly a pre Disney Star Wars fans. For Marvel comics I’d say All new all different since that is what they base their garbage on
Hopefully the failure of Starfield was enough to shake Bethesda up and realize they need to course-correct. I haven't done much analysis of why Starfield did not live up to even modest expectations (for a game that was supposed to be the company's original IP magnum opus) but a major factor seemed to be how the game was essentially made by several divisions that did not collaborate with each other and the final product crudely stitched together.
I don't have much faith, never pre-order, etc. but it would be nice if one of these goddamn AAA Western game companies would wake the fuck up before they burn everything they have to the ground.
I don't think Bethesda has the talent left to course-correct anymore. They were always behind the curve when it came to tech and talent as it is, getting by entirely by the wide scope and ambition of their games (kind of like a lot of Eurojank developers). But even they've shown significant brain drain. Starfield was the company's first real title to come out in eight years, Fallout 4 being their last one, and its state was absolutely abysmal. I don't see them digging their way out of this hole.
Expectations were the problem for Starfield. I went in without any, and I liked it.
To be honest, Bethesda is a wild card to me. The amount of back peddling they did after the show probably means they are aware they can't fuck with the NV lore but there's been lots of times their incompetence has screwed up lore like Fallout 4 and Jet.
The thing that might just kill them anyway is if they can't get better writing team, they need writers like out of NV that KNOW what they are doing then they need to just have a better method for their creation club as if it was just customisation, that might be fine but there's fucking paid quests in there!
They still made money off the whales from that game smh...
sure there was money to be made, but that single moment marked the beginning of Blizzard's rapid decline.
Make a good point as picturing the timeline is my head as that was the start of Overwatch's decline too shortly after that.
Metal Gear Solid V. Not only did the series creator leave because of it but the game released completely unfinished and will remain that way forever. It's not only missing the ending and final chapter to the game but has loads of characters, gameplay systems and plot points that were just dropped because of whatever the fuck was going on between Kojima and Konami behind the scenes.
To be fair MGS3 is being remade but I don't see it doing that well when the FF7 remake bombed and it's been out of the popular zeitgeist for so long.
So they can cover up Eva’s tits and drown out the old one so you forget them entirely?
We should start a campaign called “hands off our tits” 😆
Because like Final Fantasy 7 it is one of the most well known and popular parts of the franchise. There's still nostalgia to tap in there.
Metal Gear 1 and 2 on the other hand are close to 40 years old. You'd have to completely build those games from scratch because there's no 3d reference material at all for those games. Compared to the rest of the franchise they're also the most straight laced and you would really need someone with Kojima's touch to being them in line with the other games. They would of been perfect during the PS1/PSP era like the many similar remakes of the time (Final Fantasy, Persona) but the window for them is probably past sadly.
MGS2 has an HD texture pack with upscaled models and textures so they look better running at higher resolutions on an emulator. Comparison video
Better than a remake because no PMs trying to make a name for themselves by making the game "better" were involved.
The fast and furious films were always complete trash, but still a guilty pleasure of mine (especially the first few).
But when I saw the Rock break the cast on his arm by flexing, I was like, “okay fuck this shit now, it’s time to grow up” 😆
That was the last one I watched.
I will always love 5. It’s a genuinely good film.
I slowly gave up after that.
Which one did that happen in, lol?
Must have been after I similarly quit…
I stopped watching Survivor and Amazing Race and most other reality shows when it became obvious that White Males were winning too often so they started playing with the formats so that the female strengths came tio the fore - which is why they spend so much bullshit time now on the politics of the evictions rather than actually making it about the skill of winning challenges. So it's all just Mean Girls now and cliques and shit instead of actual skills.
Mass Effect 3 Ending killed the whole franchise.
Trying to resurrect it with Andromeda was like trying to bring a decayed body back to life by painting tits on it.
TLOU2
Reminds me, Saints Row 4 probably killed Saints Row series, and Saints Row (dumb name for a game in a series) finished it off.
Oddly enough at the other end of the Arkham franchise I thought that decent video games had died.
So there I was having beaten up Bane quite brutally multiple times and the eternal henchmen mob that keeps on coming in while I'm doing so when I finally see that I need to hit a particular button to pull his mask tubes off.
I'd just about got over the whole notifications for discovering things and seeing when a friend came onto Steam and what they were playing but now I'd got a walkthru telling me what to do to progress in the game.
Well that just threw any immersion I had in the game out the window. I would still have been annoyed that I had to figure out a finishing move technique but I would have learned that's what you do at a particular part of a battle and been up for it for future battles. Having an instruction given, along with all the other notifications, just made the whole situation feel artificial.
I still enjoyed the game afterwards but that was when I knew that games weren't what they used to be.
Halo 4 did that, twice. It started with "press f to win" when you pull some random monster down a lift shaft you're climbing in a derelict spaceship, and then ended with "press f to win" by slapping a blue plasma grenade on the big bad after however long you properly fought him.
