Imo the key take away from Souls-inspired games I see are: - Well placed checkpoints between hordes of enemies, which you need to activate manually. - You lose experience/currency on death, which you may collect after respawning, from the same location you lost it. - The surprise factor from enemy placements with maybe some subtle foreshadowing preceding it. - Combat mostly designed around 1v1 fights. - Enemies respawn after saving at a checkpoint, or leaving and entering an area. - "Door does not open from this side".
Aka, one of my favorite "SoulsLike" games, NOT from From Software, but Bandai Namco, Code Vein. Sure, they have an option, (not originally mentioned as an option, but an option nonetheless,) to go with or without a Partner, which actually has good AI, but it ticks off everything in this list, has it's own lore, and that lore even ties in to another one of their games, which ISN'T based on Dark Souls.
Isn't that just action RPG with a fixed save systems? Try the old Runescape with permadeath. Has got everything you point out but no saving. Even better right?
It's no surprise it took the Dark Souls' developer to innovate their own design. Bloodborne is still the same game in essence, but the simple switch to offensive over defensive mechanics was enough to make it original in it's own right. The issue I have with games like The Surge is that it doesn't justify some of it's mechanics such as respawning. Dark Souls builds the bonfires and death into it's lore while The Surge just happens to have it.
That is the biggest problem for me with Souls-likes and the biggest area they stumble in - I enjoy them a lot and I think Lords of the Fallen and The Surge are bloody great but the hand waving of lore for certain mechanics is bloody frustrating. Why can my character revive? How are my healing items refilling? What's the rest of the game's world like? It's infuriating how they skip out on something Dark Souls and Demon's Souls did so well.
You keep posting about how the video creator doesn't "get it" but I think it might be you who can't see the forest for the trees. People keep playing BECAUSE of the mechanics. The world and the atmosphere are a large part of the appeal for the first couple runs, after that you play for the gameplay. You can go on and on about how important the "feeling" is, but at the end of the day, the community exists because of the appeal of the mechanics. You also ignore completely how important the mechanics are to the over-all feeling. That's why it's a great game, because the individual elements aren't distinct, they all come together in support each other in a cohesive whole.
EvTav Were talking about what makes a good game, and a genre definer. Nioh has good gameplay, doesn't mean it's a good game. And people certainly didn't just play dark souls for the gameplay. Ds1 pvp is dead, ds2 pvp is dead, and ds3 is close to dying. There's only so much you can do with a linear non radiant campaign. Not even Enb plays dark souls anymore. There maybe a tiny few hold outs that think dark souls gameplay is what made it amazing but they are leaving out the whole pie.
EvTav Stop only reading what you want to read. I NEVER said that any part should be prioritized above another. I'm annoyed he thinks that important parts like environment story telling should be left out if you are trying to make a game as good as dark souls.
11:38 and ironically the only guys creative enough to make a soulslike game entirely different than the landmark ones...is From themselves, with Sekiro
冯裕洋 Sekiro is way different than dark souls The combat is way different doesn't have a stamina bar and it's mostly deflecting and damaging the enemy posture You don't lose all your souls once you die and then go back to get them but half of your money and EXP disappear It focuses heavily on stealth in sekiro something you never see in dark souls And you can't level up by using money but by using the memory of the bosses you beat
It's really frustrating going into Steam or other online game stores and having the "RPG" section be filled with every game that happens to have leveling and/or a skill tree.
Mordalon well, to be fair RPG is kinda of a shit not well defined genre besides the Experience and Stats. I mean, if you pick an undeniable Western RPG and compare it to a undeniable Japanese RPG, the only thing that they have in common is really the Exp and stats, at least that's how I see it
Especially because the term "Role-Playing" refers to acting or making choices and playing your role as a team-member, like one always does in Dungeons and Dragons, which it was named after, but most "RPGs" are single player and may or may not have choices.
Totally agree here. Just look at Madden NFL Football. EA has already added leveling player stats and Madden 18 will offer a mode to follow a high school player's rise to the NFL. How long before it's considered an RPG?
Yeah a health potion is obviously just a renamed estus flask and not a item name you see in almost every fantasy game with a health bar nah what ya talking about
I think he meant an item that has limited uses, but more uses can be gained from upgrades, and all uses are regained upon resting. Where as in most games, Once you use a health potion, That particular potion is used up and gone.
The big difference between Doom and Dark Souls is that Doom spawned an entire new genre where as Dark Souls is spawning a new subgenre much like how Metroid spawned a subgenre of the 2d action platformer. This is the big reason that we had to transition away from calling FPS' "Doom Clones" but never had to transition away from calling Metroidvania games Metroidvania games.
Doom spawned the FPS genre because that is the game that popularized it and was generally the mold for later intries for a time. If you want to go back to prototype FPS' then something even earlier than Wolfenstein would be Mazewar.
Doom gave birth to the modern cognition of PC era of gaming/market that later was translated in consoles markets. now for a game to be so popular to deserve it's own genre it's hard, especially with the "washing"of such games from light-critics ignoring actual qualities of games from a social, historical and artistic point of view. if not we would have "Nocturne-like" genre (survival horror with fixed camera and focus on action) or "just cause-like" (open world with focus on destruction)... instead we have Resident Evil-clones (that ironically is a clone itself) and GTA-Clone
You're right in that Wolfenstein was a prototype to Doom, but that doesn't mean it's the progenature of the genre as a whole. Think of it like Minecraft versions; Wolfenstein was Beta 1.7 and Doom was Minecraft release version.
Sure if you go by that definition then clearly it was Mazewar, which came out nearly 20 years before even Wolfenstein. Under your definition a ton of random games have claim to being the father of FPS, but when you take popularization into account one clear winner comes out which clearly had the most impact on the genre.
Because the beat and shoot in ****** 'em ups is an action you perform, you don't soul anyone up in souls game, maybe if you count spells like Soul Spear as souling someone up but that's not the core of the genre.
a soulslike series is just a reverse dynasty warriors, where you're able to get flung into the air like paper and the enemies are the OP avatars of gods.
Imagine that mmo. You're just one amongst hundreds and there's just one AI super enemy out there that can tear through multiple people like they're nothing.
Even as a kid i found the first three Crash games easy, with only a couple of levels being somewhat challenging. Some people are really blowing the difficulty of these games out of proportion.
Lot's of people seem to be getting the wrong idea of a genre. It is a descriptor, something used to describe games of similar values. I would rather link a small set of games together rather then chuck them on the pile of 90% of all games that is "Action Adventure", because that isn't helping anybody.
It's the very essence of the descriptor that hinders innovation and gameplay development, not necessarily that we associate games within a certain category based in similar categories. However I'm not certain to what extent a game can be innovated beyond what games have the force of influence during a period of development. I would assume that there's a lot of bandwagon jumping on successful game designs which directly associates with the lack of innovation within a certain genre pool. In addition I don't know how easy it actually is to create a game which is completely new barring the basic principles derived from precursor games which were successful; there is a mixture of economic and intellectual pressures which inhibit the growth of innovation.
Genres don't hinder innovation, setting out to make "a genre game" can though (although to be fair it can also do the opposite, if you set out to make a new game in a certain style but consciously bring in some fresh gimmick or spin to set it apart). That's on the designer side though, for the users genres are a powerful tool to allow people to find more of the things they like and avoid more of the things they dislike. So as long as the terms are intelligible and widely used enough there's really nothing at all wrong with bringing in more genre names to unify more sub-sets of works.
"When we reduce a game down to it's constituent components, dev's can copy them and end up with pretty much the same game as the original developer, but if we consider why those features were the way they were, and what sort of experience they lead to, devs can find different ways to give gamers that same feeling" - Mark Brown, 2017. This is something I've been speaking about lately, especially with the MMO Genre. There are lots of games which try to be World of Warcraft. But very few actually manage it. Weirdly, even Wildstar which is made by a lot of Vanilla WoW Developers, also misses why certain elements were addicting and successful (I actually wrote an article on Wildstar Housing about this)
The problem is mmo's are one of, if not the most capital-intensive genre to break into. Indie developers can get by and make a lengthy, story driven game without relying on AAA voice talent or motion capture, and it'll still be good, because those things aren't crucial to the experience, but only big name companies can afford the server costs and technical support staff, and the plethora other costs an mmo incurs. So the only ones left making mmo's are corporations. Indie devs make games with passion, because they want to. Corporations make games because they want to make money, which isn't inherently evil, but it means that they're constantly going off a formula to take as little risk as possible, and given mmo's substantial investment as it is, no company is willing to take the dive and try to break new ground on something that could fail. That's why every single korean mmo is pretty much exactly the same thing, it's an industry unto itself: Make an mmo cheaply and effectively, with shiny graphics and cosmetic wing accessories on a cash shop, throw in at least one "groundbreaking" new feature (tera's real time cobat, FLYFF's flying, blade and souls slightly different real time combat) to entice the audience TL;DR mmo's are a genre run by fiscally responsible businessmen with no margin for creativity or risk
I've had this discussion a lot with friends, most imitators of an iconic game try to make what they view it as, and usually miss the mark on what made it so good to begin with. You end up with a slightly empty game that is evocative of the original, but leaves you thinking "why don't I just play that instead". That being said I think Dark Souls and Bloodborne encompass what you were saying about taking a concept and making it a genre. I played both to completion and they still feel like entirely different games to me, you just have to look at some different boxes. This is how they would look in my book: Dark Souls - Intentional combat (make your swings count, and don't get too risky or you'll be punished) - Resource management (Set number of flasks, need them to last from bonfire to bonfire) - Fair patterned bosses (Bosses have set routines with obvious areas to attack) - Gear Weight management (Do I want more defense and less mobility, or more mobility and less defense) - Structural level design (Levels are designed with some semblance of realism and connect logically) - Sharp Increasing power level (start out weak, but get stronger in power and in sustainability as game goes on) - Under-doggedness (fights leave player feeling disadvantaged and afraid, shown in victory message "victory achieved") Bloodborne - Aggressive combat (Taking risks is rewarded, as health can be regained by attacking more) - Situational preparedness (all items have set quantities, and bringing the right items affects success dramatically) - High-difficulty bosses (Bosses attack with intensity and rarely give the player clear open windows to strike) - Gear optimization management (Gear has no weight, but bringing the right clothes/runes/weapons into combat is important) - Dreamlike level design (Levels are made with little sense of realism and do not connect as logically) - Light slope power level (Start out powerful, end feeling slightly more powerful, end bosses still 1-3 shot you regardless) - Power fantasy (You're out to hunt your prey, not survive against it shown in victory message "prey slaughtered") This is just a quick write up, but hopefully it shows how two games that start with the same concepts are approached and feel very different from each other. Ironically both are put out by the same studio, but hopefully other developers will catch onto the nuance and leave us with some interesting new places to push this potential genre.
