Hacker News Reader

Comment by PhasmaFelis | Hacker News Reader

There's this weird mental block that some people have when talking about games especially. Do something for the first time, and you're a visionary. Do it for the 100th time, you're polishing well-proven ideas. Do it for the second time, and you're a filthy uncreative hack. It's like calling Sonic a Super Mario ripoff, or Half-Life a Wolfenstein ripoff.

I noticed it a few years back when Minecraft was taking off. Any voxel-based building game was immediately labeled a "Minecraft ripoff" by the same people who praised polished, unambitious platformers and shooters and RPGs. Usually they'd never heard of Minecraft's inspiration Infiniminer, just like you apparently haven't heard of Harvest Moon...

View on HN

Something similar seems to be going on in Wikipedia's summary of how the new Spider-Man game was received:

> The game received praise for its gameplay, graphics, and story, while being criticized for familiar open-world tropes and lack of innovation.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man_(2018_video_game)#R... )

Some might argue that if you nailed the gameplay, the graphics, and the story, it shouldn't really matter how much "innovation" you have. By hypothesis, the game looks and feels great. What's left to criticize?

Probably the trend of open world fatigue that has been kicking around the last few years. Games pushed for larger and larger worlds until the public realised that it's only great as long as the worlds are interesting, feel "alive" and are easy and fun to get around in.

Map size seems to be shrinking back down, or at least not be the main selling point for open world games nowadays, and there has been significant criticism of the objective style missions that seem to have become the "fetch quest" of the genre.

> objective style missions

I'm very curious what you mean by this. Are you talking about all the "craft this" etc. achievements in Minecraft?

I’m not that familiar with Minecraft. I mean the kind of mission where the objective is repeated numerous times across the map, eg. Climb x towers (Assassin’s Creed), blow up x enemy encampments (Just Cause), etc.

This style of side mission just pervades open world games nowadays. Spider Man is no different with its towers, street crimes, environmental cleanups etc. but the world is a joy to get around in so I enjoy it a lot more than other similar games.

To use another example of an open world game, take Breath of the Wild which has a huge world but with a lot less of these typical trappings of modern open world games, apart from the korok seed hunting.

For a period of time, FPS games were called "Doom clones".

Not to mention the still-current terms: Roguelike and Roguelite (the second of which I find unnecessarily derogatory).

I don't think half of the people in Roguelike scene really know - or played - Rogue. It's just a genre name these days, implying permadeath, mazes and (often) ASCII art.

I generally prefer Roguelites and don't really see why the term would be derogatory...

I've never seen "Roguelite" as derogatory at all. It's an annoyingly awkwardly neologism, but we legit need a name for the genre that makes heavy use of Roguelike elements (permadeath, procedural generation, emergent combinations of elements) while completely ditching traditional Roguelike gameplay (turn-based RPG dungeon-crawling). Games like Spelunky and FTL and Dead Cells clearly draw inspiration from traditional Roguelikes, but they just as clearly aren't Roguelikes themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com