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General / Re: New Gaming Genre for Metroidvanias?
« on: January 21, 2025, 07:14:11 pm »
Being a gamer of a similar age I'd have to say that video game genres are, and have been for probably 20+ years, functionally useless.
The classic wisdom is to use gameplay as the 'tell' as to what genre the game belongs to, with anything more precise than the two massive lump categories (action and strategy) either having more clearly identifiable gameplay elements (platformer, beat 'em up, shoot 'em up) or being an emulation of a real-life activity or game (sports, racing, gambling, board games). Now back in the day when every original idea which found an audience had several identical knock-offs (home computer versions of arcade games in the early 80s for instance) it was easy to do this, although several types of games failed to 'calcify' into genres through nobody's fault, there just weren't many games like 'that', meaning genres were never all-encompassing in the first place.
Then you have the passage of time, technological advancement and changing expectations. My favourite example is Super Mario Bros. vs Super Mario Odyssey - they're both platform games and part of the main Mario series. Do they play the same? Not even close. If games in the same genre in the same series don't even resemble each other then exactly how useful is the recommendation or comparison?
New genres are extremely rare, yet new types of game appear regularly, so why the disparity? Unless a game has a very specific focus then it's very difficult to group them together into that cohesive category. Most of the newer genres I can think of happened in the casual space when Big Fish Games were a thing - time management, hidden object etc. A more recent example is 'bullet heaven' - Vampire Survivor clones, a very simplistic game pattern which has been nailed down accordingly.
Then you have dabbling/mixing within genres - elements of other games being added. Soulslikes/Soulsborne games started appearing after FROM Software's unexpected hits, no sooner to start being messed around with or some aspects (particularly bonfires and being able to reclaim your exp/status) being dropped into other types of games. Nothing stays still for long. Survival horror games, loved them back in the day, hence my tag, but I play very little SH these days, instead playing the TPS influenced games like later Resident Evils or Dead Space. Apparently some 2D games like Claire and Lone Survivor are survival horror. Really? Don't see it myself.
Then you've got the sheer amount of dialogue present in many games, you can't have hours worth of chatter in one game and no dialogue or cutscenes in another and them somehow be the same thing. The singularly useless term 'visual novel' gets bandied around a lot, yet many of these games aren't novels of any kind, they're just games with dialogue!
It's a mess. The whole idea of being able to say "it's like this" by using a term like 'platformer' is bunk, the only way to group games like Streets of Rage, for instance, is to drop loads of other terms and games in, like 'side scrolling' '2D' 'arcade style' 'co-op' and "like Final Fight/Captain Commando". You can't just say "beat 'em up" because apparently that includes everything from Kung Fu Master through to Vigilante through to Devil May sodding Cry and Tecmo Koei's Warriors series.
Nah, would heartily recommend against wading too deep into the murky waters of video game genres, nothing good down there..
The classic wisdom is to use gameplay as the 'tell' as to what genre the game belongs to, with anything more precise than the two massive lump categories (action and strategy) either having more clearly identifiable gameplay elements (platformer, beat 'em up, shoot 'em up) or being an emulation of a real-life activity or game (sports, racing, gambling, board games). Now back in the day when every original idea which found an audience had several identical knock-offs (home computer versions of arcade games in the early 80s for instance) it was easy to do this, although several types of games failed to 'calcify' into genres through nobody's fault, there just weren't many games like 'that', meaning genres were never all-encompassing in the first place.
Then you have the passage of time, technological advancement and changing expectations. My favourite example is Super Mario Bros. vs Super Mario Odyssey - they're both platform games and part of the main Mario series. Do they play the same? Not even close. If games in the same genre in the same series don't even resemble each other then exactly how useful is the recommendation or comparison?
New genres are extremely rare, yet new types of game appear regularly, so why the disparity? Unless a game has a very specific focus then it's very difficult to group them together into that cohesive category. Most of the newer genres I can think of happened in the casual space when Big Fish Games were a thing - time management, hidden object etc. A more recent example is 'bullet heaven' - Vampire Survivor clones, a very simplistic game pattern which has been nailed down accordingly.
Then you have dabbling/mixing within genres - elements of other games being added. Soulslikes/Soulsborne games started appearing after FROM Software's unexpected hits, no sooner to start being messed around with or some aspects (particularly bonfires and being able to reclaim your exp/status) being dropped into other types of games. Nothing stays still for long. Survival horror games, loved them back in the day, hence my tag, but I play very little SH these days, instead playing the TPS influenced games like later Resident Evils or Dead Space. Apparently some 2D games like Claire and Lone Survivor are survival horror. Really? Don't see it myself.
Then you've got the sheer amount of dialogue present in many games, you can't have hours worth of chatter in one game and no dialogue or cutscenes in another and them somehow be the same thing. The singularly useless term 'visual novel' gets bandied around a lot, yet many of these games aren't novels of any kind, they're just games with dialogue!
It's a mess. The whole idea of being able to say "it's like this" by using a term like 'platformer' is bunk, the only way to group games like Streets of Rage, for instance, is to drop loads of other terms and games in, like 'side scrolling' '2D' 'arcade style' 'co-op' and "like Final Fight/Captain Commando". You can't just say "beat 'em up" because apparently that includes everything from Kung Fu Master through to Vigilante through to Devil May sodding Cry and Tecmo Koei's Warriors series.
Nah, would heartily recommend against wading too deep into the murky waters of video game genres, nothing good down there..
Not bad at all.
