[P] The counter-argument would be: "You're just old, you've seen it all." It never stands up to scrutiny. I've mentioned prior that I built this really incredible project for my partner, it took years of my life but it was worth it. It's allowed them to live it, going year-by-year. And so often, I'd be dumbstruck. "What even is this game?" is one of my favourite questions. And that's why it was so difficult to define genres.

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-2

[P] What happened feels like the 1984 of games. If ideas and genres are stripped away bit-by-bit, younger gwnerations have no idea what they've been missing out on. If you were to deprive future generations of aught but plastic-wrapped, mass-produced croissants then it's easy for that generation to believe that this chewy, tough, stale croissant is the best humanity's ever made. This has happened to genres, and only a scant few remain.

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-3

[P] I remember Doom clones from back yonder, how the repetition was disparaged. And yet, every clone tried to do and be something really different. It was a verdant, fertile time of ideas when no one knew what a game was "supposed" to be. And now? It's always the same handful of engines, the same handful of genres, and the means of differentiation become increasingly more cosmetic and aestheric, meaningful divergence is gone.

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-4

[P] The mood has gone from "What if we do this?" to "We mustn't do this, it might make us less appealing as a game than our competitors." It's so rare to find anything that steps outside of that. "I've seen this before. Exactly this. Just with a different coat of paint." The competition now is over the coat of paint, becauae the underlying game has to be the same. A distressing, tragic example of this is Voidling Bound.

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-5

[P] It has a coat of paint that mimics Spore while completely missing the point of Spore. If we look at the truly realised version of Spore, Galactic Adventures, it was a wildly ambitious mess. Cure a plague, make a planet into a cube and terraform it, attend a dinner party, go and sing a song to make friends, all as a bespoke species where every design was yours. It's depressingly reductive 5o boil it down to its combat.

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-6

[P] Even though Voidling Bound is wearing Spore's skin, it's much more akin to the far more limited and dull Darkspore. It's just a third-person action game with half-hearted platforming/puszle elements. And there are a billion games just like that. For me, Voidling Bound is endemic of what's happened to modern gaming. I hadn't seen anything like Spore or Creatures, but I've seen so many hundreda of games just like Voidling Bound.

#psychology #videogames #gamedev #gamedevelopment

-7

[P] The number of genres that remain is pitiably slim. It's something you'll only realise if you take that journey back in time, otherwise you're eating plastic wrap croissants with minor cosmetic differences, nevwr knowing what a talented French baker could do with the concept of a croissant, and how varied they can be. I wish I could be excited about games, but every trailer is a sigh of "I've seen this before. Exactly this."

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-8