I've heard a lot about dead genres (i.e. any genre that hasn't had at least 2 good/popular games come out last year)...

I've heard a lot about dead genres (i.e. any genre that hasn't had at least 2 good/popular games come out last year), but no explanation.
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MGS5
Halo Wars 2
I dunno, every day there are like 5 new ones on steam pop up
There was one last year, can't remember the name
Mario is annual isn't it?
There is at least a bunch of them popping on steam every year
Same as roguelikes

There you go, nothing is dead, it's just people grow old and unable to have fun anymore.

First of all, I asked for two. Second of all, you probably don't know what the fuck a rougelike is if you think any have been released. Finally, I asked for popular or good games, and you listed Halo Wars, Mario and MGS5, and the other games you listed you didn't even give me the fucking name.

...

faggot

Is it a game in the style of Rianna Rouge?

wut

Survival horror games have also been dead for a while. RE7 was the last big budget one, but even that one got pretty bastardized with checkpoints that put you right before you died.

Pick one.

By rougelike:
Don't you mean "Roguelike"?

How about a genre that barely ever took off?
The only games I can think of that fit this description are:
Can I just have Morrowind with good gameplay and Dwarf Fortress-tier simulation please?

The only genre that's dead is fun games.

I know this feeling so fucking badly.

You might like Elona though

Good games.

I disagree, the setting of mount and blade is pretty cool. shit like the kingdom of rhodoks breaking away from the swadian empire and the small hints we get about the old calradian empire is all good man. Besides its pretty nice to have a fantasy setting that doesn't have elves and orcs in it even though im one of the faggots modding that stuff in.

No one wants to play slow games anymore. There's a few stealth games like Dishonoured, but nothing terribly amazing. Lots of games now have stealth as a possible solution to problems, but it's not the focus so it's uncooked.
No one wants to learn strategies, they want every possible thing they choose to still lead to a win. RTS games were never especially popular, they were always mid-tier genres in terms of popularity. There's no games coming out, but everyone's still just playing the same ones.
There are literally 20 of these coming out every week, as idiots keep paying for them. BoI AB+, while shit, is still popular, especially as mods are getting intergrated into the base game.
There was never really a lot of these games. I suppose there was that game "From Dust", but I never saw reviews or anons praising it. This genre has always been dead.
Yooka-Laylee has a lot of redditors and anons alike excited from what I've seen. There's that Snake game that comes out next month which looked really interesting with the snake movement mechanic.
Point n Click's have been replaced by Walking Simulators. Exactly the same thing: Only this option works to progress to the next section, small cutscene, read some documents/pictures, repeat.
SWAT4 just got re-released and people were playing it a lot more.
Project Reality is still fairly active. So is that future BF game which I forgot the year of.
There's also a bunch of devs from Project Reality making the game Squad, which people are enjoying. Insurgency comes to mind also.


Now, let me tell you about the real dying genre: Arena Shooters.
Everyone's leaving them because no one new is coming. No one new is coming because everyone still playing is really good as they've played for so long.

Is TF2 and Overwatch players tried AFPS games, the skill floor would remove the cancer scum we don't need and the skill ceiling would keep people playing to get better.

You mean why those are dead genres? Easy enough.

Niche games that are done in impressive but ultimately lackluster ways. Most devs think it's incredibly easy since you don't even have to make decent combat, but this is a very hard genre to work with.

It relies heavily on sound, lighting and setting for gameplay and if you don't use all those and use them well, it's gonna look terrible in terms of gameplay.
Most devs take shortcuts and make levels that have clear cut ways to win them and the game ends up feeling more like a puzzle game where you have to find out what's the path the devs prepared for you, instead of coming up with your own plan.

Then there's the fact that they focus too much on the predator side of it but never do more than just killing people. This is to give a feeling of empowerment to the player, but at the same time it removes the tension and makes the game feel a lot easier, not to mention adding action to what's supposed to be a tense but slow-paced genre.

There's also story and the it's told relies a lot on the level and ambient details, not so much on cutscenes, which on top of making levels decent for gameplay, can make them quite a challenge. That's why shitty stealth games prefer cutscenes for exposition and shitty symbolism or areas where stealth doesn't matter to tell it's story.


Predatory stealth ain't a bad way to make a game, but it will never appeal to ghost stealth fans, who are already a niche anyway and can't realistically support releases for that genre.

The control scheme is fucked and the genre is mostly the same anyway. Most of the depth comes from the micro that involves learning a lot of keybinds because you sure as fuck ain't gonna draw a box to select units if you want decent micro, but this makes commanding a large army a fucking chore.

