Why sequels suffer and why they succeed

[Ryufushichou]

A personal belief of mine is that a good sequel is a game that builds on the original, that takes what worked from the original and improves it while looking at what was broken and either fix or scrapping it, Continuing a narrative in an interesting way, while maintaining at least some resemblance of the original, 2 recent releases that have done so are Torchlight 2 and Borderlands 2. I'm playing through both now and enjoying both quite a lot, they both have issues here and there but they also do exactly what i stated above, they fixed the issues and improved what was good. Borderlands 2 hits and misses with this (The split screen is almost impossible to play) but I'm still enjoying it. I think that when a company notices a franchise failing and attempt to completely switch it up so that the sequel doesn't resemble the original, that's not a sequel, that's an entire new game that you slapped familiar textures on in the hope that the name would sell it alone, or if they do nothing to improve on it, and just spew out the same game with a continued story. I think if a sequel is done well it can be an amazing experience, but if you try and change a game too drastically, people will get annoyed, its the familiarity factor that sells a sequel.