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I'm shocked that Extra Credits doesn't have a review of the pride and madness that is Dwarf Fortress. ♫ I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole ♫ ♫ Diggy Diggy Hole ♫ ♫ Diggy Diggy Hole ♫
I felt as if Frost Punk was almost flipped on the expectations. I expected to be playing an RPG as a city leader, and essentially got a really hard city builder. It has been one of my favorite gaming experiences to date.
It's not a city-builder. It's a puzzle game. It's too hard to allow free expression but lacks any RNG elements so you're stuck to discovering or puzzling out the ideal path (and there is one). It's a puzzle game designed to look like a city-builder but it doesn't really play like one. I consider it worse than This War of Mine, which was their freshman outing.
I wish there was a city builder with the concentric circle shtick of Frost Punk without being so dire and full of ticking clocks. That element of the gameplay is what makes my brain light up.
Yep. Frostpunk absolutely belongs in this category as well, especially with the later scenarios and even more so on hard mode. Most normal mode players may not know this, but if your city morale stays low enough for long enough you get exiled in the snow and die. The push into the faith and authority civics trees become necessary because conditions get so bad everyone dies without a bit of authoritarianism. The game is very bleak, and downright brutal to play.
Honestly I went in the reverse lol! i thought it was just going to be a city builder but instead i got an insane story full of peril and the amazing feeling of overrcoming problems (and seriosuly testing my ethics)
A lot of people mentioned Frost Punk as a great example of City Builder which is not chill. I wanted to add Mini Motorways as a good example of a game which almost switches as you play it starting as cozy and chill logistics game, but as the game progresses it starts getting out of control as you try to feverishly adapt to new building which ultimately leads to your demise as you fail to meet the growing need of transportation. And also Darkest Dungeon is a good example of RPG where you can easily lose your high-level heroes - a concept which is rare to see in party-based RPG games, and generally such a thriller gameplay is rarely associated with RPG genre.
Thinking about what defines "genre" and "genre expectations," I've fallen back to using two terms instead of just one. In literature, there's "genre" but there's also "form." Poetry, for an example, has genres like romances, pastorals, allegories, etc. but it also has forms like sonnets, free verse, ballads, etc. The genre defines expectations of setting, theme, content. The form defines expectations of structure, mechanics, and craft. The reading experience is shaped by both, of course. I think this holds true for games, but it's common to lump both together into the one term "genre" instead of preserving the two as distinct concepts. If we think of city builders as a "genre," then that would suggest games that feature cities, urban systems, economics and demographics, etc. in their *content.* But if we think of city builders as a "form," then that would suggest certain mechanical features such as low risk, long strategy, creative freedom, even maybe more specific than that, such as interacting with a map, placing or designating buildings, etc. I think games like Ixion or Against the Storm are using the genre of city builder but their forms are something very different. Bringing formal expectations to a game, especially where difficulty (arguably the greatest factor in splitting an audience) is wrapped up into a form, because that game wears a certain genre seems to me to reveal why conflating the two concepts makes it harder to pitch game experiences to people.
I honestly really like this idea! It makes sense that the interactive nature of video games can have a sort of system of genres that is more complex than other art forms, and this seems to be a reasonable way of going about it. The only question is how these are defined? Maybe we can take all of our current genres/sub-genres and have a definition for it as both a genre and a form, but i feel like there would be a better - more efficient - way of going about this. That's probably a question for a smarter person, or maybe persons, though ... idk
@@chillmadude I guess I'd think these get defined naturally by repetitive usage by designers. In other media, genres and forms develop over time as patterns of what content and what structures the authors/artists/etc. choose most frequently to use when communicating with their target audience. Or maybe more now by what markets well/is salable to a target audience.
Following your idea, I'd say city builders are "creative RTS". They look similar to RTS games (planning down buildings, perspective) to some degree. It's kinda like the base building part of an RTS stretched into a whole game, with the haste and direct control over units removed... Hmm... Would "classic" metroidvanias be better described as "exploration performers"? They have basically all the mechanics of a platformer.
Interesting. I love your metaphore (I bet I am using that word wrong now) with poetry and the difference between Genre and Form. However I compeletely disagree on your application of this philosophy. To me Genre is defining how you should feel playing the game. Form is more about mechanics of the game. What will you do in the game. So I would argue, that Ixion and Against the Storm are not City-builders as a Genre, however they use City-building as their Form.... ...actually to be entirely honest I have played Against the Storm and I would say it's still City-builder, even as the Genre. It just adds the mechanics of roguelike/roguelite.
Given how you specifically mentioned high stakes and the consequences of early actions coming back to hit you in the end I am shocked you didn't talk about Frostpunk at all. The game focusses on people in crisis, with the player having to ensure the survival, lack of discontent and hope for the people. Every building has to be manned, people will tell the player about things and it makes it more emotional and it gives the player options that might be very effective but morally and ethically questionable at best.
SPORE goes pretty crazy with how the genres change as you progress through the game. Going from a single cell organism that is just trying to eat and grow. To an interstellar race creating trade routes and alliances with other life forms in the galaxy.
I really hope that something like Spore comes around again. I'd love an interesting and deeper evolution simulator with as much care put into it as Spore had.
I left one of the positive reviews on Steam for Ixion. Yes, it *looks* like a city builder, but what I call it is a "Crisis Management Simulator." You have a constantly changing situation presenting you challenges that you constantly have to respond to. And, as you said, it is possible to make a choice early on that comes back to haunt you hours later. Frostpunk is another good example.
I think this conundrum better demonstrates how weird video game genre categorization is. When I personally think of "city builder" I think of something like Cities; Skylines or Workers and Resources; Soviet Republic. Games where building infrastructure and connecting districts for efficient land use/resource distribution are the main goals. I think the games mentioned here are more like survival games where you play a community rather than a survivor. Like "This War of Mine" for example.
It is the case with almost any human concept. You learn a word by encountering examples but each of those examples are not quite identical. Still once you feel like you understand it is because you can imagine an example. You hear the word and have expectations, if you expect the right thing it helps you do the right thing, if your expectations (i.e. assumptions) are wrong, you will do the wrong thing. In a game it can be very frustrating, though I'm sure you can imagine situations with more serious consequences. I think "This War of Mine" "Frostpunk" and "Ixion" are all the same company; so "survival games where you play a community" is clearly their preferred genre.
Frostpunk is a great example as well, a city-builder with a hard time limit, scaling difficulty and some critical yet very finite resources. That game made me feel so morbid. Also it's sound design and soundtrack slaps. It also has a flexible enough system where there are some unique scenarios you can play that fundamentally change the way you must approach the problem.
Frost punk just falls flat about 2 hours in when you figure the game out and can't lose anymore. It only works when you as a player are within a very narrow range of skill, because they took the exponential growth curve most city builders have and just ran with it without questioning it, when the difficulty curve should've actually been the exact opposite of what it is (more people should be harder to keep alive, not easier)
@@majorfallacy5926 It does lack depth in that regard. But the first few attempts at each scenario while you're still figuring it out is pretty great. I'm hoping with the sequel they'll address the longer term challenge aspect. Right now late game you can achieve post scarcity utopia if you're in an infinite scenario, but that could definitely be altered for the sequel.
@@ASpaceOstrich first *few* attempts? I finished my first attempt with one hospital bed for every single citizen and so many resources that I didn't have any more space to build storage. After that the scenarios I tried were interesting for maybe half an hour. And adjusting the difficulty doesn't help, because it pretty much just affects that first half hour. Once you figure out that you can research 24/7 with 2 workshops and survived the early game you are pretty much settled for the rest of the scenario.
My favorite part of this video was the ineffective garrote. The rest of it was very entertaining too, but also informative and made me think more about the concept of genre.
Reminds me of Berzerk's "invincible bowtie", which does function as if the player character's head is just floating above their torso. A Hitman/Berzerk game would be interesting, but that's just Wolfenstein (pre-3D) with a timer, innit?
Against the Storm solves what I see as two problems with the city builder genre: first it provides you with direction, basically from the start, beyond just feeding and housing your people. Second, when you've stabilized and the game starts to get boring it says "Great, you won. On to the next one."
If you're looking for games that challenge the typical idea of their genre I'd recommend looking into outer wilds. I believe steam classifies it as a space exploration simulator. But it feels almost like a metroidvania (wherein as you progress through the game you unlock abilities that allow you to explore more of the map) however instead of a new ability you will be learning new information as you progress through, teaching you how to get to areas previously unexplorable. Truly a one of a kind experience that doesn't feel like anything else in the genre.
Seeing as how the video is nearly 10 minutes long, perhaps length was a concern due to how a longer video risks reducing viewership too much in their case.
Still I also agree, the two games they mention are rather recent but there have been a plethora of games in the same vein that have been released over the recent years, so I am leaning towards disagreeing with the point that this is some new/recent thing when in fact it has been going on for years, and anyone who has played any of those games would have noticed it by now.