Some players get into RTS to see massive battles and when they try multiplayer all they see are early rushes with a few units or the game ending before you get to the really good shit, so they skip it to another genre.
Others enjoy the micro a lot but don't like the build order side of the game, so they'll go to RTT or assfaggots
And some like to turtle and focus on build orders but can't be arsed with micro, so they'll instead skip to Tower Defense.

And some want an economy that isn't just "these 4 buildings produce one resource each for every worker you put on them, you funnel all of them into buildings that make an army that you use to raze your oponent's base" with some decent side to politics, diplomacy and city building, so they'll jump to things like Anno or SimCity or Banished.

Really, it's an outdated format that's only popular with people that love their micro and got used to the control scheme to the point it's practically WASD for them.
Everyone else can find exactly what they want in some other genre.

I'm the kind of person that finds any historical, contemporary, or otherwise established setting to be very boring because I've seen it all. I've seen knights, vikings, and arabs before which is pretty boring to me compared to shit like silt striders and Telvanni from Morrowind (again which has shit gameplay unlike M&B which has alright gameplay).

Give me M&B with a crazy alien setting or at least one based off of a culture I know nothing about like tribal Africans/South Americans.


I always assumed that was a generic JRPG or something, dunno why. But thanks I'll check it out.


The worst part is that I still like all of those games I listed despite them being massively flawed, I even find enjoyment in the shallowest and shittiest of Bethesda sandboxes because I'm so desperate for games in this genre. I couldn't even begin to comprehend how much I'd enjoy a good game like those and I'm angry that none exist and probably never will.

you fuckers drive me goddamn nuts

I mean, if Dwarf Fortress 1.0 ever happens that would probably do it

Depend too much on meta knowledge about the game that you only acquire from reading wikis or by much, much trial and error. Not a lot of people are willing to repeatedly lose at a game until they can finally have a chance to win.
They also rely too much on the RNG, especially on early game which is a moot point since you only reach late game if you got lucky in the early game with the RNG.
You'll be repeating the first 5 floors A LOT of times and occasionnaly go lower, so it's a lot of rat\slime slaying before you can go to actually interesting chalenges.

Basically, it's a chore, padded with RNG and meta knowledge.

Hard to do today in a level that still impresses people and just like Minecraft, they do require a certain amount of autism and imagination to be enjoyable.
Terraforming with today's graphics is a daunting task for small devs and gameplay surrounding it is too. A lot of old ideas could be copied (Black & White 3 but with Terraforming and a proper city building game) but it's a gamble since they tend to be games about awe and amusement, not competitive or that interesting in the first place.

It's far easier to make mechanics for a regular tychoon game than for a God game, cash is a much simpler resource than faith.

You mean the thing that was used to pad games so they lasted longer than they should and you didn't felt robbed of your money?
Nah, it's cool, Banjoo&Kazooie or Conker were fun games but they rely a lot on having a decent story, setting and characters which is something that devs are willing to do and players willing to try but only for the sake of the story, not to collect 50 musical notes. It's something that nobody sees the point since most collectibles aren't even a tangencial thing you can understand, just another bit for the collection, and ultimately if the game is done right, they are just an excuse to explore a different area.

Those were games about telling a story with some exploration and they were surpassed by stuff like Heavy Rain, LA Noir or Uncharted. You can say a lot of shit about some of these games but why have a point&click, camera-fixed gameplay when you can have it in 3D and from the point of view of the main character?
Technology just outgrew the genre, that's all.

Arena shooters are too autistic and "fast paced" for tactical things while regular casual players just want to shoot things with tactics adding flavour, not being the bread and butter.
Besides, realistic shooters involve a lot of walking and preparation since combat doesn't last much with realistic health and it's a very small niche of people that like the environment of a realistic shooter more than they like shooting themselves. You can find a lot of gun porn fans, you won't find many that willingly march for 15 minutes to shoot their gun during 10 seconds and then go back to marching.


I just realized most of the genres you described are pretty much small niches that either outgrew themselves into other genres or the userbase simply can't sustain them, that's all.

That's just like saying "Technology outgrew westerns"

Elona is a roguelike similar to Brogue. It has an overworld map with cities you can visit and train in, dungeons are spread around the map for you to travel to.
When you die, you spawn in your house with less money and XP (I think there are other penalties maybe) but you keep playing, unless you're doing ironman mode or something.

