5 popular series of games, which it is time for the dustbin of history

1. Assassin's Creed

Since its inception in 2007, Assassin's Creed has been a stealth action series about stealthy assassins. Since the second part, new games in the franchise have been released every year, sometimes even two at a time.

Gradually, role-playing elements began to penetrate into the series: skill branches, health bars for opponents. And with the release of Odyssey in 2018, Assassin's Creed has turned into a full-fledged action RPG. In the dialogues, you can choose answer options, they affect the results of quests. The ending depends on the actions of the hero throughout the game. The character has levels, and pumping to the maximum takes more than a dozen hours.

The games of the franchise have not lost their quality: Origins and Odyssey are fascinating, you want to study and pass them. But this is no longer Assassin's Creed. There is no hidden blade, no confrontation between the Templars and assassins, nor, most importantly, the opportunity to study the enemy, so that you can then sneak up on him and kill him in one move.

It would be logical to end the franchise at Syndicate 2015, and name the next parts somehow differently, creating, for example, a series of spin-offs. But Ubisoft won't do it: the Assassin's Creed brand is too powerful to abandon. Especially considering the cost of developing games of this magnitude.

2. Metal Gear

The Metal Gear franchise was created by Hideo Kojima, one of the most famous game designers of our time. He is passionate about his games: he controls every aspect of development, creating an amazing synergy of gameplay, art direction and storyline.

For nearly 30 years, Kojima has worked on the series, building a Metal Gear universe with its own laws, history and characters. In 2015, Metal Gear Solid V was released - the last part of the series, to which the famous developer had a hand.

But the franchise didn't end there. Konami, which owns the rights to it, continues to create games with Metal Gear in the title. So, in 2018, she released Metal Gear Survive, a survival action game in which players need to collect resources on a huge map, and then defend themselves from hordes of zombies.

Survive has little in common with the works of Kojima: it looks a bit like Metal Gear Solid V, the action takes place in the same universe. But, unlike the previous installments, Survive is boring and forgettable. The gameplay in it seems to be artificially stretched, and there is no plot and clearly prescribed characters.

Survive received very low ratings from the press, but you can be sure that Konami will release more than one game in the popular series. It's a pity: she should have been left alone.

3. Need for Speed

Need for Speed was once one of the premier racing series in the world. Since 1997, new parts have been released almost every year. But after the hugely successful 2005 Most Wanted, the franchise's popularity began to decline along with the quality of the games.

Electronic Arts, the publisher of the franchise, tried to find a gold mine again through experimentation. So, ProStreet and Shift were about legal racing, and The Run is a linear action movie of Hollywood scale.

The company has also released remakes of the series' successful games (Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted) in the hopes that fans will return after seeing the familiar title. These games did not fail, but their results are incomparable to the success of the original Most Wanted.

In 2015, Need for Speed was released, designed to reboot the entire franchise. It had everything fans love: endless night, street racing and wide tuning possibilities. But she did not gain much popularity either.

Inspired by the Fast and Furious movies, 2017 Payback fared no better - the press rated Metacritic about 6 out of 10.

Maybe Electronic Arts just needs to drop the idea of a series revival. Let the talented studios under her wing create new franchises instead of continuing their futile attempts to rediscover the "soul" of Need for Speed.

4. Tomb Raider

The Tomb Raider series has been around for over 20 years. Over the years, Lara Croft has greatly increased the number of polygons, visited hundreds of tombs and was even able to fight the dark forces side by side with the immortal Mayan warrior.

The last restart of the franchise happened in 2013. From that point on, the games in the series turned into epic adventures - like Uncharted, only with a crafting and a female character at the center of the story.

The problem is that the new heroine is not perceived as Lara Croft. This is a completely different person who, by an absurd accident, got the same name. She has neither a sense of humor, nor infinite self-confidence, nor the charisma of the main character of the previous parts. From old Lara, only her occupation and problems with her father remained.

The new trilogy is connected with the first parts only formally. So, it makes sense to put the Tomb Raider series to rest and create a new franchise of action-adventure games with a woman in the lead role. The main thing is to come up with a memorable name for the heroine.

5. Grand Theft Auto

In 2001, Rockstar Games showed what action games can be in the open world. Grand Theft Auto III surprised the entire gaming community with its scale, sense of freedom and plot worthy of a crime thriller.

The next games in the series became more and more ambitious. In San Andreas, players had access to a whole state, GTA IV introduced realism and advanced physics, and GTA V surpassed everything Rockstar had done before in terms of the scale and sophistication of the world.

However, in the fifth part, the main problem of the games from the famous studio was especially clearly manifested: outdated gameplay. The amazing degree of freedom in exploring the world here contrasts with the restrictions that appear during missions. The player must do exactly what the developers envisioned, otherwise he will fail.

You cannot stop the quest character's car by placing a truck in its path in advance: it will simply disappear. It is often not even allowed to change into a faster car during a chase. Why do you need a well-developed open world if it cannot be creatively used to complete tasks?

Moreover, the unsurpassed number of parts has a price: huge amounts of money and tens of thousands of hours of working time are spent on them. Maybe Rockstar should use these resources to create something completely new and transform the gaming industry once again.