A game I played on steam years ago, Banished, it's a city builder survival type game, I think either Markiplier or jacksepticeye played it. Your a group of exiles and your goal is to not starve to death
My game design teacher point out this flaw in how we define genres in games through mechanics. While mechanics are helpful they don't tell the whole story of what a game's experience is. The alternative he showed was from a book where game genres were instead defined by the feeling the experience aimed to evoke in the player. It used very fancy academic terms that would never work in the broad zeitgeist but the proposed genres behind those terms were pretty good. Things like chill games with low stakes you just relax in, power fantasy games that are all about empowerment and agency and creative games about customisation, expression and putting a player's unique mark on the game world. Perhaps what's needed is a marriage of the styles of genres.
A bit surprised you didn't mention Dwarf Fortress here. It's basically a city builder that does focus on the citizens, with deep simulation to make that work.
Rimworld is another great example of that type of game. I've taken to calling those games colony sims rather than city builders. You don't do any actual building yourself; you manage your colonists and *they* do the building.
RimWorld isn't exactly a city builder - the genre name I've seen brandied about is colony sim - but it does similar things to IXION. And instead of playing as a god mayor building out of a tool box, you optimize the individual colonists, who execute your will to build, grow, and fight for the colony. And depending on the difficulty level, you mostly just watch them die. Definitely one worth looking at if your team hasn't played it already.
Seconded. Rimworld is a fantastic game. It's got a lot of the same elements that make Dwarf Fortress great but is much more approachable. Still got a pretty steep learning curve, though.
You know, this is actually something that happens every time we add a 'genre' or a '-like' Metroid-vania is a platformer-shmup with exploration and RPG elements 'Rouge-like' is a descriptor for when RPG elements are hidden behind RNG A decade from now we are likely to see Ixion-like as a descriptor for "City-builder but dangerous" or something similar.
I guess this is why I enjoy Kingdoms & Castles so much. It's laid back for the most part, but also has dragons or vikings & ogres attacking you. Which forces you to build and design well thought out defenses.
One of the first games I ever played was a city builder called Caesar III. It is probably best known nowadays for the fan mods for it called Julius, and Augustus respectively. Unlike most city builders these days it's best known for its campaign as opposed to a sandbox mode. I don't even think it had a sandbox mode in its original form. Furthermore, on many of the maps you had to fend off invasions on a semi-regular basis. Furthermore, if you displeased Caesar enough he would send a seemingly unending army to raze your city. It is technically possible to fend off Caesar's army until the game effectively gives up on spawning enemy legions. I've seen it done precisely once, by my father no less.
I find it interesting that many of the games I've looked at in the Visual Novel Database (VNDB) have core gameplay loops that are very firmly other genres but happen to use VN-like UIs for character dialog / dialog options. It's not even really a mechanic thing-you could do the exact same thing using an RPG games' UI and not have someone add you to the database-but players who actually view _UI_ as defining what belongs in the genre compendium.
Here's a genre people make wrong assumptions about and buck the trend with various aspects: RPGs. A lot of people are talking about games that utilize RPG elements(level progression, character interaction, etc.) and there are RPGs that utilize aspects of other genres. For example, the Fallout series is an RPG that utilizes FPS mechanics.
They're in an interesting place, because they are classed as City Builders despite their risk profiles being closer to Base Builders like Rimworld or granddaddy Dwarf Fortress.
Ixion is fantastic! Amazing soundtrack too. I'd argue that games like it & Frostpunk are instead giving us a new-ish hybrid genre, namely the survival city builder. They're definitely borrowing from other genres, but the ones I've played have all been great so far.
Against the Storm makes me want a 4X version of the formula so bad. The beginning is the strongest part of both of these genres, and the ability to go further once you've met your objectives to see how your build holds up is great too.
Terraformers is a turn-based 3x version of the formula. There's no warfare, but there's exploration, expansion, and exploitation somewhat like Civ. It's got the same sort of "timer" mechanic as AtS, where you have to keep from running out of support by working quickly and doing things that increase support. It plays a lot like a Euro-style board game, and depending on what type of game you pick, I've found a typical run lasts somewhere between 1-2 hours (or more if you're prone to analysis paralysis) though you can continue terraforming after winning a game if you want to.
Disco Elysium got a lot of negative reviews on Steam accusing it of being a Walking Simulator or Point and Click Adventure game, because it lacks the turn based or real time combat so expected from isometric CRPG genre. Something ZA/UM were explicitly set out to do and that informed majority of their design decisions and choices as seen through the thought cabinet.
Since everyone has mentioned Frostpunk already, I'll suggest another; Timberborn! A city builder set after humanity, with beaverfolk as the new dominant species; in addition to the usual housing/food/supply chain/leisure stuff of typical city builders, you also have wet and dry seasons. Preparing for these increasingly harsh droughts is important to your town's continued survival, with dams, reservoirs, spillways, hydro power, and the like.
I've tried several digital card games that end up feeling a lot more like tower defense games. They're basically tower defense games that have a random element to what units and resources you get. I guess they just present it as a card game because that is randomized format that a lot of people are familiar with.
You guys need to check out The Pale Beyond. It’s ostensibly a resource management game, but there’s a lot of cool narrative stuff that takes it in a different direction.
"It's hard. Dark Souls Hard." Eh, more like Rimworld Hard. Failure to plan can lead to your death, but also the game can just sometimes say "Alright, you lose now".
The problem with genres in videogames is that we try to address characteristics in various layers simultaneously with a single category. In other media, like literature and film, 'genre' us used to describe the work mostly based on semantic content. But with games we also include the mechanics as part, and sometimes as the basis, of a genre. We should start splitting the categories of content, differently from the categories of mechanics or format.
I think one of the best examples of a genre mix in gaming would be the Spellforce franchise. It combines RPG elements, managing a small squad of heroes and exploring the world in squad with pitched RTS battles, and anything in between.
Streets of Rogue! It's a beautiful mash-up of the rouguelike and immersive sim genres. It slams the immersive world with interlocking gameplay systems that let you achieve objectives in a truly staggering amount of ways with a quick and snappy top-down rouguelike brawler to create the most viscerally enjoyable immersive sim I've played. After 6 years I'm still finding new ways to play a game that can be easily beat in an hour and a half. I say all this because the second game will be going in early access this year and it's far more ambitious with its scope. It deserves far more eyes on it and I think it's one of those games that could shake up the indie scene given the opportunity.
A major title that broke the mold of the time was Mass Effect, making an RPG shooter, but since it came from Bioware, expectations of what it was were already set
Islanders is my favorite city building game! It combines the love of growth and optimization with a stage system, where you have to get enough points out of your buildings to progress, meaning there is definitely a win or lose without a constant pressure necessarily. It's points system is so elegant, I think it's really more of a puzzle game that makes a city by accident, but it's designed so well that when you do well, what you create ends up looking really beautiful
something I think the New Wolfenstein games do pretty fantastically is take a classic FPS, even opening as a sort of alt-history WW2 fps, then pivoting hard into a stealth game, while still retaining mostly FPS controls and interfaces, which drives home very hard the sense of Blasko as an ex-soldier fighting against long odds.
Game that's already pushing the boundaries of its expected play experience? Sounds like Punch Out. Markets itself as a fighting/sports game, is actually a puzzle/rhythm game. Which also seems like a missed opportunity for that whole "teaching fighting games is hard" thing in that you could build a tutorial that plays like a rhythm game. As you get into harder levels of the tutorial, you have the computer mix-up the cadence of their attacks, until you reach an indistinguishable point between random patterns and fighting a human opponent.
Genre mixing is the easiest way to make fun and quirky Indie / Unity games. The short development time and play time allows for massive experimentation.
For me, this video kind of swaps my interpretation of a city builder with the "Macro Resource Management" (or just resource management) genre. To me at least, examples like Frost Punk or space colony games that present an impending doom of sorts are specifically "Colony Survival" games, where there are also City builders that are the same thing without the immediate sense of danger, or RTS where the goal is direct Competition. Even RTS has its own subgenres, like the Galaxy-wide empire management, to Age of Mythology scale games, to games like FTL where the scale is tiny. Meanwhile a game like space-haven is very close, but in colony survival style. All of these games lie in the over-arching macro-resource management genre, so games that add a twist to a sim-city like city builder just change the game to a colony sim or rts. You build a city of sorts in all of these categories, with the difference being what the city is designed for, whether that is looking pretty and organized, or to rapidly overcome an opponent. These categories exist so we can have accurate expectations for games, and if a game is labelled as a known type but is another, its not a bad game but it does need to be relabeled. That's just my opinion though. Great video, I love this channel's thought provoking topics!
Before we begin, i would like to wave at nintendo's RTS "Pikmin" and their action shooter "Splatoon". I strongly believe genre warping is a major driver of progress and innovation in the industry, but when you do it, you have to be aware you're doing it and make sure to adjust things from mechanics to visuals to target demographic appropriately
City builders have completely split into two sects: city builders and city survival. One focuses on what you have mentioned as growth, and the other focuses on efficiency. I can play city skylines and not give a damn about my industry routes but i cannot play Frostpunk without care for my people’s needs to not DIE. You could have also mentioned a lot of other strange city builders that i felt disappointment that were not mentioned like They Are Billions, a city defense of literal thousands upon thousands of ai zombies that strives for a balance of growing the city and walling it in
Dredge, while playing a lot like a much more casual and approachable Sunless Sea, is a very fascinating combination of fishing and horror game. Where escaping horrors or finding ways around them occasionally features in gameplay which is otherwise just chill and working your career as a fisherman.
