Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel's more serious direction has been explained by developer Visceral Games.
"We're under Visceral's offices now, so that means injecting a bit more story and serious tone," he said producer James Nance.
"We're known for Dead Space, now we want to be known for this as well. It's about quality and bringing epic moments to bear.
"Part of that was having the franchise grow up a little bit. The old Army games had humour and we have humour too in a buddy cop sense, and we use the humour to alleviate tension, because the storyline gets serious at times."
He continued: "But we wanted to move away from the fist-bumping, frat boy-type hero we had before, because some people found it really funny and really charming, but it didn't resonate with everybody.
"We think that we're broadening our audience and our appeal by bringing it up a little bit."
Alongside death, taxes and terrible Adam Sandler movies, video game sequels are just another crushing inevitability of life. Sequels and franchises are the lifeblood of the industry, so you can bet any halfway successful game will be aiming towards at least five more follow-ups and spin-offs in pursuit of more delicious money.
Yet even major franchises tend to run themselves into the ground eventually, where they can either reboot themselves and come back stronger than ever (think the new Tomb Raider games) or stay buried in the past.
We all have game franchises we love so much that we don't care what others
think. Then there are games that the majority just agree shouldn't exist.
Sometimes it just takes one of these to kill our most beloved series.
It Takes One Game to Kill a Franchise
Street Fighter V and SoulCalibur V come to mind.
True, and it depends on what the devs learn from the experience whether or not the franchise can make a comeback. Or even make it's first "comeback". Like with Nier. Nobody cared about the first one, but it's hype all around for the sequel :p
Sometimes a game can kill a franchise even before it starts, if it doesn't perform as well as expected. The Order 1886 is an example of this.
I want to say socom with socom 4 as it was by far the worst but confrontation had its issues also. However compared to socom 4 confrontation was amazing. Still not socom 2 but it worked.
Only in gaming can you engage in multiple planet-clearing world wars or explosive shootouts where one man somehow takes on hundreds of opponents. There's stiff competition as to which game really has the highest body count, so to make it simpler here we're going to generally avoid anything that's too “big picture” in the death department. Check out the top games with the most ridiculous body counts now!
Thank you. That frat boy, fist bumping, air guitar, bro-mance bullsh*t bothered the hell outta me. Good riddance.
Can't wait for this. Ok so the other 2 may have been average but it was fun as hell doing split screen co op with a mate.
What?! No trolling your friend for 10 minutes straight by headbutting them over and over? X3
Wele just see about that!
Visceral are amazing developers. Expect platform parity on this one. I couldn't care less about the other Army of Two games, but now I'm excited knowing a good developer is working on this one.