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Genre-Defining Games?
Gamasutra has up responses from its frequent feature, the question of the Week. This week's question was a call for the best of the best. "For any genre of your choice, what is the game that defines that genre for you?" From the article: "For the RPG, simply Final Fantasy 6. It has the best story, greatest variety of characters, tons of different music, and added many secret areas. It was the first game to truly to define a real experience of an RPG to the player.
-Anonymous" What games would you refer to as Genre Defining?
Gotta be pong!
Wouldn't a genre defining game have to be something which MADE a genre? To me, FF6 isn't even close for RPG's. Pick one of 'Wizardry' or 'Bard's Tale'. For FPS, Castle Wolfenstein. (I'd accept Doom, since that's what really made FPS 'take off'.)
A genre defining game is hardly the same as 'best game in genre'.
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No mention of the pure classic that is Populous? It's the classic God-genre game; although it's a genre mostly consisting of Peter Molyneux games. It's got to be a strong influence for many RTS games, though. I also see the infamous Brandon Every puts his (apparently) unqualified oar into the proceedings...
There is a moment in Max Payne 2 where you can listen to recorded messages from Max's tapped phone lines. You hear a couple of phone conversations that push the story a little, and then there is one where Max calls a phone sex line. He sounds depressed, lonely and in a way, confused.
The whole game you have Max in your ear, talking in this very noir tone. He's narrating his own story, if you will, and telling the player what he wants them to hear. That moment when you hear the phone sex call was almost like a breach of privacy between the player and Max. It was on Max's intention for the player to hear this low moment in his life.
Games are great at making one scared, surprised, intrigued and a bunch of other emmotions, but that was the first time that I felt empathy towards a video game. It's not genre defining, but it was a moment that shows that there can be a lot of depth to what games can be. They can be more than just shoot-em-ups. They can convey some serious, complex emmotions. We will see more of this in games in the future.
Most of you are probably two young to remember, but before these fancy-schmanzy E-G-A video cards and Mice, we had (mostly) text games. AND WE LIKED IT!
.sig), and influenced the humor in many games.
Zork was one of the first, and one of the best. It established some classic puns (See my
Now, go find that Grue.
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I'm afraid I must agree, although the term "RPG" is really way too broad to be defined by any one single game.
Wasteland helped define the post-apocalyptic party-based RPG "genre".
Bard's Tale defined the standard form for many party-based RPGs for quite some time.
Ultima IV was a defining game for RPGs where your in-game choices changed your character, and where certain situations would have no "correct" solution.
Ultima VII showed that you could create a surprisingly living world.
FF6 may be genre defining for it's little niche of the RPG landscape... I haven't played it myself and can't really say.
It really got the ball rolling on the whole genre.
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I don't mean to nit-pick (except really I do), but FF6 was 1994, and was ported to the Playstation in 1999. Still, it's hardly genre-defining. Perhaps it defines the 16-bit subset of console RPGs... but then you're getting far too specific for this issue.
I think it's safe to assume that console RPGs are a whole different animal than PC RPGs. They're only likely to diverge farther, too.
If there were a defining game for console RPGs, I'd put it at Dragon Warrior III.
...but is it art?
Empire or Civilization 1 were genre defining games for turn based strategy. Civilization had descent graphics for its time and endless playtime.
I'm suprised Fallout didn't show up on that list. The game and its spiritual predecessor Wasteland were genre defining in a way - post holocaust RPGs. Granted, a very small genre but on their strength alone they should have gotten at least honorable mention.
the only genre-creating and defining game
First Person Sneakers!!!!
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I compare almost all strategy games I play to X-Com.
Final Fantasy defines the Console RPG, which is to real RPGs what tofu is to beef: a poor substitute that people will continue to try and insist somehow fills the niche.
Console RPGs are, without fail, really "turn based battle simulators," in that the game, such as there is, does not consist of "playing a role" but instead repeatedly fighting the same stupid battles over and over again. A console RPG is all about leveling.
Real RPGs focus on an environment and the role your character plays in it. Console RPGs focus on battles, with the story thrown in to kind of tie them together.
Think "Dragon Ball Z": a poor story drawn out far longer than necessary due to an excessive number of battles. (And a legion of fans that thing it's The Best Thing Ever! and will not stop talking about them.)