Yeah I don't know if that was the inflection point but the casual shit definitely started getting worse. The backlash over all the handholding in the recent God of War might have gotten devs to take note though. It was literally "Press F to win".
The last season of game of thrones.
Elaboration not required.
not woke politics related, but To Aru Majutsu no Index 3 killed off any possibility for New Testament and Genesis Testament adaptations, simply because J.C.Staff did such a horrendous job and skipped so many lore-important parts that, by episode 5, anime-onlies had no idea what the fuck is going on and who most of the characters are
real shame, the novels are some of the best sci-fi out there
Horizon Forbidden West I think. It wasn’t an awful game, but it is so bland and derivative with a batshit stupid story that even Sony fanboys are tired of the Horizon series already.
Every sequel that has come out of late by a Sony studio has been derivative and worst of all very woke with a terrible story and awful characters, and I fully expect that the praise these boring fucking games get from soy-infused games media outlets will not translate into success in the future if Sony continues down this path.
Digimon Survive managed to likely burn off most of the steam the franchise had built from Cyber Sluts (especially its PC release). Which further kills any chance of us getting a followup to Digimon World 2 once again.
Its one thing to delay a game by like two years. Its another to market it heavily on the strategy game portions, only for it to release and be almost entirely a VN where the strategy game portions feel painfully tacked on just to pretend it isn't a VN. Doesn't even matter if the story was very good when VNs are a very special type of genre that even fans of it need a proper mood to play.
Also in a more roundabout way Midnight Suns managed to kill XCOM in a real tragic way.
Its one of the best deckbuilder/card battler games out there, mostly by virtue of not being a fucking roguelike, but came out way too late in the Marvel popularity to gain any traction and put Niko, the most insufferable and ugly thing I've ever seen, as one of the first characters you get. And it managed to combine that card battler system well with the strategic portions left over from XCOM where positioning becomes incredibly important and a properly built team can just dance around enemies that should dab on them. Heck the fact that they managed to make every Hero's deck be built around their characterization is wild.
And since its Firaxis its so easily moddable you can just remove or trivialize the parts you don't like, for those who hate the socialization aspect or some of the costumes.
But it failed hard enough that Jake Solomon was forced to resign, as was the CEO who was replaced by a woman, which kills nu-Firaxis pretty dead and leaves the Terror From the Deep hook from XCOM2 likely never resolved.
I don't know for sure, but isn't it already skipped over in the timeline for XCOM given that police squad game was released after?
Chimera was dropped with minimal fanfare for 10$ on release. It felt more like a wacky spinoff game made with spare time instead of something proper. I think they even said it was non-canonical at the time.
Considering how poorly balanced it is and how many new ideas it just haphazardly through into the game, it very much comes across as a testing ground type game for "hero units" and "RPG progression" that other games in its genre use (like Fire Emblem) being mixed with XCOM.
Wait, Midnight Suns was a deckbuilder? I never paid much attention to it, I thought it was just an XCOM-like.
You can feel XCOM influence in the combat, but yeah its fully a deckbuilder. No cover, no miss RNG, power dyanmics flipped so that you are the absurdly powerful one being taken down by half a dozen humans.
But it still suffers the the problem XCOM2 does, in that Jake Solomon fucking hates patience. So every fight is built to punish you for not going full speed at all times, which means the defensive characters and the one "random effect" one is completely useless because you don't get the chance to set up or deal with inconsistency. Overwatch move from XCOM1 truly mindbroke the man.
Though for what its worth, it being a deckbuilder but not a roguelike is very different feel that what the word usually evokes. Being able to just pick your cards as permanent skills you build around is very different than Slay the Spire type. Its actually the 8 card limit that effects you more than the cards you have.
That actually sounds really interesting. Not interesting enough for me to want to buy a Marvel product in Current Year (+/- however you want), but interesting.
I only even considered it because the "all DLC legendary edition" is constantly on sale for like 17$ after only a year, likely because the flop was that bad. And I got like 60 hours after a single run off that price so it ended up being a great deal.
And as someone who doesn't really like Marvel outside Spiderman and a few niche storylines, its less MCU centric than expected and actually treats most of the characters with the respect the comics haven't in decades. Even the annoying ones you can just shit talk to your heart's content about how stupid they are, a benefit to its social system.
Company of Heroes 3 has stuck a knife in that franchise. Granted, it’s hard to follow the footsteps of 1&2, but the slow follow out of patches, content, and the immediate availability of a store killed momentum. And that’s not even touching the crap that was gameplay.
Payday 3 suffering the same fate.
Kill the Justice League, simply because it's a microtransaction infested piece of woke garbage that has had it's writing suffer directly as a direct result of the game being heavily influenced by a terrorist ideology obsessed with deconstructionism and postmodernism.
Other examples include
Apolitical examples:
Terminator: Genisys (although I didn’t like Salvation much either) for that franchise. Limped along with “Dark Fate”, but it was already dead at that point…
Transformers: Age of Extinction, though again, you could argue that it had already tanked by Rebenge of the Fallen.
