Or to be more accurate, where does all the salt come from?

I first noticed it with the Dark Souls games. Some fans are so hipster that only Demon's Souls can be good, and every Dark Souls sequel comes with a conga line of fans that claim to hate them yet play them anyway.

Then I noticed in Path of Exile, there were players that seem to think the game was perfect in 2013 and whine about literally every single update.

And then I started dabbling in Warframe, and the same story there. There is a vocal minority of players that whine about how much worse and worse it is getting, with one even saying that it isn't worth playing at all anymore. Well, I only started playing this month, and it's scratching an itch that no other game does for me.

What I'm getting at is that every game which is ongoing over a long term, be it by sequels or continued updates, seems to have a portion of the fanbase that thinks it has become awful, fans that hate it but play it anyway.

Any thoughts on my ramble?

Reminds me of a certain site...

It's pretty common, but it pays to keep in mind that people are far more likely to post complaints and gripes than if they're happy. So it tends to look like there are a large number of people that hate any changes, but the reality is far more likely that the majority are just fine with it.

Not all, The witcher series jumps right int my mind ;)

I've always said: "No one hates a Final Fantasy game quite like a Final Fantasy fan."

There's nothing unusual about this, fans care about a franchise, so of course they'll be more upset by negative changes.


I never cared about Sim City, so the last one just looked like it was run of the mill boring to me, but to a fan it was a stripped down shadow of the old ones.

I love the Devil May Cry series, so the reboot DMC: Devil May Cry felt like it did not understand at all the mechanics that make the combat engaging, or the tone that has endeared it to many fans, and now as a result of mainstream audiences not being interested in it, and fans not buying a game that clearly wasn't made for them, we might never get another game in this beloved series of mine. This really upsets me.

I also think 2 is less wacky.
Gameplay-wise 3 is definitely better though, probably the best 3D GTA-like game out there at the moment.

Well, there will always be different opinons on every subject. So there will always be people who prefer a game/series of games the way they were at some point in the past. It doesn't need be about being "hipster", whatever that really means. Sometimes it can be just some people trolling, or wanting to whine, but sometimes it's just people having a taste different than the majority. You'll never get people agreeing 100% on even a single game or movie or whatever, let alone a series.

Most of all, the issue is change. I think Spoony put it best. It's just that for different people that "betreyal threshold" is different. Some will stick with a series for decades, some will feel betrayed by the first installment that changes anything. I have not played the third one, so I can't say, but I liked the first game much more than the second :P

Whether it's video games or movies, sequels usual aren't as good as the original.

I don't know what you mean in this context, but long term games sounds like "in dev" games and unfinished games, where you pay full price first for a buggy game and then and pay for the DLC for them to fix and add contents.

Only when they are. I can think of at least a few.

I explained; I meant games that get frequent sequels or free to play games that get frequent updates.

Well peoples should expect to be disappointed nowadays with that kind of stuff anyway, I mean with COD and FF games lately.

I agree that there are some sequels that lived up to, or were even better than, the original. But in general I stand by my statement.

Sequels are tricky. People demand them because they loved the original, but they loved the original because it was new and original. Good luck trying to make the sequel equally fresh. If you stick to the same formula, the game gets critized for it, if you stray too far from it, the fanbase cries outrage.

As for games with frequent updates, I can relate to that in a certain regard. If I come to like a game and then its rules are constantly changed until it isn't the same anymore, I'd hate that, too. That's why I don't play these games at all or only when they're finished. Maybe these people wouldn't have invested that much time if they had known beforehand how the game would turn out to be in the end (that is, not the kind of game they like), so they feel betrayed or disappointed. Or maybe they just got accustomed to how the game started and if they hadn't, they would have accepted the game as it now as well.

Best way too avoid all these scenarios: Create completely new IPs instead of cashing in on sequels, and only release your games when they're done. ;)