GTX 460 videocard.
.... so you have a GTX 460 GPU...
not a bad card.. but um... videocard? my couple of friends who are severe computer geeks would probably kill you for saying that lol.
no really they insist on calling it a graphical processing unit. not even saying GPU or anything. im glad i don't have tooo many friends like that.
also i just derailed a thread... nerd style...
anyways, thinking about it while playing skyrim a bit for fun, the game would in fact have some merit, if not for the cover saying "
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim.
I think that making a game part of a series near forces people to compare it to previous games, marring any hope of a 'simplification' in some parts of the game going over well.
this came to my mind when i considered that the only time a sequel ever gets positive praise from that nigh-cultist inner circle of long time players is when they add more complexity and content, without falling into the 'content spam' trend most companies do.
so therefore, few series get positive praise due to a majority of them adding next to nothing (CoD and such), simplifying(Skyrim, etc), or content spamming, (also CoD and others).
so while doing these things attracts new players to the series, they irritate a number of people who played earlier games.
ive only really ever seen a few successful series longer than 2-3 games who don't fall into one of the errors above. (several lesser known ones i know of that didn't).
but in general it seems like quite a difficult design block to push past, either fall into the faults, or give up on a well developed series if you cant create truly new ideas for it.
lets see... a few examples i can think of that kinda messed up.
the Assassins creed series following Ezio for three games, while the series is actually about Desmond. UbiSoft simply didn't want to drop such a well received character, so the 'main' storyline stalled.
the Call of Duty series while a decent game (the playerbase is why i hate it, not the game itself.), has fallen into 'content spam' quite badly by simply adding new maps and guns, but not refining very many core concepts every game.
Minecraft had some difficulty 'letting go' of concepts that were not working, though that's honestly more symptomatic of indie development in general, since the original project lead is often writing a game for themselves, I only have a serious problem with this when its a game that's paid for, not free.
so... yeah, just a few thoughts as to the causes of these flaws so often seen in series.