bloodborne is not a powerfantasy. everything in the game is cohesively designed to make you feel contrasted by higher and higher levels of cosmic horror. power fantasies makes you play out repressed feelings with empowerment ("Rus-fo-da" in skyrim). bloodborne keeps you facing insanity without much power or abilities.
Or somebody make a new game but everyone calls it some genre it isn't just because it happens to have one aspect that for some reason is fucking copyrighted to a single game. If it's a large map to backtrack NO SHIT do I want a map telling me where I am. It's not metroidvania it's fucking Doom, they had the same thing and it's a simple fucking tool that's common no shit sensical to have in a large game. Do you want to play Ori And The Blind Forest without the damn map just so people stop calling it metroidvania!
I remember when people were still calling Demon's Souls a hack-'n-slash. My how time flies. To me these "bonfire games" have always been a combination of several other genres, namely hack-'n-slash, metroidvania, and rpg.
Except we're still in the clone phase. Once that settles down, we may find that there is no common thread except the hack 'n' slash. I wouldn't go quite that far but I think the only criteria are stamina management, animation priority and persistence on death. You add those features onto any third person hack 'n' slash (and rebalance damage, etc. so it doesn't feel shit) and the _primary gameplay loop_ will feel like Dark Souls. That's why I prefer the term "tactical/strategic hack 'n' slash".
That's interesting! The combat works as a hack 'n slash, the story and level management work as a rpg, and the connected world works as a metroidvania, I never thought in that way until now.
No, Because Minecraft is a sandbox game cause you're allowed to manipulate the world to liking. Unlike Roguelikes which consist "in n out" approach to levels generated.
"wow I died and I have to start again ? It's just like Dark Souls !!!! Wow, you mean there are enemies that can kill you ? Just like dark souls !!" Dark souls is one of my favorite game and is both innovating and inspired by former games. But it managed to create something so unique by mixing differents mecanism and adjusting all of them together so well. but right now, people compare everything to it for no reason just because it has something in common with dark souls: very mysterious story without any clear backside story but the clues in the world, Great interconnected level design, epic music or huge boss fight, even HP potions. But hey, dark souls hasn't invented any of these. It just used it so well to create strong feelings and game sensations. There is no such things as a Dark souls genre. Even DKS 3 was close to a DKS 1 clone but it stilled managed to distinguished itself to be an excellent game. According to me, Dark souls hasn't invented things like zelda invented 3d mechanics gameplay or "Pong" invented pvp. It perfected already existing mechanics and put them together to make a coherent whole. So you can't create a complete new genre based on Dark Souls.
it doesnt matter if clones for me if you make games like dark souls,sekiro.others are awesome for me too,like i said on my other comment ,darksiders 2-3,castlevania lords of shadows 2,hellblade senuas sacrifice,jedi fallen order,code vein,ghost of tsushima.all of them have roll,lock on,different plots and stuff.try them ,i see you like dark souls i think you will like those too,so i dont mind cloning or similarities as long as there good...
Yea the original resident evil had back tracking interconnected level design that really made short cuts a value. It also progressed the story by way of in game items.
What they all miss in my opinion is that Dark Souls wasn't just about the combat. It was also about the ominous atmosphere, the not-in-your-face story telling, the realistic (and beautiful) armour sets and weapons, the highly unique dark fantasy setting, the unique level design, the multiple linear pathways (not quite open world) that give very specific and grueling challenges in between save points, and last but not least: the incredible and original role playing system of covenants and multiplayer. While the combat is brilliant, there is so much more that makes a "souls" game.
No, what they are missing IS the combat. Name me ONE OTHER GAME that has different swing heights/lengths and hitboxes so accurate you dodge something by crouching as you're doing a low attack. PLEASE I would like to know.
Sam Lowry The sound design in most Souls clones is also really mediocre. Sound plays a massive, underappreciated,role in the immersion factor of the world as well as the visceral feedback of the combat. Things like subtle ambient noises from the environment, the effect you hear when your weapon impacts a target, the growls and roars of the enemies, the rewarding and satisfying sound from parrying/riposting someone - they all contribute to what makes the Souls experience so damn outstanding, and yet the developers that are supposedly "inspired" by FromSoft's formula rarely consider or acknowledge it
Things to take from Dark Souls: 1) Subtle storytelling with a sense of grounded facts. From characters, sceneries, and items. 2) World building, how everything ropes together, making the world believable. 3) Engaging multiplayer communication, leaving long-term discussion going on *outside* the game. 4) Level design that awards keen-eyed observation, and ease in traverse. A lot of the general takes on 'soulslike' these days are something on the surface level. Dark Souls is not just about 'Z-targeting' combat or how hard and brutal it is, yet we very often see newcomers market their games like "hard and challenging like Dark Souls". That's a marketing buzzword at this point. Every games can be difficult in their own ways, not the Dark Souls way. Every game can do the points above their own ways, not just 'Z-targeting' way~
I for one have had my fill of the subtle storytelling and the nonstop "Everything is depressing and is fuck." atmosphere. But can't get enough of the z-targeting challenging combat, and minimum hand holding. But so far most Soulslikes bring that "fucked" atmosphere into their clone. Fuck me I mind as well go play Dark Souls if you're going to pull that shit.
Oreally , yea I totally agree with being over the bleak depressing atmosphere but addicted to that style of combat which is something my friends can't seem to comprehend when I try explaining it. I can't wait for more games that take aspects of this game (namely the combat) and put it into worlds that I long to inhabbit (like a Breath of the wild almost)
Hahahaha you see, that is why I insist using the name Dark Souls, without the word 'series'. I love Dark Souls, I like Dark Souls 2. Still, wanna give props to the DLC levels of the sequel. Lava is a tricky one, put them into a different space!
For sure, man, haha. Looking at individual games, and putting rose-tinted glasses aside, I can't *really* fault Dark Souls 1's world, and there only the one issue I have with Dark Souls 2. And to be fair, I think all the DLCs across all the SoulsBorne games have come through easily, being put into completely new areas. Ultimately a good choice, in my mind - makes the world still feel cohesive.
10:16 small something i would like to add. Once there is a formula the marketing team will use that too predict sales. In other words games that do not follow the formula will be regarded as dangerous investment.
The interesting thing about Dark Souls specifically is that it captures a lot of the exploratory essence of Metroidvanias with its interconnected world, bosses and items. For a while I actually thought of Dark Souls as the first proper 3D Castlevania game. Great video! Thanks for the tasty food for thought.
+Belphegor666Iam Initially Souls games can feel aggressive like that, but you soon realize in these games that Souls are ephemeral and you can always get more. Suicide runs to certain items are a common strategy in subsequent playthroughs of Souls games, which is a major benefit to the high-level DLCs of Bloodborne and DS3 being accessible very early in the game, because you can just run past enemies and pick up the weapons you know where they are. Also, you learn to recognize ambushes and how to approach areas cautiously. While exploring may not be easy in Souls games, it's very much rewarded, because it's how you find shortcuts and unique weapons and other useful items, and sometimes even lore or important characters.
Would you say it's a 3D Metroidvania, or 3D Classic Castlevania? (the NES trilogy & super) Cuz while you're right in that it does all the things from the Metroidvania's, I say it's also a modern equivalent of the classic games. The old Castlevania games where designed in a way so that players who tried to rush through levels would inevitably die quickly due to the clunky movement and slow attacks, forcing the player to approach every situation with careful calculation and caution. Likewise in Dark Souls, the fact that you die easily from grunts, the frequent uses of ambushes and your long startup attacks, also force you to play defensively and safer with precise planning and calculation.
Short answer: Yes. Dark Souls is everything I love about both types of Castlevania games, while also brining it's own "flavour" to the table. Though, sadly, later DS games streamlined the world design in a way that removed it a bit to far from the SotN-style for my taste. (Demons Souls exists in a bit of a grey area, as although the world is separated by stages, all the stages are design with exploration in mind. Perhaps it can be likened to the different sectors in Metoid Fusion?)
really appreciate the re-done visuals and graphics in this. your content was always been impeccable and lately your editing style and obsessive details in videos have been outstanding. loved these dynamic transitions you keep introducing with that mirrors edge 1 to 2 roll transition, and this episodes thief torch fade to black transition. so i really welcome these new coloured backgrounds and bold serif typo. so nice seeing content that is both equally worth-wile to understand as it is to watch. keep up the good work mark.
