Are sequels actually better? What 17 sequel head-to-heads say

The numbers

Of the 193 head-to-heads published on this site, 17 put a game against a later entry in its own series. Each comparison scores both games 1–10 on seven dimensions, so those 17 pairs give 119 dimension-level calls. This is how they fall:

Three things stand out. The newer game loses a dimension outright only 9 times in 119. It ties 71 times — three in five calls are a wash. And where it does pull ahead, it is on Build / Playstyle Variety (8 wins, no losses) and Combat (7 to 1), not on Story & Narrative (4 to 3), the one dimension where a sequel is as likely to slip as to improve.

Newer is not harder

Widening the lens past franchises: 149 of the 193 pairs put two games with different Steam release dates side by side. Counting the newer game against the older one on every dimension:

Overall it is a coin flip — 333 calls for the newer game, 339 for the older. But two dimensions are not: the older game is the harder one 63 times to 42, and the newer game has the stronger World Design 62 times to 48. Read together, the comparisons describe a decade in which games got bigger and easier — and the co-op column, with 82 ties, says most pairs are simply matched on that front.

The 17 pairs

• Atelier Ryza → Atelier Ryza 2
• Cities: Skylines → Cities: Skylines II
• Frostpunk → Frostpunk 2
• Goat Simulator → Goat Simulator 3
• Hades → Hades II
• Monster Train → Monster Train 2
• Outlast → Outlast 2
• Planet Coaster → Planet Coaster 2
• Poly Bridge 2 → Poly Bridge 3
• Rune Factory 3 Special → Rune Factory 4 Special
• SteamWorld Dig → SteamWorld Dig 2
• The Dark Pictures Anthology → House of Ashes
• The Dark Pictures Anthology → Little Hope
• The Sims 3 → The Sims 4
• Wasteland 2 → Wasteland 3
• Wreckfest → Wreckfest 2
• XCOM 2 → XCOM: Chimera Squad

Method, and what this is not

The seven scores are editorial judgments made by the people who write each comparison, on a 1–10 scale defined the same way across the catalogue. They are not review aggregates, sales, or player behaviour, and a "win" here means one editorial score is higher than the other by at least one point. A franchise pair is any comparison where both titles reduce to the same name once numerals, subtitles and edition suffixes are removed; the newer game is the one with the higher numeral, or the later Steam release date when there is none. Release dates are the ones each comparison prints, which for early-access titles is the 1.0 date.

Every row is in the open: gvg-head-to-head-scores-2026-09-02.csv has all 192 pairs with both titles, both release dates, all fourteen scores and the URL of the comparison each came from. Recount it, slice it differently, tell us what we got wrong at the contact page. The similarity side of the catalogue is published the same way on the open data page.

Cite it

Miles (2026). Are sequels actually better? What 17 sequel head-to-heads say. Game V Game. https://gamevgame.com/en/data/sequels-vs-originals — data snapshot 2 September 2026, CC BY 4.0.