The MMORPG genre is exactly like this. But people get way to caught up in the acronym and don't realize there are implied elements that were there from the beginning which made the genre.
There's no game that I know of that is explicitely about exploration. Exploration is often a mean to an end. Yet it's my favorite part of very different games. Xenoblade Chronicles X was more revolutionary to me than even BotW just because it adresses the idea of scale in open world, and it does it really well. It's an RPG where you can sneak where you want from the get go, even reaching end game places by accident, and it changes everything. Enemies are not HP sacks anymore, you observe them, learn their pattern like in a sneaking game when they are 50 levels above you. It makes the world feel alive and just reaching the next place a reward.
K, so, Ooblets. The game is not only a farm sim, but also a monster collection game AND a TCG, all in one package that is presented to the players in the goofiest way possible. I love it so much!
I live genre mashups. Pyre (from Supergiant, the folks behind Hades) is the best Fantasy/Visual Novel/RPG/3v3 Basketball game you will ever play. Valkyria Chronicles is an Anime/Visual Novel/Turn-Based-Strategy/Third-Person-Shooter. Heck, Xcom 1 and 2 are kind of a city-builder mixed with a turn-based tactics game. Portal, as you mentioned, is an FPS/Puzzle. Good stuff.
That's the best description of Valkyria Chronicles I've ever heard. Well done! Now to get back to figuring out how there could be *fish* at this latitude.
In high school, I talked with my best friend about a first-person shooter rhythm game. He scoffed at the idea and said no one would play such a thing. Later, in my 30's, there were at least 3 different games that hit those criteria.
Timberborn is a pretty good survival city builder. You are fighting progressively worse and worse droughts and have to figure out how to keep your colony alive.
Gonna have to point out here that the drought's the only challenge of the game, and is ridiculously easy to solve. Once you figured that one out, the only way your colony can mess up is if you overpopulate it.
I dunno if it's that hard to keep the colony going. Just expand the colony at the rate at which the population grows, and you'll be fine. Though, I have only recently come back to play the game, and the badwater mechanic could pose an issue. If a dam or leeve causes badwater to overflow, it could flood pure water rivers, choking the water supply, and in turn the beavers.
i'd like to mention Banished. a city builder that adds survival into the mix. maybe not as harsh as some others but it revolves around building a village that can survive. also it's funny that if everyone in the village dies, you can actually watch nature retake the territory of your village if you wait long enough
I'm reminded of something that happened to my Steam recommended list. It suddenly became filled with tons of those traditional dating sim visual novels. It took me a bit to realize why. It's because they're both tags on Persona 3 Portable. Which I guess isn't strictly wrong, but it really doesn't match why I play the game. Oddly, this didn't happen with Persona 4 Golden on steam, because despite sharing near identical gameplay, it didn't recieve the Visual Novel tag.
The RTS genre is a prime example of this. In almost every RTS, you play a match based game where you start with builders, build up a base and attack an enemy in a cutthroat battle to the death. This creates a very competitive sport like environment where the player is encouraged to improve things like "APM" to become more efficient and build bigger, better armies faster. But what if we re-examined some of the assumptions that that genre has? What if the game didn't have to focus on being a PVP death match? What if we had a game that didn't have "matches" at all, but open persistent maps that you could join or leave at any point? What if a game was more focused on giving each player separate objectives that prevented them from fully trusting each other and encouraged sudden reversals in alliances? What if there were games that gave defeated players ways to rejoin and attempt to regain territory? Etc, etc.
City builders without risk get really dull for me. I really enjoy looking after my pawns. I want them to be happy and prosperus. Timber born can only be played on hard mode and even then it's pretty easy. Rimworld, surviving mars with some difficulty tweaks turned on, Kingdoms and castles (10/10), becastled, falllout 4 if play with the mods i play with, diplomancy is not an option, frost punk, rise to ruins, tropico... ish, stronghold, banished.
I have found that genre limits mechanics. Some of the best games I’ve ever played defy genres. Developing my own game, my team never considered genre in the beginning stages and had to basically figure out what we were for marketing (since Steam wants you to put tags)
Please discuss RPGS. I've been discussing with friends (politely) for years the nuances of RPG vs games with RPG elements. Like what precisely counts as an RPG? Has that changed? Are only plot and world building heavy games like Final Fantasy and Elder Scrolls RPGs or is the door open for games like Monster Hunter (which I think won RPG of the year a few years ago?) to be considered, despite not using experience points or having most of the other trappings of an RPG?
RTS, most rts nowadays are macro based, their reports meant to be fast units are meant to be lost, but what if we flip that instead of macro it's micro, like in XCOM how you build amd customize your squad. What if we focused more on units growing, the individual soilders. Their experience and skills. So while yes its no total war style with hundred of units but each part of your army moves and is equipped like a RPG.where each uni5 is special in Loadout and covers eachothers weaknesses . As opposed to the mass production style of now
I thought Ixxion was bad not because it was hard, but because it follows in the Frostpunk school of "city building" where it's not a city-builder at all. It has like Frostpunk (at the time of release) no random elements. City-builders come on a sliding scale of two things: Either it has no random and is sandbox and design oriented or it has random elements and you're trying to best play the board. These were puzzle games with one ideal solution. It wasn't what I wanted to play, and might be fine on its own, but yeah... not any kind of city-builder or survival game.
One current genre discussion I find fascinating is people trying to come to a consensus on what to call the genre of games inspired by VAMPIRE SURVIVORS. The game is very much its own new thing and doesn't neatly fall into easy categorization, while at the same time spawning dozens of imitators/homages. I've heard it called a roguelike shoot 'em up, a reverse bullet hell, a "bullet heaven" since you're the one creating the bullets for the most part, and games that are like VS are often referred to as "survivors-like". I also find it interesting when the name of an existing game becomes a genre -- like Rogue inspiring the Roguelike genre, Metroid and Castlevania SOTN inspiring the Metroidvania genre, and souls-like being shorthand for anything with gameplay and/or difficulty similar to Dark Souls. Might be a whole discussion in itself right there.
I LOVED Ixion. Reminded me of games like Theme Park World but with narrative choices and chapters with challenges that acted like thresholds to break through with my smarts.
Geist is a Puzzle Game Shooter; You play as a scientist on a military extraction team. You have a gun, there are enemies blah blah. But starting on the second stage you are caught by your foes, subjected to an experiment and turned into a Psedo ghost, a real ghost sees it and busts you out and you are now haunting the facility of your foes trying to get out and stop them. You can possess often used inanimate objects and afraid people, so setting up a host is vital to passing each stage, and you are playing a shooter game from a new perspective, the perspective of the puzzle game. At a certain point I realized I was an untouchable observer trying to set up puzzle objects while my enemies were a bunch of meat-heads just playing a shooter game. Maybe I’ll spoke and possess one of them later to mess with them after I finish setting up this light puzzle using these statues holding the reflective disks.
I was so thinking: Hey, that sounds a lot like Against the Storm. Though I'm not really invested in the individual, more that there's enough of each specialization. If they added character progression for each citizen !!! then we'd be there.
Great watch! I think there's some definite power in bending genres, and the potential benefits of adding new systems - provided we, as players, can avoid the dis-junction of incorrect expectations. To continue with the "city builders and risk" idea, another game that fits that mold (albeit in more of a mid-point between traditional city builders and the ones in the videos) is Farthest Frontier. It's a city builder with combat. Yes, there's an optional pacifist mode, but that only removes the human threat - not, e.g., wolves preying on your far-flung resource sites. The way it works in that game is that settlement size + settlement wealth = higher likelihood- and higher size bracket of- raids. Initially, it may be three poorly armed bandits raiding your warehouse. Later in the game, it might be a fully-equipped mercenary army with siege equipment demanding X gold in Y time, lest they raze your city to the ground. It's a dynamic approach to difficulty that increases it as you succeed more, and decreases it after you're thrashed. While this reduces the likelihood of reaching an unstoppable failure point (though god knows animal attacks, disease, and hypothermia have reduced me to a sole survivor at least once), it does add pressure. This decreases your ability to optimize and (as noted in the video) the *pressure* to optimize. Yes, the game lets you move most buildings for free, but they still take time to move- and can you afford to lose access to that building, or the labourers moving it- when raiders are breaching your walls? After all, this game lets you directly issue movement and attack commands for everyone - and maybe your soldiers would benefit from back-up via the unarmed masses.
The first genre breaking game I ever owned is still one of my favorites, Thief: The Dark Project and Thief 2: The Metal Age. The game looks and functions like a first person shooter. But it was the first game to be all about sneaking and avoiding combat while progressing toward the goal. In Thief 2 on hardest difficulty, you aren't allowed to kill anything other than zombies and animals; no dead people or the level would end suddenly with a fail screen.
One game that's always made me do a double take are the pokemon snap games. They are a first person shooter, but Through the eyes of a photographer instead of a gunner.
Fun fact: There is a camera in Fallout New Vegas that works like a weapon, basically firing an invisible projectile that does no damage but counts things that are part of its quest as photographed when they get hit. However, shooting a person with it still counts as an attack.