This video is very relevant again after Sekiro's release and GOTY award. That game removes a lot of what is a staple of the series, like stamina management, stats and other RPG elements, to the point where some fans of the series even hated it. Most importantly, dodge is not very useful on it as it is on the Souls games. The influence of Souls can still be felt on it, but can every hard game with checkpoints and healing items be called a Soulslike?
@@adityaanuragi6916 Are you implying that the "feel" of Dark Souls is entirely based around dodging? Sekiro has plenty of elements in common with Dark Souls: environmental storytelling, branching paths, deliberate combat, a lonely and isolating atmosphere, limited healing uses that reset upon rest, challenging boss encounters, currency punishment upon death, etc. But it also has plenty of differences that set it apart from Dark Souls (and even Demon's Souls or Bloodborne): there's no corpse run mechanic, combat is much faster paced, there is less of an emphasis on dodging, blocking is discouraged in favour of parrying, level design is much more open and vertical, there are no classes or character customisation, no armor or weapon builds, there is a more set plot and character to follow. I think Sekiro is a great balance of a game that is clearly taking a lot of influence from Dark Souls but pushing it in a fresh and different direction.
I personally think that the Monster Hunter series is an interesting take on some aspects of this "genre". (though they are actually older) Respect towards the enemy is a central aspect of those games. They can take you down just as easily as you take them down. You can only win, if you think about what you're doing. If I were to define the core of this new genre, this would certainly be a part of it.
THANK YOU!!! thats the phrase i have been looking for ^^ "respect towards the enemy" its an aspect i realy miss in so many other RPGs... just rinning into a group of enemys and hacking them to bits is just... not the same.
That's definitely one aspect of Dark Souls. And also one of other games like Kingdom Hearts 2 FM Critical Mode (even though you can feel very powerful in it). It's when an expert who knows what he's doing can run circles around things for days but one mistake will kill you. It's essentially just a proper skill curve, and ends up giving you a similar satisfaction of accomplishment akin to learning to play a song on an instrument or getting really good at something else. I feel beating a difficult track on osu! - a rhythm game - is more similar to beating a Dark Souls boss than playing something like Dynasty Warriors. Even though the theme is much closer in the latter, it's not about precisely timed inputs and a great risk of failure.
That's absolutely right. When it comes to the three things Brown said might "define" the genre of souls-related games (action warm-ups, animation priority, stamina management), Monster Hunter pioneered all three of them, and I'm fairly certain From Soft has directly said they took inspiration from the series. Dark Souls could easily be considered a Monster Hunter-like, but with added RPG elements like a leveling system. I think the most useful concept in this video is breaking down genres into several different pieces, which can be mixed an matched for interesting games. The closer a game adheres to the list of genre conventions, the easier it is to classify, but it probably would feel less innovative. On the other hand, games with very few genre requirements can have a wide variety of different games in them, but that just means the terminology itself becomes less useful. Perhaps instead of basing FPS's on just two or three tropes, or defining "Soulslikes" with a huge list of ~15, we should focus on creating genre definitions with a number that's more manageable and useful, like... I dunno, five-ish? I loved Nioh, but that's just because I like DS, and I like the aesthetic. It's still a clone, because it adheres extra-strongly to the conventions laid out by DS, much more so than games that just happen to be in the same genre. But placing Monster Hunter in the same genre as DS and Nioh feels a bit weird, am I right? Even if the combat is similar, the overall differences in broad sections of gameplay are overwhelming. I dunno, I think I started rambling there.
respect towards the enemy is not a defining characteristic of Kingdom Hearts, especially if you have to point out a specific mode for it to be so. I never really felt like I had to respect the enemy in a *regular* playthrough of a KH game unless I was fighting some superboss at which point a lot of games demand you to respect the enemy.
I only have played world, but they have a similar feeling, specially with DS3 or Bloodborne. When I am in a high difficulty quests it is practically a Dark Souls with a new graphics with all the one shots I get when I make a mistake and because I play with bow and it is all about stamina management.
@@mariot8732 yeah but monster hunter is way older than dark souls and monster hunter world literally being the easiest in the franchise is odd to be compared to dark souls
Monster hunter has elements that the Souls game borrow but I wouldn’t classify it like a souls games otherwise horizon zero dawn would be a souls game too
Glad to see some love shown for Thief's contribution to the development of the Immersive Sim. It's not often mentioned in connection with this design philosophy, probably because it came before the seminal Deus Ex (a game which codified the style in many people's minds), but it's a great example of how this type of design can be applied in a different way than the typical "lethal or non lethal, stealth or combat, rpg character building" dynamic.
You shouldn't , because there is "Bonfire Studios". Formed by Rob Pardo and other devs that left Blizzard and the diablo Team. Stuff would get really confusing ^^
You make easily the most illustrative and insightful videos I have ever found on RUclips. Every few months, I come back to one of your videos and am yet again astonished at all you are able to communicate so sharply, and without the confused noise I hear in most other discussion. You seem to always find what really matters; thank you for sharing it with us.
really guys, Zelda Ocarina of time, lock on, dodge rolls, and collision based damage with pre-set animations for attacks. Dark souls took its combat from many early RPG's on ps1 and n64
...anyone remember kings field? it was a dark fantasy action rpg dungeon crawler with stamina management based combat made by fromsoft... before oot. the whole souls thing is nothing new. also rpgs existed on game consoles since the 70s so I'd hardly call 90s rpgs early
@@nasirbarbee5940 ... and FPS *is* a genre. I'm certainly not saying Dark Souls is derivative but I don't think it deserves to codify a new genre. If we got a sudden rush of Super Mario Odyssey clones, they'd still just be 3D platformers. That doesn't mean Super Mario Odyssey suddenly needs its own genre.
@@Robert399 okay if thats the case then why not just call metroid and castlevania reguler platformers ? Because those people who are looking for those types of games need to specify what it is they are looking for. Thats why metroidvania exist. Mario odyssey and crash bandicoot both 3d platformers. But both are different. Darksouls deserves its own genre because it has spawned a bunch of games made specifically for a type of player. You dont get the same thing from zelda twilight princess as you get from. Surge 2 or nioh the fact that we are even having this debate is foolish in my opinion.
This video also doesn't take into account people making "clones" to try grab onto a title's popularity to make a little more profit. I guess that's why we can look down on these game trends quickly sprouting up and have a negative backlash to them, calling them all "clones" or "(game title)like", no matter if their intentions are sincere or not. It is interesting that a genre is a group of works that have a similar principles, designs, or goals, yet games can focus on really complex, hyperspecific "sub-genere" where we have metriodvania or rogue like. Some times we can even use these words without knowing where they came from or why, but to describe an idea. I learned today about the origin of "rogue". Yet i used it to describe games that focuses on reparability through randomly generated factors. On a completely different note, I can't help but think of the time Totalbisucit was so made and irratated on the term "rogue like" he made an one hour video talking about and dissecting it. That was a while ago.... I might need to go back and watch that. This comment is everywhere. Congrats to you for reading... if you find it among the 2,413+ other comments :)
The thing about these "souls-like" games is that they are wholly uninspired. They saw Dark Souls and said "what if we did that but pretended it was our idea". At its core Monster Hunter and Dark Souls has similar combat. Scope the enemy out, understand it's move set, and beat the shit out of it until it dies. But they are completely different games. That's because they're each their own franchise. It doesn't matter who did it first. What matters is the game itself. Souls of the Fallen and Fallen 2: Sci Fi Boogaloo look intensely slow and boring. They also seem to be designed with difficulty in mind. Like the devs looked at DS and thought: "the fans like hard games, so let's make it really hard". DS is not a difficult game, it's meant to be challenging. Because it has its own set of mechanics and does its own thing. If you think DS and Bloodborne is hard, look at the people who can beat those games at SL1. Challenging =|= difficult. Dark Souls is like a big fish in an ocean of games, whereas the uninspired souls-likes are lampreys pretending to be a big fish. Salt and Sanctuary is its own game, Monster Hunter is its own game, even Bloodborne is its own game within the scope of Miyazaki's work. Games like the Fallen twins are not. They're devs ticking boxes.
On the flip side, Monster Hunter annoyed the shit out of me because it kept tricking my mind into thinking I was playing Dark Souls. I got these dual wielding blades, but I can't change the direction of each swing. Enemy is about to blast my location with a fireball, better sprint out of there... why is my character standing still and throwing their arms into the air to embrace death? Why did they make the move fast button out of combat into the hold still button in combat?! Why do I have over 100 kills on this fucking Pink Rathian and not a single Ruby? The rarest item in Dark Souls can be obtained by sane people.
For me, as a more casual gamer, DS is a frickin' hard game and really frustrating at times, because it demands nothing less than perfection, since you do not have any space to make mistakes. I for example never came past the capra demon. I definetly know how to kill it, but I am just not able to, since I have to pull out the same tactic more than just a couple of times perfectly, whereas it just need one hit, or maybe two to kill me (and don't forget it's utterly annoying sidekick monsterdogs).
As someone who played Demon's Souls first and loved it, I wish more people could experience it as its own thing like I got to. It's got a strange sense of humor to it.
I rewatch this video every couple of months because it is absolute gold. It's about video game genres specifically, but this is literally how ALL media works. Music, books, movies, EVERYTHING. It's constantly growing and changing the more people get inspired to create, which then inspires others. This is how culture evolves and grows. Humanity is fucking amazing.
