It's dead when the devs start pandering to normalfags, includes gacha shit, or when it's bought by EA

>>1281930 Hang on though. Ninja gaiden, both games, are being outsourced right now but tecmo is still making action games. They'll likely return when they have less on their plate as they've output a lot recently.

Fuck nintendo for what they did to mario golf. Have to add naruto fornite running across the course to get kids to buy our game!

>>1295045 RIP Camelot

>>1286210 That's valid if you think games are only their stories and nothing else.

>>1305169 Well, I don't really consider the Itsuno games to be similar enough to DMC1 either. They have surface level similarities, but it's very much an entirely other direction with how the combat has gone. The priority has become making things combo oriented, hitting enemies with a bunch of attacks and not letting them move. DMC1's combat isn't about combos you are way too strong to need to deal with hit stunning enemies, it's about full on aggression, taking out enemies fast and efficiently. The Styles give Dante a bunch of variety, but variety and efficiency do not go hand in hand. There is also the fact that in order to make the Styles viable to the gameplay they needed to heavily nerf Devil Trigger. Devil Trigger is THE Mechanic in DMC1, the whole game is about managing DT as a resource, and using it most effectively, you gain access a bunch of powerful moves that let you swiftly deal with most enemies. DT is never given the power it once had in DMC1 again. It's mostly just a damage multiplier, rather than something that fundamentally changes how to approach a fight. They needed to come up with Sin DT to give you back something that's comparable to DMC1 DT, but Sin DT is by itself considered overpowered in DMC5 so they had to come up with an entire other bar for you to manage, and have drawbacks to using SinDT unless you can maintain a SSS combo. If you can maintain SSS then you can abuse the hell out of Sin DT and the game is easy. Any competent DMC player should be able to do that, but the games bosses are not designed around fighting someone using so much Sin DT, they're designed with the assumption the average player won't be using SinDT nearly as much as a good player can. With Nero you can just Buster enemies whenever you feel like doing a huge chunk of damage, and Vergil is always overpowered. DMC1 you were very powerful, but this was balanced by having good enemies to fight. The bosses especially, and I by no means intend to say the later games don't have good bosses, but DMC1's all challenge how Knowledgeable you are about the game. Phantom rewards you for knowing about enemies weakness, Griffinon is a ranged battle, and tests you avoiding projectiles, Nelo Angelo tests you fighting an Opponent similar to yourself, Nightmare tests how well you can control the flow of battle, and Mundus is the final boss that has you contented with all sorts of things. Later DMC's don't have bosses that are able to specialize in how you fight them because there is so much customization to how the player can approach a fight. They need to be able to accommodate a player who both has zero abilities and all abilities, or playing as entirely different characters. DMC1 is so fine-tuned to that move set Dante has, it's just a better balanced game in all aspects. To me what makes DMC1, so good is that sometimes less is more, you have everything you need, and no extra fat in the movelist, there is a right time to use every Ability. The games are still good, but as they went on the Ballance became either going to be a new player is going to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of abilities, or a good player is going to break the game in half. The direction of DMC became giving the player more and more to be able to do, but not more to challenge them with. DMC3 more or less worked because you are intended to suit your loadout for the challenger going to take on, but DMC5 there isn't much to contend with the vast arsenal of abilities a player can have access to. The fight that's the best challenge in DMC5 is mission 08 Urizen, and that's only the case because you're not supposed to win that fight. It's easy to tell that DMC1 is directed by Kamiya, and the rest are Directed by Itsuno. Kamiya puts far more care into properly challenging the player in his games. DMC1 is a game that is designed around NG playthoughs it's far more like a trandtional beat-em-up, where the extra moves help a lot, but aren't actually necessary. When you are good enough you can start a DMD playthough from scratch and still stand a good chance. DMC5 doesn't even give you the option to start a fresh new game, or have multiple save files. It assumes you'll never want to play from a fresh NG. Later games cater toward NG+ far more, and I do understand that I can still play DMC3-5 in a NG kind of way, but that's just not what their design is encouraging from the player. DMC1 wants you to play on a fresh file for runs, the others don't.