Rune factory 5 has alot of issues but its a dungeon crawling/farm simulator rpg with light crafting and I found it to be worth a play through. The npc personalities follow the tropes but were surprisingly fun none the less.
I really liked Ixion, my main complaint was that there's very little replayability. Once you've figured out the basic mechanics and beaten it once there's no real incentive to play it again.
Tower Defense is a fairly simple genre - build defenses that have to kill enemies moving along a predetermined path before those enemies get through. However, there are a few games that make notable changes to this formula. Plants vs. Zombies is a tower defense game with two major tweaks: the defenses are built right in the enemy's path, and can be destroyed by the enemy; and the resources for more defenses comes primarily from the Sunflower, which has no combat ability. This turns Plants vs. Zombies into a strategy game with a growable economy - you have to balance dealing with the early threats with planting enough sunflowers to fund your late game defenses, much like full on Real Time Strategy games like Starcraft. I have frequently seen Creeper World tagged as a tower defense game, even though it has very little in common with tower defense. Here, your description of surface level description vs. underlying assumption is at its fullest. Your units in Creeper World are towers thematically, and they spend a lot of their time being stationary and firing at nearby units, but the game plays more like an RTS against a liquid. In tower defense, the key word is defense. In Creeper World, that's only the first half of the mission. Villainous is an online game that flips the script - you're the enemy in a tower defense game, and you have to make an army that will walk past preplaced towers that get stronger with each wave. Villainous uses tower defense as its template, which helps give the player an intuition on how to optimize it (which towers would be best to disable, what units to upgrade, etc.), but the actual game is more of an optimization game with a heavy emphasis on upgrades.
Wasn't DotA and Lol a variation of tower defense? Also, I think the mobile game Arknights made a lot of interesting changes to the tower defense formula.
Against the storm is really built around the struggle to get everything working. Once the town is running smoothly, its over and you win. In short you have to hit a surplus early, then expand out into a danger. Use the surplus the over come the danger. Utilize the resources there are start planning to deal with the next expansion trial.
I definitely feel like City Builders, and maybe even more generally 4X games, are on the cusp of a major innovation, or are about to inspire one at least. I realized the other day while playing Terra Nil that its gameplay was resonant of that of the Anno games, in that most of the game has the same sort of optimizing building placement gameplay, and I wouldn't have initially clocked those as being similar.
It makes sense that games derive their genres based on mechanics. Mechanics being the central core of a work is what separates a game from an interactive art piece. But we may need to derive some sort of alignment chart style system for describing sub genres
For having playing 168 hours of against the Storm at this point, (and recently replayed and finaly finished Frostpunk), I'll be honnest, Against the Storm is addictive i love it but.. it almsot doesn't feel like a city builder sometime. Particulalry in tone and feeling. The fact that each game each colony you build will eventually be abndoned once you win/loose since you are effectively on a glorified timer and you're never building somethin that's meant to last or has an impact kind of run contrary to the city buuilding ich if that makes sense. By comparaison in frostpunk the real challenge the real consequence: the storm, doesn't trully appear untill the end of the game but when it does and yous urvive there is a real feeling of acomplishement. It's weird too because the lore of agaisnt the Storm really feel like it could be similar to Frostpunk, like you'd be building somethig t hat wille ventually have to stand against the floor and storm... But no instead you build these shody colonies to exploit as much resource as possible before they get wipped out by the great cyclical catastrophe so you cna unlock more metagame throgh the evolution fo the central city. It's weird but agaisnt the storm feel more like it's less agale ablut building things and moe about exploiting and harvesting if that make sense. And frnakly the sense of risk is that much more lesened in against the storm. Like the fact everything from building, people and colony feel more disposable emans when tragedy struck due to a bad even youc ouldn't resolve enough, it feels sort of..e h. and llosing a game is jsut loosing one of many. That DOESN'T mean there ins't any challenge but it's, if that make sense, less the fear of loosing and more the challenge of winning if that make sense ? Likea t the diffculty of Prestige 2 Ia m curently at, if I loose a colony I jsut shrug, it's part fo the normal gameplay, there's no real stakes to loosing. Hwoever if I win a colony then I feel good because winnign is actually hard. By comparaison 'loosing' a game of frostpunk means seeing the city you've build for the last twenty or so hours die out in amatter of minute as all the people die the reosurces become depleted and everything shut down. Agaisnt the strom is very addictive, very gameplay focussed over lore, buta game of Frostpunk feels oh so much more memorable. I think there's a good balce tat could be struk somewher ebetween the two..
Islanders feels similar to a roguelike City Builder. It does have a lose state, but you only have certain buildings available each time you request for more, so optimization is key
One of few flip on genre games I've played was Atomicrops. A rouge lite which you one of five farmers must grow and protect your crops. You have to venture out to one of 8 fields, to find seeds, items and animals. It's main twist is well, it mashes together a top down shooter and farming sim, to in my opinion, mixed results. Both mechanics are usually separate and rarely are put to close together, though when they are placed closely together, for example the final boss, the corpse-a-copia, it's a really complex and rather thrilling to navigate. Unfortunately items that make a farmer, and a fighter, rarely ever intersect more than a simple resource or tangential relation (like speed and recharge), making it so you often have to pick between obliterating every enemy in existence or making a quintillion dollars. definitely worth checking out, despite my criticism, I actually think it's really fun and is generally a ridiculous ride from start to finish, filled with cheap puns as bosses, unusual guns, and a transactional marriage system, no real story though, your just trying to make sure no one starves.
I can't recall the game right now, but the other day I played a game that I really struggled to pin down a genre on, and eventually realized it was using fps mechanics, but was a competly different genre. I really liked it, but it clued me in that we should probably separate mechanics groupings, aesthetic groupings and vibe/feel groupings.
One genre that really needs a set of definitions is "roguelike". For me, "roguelike" specifically means a dungeon-based, turn-based game; based on my growing up on Larn, Angband, and ToME. I call other games that most people call "roguelike" "Procedural run-based"; because that is to me what they have in common: procedurally generated, based on making runs through the game - and while that includes roguelikes, it also includes games like Against the Storm (sorted for me as a "run-based" "builder"), Transcendence ("Run-based" "Space"), and Conquest of Elysium ("Run-based" "strategy").
Procedural run-based just doesn't roll of the tongue the same way as roguelike tho and in a way it is a ode to rogue. quake started competitive fps but it will not be remembered as such by the wider audience
There is some push to call those games rougelite. But it had a hard time to be adapted (and to be fair it's also a terrible name). One problem is that most people don't even know what rouge is. Everybody would protest if I called Call of Duty a DooM Clone.
@@RFTL It is my understanding that "RogueliTe" games are ones in which there is some degree of meta-progress: games like Rogue Legacy or Against the Storm where you build up over time - often with some meta-story that you are working on. This contrasts with "RogueliKe"; which are strictly run-based, with little or nothing carried between runs.
Stacklands, a resource management card game... where the cards are physical and push each other around. So it goes from the precise sorting plate spinning of, say, Cultist Simulator, to a messy table of cards vaguely where they should be, making you search through the haphazard stacks for what you need every time something pushes them around, looking like my desk in real life actually!
>first city-builder in the video >it's ixiom Isn't that more of an RTS game? >hardcore city-builders >anno What? Anno is just long, not hard. >second city-builder >it's against the storm That's a straight-up RTS game.
Sprinkling in good and bad sides to events can make the genre exciting. A sudden windfall results in corruption. A natural calamity comes with foreign aid. "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same"
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Thanks for watching!
Have you played "planet crafters"? If you enjoyed those two you'll enjoy this one.
I'm shocked that Extra Credits doesn't have a review of the pride and madness that is Dwarf Fortress.
♫ I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole ♫
♫ Diggy Diggy Hole ♫
♫ Diggy Diggy Hole ♫
Frost punk. Very good game. It has child labor! It’s also very cold. In all seriousness it has a very good story! You guys should play it!
I felt as if Frost Punk was almost flipped on the expectations. I expected to be playing an RPG as a city leader, and essentially got a really hard city builder. It has been one of my favorite gaming experiences to date.
It's not a city-builder. It's a puzzle game. It's too hard to allow free expression but lacks any RNG elements so you're stuck to discovering or puzzling out the ideal path (and there is one). It's a puzzle game designed to look like a city-builder but it doesn't really play like one. I consider it worse than This War of Mine, which was their freshman outing.
Ixion is pretty much Frost Punk in a different dress.
I wish there was a city builder with the concentric circle shtick of Frost Punk without being so dire and full of ticking clocks. That element of the gameplay is what makes my brain light up.
Yep. Frostpunk absolutely belongs in this category as well, especially with the later scenarios and even more so on hard mode. Most normal mode players may not know this, but if your city morale stays low enough for long enough you get exiled in the snow and die. The push into the faith and authority civics trees become necessary because conditions get so bad everyone dies without a bit of authoritarianism. The game is very bleak, and downright brutal to play.