I would take this a step further outside "media" and say it's a useful framework to think about how all categorization of creativity works, even ones where we don't typically use the term "genre". There's a constant tension between using what works and expanding beyond it, and what we consider "beyond it" depends on how you frame what it as (a sort of Sapir-Whorfian effect). Take for example, food. How we think about a dish or a cuisine, focusing on keeping it true to some romanticized original, or abstracting the core elements of what makes it enjoyable, to be creative and explore new boundaries. Like people getting into arguments about what is or isn't pizza. By trying to compare something like Deep dish pizza(clone) to Neopolitan "pizza", you're canonizing one type of pizza as somehow perfect, rather than a few abstract elements that people like(tomato sauce, cheese, flatbread). To an extent, I've seen attempts to broaden it, often with the use of the term "flatbreads" to refer to pizza-like dishes that are toppings with a bread based that can be eaten as finger food. With food, the two main things that tend to be tweaked are flavor and form factor. So pizza made into a casserole, as deep dish is sometimes called, is tweaking the form factor but keeping the tomato/cheese/bread flavor, while tweaking the flavor like white pizzas or dessert pizzas but keeping the sliced finger food on a crispy flatbread keeps the same form factor and is a different approach. Maybe more successfully in the US, the idea of "tapas" has been broadened from typical Spanish bar food, to a category sometimes called "small plates". The boundary of what's a dish and what's a category of dishes is fuzzier than people realize. Eggs Benedict can be thought of as a dish, but there's plenty of clones, using smoked salmon, crab cakes, etc. At some point, you could consider Eggs Benedict a genre/category of dishes involving english muffins, hollandaise, meat and poached egg. Or you could take it further with all sorts of variation, from replacements of the English mufffin with biscuits, bagel, waffles, etc, the egg could be scrambled, the sauce is anything thick and gooey like melted cheese, at which point, you may think of the Eggs Benedict genre as just an open faced breakfast sandwich genre.
The bit about genre classifications for roguelites would be a good point if it wasn't the developers for those games coming up with the different names themselves so as not to be put into the roguelike genre they didn't want their games classified as. It wasn't the players who wanted to move away from the roguelike classifications. Even Rogue Legacy, despite having rogue in its name, attempted to move out of the genre's name by coining itself as a Roguelite. It's the same for a lot of the games within the more modern push of rogue mechanics. So no, it's not bitter players upset a genre got wider. It's developers wanting to move on from the comparison you're sticking them back under. Especially because the more traditional sense of the genre is also still alive, moving forward with new games under its classification. They're two different entities at this point, and there is crossover between the playerbases even if it's not a complete overlap.
He is, yes. To move away from the typical judgements and audiences you get from the term "roguelike." Most people who really get into the platformers, and shooters, and more modern games tend to be more okay with the name "roguelite." It's stuck since. Interestingly enough, traditional roguelike games have moved forward in design a lot too. With Rogue and Nethack originally being just dungeon crawlers, and most of the more recent games having open world and sandbox elements to them. Though they graphically still underrepresent what is going on, mechanically, they've come a long way. Even the original Diablo was originally an offshoot of Roguelike game design, which the developer talks about during his GDC post-mortem.
I went into this video with the thought "Yes, because there's a market" But when I really saw what you were saying, I was surprised to be confronted with how narrow minded my initial thought was. I was simplifying the argument that you were actually making in my own head. It amazes me now to look back at the games you mentioned that I have played and realize just how uninspired they actually felt playing them, never able to connect as to why this was. Thanks for this video, it's got my mind's gears turning now as to what this argument and topic is really all about.
I would suggest that the naming of a genre after its parent game might be less responsible for cookie-cutter remakes than the simple success of the game. When some title is on all the gaming news headlines and they start selling merch for it at Target, many companies try to clamber into that space to have a taste of that success. Like with battle royale games somewhat recently.
The problem with this reasoning is that if, for example, we apply the genre concept of "Immersive sims" to Zelda or Hitman, it starts to bend and blurry the line that separates different genres. Is it Zelda that is really an immersive sim or is it Thief that is actually an action-adventure game that focus a lot on stealth? Hell, how do you even define where each one of those catchy genre names apply and where they don't? Seriously, how do we do this process? Of course, you could say that "everybody" knows what an RPG is, or what a text adventure or a FPS is. But how do everybody knows? Of course, comparing a bunch of games and noticing similarities, and then giving a random name. The games that stand out usually are the most referenced and the ones that guide the invention of the genre. But that definition is always limited. If I play Dungeons of Dredmor on non-permadeath mode it stops being a roguelike? Really? Either those definitions are too strict or too broad. Even if they're not based on only one game, they are ALWAYS indicating standards that serve more like formulas than guidelines. And what determines if a game can really be unique is not if a "genre" is too narrow or not. It is HOW it puts together its ideas. A very genre-defying game, like Bwyond Good an Evil, can be memorable. But a game that respects all 123948 rules of the Berlin interpretation - Ultima Ratio Regum, for example - can also be extremely unique. TLDR: what makes a game blend like most soulslikes, minecraft clones or newer immersive sims is not if their supposed "genre" is open enough, but HOW they use (or dont use) the genre guidelines.
Dude, just discovered your channel. I love a few channels for their reviews and analysis, but you standout for truly taking mechanics or trends of the game market and analyzing them. All that to say great videos man!
OR just release it for PC so it doesn't become obsolete when the next console gen without backwards compatibility comes along. Then for bonus points keep it mod friendly, so dedicated fans can keep brushing up the graphics and have it stay palatable. Hate it when a game is held hostage to force people into buying hardware. Especially annoying when the game is then basically erased once said hardware becomes unobtainable. Certainly don't want encourage this scam of selling you the same game over and over for full price, just for the privilege of keeping it.
@@danielschroedinger2090 You mean the people who made a game don't have the right to do with it what they want? HOW DARE THEY. Keep port begging I guess.
@@IskandarTheWack Who said anything about rights? You can acknowledge peoples right to something while also disagreeing with it. Also why wouldn't the devs want their game on as many plattforms as possible? This is not about what the people who made the game want to do, but about what the people, who own the publishing rights want.
Speaking of games that turned into genres in more recent history, perhaps the best example of the cycle you mentioned is DotA. Initially other games in the genre were called DotA clones and while Heroes of Newerth is quite literally an exact DotA clone just changing character names and a few abilities here and there, League of Legends took the ideas of DotA and made them more accessible by removing mechanics like denial, controlling multiple units(from skills of certain characters and items), etc and eventually added others including new maps and more recently new map objectives and turret plates. Smite iterated on the formula by being 3d instead of 2d with a completely different movement and aiming scheme, using the keyboard instead of point and click with the mouse. The core elements of a base with towers protecting it and minion waves marching onwards from each base to attack the other team remain consistent, as do the fact that the player choosing and playing as a single character, which makes for a rather rigid structure. However within that structure there is still room to innovate and other games have while DotA 2 stuck to its original formula, merely modernizing and streamlining it, and is still the most successful game in the genre. Speaking of the Souls-like genre, oddly enough it took id software themselves to iterate upon their own genre with Sekiro, staying inside Dark Souls' rigid structure but greatly innovating inside it. I think it was easier for id software to do it than for anyone else as they were the original creators thus fans are more accepting of changes made by them than by anyone else.
While a huge part of DS1 success was its combat mechanics and importance of DYING lol I feel like some Devs think if they nail that type of combat mechanics etc then it is a souls like...DS1 was a game changer partly because of that along with the LORE and the exploration. Surge is not a souls like. Neither are honestly all the others. The combat is close and everything else is either badly done or missed completely. Too many downplay the importance of those other factors and the reason DS1 still has and will pretty much always have a dedicated playerbase. You can play through the game ten times and without a doubt %100 there will still be secrets and tidbits that you have never seen before. I ran it the other day and there was more then enough players online for invasions and summoning. 7 years later.
Action warm ups, animation priority, and stamina management are all present in monster hunter. I would be fine calling monster hunter a soulslike game in terms of combat, but the game is very unique in other aspects...
Marvo Langeberg doesn’t really matter what came out first, it’s what popularized the genre. They didn’t call them Wolfenstein Clones, they called them Doom Clones.
So if MH was the one that popularized them it would be "MH-like"? that doesn't sound right, I think the "Hunter Genre" should be there.. but then again that would be more of a simulator. :/
@@SuperSecretAgentNein MH did actually popularise those elements and had a lot of rivals which released in Japan and the West prior to Souls. It isn't like MH World is the first million selling game with those parts: www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/finance/million.html
why would i want genres to be broadly defined? thats not helpful for me when im looking for a specific experience. perfect examples are "first person shooter" or "rpg" which dont mean anything nowadays
None of the base-level genres mean much in gaming today. I find the Steam tag system to be a little more defining, but ultimately a game usually needs a paragraph, or a Let's Play, to fully understand the style and mechanics.
Not to mention even in well established mediums such as novels and films they still have genres to help define what type of experience you'll get, much to the chagrin of others who desperately try to defy said genres and ironically go into the "try too hard to not be genre fiction."
Wimpleton Duck It's funny you specifically called out metal, because for pretty much every music genre, there is a subgenre of metal that uses the same kind of structure 'specific' to that genre. EG Trash Metal and Jazz have the same form structure, despite sounding wildly different.
