How much change is the right amount of change?

A fellow Blaugustan Steve from Frostilyte Writes published a great piece about Slay the Spire 2 this week. In it, he wished that the developers would have made more changes and especially points out how dull and repetitive the early game — especially Act 1 — can get in a game where you always start with the same deck of cards before you get to build your own build.

Overall, his criticism of the sequel is very good.

What stood out for me was this quote:

As you might’ve surmised, I’m fairly lukewarm overall on the sequel. A big part of that stems from how Slay the Spire 2 doesn’t do much to actually move the needle forward. The new artwork is nice, as is the rebalancing of a subset of cards from the first game. However, it’s hard to shake the feeling that I’ve already played this game before given how much it has in common with its predecessor.

We had a bit of a back and forth discussion about it because for me, that was the best part of Slay the Spire 2. I opened the discussion in our Discord chat with:

For me, that was the biggest relieve when I bought the game. I was worried they'd change the game I really enjoyed too much for the sake of changing things and so far I've been really happy with the new stuff that breath new life into the well proven basic gameplay loop.

This lead to a great discussion about different expectations for sequels and what makes a sequel worthy of full price game rather than updates or DLC to the original.

After our discussion, the thought stayed with me and simmered in my mind for a few days.

For a while now, I’ve been planning to write about the difficulty of sequels or 2nd seasons for movies and TV shows. There are two shows that have recently pushed me towards disappointment with their strong first season and meh second season: first one is Absentia and second one is The Night Agent.

Both of them had strong opening seasons. They had a good gimmick that separated them from other run-of-the-mill agent/alphabet agency stories and that kept me immersed to the stories. Their appeal was in the strong storyline and less so about specifically interesting characters or world building. So when the second seasons rolled out, they lost their charm. They became regular stories that unfortunately didn’t carry it for me to enjoy.

It happens way too often: someone writes a great story, it gets popular and then someone decides they need to make a continuation. Not for the purposes of telling more great stories but to make money on something popular.

When it comes to video games, I think there is a fine line between a cheap cash grab and not breaking a working, proven model. And it’s very subjective too. I can’t always tell why I like minimal changes for one game but am disappointed by it for another one.

With Slay the Spire 2 (by the way, I have written about it more in my digital garden, spoiler alert), I was worried the game would change too much. I really really liked the first one and was genuinely hesitant to buy the sequel when it hit Early Access because I worried they’d change things I loved about it. (Spoilers: they didn’t).

So far, after ~20 hours of play time under my belt, I’m really satisfied with the balance of good old stuff and new fresh additions and tweaks. Could the new stuff have been a DLC instead of a full game? Probably. Especially the parts that I care about. But I’m still happy to pay full price and don’t feel like I’ve been duped.

A related point is controller schemes in games. So much of video gaming for me is muscle memory — especially when playing with a controller — that when games change how controls work, it irritates me so much. I recently replayed The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part 2 and even really small changes to controls took me roughly 80% of the game to adjust to and I died a bunch of times because in a heated moment where quick reactions needed to happen, I pressed the wrong button.

Even if the new way of controlling is objectively better and fixes some issues with the old one, I would rather have the memorised old system than having to learn a new one because that stuff is hard.

Otherwise Last of Us Part 2 is a brilliant example of a good balance between new things while sticking to a good working base. The gameplay is very familiar to anyone who has played the first one and most elements are there as-is from the original. Yet, through masterful storytelling, the game feels like a completely different experience.