Honestly I went in the reverse lol! i thought it was just going to be a city builder but instead i got an insane story full of peril and the amazing feeling of overrcoming problems (and seriosuly testing my ethics)
A lot of people mentioned Frost Punk as a great example of City Builder which is not chill. I wanted to add Mini Motorways as a good example of a game which almost switches as you play it starting as cozy and chill logistics game, but as the game progresses it starts getting out of control as you try to feverishly adapt to new building which ultimately leads to your demise as you fail to meet the growing need of transportation. And also Darkest Dungeon is a good example of RPG where you can easily lose your high-level heroes - a concept which is rare to see in party-based RPG games, and generally such a thriller gameplay is rarely associated with RPG genre.
You'd think something called *Frost* Punk would be *chill*
@@guaymaster it's freezing
Frostpunk’s endless mode is absolutely where that problem is. It takes a slightly longer time than a standard campaign to get boring.
Frust Punk may not be chill, but it's certainly chilly
Thinking about what defines "genre" and "genre expectations," I've fallen back to using two terms instead of just one. In literature, there's "genre" but there's also "form." Poetry, for an example, has genres like romances, pastorals, allegories, etc. but it also has forms like sonnets, free verse, ballads, etc. The genre defines expectations of setting, theme, content. The form defines expectations of structure, mechanics, and craft. The reading experience is shaped by both, of course. I think this holds true for games, but it's common to lump both together into the one term "genre" instead of preserving the two as distinct concepts. If we think of city builders as a "genre," then that would suggest games that feature cities, urban systems, economics and demographics, etc. in their *content.* But if we think of city builders as a "form," then that would suggest certain mechanical features such as low risk, long strategy, creative freedom, even maybe more specific than that, such as interacting with a map, placing or designating buildings, etc. I think games like Ixion or Against the Storm are using the genre of city builder but their forms are something very different. Bringing formal expectations to a game, especially where difficulty (arguably the greatest factor in splitting an audience) is wrapped up into a form, because that game wears a certain genre seems to me to reveal why conflating the two concepts makes it harder to pitch game experiences to people.
Have you seen their video on Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics? It talks a lot about the same ideas of how mechanics can serve different emotions.
I honestly really like this idea! It makes sense that the interactive nature of video games can have a sort of system of genres that is more complex than other art forms, and this seems to be a reasonable way of going about it. The only question is how these are defined? Maybe we can take all of our current genres/sub-genres and have a definition for it as both a genre and a form, but i feel like there would be a better - more efficient - way of going about this. That's probably a question for a smarter person, or maybe persons, though ... idk
@@chillmadude I guess I'd think these get defined naturally by repetitive usage by designers. In other media, genres and forms develop over time as patterns of what content and what structures the authors/artists/etc. choose most frequently to use when communicating with their target audience. Or maybe more now by what markets well/is salable to a target audience.
Following your idea, I'd say city builders are "creative RTS".
They look similar to RTS games (planning down buildings, perspective) to some degree.
It's kinda like the base building part of an RTS stretched into a whole game, with the haste and direct control over units removed...
Hmm... Would "classic" metroidvanias be better described as "exploration performers"? They have basically all the mechanics of a platformer.
Interesting. I love your metaphore (I bet I am using that word wrong now) with poetry and the difference between Genre and Form. However I compeletely disagree on your application of this philosophy.
To me Genre is defining how you should feel playing the game.
Form is more about mechanics of the game. What will you do in the game.
So I would argue, that Ixion and Against the Storm are not City-builders as a Genre, however they use City-building as their Form....
...actually to be entirely honest I have played Against the Storm and I would say it's still City-builder, even as the Genre. It just adds the mechanics of roguelike/roguelite.
Given how you specifically mentioned high stakes and the consequences of early actions coming back to hit you in the end I am shocked you didn't talk about Frostpunk at all. The game focusses on people in crisis, with the player having to ensure the survival, lack of discontent and hope for the people. Every building has to be manned, people will tell the player about things and it makes it more emotional and it gives the player options that might be very effective but morally and ethically questionable at best.
SPORE goes pretty crazy with how the genres change as you progress through the game. Going from a single cell organism that is just trying to eat and grow. To an interstellar race creating trade routes and alliances with other life forms in the galaxy.
I really hope that something like Spore comes around again. I'd love an interesting and deeper evolution simulator with as much care put into it as Spore had.
Agreed. The issue was they spread themselves too wide without depth
I left one of the positive reviews on Steam for Ixion. Yes, it *looks* like a city builder, but what I call it is a "Crisis Management Simulator." You have a constantly changing situation presenting you challenges that you constantly have to respond to. And, as you said, it is possible to make a choice early on that comes back to haunt you hours later. Frostpunk is another good example.
I think this conundrum better demonstrates how weird video game genre categorization is. When I personally think of "city builder" I think of something like Cities; Skylines or Workers and Resources; Soviet Republic. Games where building infrastructure and connecting districts for efficient land use/resource distribution are the main goals. I think the games mentioned here are more like survival games where you play a community rather than a survivor. Like "This War of Mine" for example.
It is the case with almost any human concept. You learn a word by encountering examples but each of those examples are not quite identical. Still once you feel like you understand it is because you can imagine an example. You hear the word and have expectations, if you expect the right thing it helps you do the right thing, if your expectations (i.e. assumptions) are wrong, you will do the wrong thing. In a game it can be very frustrating, though I'm sure you can imagine situations with more serious consequences.
I think "This War of Mine" "Frostpunk" and "Ixion" are all the same company; so "survival games where you play a community" is clearly their preferred genre.
Frostpunk is a great example as well, a city-builder with a hard time limit, scaling difficulty and some critical yet very finite resources. That game made me feel so morbid. Also it's sound design and soundtrack slaps.
It also has a flexible enough system where there are some unique scenarios you can play that fundamentally change the way you must approach the problem.
The fact that a weather event has boss music in that game is amazing, and that boss music slaps.
@@ASpaceOstrich Very true
Frost punk just falls flat about 2 hours in when you figure the game out and can't lose anymore. It only works when you as a player are within a very narrow range of skill, because they took the exponential growth curve most city builders have and just ran with it without questioning it, when the difficulty curve should've actually been the exact opposite of what it is (more people should be harder to keep alive, not easier)
@@majorfallacy5926 It does lack depth in that regard. But the first few attempts at each scenario while you're still figuring it out is pretty great. I'm hoping with the sequel they'll address the longer term challenge aspect. Right now late game you can achieve post scarcity utopia if you're in an infinite scenario, but that could definitely be altered for the sequel.
@@ASpaceOstrich first *few* attempts? I finished my first attempt with one hospital bed for every single citizen and so many resources that I didn't have any more space to build storage. After that the scenarios I tried were interesting for maybe half an hour. And adjusting the difficulty doesn't help, because it pretty much just affects that first half hour.
Once you figure out that you can research 24/7 with 2 workshops and survived the early game you are pretty much settled for the rest of the scenario.
My favorite part of this video was the ineffective garrote. The rest of it was very entertaining too, but also informative and made me think more about the concept of genre.
Reminds me of Berzerk's "invincible bowtie", which does function as if the player character's head is just floating above their torso.
A Hitman/Berzerk game would be interesting, but that's just Wolfenstein (pre-3D) with a timer, innit?
Against the Storm solves what I see as two problems with the city builder genre: first it provides you with direction, basically from the start, beyond just feeding and housing your people.
Second, when you've stabilized and the game starts to get boring it says "Great, you won. On to the next one."
If you're looking for games that challenge the typical idea of their genre I'd recommend looking into outer wilds. I believe steam classifies it as a space exploration simulator. But it feels almost like a metroidvania (wherein as you progress through the game you unlock abilities that allow you to explore more of the map) however instead of a new ability you will be learning new information as you progress through, teaching you how to get to areas previously unexplorable. Truly a one of a kind experience that doesn't feel like anything else in the genre.
I'm shocked that you did an entire video about city builders with added consequences, and never once mentioned Frostpunk.
Seeing as how the video is nearly 10 minutes long, perhaps length was a concern due to how a longer video risks reducing viewership too much in their case.
Still I also agree, the two games they mention are rather recent but there have been a plethora of games in the same vein that have been released over the recent years, so I am leaning towards disagreeing with the point that this is some new/recent thing when in fact it has been going on for years, and anyone who has played any of those games would have noticed it by now.
A game I played on steam years ago, Banished, it's a city builder survival type game, I think either Markiplier or jacksepticeye played it. Your a group of exiles and your goal is to not starve to death
My game design teacher point out this flaw in how we define genres in games through mechanics. While mechanics are helpful they don't tell the whole story of what a game's experience is.
The alternative he showed was from a book where game genres were instead defined by the feeling the experience aimed to evoke in the player. It used very fancy academic terms that would never work in the broad zeitgeist but the proposed genres behind those terms were pretty good. Things like chill games with low stakes you just relax in, power fantasy games that are all about empowerment and agency and creative games about customisation, expression and putting a player's unique mark on the game world.
Perhaps what's needed is a marriage of the styles of genres.
A bit surprised you didn't mention Dwarf Fortress here. It's basically a city builder that does focus on the citizens, with deep simulation to make that work.
Rimworld is another great example of that type of game.
I've taken to calling those games colony sims rather than city builders. You don't do any actual building yourself; you manage your colonists and *they* do the building.