Ah good that we have Ishkur as the world authority on naming at least electronic music genres. But then again, new subgenres occur daily, and he's always 10 years behind.
the weird thing about genres named after games (to me, at least) has always been "what do we rename them?" what should a "roguelike" be called if we renamed it? When I hear the word, i think of perma death and procedural generation which sometimes have a story. I didn't even know they were named after rogue until a few years after i got into the genre.
Single-shot procedural generation? SSPG, shotproc? Perma-death dungeons? Permaduns? Procedural death labyrinths came up in the video. Randomized levels?
One thing to consider though is that roguelike is not really its own genre; rather, it is a specific subgenre of dungeon crawlers. I don't think it's really fair to say that naming a genre "roguelike" stifles the development of the genre when it is already used to refer to a specific type of dungeon crawlers.
Also, games like Rogue Legacy aren't truly Roguelikes, they are not like Rogue. Those games take some mechanics from Rogue, like permadeath and random generation. That isn't enough for Roguelike to be a useful descriptor, if we include those games
I love all the talk of mechanics defining a genre, followed by saying that's not everything it's about atmosphere and storytelling, sets up the video to restate this wordlessly by finishing on the game's first massive oh my god moment where the raven grabs you off the cliff. Excellent video direction.
Is it just me, or as this video changed since I last saw it ? Anyway, amazing work Mark, definitely a video I'll be rewatching, it's just so full of interesting stuff :) !
Great video! I’m rewatching it because I found out that Dead Cells describes itself as a Rogue-lite Metroidvania inspired action-platformer with Souls-lite combat
I think you can also argue that some genres can *stop* being genres and become even more broad. Like, nowadays if you just say of a game “it’s an FPS” that doesn’t really give that much information, because there are SO many different ways developers have used first person shooter mechanics. Like yeah Doom Eternal is kind of a “true” FPS, but something like Overwatch is also an FPS. In that way, FPS is almost more of a medium than a genre.
Well in other arts genre can also define an extremely loose thing qnd things like sub genre exist, like Rock just means that it has a guitar or abstract art refers to everything that is not photorealistic wich is most paintings ans sculptures at this point
I wouldnt worry too much about the canonisation thing, at least in rogues case. I would be willing to bet that upwards of 80 or 90% of gamers have never heard of Rouge and just take the name at face value.
Didn't Dark Souls just copy Monster Hunter's combat and alter the death mechanic? They didn't "invent" a genre, they just further popularized it. So let's say we make this genre defined as you say, and prioritize "Action warmups", "Animation Priority", and "Stamina management". We still have Monster Hunter, which predated Dark Souls by 7.5 years, and Demon's Souls by 5. And yet no one seems to care for the similarity. Fans of the Souls series even scoff at the idea that their game wasn't the first to do what it does. Monster Hunter's focus on boss fights cannot be enough to prevent these series from being in similar genres, otherwise we run too narrow of a conception of the genre. Also "never progressing past step 2" is what the Metroidvania subgenre is when regarding platformers. All you have to do is interconnect the map on a platformer, add in some ridiculously hidden secrets, and encourage the player to backtrack while fighting respawning enemies. Hollow Knight is a true Metroidvania. Dark Souls could even be argued to be a 3D Metroidvania. Mostly I'm tired of everyone comparing things to Dark Souls. Difficulty is not a brand, and everything in Dark Souls, from the abstract lore, to the combat, to the pride it is known for eliciting when you overcome a difficult boss, has all been done before.
MasterofLaziness Dark souls is a natural sucessor of demon souls and demon souls is a natural successor of kingsfield. A series that existed before Monster Hunter.
I recall playing Dark Souls for the first time and saying to myself, "This is a lot like a Survival Horror game" and me and my friends dubbed it as Namco/Bandai's response to "Resident Evil".
@divide two nah, "-spirit" is too edgy. "Souls-spirit" Nah, if that were our other option, "-like" is waaaaayyyyy better. No need for fancy explanations, a game that is like X.
Sometimes that’s the only way it can work. Luckily for Doom the genre it popularized could be defined easily and quickly. First person, and shooter. How do you quickly explain a game like rogue? How do you quickly explain a game like Dark Souls? DS isn’t JUST an action rpg, when someone says X game is an action rpg it’s a real crapshoot on if it will be anything like Souls. Alternately, we could break down what makes a Souls game, a combat focused action rpg with minimal overt storytelling and a...I don’t even know how to succinctly explain the leave your currency/experience at the place where you died and then have to retrieve it or lose it system. Hey how bout we just call it a soulslike? It’s inelegant but it gets the point across and that’s really the whole point of genre isn’t it?
I don't think Dark Souls' combat aspect you've mentioned should be genre's definition (Action Warm-up / Animation Priority / Stamina Management) because those are not inspired specifically by Dark Souls but more by Monster Hunter series, which is older, and inspired Souls series' combat. Soulslike should be defined by 1 gameplay characteristic: progressing between save points through pre-designed levels.
I have to disagree. I think people want more of the same and don't want a formula shaken up, especially with niche genres/IPs. There is a danger that an entire design philosophy of games can disappear if the formula is shaken up too much. Even in niche genres like 2D fighting games an expert can tell you that SNK, Capcom, and Arc System Works have different approaches to the genre. Problem is if Capcom changes stuff too much for Street Fighter 6, the fans can't just jump into King of Fighters or Guilty Gear. I feel bad for the people still stuck on old games because no company is willing or interested in making a game that captures the formula they really like. I think of the Mario fans who have wanted a sequel to 64 for ages who were dissatisfied with Sunshine and didn't care for Galaxy and just now they are getting Odyssey. Now don't get me wrong Nintendo can and should make different types of 3D Mario games, but they should've provided something for the Super Mario 64 crowd besides a remake.
important aspects of Dark Souls: 1. deliberate, timing based combat 2. deliberate checkpoint system 3. XP is also currency 4. XP/currency lost upon death 5. lost XP/currency can be recovered if the player can avoid dying again 6. volatile resource management (stamina, estus, magic) 7. certain resources refreshed after dying/ activating a checkpoint 8. checkpoints are a CLEAN SLATE, health, refreshing resources and enemies are all restored 9. oh, and it has to be an RPG i think the most important aspects would be the checkpoint system, loss and reclamation of currency and/or XP upon death, and the checkpoints as a clean slate system, with volatile resource management being more optional. the checkpoint and checkpoint refresh systems i think are the most important, but don't really describe the genre very well
I like how similar metroidvanias are, honestly. It's a set of mechanics I really like, and sometimes I just want to play something similar with different aethetics or slightly different mechanics
The thing about Rogue-lite, is unlike Rogue-like, it's NOT a genre. It's applied to other genres in the same way that any sort of game can have rpg elements. Similarly, boiling "Souls-like" down to methodically managing your stamina would be applicable to other genres, and no longer be a genre by itself.
This would suggest that something cannot be part of multiple genres at once. For example Portal is both a puzzle game, and an FPS. Both "rogue-lite" and "rogue-like" are being used as genres. It is really just all around a debate of what "rogue-like" should entail.
In school, we were tasked with naming different "genres" of games, the instructor wrote down all our responses. for example, he then asked, ok in first person games what kind of weapons do you have. we rattled everything we could think of and again he wrote em down. when we had the entire board covered with everything we could thing of he said, Alright now for your guys game designs you cant have anything we wrote up on the board. It really made you realize how creating games based on a genre traps you into conventions already explored. This video reminded me of that same lesson. when you try to make a game that adhere's to an assumed genre you stifle a lot of creativity right out the gate.
Quake isnt based on classes though. The game that added classes to the shooting was the first team fortress. If anything, hero arena shooters are TF2 clones.
The essence of the Souls-like gameplay experience is this - Every action requires thought, and since the pace doesn't require twitchy play, you get just enough time to think about every action. The end result is that you get the feeling of a turn based RPG, but executed in real time.
I think I remember it being referred to as "intentional combat" which only covers the combat, so not a good name for a genre. Hmm..Intentional deathloop adventure genre? Deathloop meaning dying isn't a reset of anything other than position, as enemies, loot and everything else stays as it was.
I need a Soulslike genre so I instantly know which games are just out to waste my time with esoteric difficulty, corpse runs and respawning everything, and not bother with them.
Another genre which has been named from a game, yet this fact is not as often acknowledged, is the adventure game genre. People tend to forget that it was named for the 1976 Colossal Cave Adventure(also known as simply "Adventure").
To be fair though adventure is a PRETTY vague word that could mean anything and I don't htink most people even know that's why the genre has its name. With something like rouge or souls they don't really say as much about their genres just by their names so people are more likely to look up and know the origins of these words out of curiosity. WIth adventure games people automatically hear "adventure" and assume they are games with long winding narratives that go to many different places and are meant to be, well, and adventure of some kind. Things like rouge likes both have "like" in their name which implies they're similar to something and rouge doesn't really reflect the ideas of perma death and such like how adventure does with wind and fantastical narratives.
"We judge new games by their ability to emulate the original", that's very true. That happened too with mighty N9 and Yooka laylee,I find both them pretty mediocre ,but people love it because "it's like (insert game here)". Same with dark souls and lords of fallen. The main difference between them is that the first is a good game and other is boring and too frustrating.
Now I remember Azura Dreams, a Playstation game. Was a rpg where every time you entered the tower you started at level 1 and had to work your way up as far as you could, with level layouts ever changing with each new entry,random enemy placement, you starting at level one as well each time, only keeping your monsters/pets and equipment. And even your equipment could erode and be destroyed. But nobody - really nobody called that a rogue-like. We all understood well what a rpg is.
