Id say some stories, worlds, games etc are harder to work without the creator.
For example Game of Thrones was pretty obvious it doesnt work ( needs the writers story) . LOTR is struggling coming up with new stuff.
But then you have Star Wars. Some games and stories are great outside of George Lucas indeas and some have been a disaster.
I cant really see someone filling in the MGS story without Kojima. Which its mostly done anyway. Sequels and remakes, yeah they can be done. But it would take someone unique to do it.
Its his wacky take on the world and he’s pretty unique i story telling/lore
I guess it depends on the type of story, lore, game etc.
Don’t agree. None of the material you mentioned failed because the creator isn’t involved, it failed either because they were either rushed or exec driven soup.
LOTR is a small universe and actually a rather small story. For it to work you have to break away and expand instead of revolving around the original story.
Of course some attempts will be better than others. That’s just the way it is, look at MGS, even though Kojima was behind all of them not all hit. Curiously enough the best written MGS is MGS1 and it’s the English translation that made it work so well, because the writers responsible for the English version did a lot of work to make it sound less ridiculous, which Kojima hated. MGS4, MGS V, Death Stranding just kept getting worse and worse from a writing/story/characters perspective. Death Stranding worked despite Kojima weirdness.