Spin-Offs

*Trailer Voice Guy*
Previously, on Randomly Mine!

I talked about gaming's currently common cynical cash-grab character crossovers. Fortnite becoming a fight to the death on an island between Master Chief, Jill Valentine, Chun Li, John Wick, Miles Morales, and a million other iconic characters, isn't nearly as cool as it should be when most exciting thing its currently doing with them…

Is an NES style single text-box.

I mentioned there's "multiple topics to go from here" and this here is the one I've wanted to talk about for years; Miles is actually a good place to start, Spiderman is probably the most famous version of this idea.

Spin-Offs.

We've now got a trilogy of movies about the universe of different Spidermen that've been made over the years. Peni Parker & SP, Spiderman 2099, Spiderpunk, Spidergirl, Spiderman Noir, and most obviously, Spider Gwen and Miles, is just scratching the surface. 

It's kinda funny actually that when it comes to comics, they're operating on both extremes of how canon is handled.

On one end, is what's since translated to films, the connected universe.

I hate this shit.

I hate every character having to serve one plotline, I hate having to read so much 90% unrelated heaps just to hear the 10% that's relevant to the "larger" narrative, I hate the ubiquity of style across characters, and I hate how it always has to end in with fucking sun exploding.

On the other end, is what's maybe starting to translate to films, the spin-off.

I love this shit.

I love each character only serving their own plotline, I love only having to read a set run, I love the unique style across franchises, and I love that it has the potential to end where it should.

Doesn't always happen, but hey, that's better than the sure thing of copy/pasting DC's Infinite Crisis for the sake of raising the stakes consistently.

The main thing I appreciate is unlike connected universes that add copious amounts of complexity to the narrative without necessarily making it any deeper or more interesting, spin-offs can be as simple, in-depth, fascinating, funny, serious, or goofy as they want, because it always starts with a simple concept.

In the case of all the Spiderman spin-offs, it usually just comes down to what if the Spider bit someone else? One of the most famous spin-offs for Superman, Red Son, is just Superman's origin story, but he lands in Soviet Russia rather than Kansas.

Obviously, this story is no longer just Superman's origin story.

Now, how does this relate to video games?

Well, all these crossovers got me to thinking that we don't see comic style spin-offs in video-games very often. Fighting games and now Battle Royales are the biggest exception, but even then, it mostly just amounts to cameos.

The only thing Street Fighter about playing as Chun Li in Fortnite, is Chun Li's presence. 

Fighting games can go a little bit further, Geralt in Soul Calibur 6 has Kaer Morhen as a backdrop, and one of the iconic songs from the game's score, but at the end of the day, it's still just Soul Caliber.

This isn't bad, it's just… kinda bland.

It doesn't hold the excitement or potential of the Soul Calibur developers making a Witcher Fighting game, utilizing all of the franchises' locations, characters, powers, weapons, and motifs that'd create the perfect cocktail spin-offs have of originality and familiarity.

However, just that example I think highlights why this isn't done very often.

I'd never call writing a spin-off easy, but a comic writer doesn't need to create a gameplay loop that's in-keeping with the franchises' spirit while also original enough to stand out from the competition and be polished up to the quality of games with 20+ years of iteration and probably 10x your budget that may not be supported by your existing playerbase whatsoever because they're ultimately there for a gameplay loop you are now not carrying over in your spin-off or with a new character they may not care about as much or don't agree with the gameplay loop an existing beloved character is being put into…

Yeah.

At the end of the day, regardless of what franchise you're writing for, in a spin-off, you've got a story to tell.

A spin-off video-game has to do much more than that.

However, in the age of more accessible tools, shared assets, better optimized engines, easy engine licensing, players consuming a wider variety of game genres today, and publishers realizing the benefits of putting your brand out there in more than one game every four years, maybe there is hope to make crazy ideas like a Witcher Soul Calibur, or a Cyberpunk Need for Speed, John Wick Max Payne, ODST HL:Alyx, normal.

There's also more things to do with spin-offs in gaming because of gaming's complexity.

Instead of just "the spider bites Gwen", you can put entirely new gameplay with the same character, or put the exiting gameplay of the same character in a new setting, or change everything except the city they're in.

I'm sure if the 1960s had Twitter, that DC would've gotten tons of push back for initiating their wide range of spin-offs from longtime fans who wanted to keep their favorite franchise consistent, but after decades and decades of the opposite occurring, people got used to it.

Meanwhile for video-games, they'll attempt it once every couple of years like Agents of Mayhem, and after no acknowledgement of any of their own errors in marketing, management, or media coverage, play the reboot card, which, let's be honest, even when it works, "reboot" is just a spin-off with training wheels.

I think we can afford to take them off.