Love this video but I have one small quibble. When you talked about immersive sims you mentioned how theif was considered a failure and is often forgotten. I don't think this is entirely true since it was primarily a stealth game/ sandbox that had a large impact on the stealth genre on its own.
Thank you for actually including links to the videos you mentioned, many channels claim "Links in the description" and then there's nothing... LoL! Anyway, interesting video. New subscriber here. Keep it up!
No, because those elements encompass just a single aspect of Souls games. Otherwise any run 'n gun that came before Metroid would be definable as metroidvania.
Skeletroy Exactly that's why his ideas are so stupid. He has the same philosophy the people who made nioh and the surge had. The combat and game mechanics aren't what made dark souls special.
Luckee Strikee But that single aspect is the focus of the potential genre...like how (in my opinion) the core aspect of Metroidvania games isn't running and gunning, but backtracking to previously inaccessible areas to fill out that map. I'd argue that you could make a Metroidvania style game that doesn't have any platforming, as long as the exploration factor is there. Maybe Dark Souls, with its expanded ideas and mechanics, would then be considered a Punch-Out-light?
Souls are Punch-Out-like as much as they are Diablo-like, or Metroidvania, or ICO-like even (as admitted by Miyazaki himself). They clearly brought various elements from past titles, but they reinterpreted them uniquely and elegantly enough to be be seen as, well, something new. Even taking combat alone, for example: Punch Out doesn't contemplate spacial awareness, but it's one of the key aspects to Souls games combat.
It's the case where where Civilization can be considered a roguelike due to it sharing a few major mechanics with Rogue. However, Civ isn't a dungeon crawler, you don't play as one character, turns aren't based on time units, etc. It's more so how the mechanics come operate, are utilized, and presented rather than just being there.
Just to highlight the problem with using games to define genre: I disagree with the definition of "Castlevania that plays like Metroid" for "Metroidvania". For me, the genre name mashes the titles together because they are both necessary to define the genre. They share common elements (specifically an interconnected world where access is limited by ability set), but Castlevania diverts far enough that it cannot be confused with Metroid. In fact, Castlevania's added RPG elements pushes different strategies on the player (while Samus generally just improves on her core shooter abilities). Defining genre in video games is interesting, though. I think we use game titles as shorthand for genre because we don't quite have the language to define game mechanics, and that means that we can't as easily define the specific mechanics that make up a genre.
Understand Metroidvania came to categorize Castlevania itself within its own genre (Such as ClassicVania / MetroidVanias) Hence why most Metroidvanias often lack anything resembling SoTN, because most are aping Super Metroid by design, the Vania moniker seems to only exist because it sounds alot better than "Metroid-like", and because Castlevania is popular enough for people to recognize when used in conjunction with Metroid.
You talking about how a very original and influential game can spawn many similar games until a genre forms reminds me of how games with a passing resemblance to other games can be confused for the same genre when they're actually quite different. For example, it's a major pet peeve of mine whenever people refer to the Metroid Prime trilogy as First Person Shooter. It is not, it is a first person adventure that just happens to feature shooting as its primary mode of attack. The distinction is that First Person Shooters are normally all about how many things you can kill and what best weapon to do said killing with, often with ammo management. Metroid Prime isn't that at all, most rooms you can walk through without needing to kill anything. Nor is it about the weapons, the weapon upgrades are more to help you access previous inaccessible areas i.e. exploration than they are for killing things more efficiently. First person shooters generally have little variation in where you can'are supposed to go and it's just about killing everything between your starting point and the end goal to win, whereas Metroid is about exploration, where you're supposed to go is deliberately non-obvious, there are many branching paths that in some way are all valid to an extent. It is a first person adventure that just happens to feature shooting, as its primary attack mode- it could just as easily be melee combat and the game would largely be pretty similar; if you call it a first person shooter you may as well call Minecraft a first person shooter just because it happens to have some projectile attacks.
Dark Souls itself is already a combination of many video game genres so can you really call soulslike a "new" genre. It's more about devs that are ripping off the formula of dark souls like back in the CoD4 days with call of duty and military shooters.
Well I think the impact of Dark Souls is similar to that of CoD4. It's a game that borrows many elements from previous genres/games and iterates on them rather than revolutionize them. When Doom released it did something that no game ever did before with that first person perspective. Of course there were plenty of game which tried and first person perspective before Doom but none of them nailed it in quite the way Doom did with its stellar graphics and smooth gameplay, the fps perspective was not viable before Doom. Dark Souls borrows most of the gameplay from other games, the combat is a more advanced Z-targetting system from Ocarina of time, the world is designed in a MetroidVania like way with its interconnectedness, and leveling up and stuff is a core element from any RPG. I love me some Dark Souls but a new genre it ain't, the only thing it really added rather than iterate on was the unique storytelling. PS: Great video, I love your content.
+Thatssomegoodpie Animations Souls has a lot of very innovative and new aspects that have not been seen before. It's just that its clones are not taking inspiration from them, instead they are ripping off (as you said) the things that Souls itself has borrowed from older games.
As someone who can't help but classify things, gaming genres leave me lacking. I've been toiling away at defining (and redefining) the existing genres, and this really got me thinking about how to approach the topic again. I loved this video, and I would love to see more on what the classifications of each genre are to you.
Imho, you forget the most important aspect. For a game to spawn a new genre it needs to be unique enough that it doesn't fit in the existing genres, or mashes up existing genres in new and interesting combinations, where it's no longer appropriate to use the old names. This is also why new genres initially tend to get names based on the godfathers of the genre like Doom-clones, rogue-likes or Metroidvanias. Initially there simply isn't a better way to describe them. And this is also why say "zelda-like" or "mario-like" has never really become a thing. Because while they are definitly genre-defining games,they never were so different from the already existing games that we had to invent a new one to talk about them. As for Dark souls spawning a new genre, it completly fails in this sense. It still easily fits in existing genres as it's simply an action-rpg with a penchant for obtuse mechanics & storytelling. It honestly isn't all that unique. At best you might be able to argue it spawned a specific niche subgenre of action-rpg's, but even that is a stretch...
It isn't a stretch to say it's at least a subgenre considering how closely games emulate dark souls gameplay even after so many years, there's been so little innovation yet so many games I'd say it's undeniable it's big enough to warrant it's own "niche" also very subjective but as many others have I'd argue things like the bonfire mechanic already differentiate it enough that it isn't really just an arpg anymore, it's simultaneously more straightforward in some of it's mechanics while infinitely more focused in making the player master a simple set of moves, something almost completely opposite to most arpgs with a more varied moveset and way more button mashy gameplay loop
@@T-------- How is the bonfire mechanic something different? Its simply a checkpoint system. That's not exactly unique. As for others emulating it. Its (currently) a leader in its genre, and it got lucky enough to become a populair meme. As for the differences with other arpgs. You have two flavours of arpgs. The first is the spammy click all the skills and turn the screen into a discoparty. The second is the more controlled, learn the patterns of the bossfight kind of thing. Souls falls in the second catagory, and is definitly a genre leader, but it didn't create that genre.
@@kakalukio it's simplifying it way to much to say it's only a checkpoint, just that mechanic alone and having to fight all enemies again every time you use it make it stand out from very similar games in combat like monster hunter, and idk it's more than a stand out in it's genre, it's the game every dev takes notes from when wanting to make a slow action 3d game, if the games had started differing from ds we could argue if there's any point in the term soulslike, but as it stands there are dozens and dozens of games doing the exact same thing over and over, it's really gotta be it's own thing by that point the way i see it
@@T-------- its literally Just a checkpoint though. And respawning enemies isnt exactly unique either. What makes it different from other checkpoint systems that would make it noteworthy? As for other games copying it. Sure, its an industry leader, with a large présence in current pop culture. So of course others try to emulate it. But that doesn't make it a new genre. Otherwise any industry leading game wouldve spawned a new genre.
@@kakalukio the biggest games have though? Pubg/Fortnite with battle royales, dota and lol with mobas or civilization with 4x strategies, they also have in common not being the first ones to do all of their mechanics, but be the first to present them in a different way than previously seen before, and coupled with immense success and number of devs trying to copy them you end up getting new genres. About the bonfires agree to disagree ig but in games like ds1 it forces you to explore and survive through areas you're not familiar with, trying to make as much progress in a new zone before getting killed and having to do it again, it changes entirely the gameplay loop as it forces you to look for new paths and shortcuts, get familiar with enemy spawns and manage what to do with your souls before you lose them, the mechanic itself isn't new, but it being used with the other mechanics like in combat or exploration changes the way you think of the gameplay significantly enough that it merits a new term to define it
A lot of people seem to think that the most important Thing about a souls game is the difficulty. Thats not the case. Dark Souls offers a lot more than that. A game is not a "souls-like" (as much as i hate the term) because its considered hard.
While I agree, I do think the difficulty is important in how it pressures gamers into engaging with the mechanics in a certain way. The hallmarks of Souls-likes experiences, the risk-reward of potentially loosing Souls or gaining more and deciding when and how to use Estus and other items, are only possible when the game is hard enough to make those risks actually risky.