So, anyway, Final Fantasy defines the Console RPG, which is not the same thing as the RPG.
I'm just going to point out some things that I think.
I would take Planescape: Torment for RPGs over any Final Fantasy game, hands down.
Ico had an emotional pull like few other games I've played.
Not that I don't love Splinter Cell, but I'd rather play any of the Metal Gear Solid games any day.
I hate to use newer games that have just come out really recently, but in WWII shooters, Call of Duty and Brothers in Arms are just head an shoulders above the rest.
In the category of Graphic-Based Adventure Games, I nominate The Secret of Monkey Island. It was not the first by a long shot. If this were a thread about "created the genre" I'd probably put King's Quest in this place.
I almost said Grim Fandango, but really Grim Fandango is just as good as Monkey Island or Sam & Max Hit the Road or Day of the Tentacle but not so hugely better that I'd think it defined the genre. Re-introduced it, yeah, and that was wonderful. Monkey Island was funny, intelligent, not so entirely hard that I couldn't finish it, and has a fantastic soundtrack. (MI2's was even better.)
My love of Monkey Island 1 & 2 was what made the cancellation of the second Sam & Max harder to take. We all want to re-live the glory days in new and interesting ways.
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I'm impressed that the article mentioned rogue! (And you should all be impressed that I at least skimmed TFA.:)
But by the standards they used for choosing the other games, I would have to say that Nethack really defines the genre that rogue started. More so even than Diablo.
I did like this, though:
"Best game ever - Nethack"
-John Root, id Software
I don't think that it's necessarily that PC and Console style RPGs are so different as I think that the difference is in the japanese vs american style of story telling (and types of stories). In american style RPGs, the focus seems to be on adventure for the sake of adventure, collecting treasure, and the story of a common person picking themselves up by the bootstraps and becoming a hero. In contrast, Japanese style RPGs seem to focus on the reluctant hero, chosen by fate, to to fulfill some great destiny/prophacy/etc. In American (or perhaps Western style would be more appropriate) RPGs, there is a bit more lattitude in the characters themselves, essentially the entire gamut frrom Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil can still be seen as being Heroic. In Japanese style games the storyline tends to only work with a character, though often reluctantly, struggling with the morality of a situation and eventually becoming something like Chaotic Good.
I think that these differences end up effecting the games in a number of ways (or rather, each type of story faces it's own technological limitations). In the Japanese style games, since there is a more fixed character (the player controls the character) A much less branching storyline is acceptable. In Western style games (the player IS the character) the character has more choice, and that limits the possibilities for the pre-written scripts. Because of the limitations on how much story can be written in American style games, the games themselves seem to focus more on dungeon crawling, accumulating treasure and experience (which also fits in with the image of the western style hero as the rouge adventurer).
I think that the reason it seems to be divided among PC/Console lines is that most PC games are developed by american companies, whereas historically the majority of console games (especially RPGs) were developed by Japanese companies.
Although I don't think that either style is inherintly superior to the other, I personally tend to prefer the more story driven Japanese style games to the Adventure driven American style games.
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Some reasonable enough picks in the article, but a lot of very strange omissions and perhaps a few unwarrented inclusions as well. Of course, it's hard to make just one pick per genre, so I'm not even going to bother trying.
Adventure:
I don't see how anybody can talk about genre defining adventure games without at least a nod to Zork. The license may have been driven into the ground since then, but it still has vast significance. Moving forwards, I guess the next big genre-definers were the Sierra adventures. I'm not sure which of these actually came first, so I'm just going to name the Police Quest, Space Quest, Kings Quest and Leisure Suit Larry games. Next came the Lucasarts games; I'm thinking particularly of Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max here, although Monkey Island also merits a nod. With the "no deaths" gameplay and the quirky humour, I think these basically represent the high-point of the genre. Finally, the Syberia games deserve a nod for trying to resurrect the genre on modern hardware.
