(Zone Of The Enders appreciation post)

#VideosGame #HideoKojima

I miss the time before clearly defined genres. Games sometimes did tings that were just, their own. It didn't always work, but it was interesting.

I realise why it isn't the case anymore. Most video games have to make at least a little money. And there are video games that are just, fully experimental and really out there.

But they are nowhere near whatever I would call the mainstream. And... OK, let's be honest, I'm a basic b-word with no knowledge of anything, so I am not AWARE of the fun experimental games unless a Youtuber I follow makes a video about those. And few do, because guess what. Videos like these do not have many views. And so it goes.

I remember getting into LoL for a (short) while. It was fun, until it very much wasn't. But I saw potential in the general idea. So I checked DotA, and it was, to a noob, basically the exact same game. Yes, I know it has a different meta or whatever, and different champions and that makes the game completely different.

But it had the exact same core.

So anyway, not for me, I decided.

Later I checked out another MOBA. Which was described as like, radically different to play. A completely different game.

It had the exact same gameplay, to me. You buy items, you have like five powers or whatever, you have two special abilities, it... it is the exact effin' same thing! Yes, if you've played LoL for 40 or 400 or 4000 hours, I'm sure it's very different. But it has the same interface, it has the same control scheme, it has the same general speed at which things unfold. It has lanes, it has mobs (or whatever it's called), it has little buildings that you destroy in order to progress.

I understand that sometimes things just work. Sometimes you do not have to reinvent the wheel.

I do.

But the idea that those three games were described as completely different and none of them had its own unique elements, gameplay stuff, presentation, NOTHING... it blew my mind. Those games differed only in things that seem different to someone already playing these kinds of games, a lot.

And like... yeah, I am never going to play a MOBA game, and that's OK.

But that is just so wild to me. People perceive those extremely similar games as being super different.

Like... in the 90s, most FPS games were called, rightly, "Doom clones". And yet they were still so drastically different. Duke Nukem 3D plays very different from Quake. In every way. You don't have the same speed, dynamic, interface layout, presentation, weapon loadout, level design, anything.

And those games were called CLONES of the same base game.

What the heck happened?

#videogames #videosgame #indiegames #gamedesign