Fantastic video! And you know what surprised me when I learned it was a Metroidvania kinda? Kirby & the Amazing Mirror. Lots of branching paths and backtracking
I think there's value in iteration as well as innovation. Actually I think innovation is incredibly over valued but whatever. I really like Nioh and it's because, to me, it feels more like Dark Souls 3 than Dark Souls 3. There are many improvements to the formula like the combat mechanics and control scheme that Miyazaki hasn't figured out in all the time he's been making these games. And the level design is *chef hand kiss motion*. I think this applies to Prey as well. The devs never intended to innovate within the immersive sim genre. Their stated design goal was to make a spiritual successor to System Shock and Bioshock and I think they did a pretty good job. They certainly handled moral choice better than Bioshock does.
flesh sock I have to disagree. Miyazaki has perfected the combat. simple, but deep and complex. nioh was fun, but the combat felt more like wait for the enemy to stop, then attack. in soulsborne games, you have the added I frames in rolling, so that you can be in and around the action. dodging and rolling between hits instead of just standing off to the side waiting your turn. It's also great for PvP. nioh would not be PvP friendly. especially with all the game breaking magic. nioh tried to spice up the combat by adding more mechanics, but ended up with a much shallower finished product.
69mickswagg "Simple but deep and complex" two of those words mean opposite things buddy. Nioh has I-frames so I don't know why you brought that up and with stance changing and ki pulsing Nioh encourages you to play much more aggressively than even bloodborne. If you just waited for the enemy to stop to attack that's your fault not the games.
flesh sock No, you just don't understand what I'm saying. It's simple as in there aren't a ton of mechanics, but what you can do with those mechanics are where the depth comes in. it's almost limitless the ways you can use what they give you to fight in interesting ways. nioh has more mechanics, but it always boils down to, wait until the bad guy is finished, then you attack them. Also, the enemy mechanics in soulsborne games and the enemy variety puts nioh to shame. But, this is just my opinion. I accept that you like Nioh better. And that's fine. there are literally tens of you out there. And I know you don't have to wait for them to attack first. But if they do get an attack out, it's almost always better to use your roll to just escape their area and wait for them to finish. In soulsborne games, you can dance around them as long as you have the skill to time your rolls, and do things like back stabs and parry.
69mickswagg It would be cool if you knew how to read. I said 2 of the words. Simple and conplex mean opposite things. I never denied that souls combat has depth. I also never said I like Nioh more. I think Nioh is iterating and improving on the souls formula when the actual souls games aren't. That doesn't stop Dark Souls being one of my favourite games. The cognitive dissonance required to hold the opinion you have is prettt impressive though. You can dance around enemies in Nioh. You can parry in Nioh and you can back stab. And the safest strategy to not die in Dark Souls is to wait for the enemies to stop attacking and attack them. I can agree with the enemy variety point, although saying it puts Nioh to shame is a bit over the top.
Yeah, exactly. I like to think of roguelikes and metroidvanias as videogames equivalent to sonnets or haikus - a very strict form which allows a broad range of possible expressions. Many videos are dedicated to the problem of stangation and design cliches, few to the pressure to innovate. So many ideas are left underdeveloped because they had already been done in a basic way by another game.
Imo the key take away from Souls-inspired games I see are:
- Well placed checkpoints between hordes of enemies, which you need to activate manually.
- You lose experience/currency on death, which you may collect after respawning, from the same location you lost it.
- The surprise factor from enemy placements with maybe some subtle foreshadowing preceding it.
- Combat mostly designed around 1v1 fights.
- Enemies respawn after saving at a checkpoint, or leaving and entering an area.
- "Door does not open from this side".
Aka, one of my favorite "SoulsLike" games, NOT from From Software, but Bandai Namco, Code Vein. Sure, they have an option, (not originally mentioned as an option, but an option nonetheless,) to go with or without a Partner, which actually has good AI, but it ticks off everything in this list, has it's own lore, and that lore even ties in to another one of their games, which ISN'T based on Dark Souls.
So basically Hollow knight is a soul game ? 😅
@@xellanchaos5386 Code Vein is a bad Souls clone imo.
Isn't that just action RPG with a fixed save systems?
Try the old Runescape with permadeath. Has got everything you point out but no saving.
Even better right?
@@artimist0315 soulsvania kek
It's no surprise it took the Dark Souls' developer to innovate their own design. Bloodborne is still the same game in essence, but the simple switch to offensive over defensive mechanics was enough to make it original in it's own right. The issue I have with games like The Surge is that it doesn't justify some of it's mechanics such as respawning. Dark Souls builds the bonfires and death into it's lore while The Surge just happens to have it.
That is the biggest problem for me with Souls-likes and the biggest area they stumble in - I enjoy them a lot and I think Lords of the Fallen and The Surge are bloody great but the hand waving of lore for certain mechanics is bloody frustrating. Why can my character revive? How are my healing items refilling? What's the rest of the game's world like? It's infuriating how they skip out on something Dark Souls and Demon's Souls did so well.
Ryan Hollinger Exactly, this guy who made the video just doesn't get it. It's not just the mechanics it was the feeling and the world it built with it
You keep posting about how the video creator doesn't "get it" but I think it might be you who can't see the forest for the trees. People keep playing BECAUSE of the mechanics. The world and the atmosphere are a large part of the appeal for the first couple runs, after that you play for the gameplay.
You can go on and on about how important the "feeling" is, but at the end of the day, the community exists because of the appeal of the mechanics. You also ignore completely how important the mechanics are to the over-all feeling. That's why it's a great game, because the individual elements aren't distinct, they all come together in support each other in a cohesive whole.
EvTav Were talking about what makes a good game, and a genre definer. Nioh has good gameplay, doesn't mean it's a good game. And people certainly didn't just play dark souls for the gameplay. Ds1 pvp is dead, ds2 pvp is dead, and ds3 is close to dying. There's only so much you can do with a linear non radiant campaign. Not even Enb plays dark souls anymore. There maybe a tiny few hold outs that think dark souls gameplay is what made it amazing but they are leaving out the whole pie.
EvTav Stop only reading what you want to read. I NEVER said that any part should be prioritized above another. I'm annoyed he thinks that important parts like environment story telling should be left out if you are trying to make a game as good as dark souls.
11:38 and ironically the only guys creative enough to make a soulslike game entirely different than the landmark ones...is From themselves, with Sekiro
FromSoftwareLike genre
I kinda feel like sekiro is too similar to dark souls
@@commanderleo neither game has an open world design, both are linear, there are different paths u can take, but still linear
@@commanderleo r u brain damaged?
冯裕洋
Sekiro is way different than dark souls
The combat is way different doesn't have a stamina bar and it's mostly deflecting and damaging the enemy posture
You don't lose all your souls once you die and then go back to get them but half of your money and EXP disappear
It focuses heavily on stealth in sekiro something you never see in dark souls
And you can't level up by using money but by using the memory of the bosses you beat
This video about game design is the Dark Souls of videos about game design.
0x20 you are right, bonus points to you for triggering at least one moron :D
Ephelizard What is your profile picture? It's so cute!
It's a sugar glider :3
Ephelizard That's the cutest thing ever.
Ephelizard this vid is about game desire I thought it was about putting me to sleep
It's really frustrating going into Steam or other online game stores and having the "RPG" section be filled with every game that happens to have leveling and/or a skill tree.
Same here with roguelikes. Although "RPG" is about as dead as you can be as far as meanings of a category go...
Mordalon well, to be fair RPG is kinda of a shit not well defined genre besides the Experience and Stats. I mean, if you pick an undeniable Western RPG and compare it to a undeniable Japanese RPG, the only thing that they have in common is really the Exp and stats, at least that's how I see it
Especially because the term "Role-Playing" refers to acting or making choices and playing your role as a team-member, like one always does in Dungeons and Dragons, which it was named after, but most "RPGs" are single player and may or may not have choices.
My favorite RPG:"Yoshi's Island'
I just love "role-playing" as a dinosaur with shoes.
Totally agree here. Just look at Madden NFL Football. EA has already added leveling player stats and Madden 18 will offer a mode to follow a high school player's rise to the NFL. How long before it's considered an RPG?
>it's just a renamed versions of estus flask from dark souls
>health potion
>health potion
@@seemoore9175 health potion
health potion
Not 4chan
Yeah a health potion is obviously just a renamed estus flask and not a item name you see in almost every fantasy game with a health bar nah what ya talking about
I think he meant an item that has limited uses, but more uses can be gained from upgrades, and all uses are regained upon resting. Where as in most games, Once you use a health potion, That particular potion is used up and gone.
You guys remember when we used to call FPS games "DOOM clones"?
Me neither. I was a small child.
I remember when Doom was mentioned to be like Wolfenstein 3d.
It was doom-like around here in France.
I didn’t even exist
No. But i do remember when open world sandbox games were all called "GTA clones".
@Steven Murphy It actually happened.
The big difference between Doom and Dark Souls is that Doom spawned an entire new genre where as Dark Souls is spawning a new subgenre much like how Metroid spawned a subgenre of the 2d action platformer. This is the big reason that we had to transition away from calling FPS' "Doom Clones" but never had to transition away from calling Metroidvania games Metroidvania games.
Doom spawned the FPS genre because that is the game that popularized it and was generally the mold for later intries for a time. If you want to go back to prototype FPS' then something even earlier than Wolfenstein would be Mazewar.
Doom gave birth to the modern cognition of PC era of gaming/market that later was translated in consoles markets.
now for a game to be so popular to deserve it's own genre it's hard, especially with the "washing"of such games from light-critics ignoring actual qualities of games from a social, historical and artistic point of view.
if not we would have "Nocturne-like" genre (survival horror with fixed camera and focus on action) or "just cause-like" (open world with focus on destruction)...
instead we have Resident Evil-clones (that ironically is a clone itself) and GTA-Clone
lol if Wolfenstein was the trailblazer, not Doom, why were so many games called Doom Clones instead of Wolfenstein Clones?