>>1281930 When you know the devs have nothing else of interest to say, nor fun gameplay to provide. Sometimes you know on sight, others you have to get burned once or twice to know a company is done for. D:A ends with Origins, ME ends with ME1, BG ends with Throne of Bhaal, KCD ends with 1, TES ends with Morrowind, Dragons Dogma ends with Dark Arisen. Meanwhile, Miyazaki can shit stuff endlessly and, as long as you realize those games are just for the gameplay, since there is no story and lore is just noise put there for cow tools ponderers to keep themselves busy and provide free marketing, I wouldn't consider any of his series dead.

>>1281930 when sequels that are wildly different from the source material, aren't identified as spinoffs. the fandom is immediately split, the developer focus is divided, further sequels desperately try to pull both sides together satisfying nobody, it will never go back. some people think sequels should be innovative, but i disagree.

Most good online games are dead already

>>1321392 I don't know, I think multiplayer tactical shooters are really fun still.

When it fails to embody the spirit of the original games that brought you happiness. Either aesthetically, graphically, tonally or gameplay wise. Thats how you know its dead, especially when every new attempt is more inept and shallow than the last.

When it gains mainstream attention. If it's a game with comedic undertones, it'll become a wacky zany Rick & Morty type of shit because that's what casuals want. If it's a horror game that relies on atmosphere, it'll become a jumpscare fest becase that's what casuals want. If it's a game with very rich history and lore, it'll b riddled with plot twists and stray extremely far away from what the series was because that's what casuals want. If it's a somewhat challenging game, casuals will shit their pants and demand it to be simplified. As a result, the game will be easy enough for even dogs to finish and only becomes challenging after 10th NG+ or something. Games are at their best when they're niche and cater to a specific audience. The moment casuals get a hold on it, they die.

>>1321848 I think this is the best descriptor. A game doesn't even have to be bad to be dead, just lacking what made it interesting.

>>1321848 I approve of the copious amounts of Cocoposting

>>1281930 >Half-Life When Marc Laidlaw left. Shit was so over it made even the "leakers" and youtube "trust me bro, its coming out" e-celebs bend the knee. >TES series When Todd started pumping out special editions for the freshly shitted out Skyrim. People who were much wiser than me seen the series death when Todd chased away the og core members of the Beth team (during the Oblivion development). >Warcraft When Blizzard sacrificed everything for the slop what was and is WoW. Fuck all and every MMORPG and their nigger playerbase! >(nu)X-COM Firaxis bended the knee for the Marvel money. Funny, i remember a different franchise's fans warning everyone about the "marvel curse". >Civilization Civ devs proudly promote how Civ 5 will be more noob friendly. and hexes shit. Civ peaked with 4 and went beyond peak with mods like Ashes of Erebus. >Heroes Might and Magic HMM6 Uplay only was the first sign. HMM7 being pro-refugee was the last sign. >Metal Gear Solid After MGS4 Kojimbo's idiotism wasnt even subtle anymore, and people still sucked his dick. >The Sims Sims 4 killed a series which was enough addicting to milk women. (no pun intented) >Battlefield 2042 Do you niggers even know that a new one is under development? No? Lmao EA. >Medal of Honor I cant even start. This wasnt a quick or a nice death. EA dragged the whole series to the fucking ground before let it finally die. Now if i think about it... it would be much more harder (and shorter) to name all the series which ended with grace.

>>1336727 That's a good list but TES is a lot more complex than that and includes many more moving parts that covers Todd's autism, Starfield and Zenimax making fucktons of money from ESO. To answer OP though it can be really sudden Guild Wars ... ... Guild Wars 2 Dead (and it hurts me to this day)

>>1336727 >People who were much wiser than me seen the series death when Todd chased away the og core members of the Beth team (during the Oblivion development). Did you know Peterson didn't play Oblivion for over a decade? He hated the Cyrodill retcons that much. >Sims 4 killed a series which was enough addicting to milk women. (no pun intented) Sims 4 was the most successful of the entire series and that's a goddamn tragedy. Did you know it was built atop the corpse of a cancelled web MMO? That's why it's so lacking in features. I hate TS4 so fucking much oh my god, and it's been the only new entry for over a decade now. They turned The Sims into live service slop. At least the robots are cute and (literally) fuggable. Have a classic gif from /clang/.