RimWorld isn't exactly a city builder - the genre name I've seen brandied about is colony sim - but it does similar things to IXION. And instead of playing as a god mayor building out of a tool box, you optimize the individual colonists, who execute your will to build, grow, and fight for the colony. And depending on the difficulty level, you mostly just watch them die. Definitely one worth looking at if your team hasn't played it already.
Seconded. Rimworld is a fantastic game. It's got a lot of the same elements that make Dwarf Fortress great but is much more approachable.
Still got a pretty steep learning curve, though.
You know, this is actually something that happens every time we add a 'genre' or a '-like'
Metroid-vania is a platformer-shmup with exploration and RPG elements
'Rouge-like' is a descriptor for when RPG elements are hidden behind RNG
A decade from now we are likely to see Ixion-like as a descriptor for "City-builder but dangerous" or something similar.
Remember kiddies: If one game steals your game's mechanics, it's a ripoff, if 100 do, it's a genre.
I guess this is why I enjoy Kingdoms & Castles so much. It's laid back for the most part, but also has dragons or vikings & ogres attacking you. Which forces you to build and design well thought out defenses.
I think THEY ARE BILLIONS is also an good example for high risk City Builder. Only one zombie in your base and it is Game Over.
Which to me made it immensely unsatisfying. Having absolutely zero room for mistakes means no room for experimentation.
@@Cross31415 there is plenty of room for experimentation.
It just isn't forgiving is all
One of the first games I ever played was a city builder called Caesar III. It is probably best known nowadays for the fan mods for it called Julius, and Augustus respectively. Unlike most city builders these days it's best known for its campaign as opposed to a sandbox mode. I don't even think it had a sandbox mode in its original form. Furthermore, on many of the maps you had to fend off invasions on a semi-regular basis. Furthermore, if you displeased Caesar enough he would send a seemingly unending army to raze your city. It is technically possible to fend off Caesar's army until the game effectively gives up on spawning enemy legions. I've seen it done precisely once, by my father no less.
AGAINST THE STORM! My current obsession. Nearly perfect!
You have 2 days to quell this ghost before he kills everyone in your settlement with a 'V' in their name
I find it interesting that many of the games I've looked at in the Visual Novel Database (VNDB) have core gameplay loops that are very firmly other genres but happen to use VN-like UIs for character dialog / dialog options. It's not even really a mechanic thing-you could do the exact same thing using an RPG games' UI and not have someone add you to the database-but players who actually view _UI_ as defining what belongs in the genre compendium.
Here's a genre people make wrong assumptions about and buck the trend with various aspects: RPGs.
A lot of people are talking about games that utilize RPG elements(level progression, character interaction, etc.) and there are RPGs that utilize aspects of other genres. For example, the Fallout series is an RPG that utilizes FPS mechanics.
They're in an interesting place, because they are classed as City Builders despite their risk profiles being closer to Base Builders like Rimworld or granddaddy Dwarf Fortress.
Ixion is fantastic! Amazing soundtrack too. I'd argue that games like it & Frostpunk are instead giving us a new-ish hybrid genre, namely the survival city builder. They're definitely borrowing from other genres, but the ones I've played have all been great so far.
Please PLEASE give us more episodes of "games that break the mold of X genre"
Against the Storm makes me want a 4X version of the formula so bad. The beginning is the strongest part of both of these genres, and the ability to go further once you've met your objectives to see how your build holds up is great too.
Terraformers is a turn-based 3x version of the formula. There's no warfare, but there's exploration, expansion, and exploitation somewhat like Civ. It's got the same sort of "timer" mechanic as AtS, where you have to keep from running out of support by working quickly and doing things that increase support. It plays a lot like a Euro-style board game, and depending on what type of game you pick, I've found a typical run lasts somewhere between 1-2 hours (or more if you're prone to analysis paralysis) though you can continue terraforming after winning a game if you want to.
Disco Elysium got a lot of negative reviews on Steam accusing it of being a Walking Simulator or Point and Click Adventure game, because it lacks the turn based or real time combat so expected from isometric CRPG genre. Something ZA/UM were explicitly set out to do and that informed majority of their design decisions and choices as seen through the thought cabinet.
Since everyone has mentioned Frostpunk already, I'll suggest another; Timberborn! A city builder set after humanity, with beaverfolk as the new dominant species; in addition to the usual housing/food/supply chain/leisure stuff of typical city builders, you also have wet and dry seasons. Preparing for these increasingly harsh droughts is important to your town's continued survival, with dams, reservoirs, spillways, hydro power, and the like.
I've tried several digital card games that end up feeling a lot more like tower defense games. They're basically tower defense games that have a random element to what units and resources you get. I guess they just present it as a card game because that is randomized format that a lot of people are familiar with.
You guys need to check out The Pale Beyond. It’s ostensibly a resource management game, but there’s a lot of cool narrative stuff that takes it in a different direction.
"It's hard. Dark Souls Hard."
Eh, more like Rimworld Hard. Failure to plan can lead to your death, but also the game can just sometimes say "Alright, you lose now".
The problem with genres in videogames is that we try to address characteristics in various layers simultaneously with a single category. In other media, like literature and film, 'genre' us used to describe the work mostly based on semantic content. But with games we also include the mechanics as part, and sometimes as the basis, of a genre. We should start splitting the categories of content, differently from the categories of mechanics or format.
I think one of the best examples of a genre mix in gaming would be the Spellforce franchise. It combines RPG elements, managing a small squad of heroes and exploring the world in squad with pitched RTS battles, and anything in between.
Streets of Rogue! It's a beautiful mash-up of the rouguelike and immersive sim genres. It slams the immersive world with interlocking gameplay systems that let you achieve objectives in a truly staggering amount of ways with a quick and snappy top-down rouguelike brawler to create the most viscerally enjoyable immersive sim I've played. After 6 years I'm still finding new ways to play a game that can be easily beat in an hour and a half. I say all this because the second game will be going in early access this year and it's far more ambitious with its scope. It deserves far more eyes on it and I think it's one of those games that could shake up the indie scene given the opportunity.
A major title that broke the mold of the time was Mass Effect, making an RPG shooter, but since it came from Bioware, expectations of what it was were already set
Islanders is my favorite city building game! It combines the love of growth and optimization with a stage system, where you have to get enough points out of your buildings to progress, meaning there is definitely a win or lose without a constant pressure necessarily. It's points system is so elegant, I think it's really more of a puzzle game that makes a city by accident, but it's designed so well that when you do well, what you create ends up looking really beautiful
I also enjoy this solid little title!
The Witcher 3: the adventure RPG that becomes the story of a travelling, Gwent playing gigolo who, every once in a while, slays monsters! :D
6:38 this picture is just too good.
something I think the New Wolfenstein games do pretty fantastically is take a classic FPS, even opening as a sort of alt-history WW2 fps, then pivoting hard into a stealth game, while still retaining mostly FPS controls and interfaces, which drives home very hard the sense of Blasko as an ex-soldier fighting against long odds.
Game that's already pushing the boundaries of its expected play experience? Sounds like Punch Out. Markets itself as a fighting/sports game, is actually a puzzle/rhythm game.
Which also seems like a missed opportunity for that whole "teaching fighting games is hard" thing in that you could build a tutorial that plays like a rhythm game. As you get into harder levels of the tutorial, you have the computer mix-up the cadence of their attacks, until you reach an indistinguishable point between random patterns and fighting a human opponent.
I feel like Frostpunk did this for me really well, its not terribly difficult but its no zen city builder.
Can yall do another games you might not have tried? I miss that series.
Genre mixing is the easiest way to make fun and quirky Indie / Unity games.
The short development time and play time allows for massive experimentation.
I'm shocked you didn't talk about Frostpunk. It's the strongest example of what you talk about in gaming.
There is already whole genre of survival city builders, and has been for quite some time.
For me, this video kind of swaps my interpretation of a city builder with the "Macro Resource Management" (or just resource management) genre. To me at least, examples like Frost Punk or space colony games that present an impending doom of sorts are specifically "Colony Survival" games, where there are also City builders that are the same thing without the immediate sense of danger, or RTS where the goal is direct Competition. Even RTS has its own subgenres, like the Galaxy-wide empire management, to Age of Mythology scale games, to games like FTL where the scale is tiny. Meanwhile a game like space-haven is very close, but in colony survival style. All of these games lie in the over-arching macro-resource management genre, so games that add a twist to a sim-city like city builder just change the game to a colony sim or rts. You build a city of sorts in all of these categories, with the difference being what the city is designed for, whether that is looking pretty and organized, or to rapidly overcome an opponent. These categories exist so we can have accurate expectations for games, and if a game is labelled as a known type but is another, its not a bad game but it does need to be relabeled. That's just my opinion though.
Great video, I love this channel's thought provoking topics!
Halfway the story I was expecting you to mention Frostpunk too :)
Before we begin, i would like to wave at nintendo's RTS "Pikmin" and their action shooter "Splatoon". I strongly believe genre warping is a major driver of progress and innovation in the industry, but when you do it, you have to be aware you're doing it and make sure to adjust things from mechanics to visuals to target demographic appropriately
City builders have completely split into two sects: city builders and city survival. One focuses on what you have mentioned as growth, and the other focuses on efficiency. I can play city skylines and not give a damn about my industry routes but i cannot play Frostpunk without care for my people’s needs to not DIE.