What sets it apart is that it has more content outside of combat and an unique leveling mechanism both for you and the challenges you face.
Your atributes rise according to the skills you train but also on their potential that depends on your race but also on what you eat. The Cooking Skill is a very important one.
You can own a farm and plant things there, have a ranch where you drop your pets to make eggs and more, a shop where you can drop your loot that will be sold at full price and a museum for collectables.
You can have pretty much everything and everyone as pets including Gods and develop romantic relationships with them.

Best of all is the Fame system. Completing dungeons or quests increases your Fame, which makes harder quests and dungeons appear for better rewards.
Failing quests or repeatly dying lowers your fame however, so the difficulty adjusts to how well or badly you're doing. You can be a very famous bard (there's a Performance skill) and be assaulted in the road by very dangerous bandits. Best to train your pets to defend you!

Get Elona Custom since it's a fanmade version with a lot of tweaks and improvements, we sometimes have a thread here.

No, it's not. It's more like saying "technology outgrew black and white movies" or "technology outgrew having a piano for a soundtrack and captions for dialogue".
You could very well tell the exact same story in most point&click games from old with a new 3D interface and lose nothing in the story.

I agree with on your point about PnC games. As I mentioned earlier, Point n Clicks are now replaced by what we joke about as Walking Simulators. The ones will more depth to them are the same as previous PnC games, it's now just Walk n Interact.

You realize you can make a point and click game with detailed 3d graphics and still make it a point n click, right? It's literally just the perspective of the camera and the movement of the character.

You had it right the first time, collectathons are just a bad genre.

Depends.
If it's a game where I'm told to replay a level 10 times to get every single item, it's trash Mario 64 is the father of this sin.
If it's a fun platformer game like, say, Spyro A Hero's Tail, where you can go off the beaten track and find extra items to unlock extra content, then that's alright.

I'd say open-world games are better for Collectathons. Though this then leads to forcing the player to backtrack every time they get a new tool/item/weapon.

user, learn how to gamedev and start doing that shit.

I'm working on other projects right now, but I did made a prototype for something like this once.
The problem is that you need to have a very good simulation running with the NPCs first that you can interact with and that's the hardest part, but to be honest I'm not sure how much people would apreciate this.

I had a small village with 7 NPC characters, 2 were a couple in a farm, grew wheat that they sold to a tavern where a girl cooked bread for everyone visiting. Then there was a mine with some dude that collected ore, a lumberjack that collected wood and a blacksmith that used ore and wood for tools that everyone else needed for their jobs.
I added a 7th guy that had no job, he was the village drunk hobo (didn't even had a house).

The simulation was quite good, they had their jobs that tried to meet the demand for the resources or services they rendered and match it accordingly (if a lot of people buy a certain tool, the next day the blacksmith would make more of that tool and less of the others for instance).
I even did a lot of work with socializing with neat results. People visited the tavern at the end of the day and chose interactions based on their traits, some being mean, others being way more talkative or gossiping a lot about each other.
Except the hobo that never had anything to do, so he visited the tavern and kept boasting about skills he didn't even had and flirting with the tavern wench, annoying her.


At some point, I'd add the player as a character that you could direct to do the exact same as the AI but by your own hand, not a script.
However, I got thinking that maybe this level of detail might not appeal to a lot of people since most of it goes unseen anyway.
I still like knowing there's characters with their own dreams and making plans for the future and running in the background, especially knowing that at anytime I can poke at the simulation from any angle of my choice.

But would this be popular with people? Would they like this super detailed simulation where the player is just another pawn in the world, no more important than an NPC for the grand scheme of things?

Found the RE123 Nigger.

My solution is instead of making an entire game from scratch I'll just mod Morrowind to the point where it's barely recognizable gameplay-wise, but I've hit a lot of brick walls in the engine and will have to wait on the OpenMW devs to dehardcode more gameplay features (stuff like NPC scheduling can technically be done but it's not great and changing nearly anything about combat/RPG mechanics is either going to be near impossible or will use a massive amount of hacky scripting).

Right now I'm just going through the entire history of Morrowind modding and merging every mod I like into one big overhaul and making compatibility patches.

I'm learning gamedev, but as I've never done Holla Forums beyond hardware, it's hard for me to just learn coding.
I've got a game planned out that I think a bunch of anons would like, and it's not a terribly difficult task when compared to other games anons make, but still, really hard to start.