>>1281930 >At what point do you acknowledge a game series to be "dead"? When the franchise rights are sold to a company that doesn't make video games, everyone working for the developer is fired, and the game never gets another update again.

For me Serious Sam died with BFE. After that the story goes always further back in time instead of progressing more with the story. Serious Sam 2 is kino tbh.

>>1404940 nah fuck you Serious sam 2 sucks; for one sheer reason enemy hp pools on Serious difficulty are utterly retarded. inb4 well that's what you get on that difficulty goy! No. The prior games even BFE did this difficulty fine, why'd they have to ramp up hitpoints enemies have? It makes some foes utterly tedious. Right off the hop in the first level with the vehicle section or whatever eventually it spawns a giant spider this thing legit takes 2-3 mins of straight up firing to kill while avoiding attacks, this is me not missing really if ever too then directly after you defeat that one it spawns three more on serious This just destroyed my interest to continue playing; Serious is fine in difficulty but if those giant spiders are anything to do by not accounting actual bosses too many enemies going forward depending have far too much hp. No thanks. The story sucks ass, as does the plot. And on top of it It doesn't finish the fucking series either

I have three red flags: 1.) Publisher and/or developer ignores what consumers want. See: World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, Fallout, Civilization. 2.) Developer enters the casualization death spiral. See: World of Warcraft, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Super Smash Bros. 3.) Publisher and/or developer doesn't actually understand what made their games good. See: World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy, The Elder Scrolls, too many fighting game IPs to list, Team Fortress 2, and an honorable mention for Starfield despite being a new IP. I realize I'm mostly listing the same 3-4 IPs over and over, but Blizzard and Bethesda are just exceptionally talented at raping the IPs they own to death.

Pretty much the removal of what made the series good such as level design, combat, good plot and more. This game pretty much marks the death spiral of its series for example.

>>1405093 These spiders are pretty much a boss fight, just without the healthbars. Special music and everything. They're quite rare onwards. From what I've figured out, the game doesn't do anything special with the pools, just a 25% bonus health to everyone on Serious. The pools themselves aren't that noticeable most of the time, but several encounters become much harder than they need to be due to you now missing damage breakpoints. The bulls and footballer orcs are the biggest offenders, they start surviving the usual treatment of 2 rockets/1 sniper shot and quickly take all available space.

>>1281930 >>1407217 What's painful is that this game was supposed to have more. But they had to rush for the release, by that it became a unfinished mess with plotholes and slogfests. And to make it infuriating is that Apocalypse/Final was supposed to be a extension, but instead they allowed a literal who to make a official fanfiction out of nepotism (said who worked on Maniax btw, which makes it worse). And I blame entirely on Atlus for giving ANY semblance and influence on Persona to any other titles. The old-guards left for a really long time, and the only people they have now were mostly Persona devs, which is why there's this disconnect where the newer games feels off in comparison. And I'm not talking about Kaneko (which even then he has his own can of worms), Majin Tensei is more SMT than SMT If, which is the genesis of Revelations: Persona, even then, these games before 3 had a connection, they were more "SMT" than anything V has to offer. Which is why they want to bury these games so hard to the general public. Because 3 and onward were popular at the time where Moe and other slice of life genres was at it's peak before they were slowly died out of oversaturation. They milked these games so much that they tried to inject it to other games thinking they would boost in sales. When in reality it only made it worse. Soul Hackers 2 sold around 70k, worse than Strange Journey's 150k.

BEST TIMELINE: The devs release the best and final game, concluding the story, and leave it be, returning only to patch it. The fanbase is concentrated in one game and they keep playing it forever, and no other company attempts to make a better game in the same market. Ragna exists outside of space and time and curses anyone who attempts to reboot the franchise. WORST TIMELINE: Eternal Christmas eve. The best thing ever is up next, it would only take a pittance to release it, and there's a large and dedicated fanbase waiting for it. HOWEVER. It never comes out. Decades pass, and the only thing that happens is an endless series of absolute fucking garbage spinoff games that clearly no one even wants to make, let alone play, while the creator shit talks his fans, telling them if only they eat up enough garbage they'll get what they want. Eventually they make a whole alternate sequel to fill the void and give themselves some freedom and it's actually really cool, until the final chapter which is going to be really cool and would take a pittance to release and everyone is waiting for it, HOWEVER, this never happens. And now they have two hostages. The company announces the future of the franchise comes down to whether they can make the sequels expensive enough to be worth releasing and outline their decade-spanning plan to bankrupt themselves. The kickstarter fails.