You could have also mentioned a lot of other strange city builders that i felt disappointment that were not mentioned like They Are Billions, a city defense of literal thousands upon thousands of ai zombies that strives for a balance of growing the city and walling it in
I LOVE to see the art of David Hueso. The composition, the style, simply fantastic!!
Dredge, while playing a lot like a much more casual and approachable Sunless Sea, is a very fascinating combination of fishing and horror game. Where escaping horrors or finding ways around them occasionally features in gameplay which is otherwise just chill and working your career as a fisherman.
The MMORPG genre is exactly like this. But people get way to caught up in the acronym and don't realize there are implied elements that were there from the beginning which made the genre.
There's no game that I know of that is explicitely about exploration. Exploration is often a mean to an end. Yet it's my favorite part of very different games. Xenoblade Chronicles X was more revolutionary to me than even BotW just because it adresses the idea of scale in open world, and it does it really well. It's an RPG where you can sneak where you want from the get go, even reaching end game places by accident, and it changes everything. Enemies are not HP sacks anymore, you observe them, learn their pattern like in a sneaking game when they are 50 levels above you. It makes the world feel alive and just reaching the next place a reward.
The Trauma Centre series is one of the most engaging rail shooters I've played. :D
K, so, Ooblets. The game is not only a farm sim, but also a monster collection game AND a TCG, all in one package that is presented to the players in the goofiest way possible. I love it so much!
I live genre mashups. Pyre (from Supergiant, the folks behind Hades) is the best Fantasy/Visual Novel/RPG/3v3 Basketball game you will ever play. Valkyria Chronicles is an Anime/Visual Novel/Turn-Based-Strategy/Third-Person-Shooter. Heck, Xcom 1 and 2 are kind of a city-builder mixed with a turn-based tactics game. Portal, as you mentioned, is an FPS/Puzzle. Good stuff.
That's the best description of Valkyria Chronicles I've ever heard. Well done!
Now to get back to figuring out how there could be *fish* at this latitude.
Against the Storm is the stargate atlantis sim i always wanted
In high school, I talked with my best friend about a first-person shooter rhythm game. He scoffed at the idea and said no one would play such a thing.
Later, in my 30's, there were at least 3 different games that hit those criteria.
Timberborn is a pretty good survival city builder. You are fighting progressively worse and worse droughts and have to figure out how to keep your colony alive.
Gonna have to point out here that the drought's the only challenge of the game, and is ridiculously easy to solve. Once you figured that one out, the only way your colony can mess up is if you overpopulate it.
I dunno if it's that hard to keep the colony going. Just expand the colony at the rate at which the population grows, and you'll be fine. Though, I have only recently come back to play the game, and the badwater mechanic could pose an issue. If a dam or leeve causes badwater to overflow, it could flood pure water rivers, choking the water supply, and in turn the beavers.
Hot take: Pokémon Snap is a FPS.
Not just because it's first person, but it is also a shooting game. A *photo* shooting game.
i'd like to mention Banished. a city builder that adds survival into the mix. maybe not as harsh as some others but it revolves around building a village that can survive. also it's funny that if everyone in the village dies, you can actually watch nature retake the territory of your village if you wait long enough
I'm reminded of something that happened to my Steam recommended list. It suddenly became filled with tons of those traditional dating sim visual novels. It took me a bit to realize why. It's because they're both tags on Persona 3 Portable. Which I guess isn't strictly wrong, but it really doesn't match why I play the game.
Oddly, this didn't happen with Persona 4 Golden on steam, because despite sharing near identical gameplay, it didn't recieve the Visual Novel tag.
The RTS genre is a prime example of this. In almost every RTS, you play a match based game where you start with builders, build up a base and attack an enemy in a cutthroat battle to the death. This creates a very competitive sport like environment where the player is encouraged to improve things like "APM" to become more efficient and build bigger, better armies faster. But what if we re-examined some of the assumptions that that genre has? What if the game didn't have to focus on being a PVP death match? What if we had a game that didn't have "matches" at all, but open persistent maps that you could join or leave at any point? What if a game was more focused on giving each player separate objectives that prevented them from fully trusting each other and encouraged sudden reversals in alliances? What if there were games that gave defeated players ways to rejoin and attempt to regain territory? Etc, etc.
There are some genres that should never blend without stress testing to see if they’d work.
We’d used to mod Minecraft to find out.
MOBA's and Tower Defense games both originated from RTS mods.
City builders without risk get really dull for me. I really enjoy looking after my pawns. I want them to be happy and prosperus.
Timber born can only be played on hard mode and even then it's pretty easy. Rimworld, surviving mars with some difficulty tweaks turned on, Kingdoms and castles (10/10), becastled, falllout 4 if play with the mods i play with, diplomancy is not an option, frost punk, rise to ruins, tropico... ish, stronghold, banished.
I have found that genre limits mechanics. Some of the best games I’ve ever played defy genres. Developing my own game, my team never considered genre in the beginning stages and had to basically figure out what we were for marketing (since Steam wants you to put tags)
Please discuss RPGS. I've been discussing with friends (politely) for years the nuances of RPG vs games with RPG elements. Like what precisely counts as an RPG? Has that changed? Are only plot and world building heavy games like Final Fantasy and Elder Scrolls RPGs or is the door open for games like Monster Hunter (which I think won RPG of the year a few years ago?) to be considered, despite not using experience points or having most of the other trappings of an RPG?
RTS, most rts nowadays are macro based, their reports meant to be fast units are meant to be lost, but what if we flip that instead of macro it's micro, like in XCOM how you build amd customize your squad. What if we focused more on units growing, the individual soilders. Their experience and skills. So while yes its no total war style with hundred of units but each part of your army moves and is equipped like a RPG.where each uni5 is special in Loadout and covers eachothers weaknesses . As opposed to the mass production style of now
I thought Ixxion was bad not because it was hard, but because it follows in the Frostpunk school of "city building" where it's not a city-builder at all. It has like Frostpunk (at the time of release) no random elements. City-builders come on a sliding scale of two things: Either it has no random and is sandbox and design oriented or it has random elements and you're trying to best play the board. These were puzzle games with one ideal solution. It wasn't what I wanted to play, and might be fine on its own, but yeah... not any kind of city-builder or survival game.
One current genre discussion I find fascinating is people trying to come to a consensus on what to call the genre of games inspired by VAMPIRE SURVIVORS. The game is very much its own new thing and doesn't neatly fall into easy categorization, while at the same time spawning dozens of imitators/homages.
I've heard it called a roguelike shoot 'em up, a reverse bullet hell, a "bullet heaven" since you're the one creating the bullets for the most part, and games that are like VS are often referred to as "survivors-like".
I also find it interesting when the name of an existing game becomes a genre -- like Rogue inspiring the Roguelike genre, Metroid and Castlevania SOTN inspiring the Metroidvania genre, and souls-like being shorthand for anything with gameplay and/or difficulty similar to Dark Souls. Might be a whole discussion in itself right there.
It occurs to me that there's an implied question there of "How many people need to rip-off a popular game before it becomes a new genre?"
I LOVED Ixion. Reminded me of games like Theme Park World but with narrative choices and chapters with challenges that acted like thresholds to break through with my smarts.
Geist is a Puzzle Game Shooter; You play as a scientist on a military extraction team. You have a gun, there are enemies blah blah. But starting on the second stage you are caught by your foes, subjected to an experiment and turned into a Psedo ghost, a real ghost sees it and busts you out and you are now haunting the facility of your foes trying to get out and stop them. You can possess often used inanimate objects and afraid people, so setting up a host is vital to passing each stage, and you are playing a shooter game from a new perspective, the perspective of the puzzle game.
At a certain point I realized I was an untouchable observer trying to set up puzzle objects while my enemies were a bunch of meat-heads just playing a shooter game. Maybe I’ll spoke and possess one of them later to mess with them after I finish setting up this light puzzle using these statues holding the reflective disks.
I was so thinking: Hey, that sounds a lot like Against the Storm.
Though I'm not really invested in the individual, more that there's enough of each specialization.
If they added character progression for each citizen !!! then we'd be there.
Great watch! I think there's some definite power in bending genres, and the potential benefits of adding new systems - provided we, as players, can avoid the dis-junction of incorrect expectations.
To continue with the "city builders and risk" idea, another game that fits that mold (albeit in more of a mid-point between traditional city builders and the ones in the videos) is Farthest Frontier. It's a city builder with combat. Yes, there's an optional pacifist mode, but that only removes the human threat - not, e.g., wolves preying on your far-flung resource sites.
The way it works in that game is that settlement size + settlement wealth = higher likelihood- and higher size bracket of- raids. Initially, it may be three poorly armed bandits raiding your warehouse. Later in the game, it might be a fully-equipped mercenary army with siege equipment demanding X gold in Y time, lest they raze your city to the ground.
It's a dynamic approach to difficulty that increases it as you succeed more, and decreases it after you're thrashed. While this reduces the likelihood of reaching an unstoppable failure point (though god knows animal attacks, disease, and hypothermia have reduced me to a sole survivor at least once), it does add pressure. This decreases your ability to optimize and (as noted in the video) the *pressure* to optimize. Yes, the game lets you move most buildings for free, but they still take time to move- and can you afford to lose access to that building, or the labourers moving it- when raiders are breaching your walls? After all, this game lets you directly issue movement and attack commands for everyone - and maybe your soldiers would benefit from back-up via the unarmed masses.
