LogFAQs > #958399334

ParanoidObsessive posted...

He's not wrong, though. Any time I hear someone describe a game as being "like Dark Souls", I pretty much stop caring about that game entirely. Because the comparison is usually used to describe what I generally refer to as "frustration gaming", and I f***ing loathe frustration gaming as a genre.

Not gonna lie, I actually specifically had you in mind when I wrote that >.>

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Genres exist for a reason, though.

You can describe a game as a "platformer", and you've just told me with a single word exactly what sort of gameplay a given game has. Call something a "turn-based RPG" or a "bullet hell shooter", and you've just explained more or less exactly how the game controls and plays. If a game isn't a pure example of the genre, you can easily add extra descriptors to elaborate.

Pretty much. Genres are a very high-level description of what something is, and there are many games that don't fit cleanly into any one genre that are hard to describe with genre labels (so they shouldn't be), but the concept exists to give you a vague idea of what to expect. That can be refined further with sub-genres or by comparing to specific games within that genre, and then further from there by discussing traits that are specific to the game in question.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

As people have pointed out in the past, before FPS became the preferred term for the genre, most FPSes were referred to as "Doom Clones".

More recently, ARPG's were broadly considered to be Diablo clones pretty much right up until D3 came out and was arguably quite a bit worse than Torchlight II, Path of Exile, and other contemporaries in the genre that showed it was no longer defined by the Diablo series. Metroidvanias, on the other hand, have kept their name despite the fact that Dread is the first Metroid or Castlevania game to actually fit the genre in 8 years, which I guess is a testament to just how thoroughly they dominated it in the past.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

But even if they don't, "Rogue-like" still tells you exactly what you need to know so long as you understand what the term means.

Arguably, "Rogue-like" isn't that informative, genre-wise. It tells you how the gameplay loop is structured (shorter runs with random variation and the expectation of failure), but it doesn't actually say anything about what kind of gameplay you can expect. Liking FTL is not in any way a predictor of liking Hades because they're completely different genres that just have similar structures. "Rogue-like" is pretty similar to "RPG" in that regard, since you also see RPG elements show up in pretty much every genre now and that doesn't tell you much about the gameplay experience beyond those elements.

On the other hand, though, those are still useful descriptors, especially from the perspective of "genres help you figure out which games to ignore outright." If you don't like the roguelike structure, you're not going to like a roguelike regardless of what genre it's in, or that format may make a genre you otherwise wouldn't enjoy more interesting for you. RPG elements in particular help genres that would otherwise feel too grindy be more enjoyable by adding a sense of meaningful progression to them. They're useful, even if they don't say very much on their own.

I will say that I doubt the term "roguelike" is going anywhere, though. Much like "metroidvania" (and to an even greater extent), the term is generally used now without actually considering the original Rogue. That's just what the games are called, such that many of the people calling them that don't even know what Rogue is (heck, all I could tell you is that it's an old game that was structured like modern roguelikes are, for a nice, circular definition). "Souls-like" may or may not last once From stops dominating the subgenre (much like what happened with Diablo), though the fact that it's become the de facto term despite Monster Hunter offering a similar experience (slow, methodical action RPG with a high skill ceiling that rewards practice and personal skill development more so than character development) tells me it's probably got a fair bit of life left in it yet.

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