GenieKnows Games Narrowing the field

It seems as though game trilogies are popping up all over the place these days. Much like any gaming trend, developers are flocking to pump out trilogies in hopes of cashing in. Generally what this means for the gamer is the games they purchase contain less content and thinner plots so that the developers can build suspense and increase anticipation for their game's sequel. Two great examples of this are Crysis and Assassin’s Creed where I could only help but feel that content was deliberately left out.

MTV's Multiplayer blog has just interviewed Denis Dyack, president of Silicon Knights and developer of Too Human. Strangely enough during the interview, MTV questioned Silicon Knights' motivation for creating Too Human as a Trilogy (I mean who would think that MTV would toss any sort of hardball questions?), raising concerns if Too Human will follow similar patterns of recent trilogies. I found Dyack's response to be rather interesting:

I commend you for your skepticism, first of all. Secondly, I would strongly contest that “Star Wars” was ever meant to be a trilogy. So the only true trilogy in the movie industry that I’m aware of, to date, has been “Lord of the Rings.” It was meant to be a trilogy from beginning to end. And I’m very very leery of these games that are successful and are suddenly called a trilogy when they’re on the third one. Because that’s just marketing.

“Too Human,” from when we started to work on the game for the 360, has been a trilogy. For the first game, the theme is discovery; the second game, the theme is revenge; the third game is enlightenment. We know exactly what’s going to happen from beginning to end. It’s planned out in such a way that there is without question a reason for the three parts. If there would have been a reason for four parts, we wouldn’t call it a trilogy, we would call it a… canto, I guess.

I think there is always the problem you can run into, trying to not do as much. Production values are getting much much higher. So doing things in parallel makes a lot of sense. I not only love “Lord of the Rings;” I think what they did [by making the movies simultaneously] was a smart way of doing things. And certainly I think it’s a good model. To date, you really need confidence in the whole trilogy to do it. And that’s sort of where things stand today. It’s hard to get things off the ground. You have to have big buy-in. Hopefully people will see that with “Too Human.

Check out the full interview here: We Ask Denis Dyack If ‘Too Human’ Really Needs To Be A Trilogy