Rune Factory is one that might die twice depending on if Azama is a spinoff or not. It's a zombie either way, a series out of its era, with the worlds of earlier games being big enough to be an adventure, and 5 trying to do that but with modern techniques, causing it to be an open world game that failed to understand what adventure really is. If Azami is meant to be like a modern Tides of Destiny, then it could be argued to not be dead again, annoyingly. But if it isn't and this is the way going forward, then it wouldn't be incorrect to say that Rune Factory is a Frankenstein's series. Disturbed from its eternal rest in a time it shouldn't belong to, and it is stitched together with things that have worked that were tangentially relevant to when it lived.

When it ends on a cliffhanger and hasn't been heard of in almost 15 years.

>>1281930 1. When the developer shuts down and the IP is abandonware. 2. When the developer shuts down and the IP is sold to a company that doesn't make games. 3. When the developer delays the game more than twice, even if it comes out afterward. 4. When the game stops getting development updates or even hints that it's still being developed for more than two years.

>>1651346 The 2010s was the turning point where for whatever reason Atlus needed to make their non-Persona series more generic. SMT is already explained but you have stuff like them having the bright idea to include shitty story modes in Etrian Odyssey games and make ruin Radiant Historia entirely with the remake, all futile efforts to expand for a wider audience.

What is death? If we understood it from a certain view, nothing is truly dead if someone retains some fragment or memory of it. In so far as that one person can remember that game, then the game series can never be dead, as the possibility of creation, be it ever so small, is still non-zero because I, like others, can believe that a series isn't inherently tied to a set team or a set developer (Is DMC an Orphan or does it have twin heritage because Kamiya only did DMC1?) More controversially, I believe the inverse as well. (the team/developer isn't inherently tied to the IP) What do we make of "Spiritual Sequels?" Are those the souls of the games transferred into new shells to avoid IP Infringement? We have come far enough in games where IP and creator/ developer has been delineated enough to the point where series is both the IP as well as the developer working adjacent to the IP a la Kojimbo and MGS and his in-dev stealth game. Is Castlevania dead or is Bloodstained simply the reincarnated Castlevania? If the design philosophy is expanded or inherited, then what's to keep any series from being dead? So long as the 2D fighter exists, Street Fighter II is truly never dead. In a more abstract case, so long as shooting games exist, Space Invaders is never truly dead. Their genes of philosophy are spread and as such, they live in the immortal fabric of game design, and in some cases, genre.

>>1407217 SMT 4's plot was decent imo.

>>1652880 If you really want to be pedantic the original III Castlevania games + the MSX game and the aarcade game were done by a different guy that seems to have completely disappeared. So by the next console generation Castlevania had already died once and been reborn. And then it kind of died again and arose as Igavania. And also whatever the fuck they were doing on the N64. Then Igavania slowly ran out (much like how the Belmont bloodline ran out) and it kind of died again. And then came back as 3 GoW clones. And also whatever the fuck they were doing on the Wii weird art style; excellent soundtrack. Then it died again and it got put on a pole by Konami and had t shake its ass for the Yakuza in pachinko parlors. Then it fully reincarnated as a spiritual successor with Bloodstained while it's original corpse is being publicly defiled by an Indian faggot. The newest wrinkle is that it's once again being revived as a semi parody/semi genuine spiritual successor of the best Castlevania game Simon's Quest which will release some time hopefully before WWIII.

just imagine how much better video games would've been if there was a "1 game per franchise" rule. there would have been many more creative franchises instead of milking the shit out of 20+ year old IPs.

>>1653815 Not really. They would have just made Not [X], from the makers of [X] and we'd be in the exact same place.

>>1653842 that's still better than having the millionth RE, AC and GTA game forever. even Watch Dogs which is just Assassin's Creed Hacker Edition was a bit of fresh air from AC

>>1653085 It's mediocre at best just like Vengeance. If you compare it to Strange Journey (previous game) it is really apparent.