Five Reasons Game Trilogies Suck (PC)

Gamers often get treated to the line that a story is "too big" to be contained in a single game, and therefore needs an entire trilogy to handle it. We see it with games like Halo and the upcoming Mass Effect. More often than not, it all ends up being a load of crap. Here are five reasons why players should groan in despair whenever a story needs to be continued.

Trilogies are very expensive

At $50-60 per game, game trilogies can cost gamers up to $180! This doesn't even take into account console cycles, which means gamers might have to shell out the cash for brand-new systems to finish the story started on the old one. At least book and movie trilogies have lower prices, and don't necessarily require new entertainment systems to appreciate them.

They take forever

Unless the games are designed in short-term, episodic format, too much time passes between chapters. The original Halo released in 2001, which means about six years will have passed from the start of the trilogy to its end. Eight years passed between Half-Life 1 and 2. Waiting for new chapters to come out is like watching a strip tease in ultra slow motion. Players have to strain their memories or jump online to recall the events from previous games. To refresh people's memories, entire sequences need to be inserted to remind them of critical events from past, or worse... it all gets shoved into the manual no one reads. So, exactly why is there so much effort being put into the story if players can't appreciate it all at once?

You might not see the end

The extremely long development periods associated with trilogies lead to a huge number of problems. Trilogies can be cancelled at any time, which is why we'll probably never see the next chapter of Advent Rising (though, that could be a good thing). Shenmue was supposed to be a trilogy, but its second chapter suffered because the Dreamcast went belly up. It's currently slated to become a massively-multiplayer online (MMO) game, but who knows when that will happen? And since MMO's generally can't be "completed," fans STILL won't see a conclusion to the story.

The games look bad as a whole

The graphics, features and gameplay from Halo 2 made Halo look old and archaic. Halo 3, using the Xbox 360 hardware, will make previous chapters look like crap. Game trilogies lose all sense of consistency. Warthogs are invincible in Halo, yet blow up in Halo 2. Did someone switch to cheaper parts? Characters get inserted for no good reason. Did playing the Arbiter provide a better sense of Covenant dynamics? NO! Because he fought the same enemies the Master Chief did! The Brutes seemed to come out of nowhere, since they were never seen in Halo 1. More often than not, game trilogy stories usually end up being a convoluted mess than a cohesive, epic tale. What? We have to read the books, watch the animated series and listen to the internet broadcasts to find out what happened between parts 1 and part 2? What kind of crap is that?!

The ending might not be worth it

At least the last two movies from the Matrix Trilogy had the courtesy to disappoint fans within one year. If a video game trilogy ends on a sour note, gamers lose out on over $180 (not including the cost of a new console) and over six years of their lives. That's assuming the trilogy ever sees completion. When buying games, players should be treated to a whole package, not an advertisement for the next chapter.