First Person Shooters:
Wolfenstein3d and Doom were probably the big early genre-definers here. The former basically introduced gamers to the concept, while the latter really showed what the genre could do in terms of atmosphere and adrenelin. Quake probably represented the biggest technical advance, and hence has been massively important in defining the genre, but its single-player gameplay felt like a massive step back from Doom. Of course, it also popularised the idea of online gameplay to an extent that none of its predecessors have managed. I don't actually see Half-Life (or its sequel) as being particularly genre-defining... they were just examples of existing concepts done very well; they don't bring anything new to the genre.
Action/Platformers:
The early Mario games are obviously the most significant influences here, although I think Sonic also deserves credit for bringing a sense of fun to to the series (at least before the hideous 3d incarnations) that Mario never quite had.
Racing:
I think the most significant early racing game has got to be Outrun, which was massively popular in arcades for a while, with its big, shaking cabinet. Hard Drivin' was also significant; it had a more "realistic" feel than Outrun and its clones (despite the insane stunts) and I think modern racing games ultimately owe more to it than they do to Outrun. In the modern era, I think Ridge Racer was really responsible for bringing the genre onto modern hardware, while the Gran Turismo series have pretty comprehensively established the racing-sim category.
RPGS:
Ok, this is the section where I think the contributors to the article get it most "wrong". Very disappointing to not see a single nod towards the Ultima series. These defined the whole non-Japanese RPG world up until the early/mid-90s, even if the series did have a pretty dire ending. Of course, Ultima Online was also the first really successful MMORPG. Moving on to more modern games, it's probably right to recognise Baldurs Gate and its sequel, as they revived the fortunes of the "Western" RPG at a time when they were pretty low indeed. On the Final Fantasy front, I don't actually think VI is worthy of recognition, even though it's the one the fanboys like to drool over. It was essentially IV or V with a better story. I think you have to either point at II, which was the first to have any real story at all, or at VII, which was the first time that Square had the technical resources to do their story justice. Diablo probably deserves a nod as well, for largely inventing the action-RPG genre.
RTS
It's sad that so many people picked Starcraft here. Successful though it was, I fail to see how it defined the genre. Obviously, Dune 2 and Command & Conquer were the really important titles; I think C&C was more so, because it introduced the now-obligatory drag-click system, as well as multiplayer. Total Annihilation should get a nod for proving that RTSes don't have to look like crap.
i dunno when people talk about RTS, they almost always compare it to starcraft, therefore i'd say starcraft defined what RTS should be, for now anyway.
Warcraft 2 was great but no one compares it to anything after starcraft was released. C&C was pretty overated IMO, same with TA.
Thinking back now, I can't believe how many hours I spent on various platforms organizing 6 different blocks...
I think that that game on the original Game Boy created the entire hand held gaming industry.
I think of an RPG as a game that lets me develop characters the way I choose to, as well as to decide what my characters do, and how they will respond to people in the game environment.
With that said, Diablo doesn't qualify because you can't choose if you want to accept a quest, or even how you will interact with an NPC. Games that only let you accept or reject a quest without choosing the tone also fall short.
Baldur's Gate 2 is one of the best when it comes to computer role playing games. You can pick a tone when it comes to dialog choices, and that will alter the way the dialog flows. You can also choose to be nice(good), or you can be nasty and greedy. It's up to you. The only thing that most find limiting is that you can't necessarily ally yourself with the side of evil. You can BE evil, but you can't choose to ally yourself with the person who starts as the enemy.
Wizardry 6-8(the three games are a trilogy that tells a story) is the flip side. You have your choice about which side to ally yourself with, but you don't have a lot of choices about how you interact with NPCs.
You also have the old-school dungeon crawl type games that many think of as RPGs. The original Wizardry, or Bard's Tale arn't great RPGs by the standards of today, but back in those early days they were fun games.
Then you have the old "Gold Box" games, with Pool of Radiance being the first. They used the old Dungeons and Dragons rules(none of this 3rd edition junk we have today), but added things that made the game more like a RPG, such as maps(in the manual).
The sad thing is how many games coppied Dungeons and Dragons when it came to a combat system, yet none of them really improved on it. When you go up in level, you get more hit points. The original Dungeons and Dragons system had a decent enough reason, because Hit Points also reflect your ability to avoid taking damage, and as you gain experience adventuring, your endurance will go up in theory. Other game systems that use stamina or endurance really have no good reason to award more hit points because you go up in level.