Lost Planet
Okay, so the second game failed to catch on. Even as someone who considered it to be the best game released in 2010, it's very easy to see a number of places where the game fell down:
- Maybe it was because the story was incoherent as fuck, didn't have a single named character (not even a handler for the player group, or even an actual villain), etc.
- Maybe it's because was just too demanding on players who wanted to play solo, or players who only like extremely simple goals in co-op, and maybe it was because the old-school arcade 'your team has x credits, if you run out then you have to start the chapter all over again' lives/continue system isn't something that resonates with many players anymore.
- Maybe it's because the terrible attempt at handling multiplayer with a matchmaking system instead of the more robust game selection system of the first game killed off both the variety and the general playerbase of the game's multiplayer.
- Maybe it's just because first/third-person shooter players aren't accustomed to having to learn animations and invincibility frames and stuff the way that action game players are, and they should have done a better job at explaining active detonations, anchor canceling, and things like that.
But the core gameplay was absolutely there; when someone comes to terms with the action game mechanics and gets comfortable using them, it gives Vanquish a run for its money in the stylish shooter department. The game had about as many bosses as Monster Hunter Tri, and then it had levels and crazy setpieces on top of it. Halo wishes it had as much variety and opportunity for sandbox creativity as Lost Planet 2; there's so much raw stuff in the game that there are probably a good half dozen instances where detailed, fully fleshed out weapons or equipment are only found in the campaign once in some hidden cave off to the side that you're not likely to catch until your third playthrough, and there are even some things that are not only never in the campaign, but are only on one variation of one map in the multiplayer.
Basically, to make a proper Lost Planet 3 that was popular wouldn't really take all that much effort:
Give the game's story some actual characters again; they don't need to be good, but they need to have, you know, names.
Use the changes that were patched into the game for solo play on Easy/Normal, and go a little further and reduce enemy counts in the bigger fights so that the less skilled players aren't just totally overwhelmed. I'd be really loathe to see it go, but get rid of complex co-op objectives; people like co-op in Halo, Gears, and Left 4 Dead, and don't really like it in Lost Planet 2 and Resident Evil 5. Run Easy and Normal co-op modes on a standard Halo model, where you can respawn infinitely from the last data post, make Hard mode co-op the same as LP2 is now that it's been patched, and use the original hardcore model for Extreme.
Go back to the first game's model for multiplayer, where you could put up a Ranked match with whatever settings you wanted, and people would just either join or not join your game, and you could choose whether to start it with two people or sixteen.
And finally, put in some simple, nonobtrusive tutorial stuff near the beginning of the game that explains and gives the player a chance to practice dodging, active detonations, machine gun interruptions, underhand grenade throws, and other basic things like that. And somewhere in the game, have an actual effective tutorial for more advanced mechanics like anchor canceling and using invincibility frames to dodge.
The best part of it would be that since there was such a ridiculous amount of content in Lost Planet 2 that almost never got used, there wouldn't really need to be much new stuff at all in terms of weapons, equipment, enemies, etc; there would just need to be new levels to put them in.
I mean, or, you could just hand the game off to a D-grade studio like Spark Unlimited, have them make a close-in-over-the-shoulder cover-based QTE-filled Dead Space clone, take away all the mechanics that made Lost Planet worth playing in the first place, reduce the mechanically robust, interesting, and nuanced set of VSs that could be worked into the course of regular gameplay as an optional tool in the player's kit, with a single giant robot used for boss fights and scripted sequences, whose primary attack seems to be a first-person melee drill smash.
And then to rub salt in the wound you could make another sequel, only this time it's a singleplayer-only affair on the 3DS that uses some of the old robot designs but is otherwise a ~wacky snow pirate anime military high school hijinx~ game.
(Devil May Cry fans don't know how good they've got it.)