The first genre breaking game I ever owned is still one of my favorites, Thief: The Dark Project and Thief 2: The Metal Age. The game looks and functions like a first person shooter. But it was the first game to be all about sneaking and avoiding combat while progressing toward the goal. In Thief 2 on hardest difficulty, you aren't allowed to kill anything other than zombies and animals; no dead people or the level would end suddenly with a fail screen.
Frog Fractions is the quintessential example of mechanics setting expectations and then continued gameplay breaking those expectations
One game that's always made me do a double take are the pokemon snap games. They are a first person shooter, but Through the eyes of a photographer instead of a gunner.
Fun fact: There is a camera in Fallout New Vegas that works like a weapon, basically firing an invisible projectile that does no damage but counts things that are part of its quest as photographed when they get hit. However, shooting a person with it still counts as an attack.
Rune factory 5 has alot of issues but its a dungeon crawling/farm simulator rpg with light crafting and I found it to be worth a play through. The npc personalities follow the tropes but were surprisingly fun none the less.
Dungeon Keeper 2!!!! Takes "city building" and adds FPS action and it's just awesome!! Also, exactly what genre is Btutal Legend?
I really liked Ixion, my main complaint was that there's very little replayability. Once you've figured out the basic mechanics and beaten it once there's no real incentive to play it again.
Tower Defense is a fairly simple genre - build defenses that have to kill enemies moving along a predetermined path before those enemies get through. However, there are a few games that make notable changes to this formula.
Plants vs. Zombies is a tower defense game with two major tweaks: the defenses are built right in the enemy's path, and can be destroyed by the enemy; and the resources for more defenses comes primarily from the Sunflower, which has no combat ability. This turns Plants vs. Zombies into a strategy game with a growable economy - you have to balance dealing with the early threats with planting enough sunflowers to fund your late game defenses, much like full on Real Time Strategy games like Starcraft.
I have frequently seen Creeper World tagged as a tower defense game, even though it has very little in common with tower defense. Here, your description of surface level description vs. underlying assumption is at its fullest. Your units in Creeper World are towers thematically, and they spend a lot of their time being stationary and firing at nearby units, but the game plays more like an RTS against a liquid. In tower defense, the key word is defense. In Creeper World, that's only the first half of the mission.
Villainous is an online game that flips the script - you're the enemy in a tower defense game, and you have to make an army that will walk past preplaced towers that get stronger with each wave. Villainous uses tower defense as its template, which helps give the player an intuition on how to optimize it (which towers would be best to disable, what units to upgrade, etc.), but the actual game is more of an optimization game with a heavy emphasis on upgrades.
Wasn't DotA and Lol a variation of tower defense?
Also, I think the mobile game Arknights made a lot of interesting changes to the tower defense formula.
Against the storm is really built around the struggle to get everything working. Once the town is running smoothly, its over and you win. In short you have to hit a surplus early, then expand out into a danger. Use the surplus the over come the danger. Utilize the resources there are start planning to deal with the next expansion trial.
I was waiting for you to mention against the storm. That game has taken up so many hours of my life.
I definitely feel like City Builders, and maybe even more generally 4X games, are on the cusp of a major innovation, or are about to inspire one at least. I realized the other day while playing Terra Nil that its gameplay was resonant of that of the Anno games, in that most of the game has the same sort of optimizing building placement gameplay, and I wouldn't have initially clocked those as being similar.
It makes sense that games derive their genres based on mechanics. Mechanics being the central core of a work is what separates a game from an interactive art piece. But we may need to derive some sort of alignment chart style system for describing sub genres
For having playing 168 hours of against the Storm at this point, (and recently replayed and finaly finished Frostpunk), I'll be honnest, Against the Storm is addictive i love it but.. it almsot doesn't feel like a city builder sometime.
Particulalry in tone and feeling. The fact that each game each colony you build will eventually be abndoned once you win/loose since you are effectively on a glorified timer and you're never building somethin that's meant to last or has an impact kind of run contrary to the city buuilding ich if that makes sense. By comparaison in frostpunk the real challenge the real consequence: the storm, doesn't trully appear untill the end of the game but when it does and yous urvive there is a real feeling of acomplishement. It's weird too because the lore of agaisnt the Storm really feel like it could be similar to Frostpunk, like you'd be building somethig t hat wille ventually have to stand against the floor and storm... But no instead you build these shody colonies to exploit as much resource as possible before they get wipped out by the great cyclical catastrophe so you cna unlock more metagame throgh the evolution fo the central city. It's weird but agaisnt the storm feel more like it's less agale ablut building things and moe about exploiting and harvesting if that make sense.
And frnakly the sense of risk is that much more lesened in against the storm. Like the fact everything from building, people and colony feel more disposable emans when tragedy struck due to a bad even youc ouldn't resolve enough, it feels sort of..e h. and llosing a game is jsut loosing one of many. That DOESN'T mean there ins't any challenge but it's, if that make sense, less the fear of loosing and more the challenge of winning if that make sense ? Likea t the diffculty of Prestige 2 Ia m curently at, if I loose a colony I jsut shrug, it's part fo the normal gameplay, there's no real stakes to loosing. Hwoever if I win a colony then I feel good because winnign is actually hard.
By comparaison 'loosing' a game of frostpunk means seeing the city you've build for the last twenty or so hours die out in amatter of minute as all the people die the reosurces become depleted and everything shut down.
Agaisnt the strom is very addictive, very gameplay focussed over lore, buta game of Frostpunk feels oh so much more memorable.
I think there's a good balce tat could be struk somewher ebetween the two..
I think citybuilders with risk is already a thing, it is just really niche.
Islanders feels similar to a roguelike City Builder. It does have a lose state, but you only have certain buildings available each time you request for more, so optimization is key
Haha! Been playing Against the Storm and it is nice to see it get some love! The new Fox race are my besties!
One of few flip on genre games I've played was Atomicrops. A rouge lite which you one of five farmers must grow and protect your crops. You have to venture out to one of 8 fields, to find seeds, items and animals. It's main twist is well, it mashes together a top down shooter and farming sim, to in my opinion, mixed results. Both mechanics are usually separate and rarely are put to close together, though when they are placed closely together, for example the final boss, the corpse-a-copia, it's a really complex and rather thrilling to navigate. Unfortunately items that make a farmer, and a fighter, rarely ever intersect more than a simple resource or tangential relation (like speed and recharge), making it so you often have to pick between obliterating every enemy in existence or making a quintillion dollars. definitely worth checking out, despite my criticism, I actually think it's really fun and is generally a ridiculous ride from start to finish, filled with cheap puns as bosses, unusual guns, and a transactional marriage system, no real story though, your just trying to make sure no one starves.
Inscryption is a game that has a hard time fitting into one genre
Against the Storm is very fun
I can't recall the game right now, but the other day I played a game that I really struggled to pin down a genre on, and eventually realized it was using fps mechanics, but was a competly different genre. I really liked it, but it clued me in that we should probably separate mechanics groupings, aesthetic groupings and vibe/feel groupings.
One genre that really needs a set of definitions is "roguelike". For me, "roguelike" specifically means a dungeon-based, turn-based game; based on my growing up on Larn, Angband, and ToME. I call other games that most people call "roguelike" "Procedural run-based"; because that is to me what they have in common: procedurally generated, based on making runs through the game - and while that includes roguelikes, it also includes games like Against the Storm (sorted for me as a "run-based" "builder"), Transcendence ("Run-based" "Space"), and Conquest of Elysium ("Run-based" "strategy").
As someone who grew up playing actual Rogue, hard agree.
Procedural run-based just doesn't roll of the tongue the same way as roguelike tho and in a way it is a ode to rogue. quake started competitive fps but it will not be remembered as such by the wider audience
There is some push to call those games rougelite. But it had a hard time to be adapted (and to be fair it's also a terrible name).
One problem is that most people don't even know what rouge is. Everybody would protest if I called Call of Duty a DooM Clone.
@@RFTL It is my understanding that "RogueliTe" games are ones in which there is some degree of meta-progress: games like Rogue Legacy or Against the Storm where you build up over time - often with some meta-story that you are working on. This contrasts with "RogueliKe"; which are strictly run-based, with little or nothing carried between runs.
Stacklands, a resource management card game... where the cards are physical and push each other around. So it goes from the precise sorting plate spinning of, say, Cultist Simulator, to a messy table of cards vaguely where they should be, making you search through the haphazard stacks for what you need every time something pushes them around, looking like my desk in real life actually!
>first city-builder in the video
>it's ixiom
Isn't that more of an RTS game?
>hardcore city-builders
>anno
What? Anno is just long, not hard.
>second city-builder
>it's against the storm
That's a straight-up RTS game.
Watching hitman attempt to choke someone with no neck made me laugh harder than I thought I would!
Sprinkling in good and bad sides to events can make the genre exciting.
A sudden windfall results in corruption.
A natural calamity comes with foreign aid.
"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same"