What would be really nice is to learn gamedev by helping others, but I have no idea where to ask. /agdg/ ignored my posts. ;-;

You can, but a limited camera is hard to explain or accept today. And even harder to pull off right.
And WASD or joystick movement tends to be more immersive since you're directly moving the character, after all.

It's not that it's that much better than traditional P&C, rather it gives more freedom to look around and feels more immersive, which is key on a genre defined by exploration and immersion in the story.


Nah, don't be like that. They can be good if collecting things is done right. Proper collectathons make a lot of their trophies a reward for platforming levels or use them as incentive to explore new areas. It's only ever badly done if collecting shit is the only goal and the only thing you do in the game (much like traditional walking simulators)
But if they take you to neat locations, show nice characters and put some behind good chalenges, they are pretty good games.

Crash Bandicoot is a soft-collectathon in regards to the gems for instance.


In defense of Mario, most levels only require about 5 times and each one has a few differences on the map itself that change how you play the level.
Spyro's a pretty neat game too.

i don't know the first thing about developing but i can tell you as a player that this sort of thing is what made STALKER so exciting for me. the fact that the world moves on without you makes you feel small (in a good way) and like you're just a piece in a very large puzzle. if you could find a more overt way of showing these kind of relationships - randomized conversations with that tavern wench where she talks negatively about the smelly braggart drunk hobo and talks positively about that handsome (((merchant))) who bought her a present. or maybe factions who aren't overtly at war but have tense borders with one another talking about "last night of my went missing and i'm sure it's those motherfucking ", that sort of thing

I really enjoyed the art style of the Banjo, Spyro, Crash, Mario64 etc games. Just those bright characters with bright green fields and blue skies makes me feel comfy.

Only really I want Yooka-Laylee and Snake to succeed is so there's more comfy high-detail, bright, fun games.

I agree with you on stealth, but not on RTS games. They were actually fairly popular in the 90s, not as much as FPS games were but they still had a pretty large audience. To say that they were never huge would sell them short.
That's true for online play, but RTS games thrive in a LAN setting. Besides, even online players won't go hard 100% of the time and will still build up massive armies to ram into each other.
You still can't get massive-scale battles in any genre but RTS games.

You can try to do that, but you're still gonna be restricted by their engine. Dunno how good are the results you can extract with that.

I know I've tried multiple times to mod Oblivion and Skyrim to a game they are never gonna be and I've had to accepted that the best I can make is a decent dungeon crawler with Oblivion.


Code is easier than hardware, it's literally just logic most of it. The hardest thing to learn is how shit is drawn so you can optimize things and don't end up with slider presentations. The rest of the optimization shouldn't be that hard for you if you're into hardware and after all, it's artfag stuff.

Because you clearly want to steal their glorious ideas and win big bucks without putting any effort yourself.
Because you're an ideas guy that's not gonna contribute at all
Because most /agdg/ people are too insecure in their projects to work with anyone but themselves. It's already bad enough to fail our own expectations, disapointing other people feels even worse.


That was the plan, that people kept relationships regarding each other and you could ask their opinion on someone or just see the conversations panning out. And if you found out that she likes the (((merchant))), talking shit about him with her wouldn't be a smart choice. However NPCs would also be able to lie if it's part of their plan to win the favour of someone.

I really gotta get back into that project one day.

All I want to make is a walking simulator based on books that everyone here loves. Literally 1:1 of the stories, as I think they lend themselves to it.

In a time where there was a lot of experimentation but not much competition to what an RTS could offer, much like shooters were really popular until a lot of different genres showed up that took some of their players and look at shooters today.

It's a bit ironic that I complained about RTS players getting used to the control scheme in the same era where a lot of FPS players got used to strafejumping and bunnyhopping but neither sees much popularity today.

I know ;_; and RTS aren't even as big as I wanted them to be

Also, I want to thank you all for this thread, it's good to have civil discussions every now and then.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a lot of shitposters here being contrarian faggots, it's pretty nice discussing things without devolving into an insulting competition.
Thanks for the thread, Anons.

Is that a challenge? :^)

About roguelikes, supposedly if you are particularly skilled at them you should be able to win consistently. I've heard stories of people who were able to win their very first, and second, and maybe even third games on certain roguelikes. Not because of RNG, but because they understand the genre, are extremely good at what they are doing (probably translates to being careful), and maybe did research beforehand, I don't know about that. I'm sure it's possible, even likely that RNG can completely screw you out of being able to win, but if you are good enough that should be the minority of games, not every game until you get lucky.

I say all this hypothetically, since I've never actually been able to win at any of them myself legitimately.