And, more controversially perhaps, War for the Planet of Apes. I’ve seen the original Heston movie and the Tim Burton one. I though Rise and Dawn were conceptually interesting, but then it just became “Hooomans [almost] inherently bad”, and, imho, became fairly unwatchable…
Also Star Trek Beyond killed the reboot film franchise, but people seem to have largely forgotten about that, for some reason. It was… Meh.
Mass Effect 3, though not quite for the reason most people would say. Yes, yes, the ending sucked and ruined the rest of the trilogy, but it was inevitable that it was going to kill the franchise dead no matter how good or bad it was. Mass Effect was conceived from the beginning to be an epic told across three games where choices made in one would have rippling effects in the others, and the end would always result in a shattered status quo that would affect all civilization across the entire galaxy. Even in the most ideal situation where the project lived up to the hype and ambition (which it didn't even come close to doing), making a sequel to that would be impossible.
Honestly, I always thought the premise behind Mass Effect was flawed from the beginning. Bioware approached the project like they were making an epic film trilogy, when they should have looked at it as an RPG sandbox. Right from the onset, the ME universe had a massive amount of worldbuilding, history, unsolved mysteries, politics rife with intrigue, and plot hooks that could have been used to tell thousands of stories. Instead, they used all that to tell one big one that would change the world state tremendously in so many ways that a continuation wouldn't really be possible. Not without fracturing the fanbase anyway. Though the fact that all the endings were so godawful was the nugget on top of the shit sundae.
That being said, Andromeda definitely drove at least a few nails into the ME coffin. It was obviously meant to be a soft reboot of the franchise, providing a reason to take all the existing alien races and put them in a far-off galaxy away from the original trilogy's nonsense, but its poor reception put the kibosh on that plan. So I guess it would still count.
Funnily enough, it may have also had a hand in killing both Anthem and Dragon Age as well. Or perhaps Anthem killed Mass Effect and Dragon Age. It's hard to say. Anthem siphoned resources off development for DA4 and Andromeda, but Andromeda was such a colossal failure that it put even more pressure an Anthem to reach success numbers it could never achieve. Regardless, Dragon Age is screwed thanks to both fuck-ups.
It seems pretty evident to me the plan is to destroy franchises.
Too bad they couldn't rationalise in their heads we can STILL play/view the old stuff and we'll discount any of the new shit they make. People are STILL watching old 90s sitcoms more than current stuff and people STILL play Skyrim.
There so much physical media left behind that this plan was doomed to fail not to mention people just going elsewhere to Asia instead for entertainment.
Sure, for now. But look at what Blizzard and Disney are doing by either phasing out or replacing classic media with "modern" versions, like they did with Diablo, Warcraft, Splash, etc.
Most people consume old media through new technologies, and that is the whole point. Once those technologies become thoroughly saturated on the market (and they mostly are at this point) they will begin phasing out old devices to play old media, and soon you will only be able to access old media on new devices. And from there, they will keep doing what Blizzard/Disney/Universal are doing insofar of rewriting history, overhauling the old content, or updating old media for "modern audiences".
The thing is, they're not failing, though. Sure plenty of normies will claim they "hate woke stuff", but universally, most normies have accepted interracial relationships in most media, and most romantic media these days puts interracial relationships front and centre.
Feminism is front and centre with every single female character; you cannot get damsels in distress anymore in media and the average normie is completely fine with this. In fact, ask a normie how they feel about damsel in distress tropes in movies and most will tell you that they need to go away. Why? Because they've been brainwashed to think that over the last several decades.
Most normies are okay with faggotry so long as their favourite character or ship who isn't a homosexual doesn't get turned into one. Most normies are completely fine with race-swaps so long as the "story is good".
On this forum we recoil at such things, but in normie land I'm regularly experiencing the demoralisation of reality when you enter into their spaces and listen to them talk or discuss things and how accepting they are of a lot of the woke elements pushed into media. It's only when it goes too far do they actually recoil (like Star Wars or Dr. Who), and it usually requires subverting a property or media to such a vile extent that it gets them emotional, otherwise they shrug it off.
This... this is the only saving grace about all of this nonsense. Most media out of Eastern Europe and Asia are fantastic and traditional and original. Sure there is schlop here and there, but for the most part it really sheds a light on how bad Western media is coming out of the U.K., and the Americas. I wouldn't be surprised if region locking becomes a thing again if they really feel that non-subversive media is a threat to their plans, but right now they're slowly etching away at the populace with woke propaganda.
When you look at stuff like Prey, Cyberpunk, Baldur's Gate 3, or what they've done to Peach in Mario, you see how accepting normies are of woke media that is at least somewhat entertaining/engaging. They will keep using this method to further their agenda, and sadly, most people will go along with it.
Most young impressionable people just consume the latest releases and get their friends to do the same.
the only way out is to create our own media. and i don't mean Kyle Rittenhouse and Jesus Kill the SJWs: White Ops Deluxe Edition
Haha, I do have Acquitted.