You're right in that Wolfenstein was a prototype to Doom, but that doesn't mean it's the progenature of the genre as a whole. Think of it like Minecraft versions; Wolfenstein was Beta 1.7 and Doom was Minecraft release version.
Sure if you go by that definition then clearly it was Mazewar, which came out nearly 20 years before even Wolfenstein. Under your definition a ton of random games have claim to being the father of FPS, but when you take popularization into account one clear winner comes out which clearly had the most impact on the genre.
its been 2 years and i am extremely disappointed that *"souls em up"* didnt take off as the genre name
sure
i will exclusively refer to these in that way now
Because the beat and shoot in ****** 'em ups is an action you perform, you don't soul anyone up in souls game, maybe if you count spells like Soul Spear as souling someone up but that's not the core of the genre.
@@night1952 u soul up ur character. Its part of the rpg system they all have. Gotta think outside the box with the name
I prefer " roll & soul "
don't know why, but I think Mark Brown may like spelunky
there's always a spelunky in every video. ahaha
what makes you think that?
Who is this spelunky? I like romance
I want to call the new genre of dark souls roll'em'ups.
420 praise it.
LMAO
Rolling sim
......you sir......are a genius
And I was the one to bring the likes to 420
@@mysterio1967 and i was the one to destroy this achievement
a soulslike series is just a reverse dynasty warriors, where you're able to get flung into the air like paper and the enemies are the OP avatars of gods.
“Can anybody provide me with a decent breather?”
Imagine that mmo. You're just one amongst hundreds and there's just one AI super enemy out there that can tear through multiple people like they're nothing.
@@propheinx2250 Really gives you a different perspective
@@propheinx2250 great idea
@@propheinx2250 so normal mmos and mmo bosses?
Soulslike games like Lords of the Fallen, The Surge, Nioh, Crash Bandicoot N.sane Trilogy
That's the joke.
+Knight Warrior
It is. Nothing in Souls challenged me as much as Crash 1 did.
Isaac woosh
Still don't get why the Crash=Dark Souls meme even exists. Crash really isn't _that_ hard as far as oldschool platformers go.
Even as a kid i found the first three Crash games easy, with only a couple of levels being somewhat challenging. Some people are really blowing the difficulty of these games out of proportion.
Lot's of people seem to be getting the wrong idea of a genre. It is a descriptor, something used to describe games of similar values. I would rather link a small set of games together rather then chuck them on the pile of 90% of all games that is "Action Adventure", because that isn't helping anybody.
Genre is just a broad category, that's why you have sub-genres. That's like complaining that all novels fall under "Fiction".
Well, action adventure does imply certain qualities, like very involved gameplay and a certain level of exploration. Which not all games have.
well there is "species" just below "genus"
It's the very essence of the descriptor that hinders innovation and gameplay development, not necessarily that we associate games within a certain category based in similar categories. However I'm not certain to what extent a game can be innovated beyond what games have the force of influence during a period of development. I would assume that there's a lot of bandwagon jumping on successful game designs which directly associates with the lack of innovation within a certain genre pool. In addition I don't know how easy it actually is to create a game which is completely new barring the basic principles derived from precursor games which were successful; there is a mixture of economic and intellectual pressures which inhibit the growth of innovation.
Genres don't hinder innovation, setting out to make "a genre game" can though (although to be fair it can also do the opposite, if you set out to make a new game in a certain style but consciously bring in some fresh gimmick or spin to set it apart). That's on the designer side though, for the users genres are a powerful tool to allow people to find more of the things they like and avoid more of the things they dislike. So as long as the terms are intelligible and widely used enough there's really nothing at all wrong with bringing in more genre names to unify more sub-sets of works.
This is amazing insight. Thank you!
ok
You mean insight 99? 👀
"When we reduce a game down to it's constituent components, dev's can copy them and end up with pretty much the same game as the original developer, but if we consider why those features were the way they were, and what sort of experience they lead to, devs can find different ways to give gamers that same feeling" - Mark Brown, 2017.
This is something I've been speaking about lately, especially with the MMO Genre. There are lots of games which try to be World of Warcraft. But very few actually manage it. Weirdly, even Wildstar which is made by a lot of Vanilla WoW Developers, also misses why certain elements were addicting and successful (I actually wrote an article on Wildstar Housing about this)
The problem is mmo's are one of, if not the most capital-intensive genre to break into. Indie developers can get by and make a lengthy, story driven game without relying on AAA voice talent or motion capture, and it'll still be good, because those things aren't crucial to the experience, but only big name companies can afford the server costs and technical support staff, and the plethora other costs an mmo incurs.
So the only ones left making mmo's are corporations. Indie devs make games with passion, because they want to. Corporations make games because they want to make money, which isn't inherently evil, but it means that they're constantly going off a formula to take as little risk as possible, and given mmo's substantial investment as it is, no company is willing to take the dive and try to break new ground on something that could fail. That's why every single korean mmo is pretty much exactly the same thing, it's an industry unto itself: Make an mmo cheaply and effectively, with shiny graphics and cosmetic wing accessories on a cash shop, throw in at least one "groundbreaking" new feature (tera's real time cobat, FLYFF's flying, blade and souls slightly different real time combat) to entice the audience
TL;DR mmo's are a genre run by fiscally responsible businessmen with no margin for creativity or risk
lol. just when i started reading the comment, Mark said exactly the Same thing.
I've had this discussion a lot with friends, most imitators of an iconic game try to make what they view it as, and usually miss the mark on what made it so good to begin with. You end up with a slightly empty game that is evocative of the original, but leaves you thinking "why don't I just play that instead".
That being said I think Dark Souls and Bloodborne encompass what you were saying about taking a concept and making it a genre. I played both to completion and they still feel like entirely different games to me, you just have to look at some different boxes.
This is how they would look in my book:
Dark Souls
- Intentional combat (make your swings count, and don't get too risky or you'll be punished)
- Resource management (Set number of flasks, need them to last from bonfire to bonfire)
- Fair patterned bosses (Bosses have set routines with obvious areas to attack)
- Gear Weight management (Do I want more defense and less mobility, or more mobility and less defense)
- Structural level design (Levels are designed with some semblance of realism and connect logically)
- Sharp Increasing power level (start out weak, but get stronger in power and in sustainability as game goes on)
- Under-doggedness (fights leave player feeling disadvantaged and afraid, shown in victory message "victory achieved")
Bloodborne
- Aggressive combat (Taking risks is rewarded, as health can be regained by attacking more)
- Situational preparedness (all items have set quantities, and bringing the right items affects success dramatically)
- High-difficulty bosses (Bosses attack with intensity and rarely give the player clear open windows to strike)
- Gear optimization management (Gear has no weight, but bringing the right clothes/runes/weapons into combat is important)
- Dreamlike level design (Levels are made with little sense of realism and do not connect as logically)
- Light slope power level (Start out powerful, end feeling slightly more powerful, end bosses still 1-3 shot you regardless)
- Power fantasy (You're out to hunt your prey, not survive against it shown in victory message "prey slaughtered")
This is just a quick write up, but hopefully it shows how two games that start with the same concepts are approached and feel very different from each other. Ironically both are put out by the same studio, but hopefully other developers will catch onto the nuance and leave us with some interesting new places to push this potential genre.
bloodborne is not a powerfantasy. everything in the game is cohesively designed to make you feel contrasted by higher and higher levels of cosmic horror.
power fantasies makes you play out repressed feelings with empowerment ("Rus-fo-da" in skyrim).
bloodborne keeps you facing insanity without much power or abilities.
Or somebody make a new game but everyone calls it some genre it isn't just because it happens to have one aspect that for some reason is fucking copyrighted to a single game. If it's a large map to backtrack NO SHIT do I want a map telling me where I am. It's not metroidvania it's fucking Doom, they had the same thing and it's a simple fucking tool that's common no shit sensical to have in a large game. Do you want to play Ori And The Blind Forest without the damn map just so people stop calling it metroidvania!
I remember when people were still calling Demon's Souls a hack-'n-slash. My how time flies. To me these "bonfire games" have always been a combination of several other genres, namely hack-'n-slash, metroidvania, and rpg.
Plus a good story. That's one of the most important things and why most souls like are shitty.
They have no mystery, mystery is cool.
Except we're still in the clone phase. Once that settles down, we may find that there is no common thread except the hack 'n' slash. I wouldn't go quite that far but I think the only criteria are stamina management, animation priority and persistence on death. You add those features onto any third person hack 'n' slash (and rebalance damage, etc. so it doesn't feel shit) and the _primary gameplay loop_ will feel like Dark Souls. That's why I prefer the term "tactical/strategic hack 'n' slash".
I like "bonfire games". Haha that's a better name
That's interesting! The combat works as a hack 'n slash, the story and level management work as a rpg, and the connected world works as a metroidvania, I never thought in that way until now.
Except a lot of them aren't metroidvainas anymore that was mainly the first dark souls and some of it's clones
HOLD UP i just realized.
*Hardcore Minecraft is a roguelike*
Oh yeah youre right!
I know right?
Same i was thinking about that mid way through
Early on Minecraft was intended to be a 3D roguelike similar to Dwarf Fortress
No, Because Minecraft is a sandbox game cause you're allowed to manipulate the world to liking. Unlike Roguelikes which consist "in n out" approach to levels generated.
"wow I died and I have to start again ? It's just like Dark Souls !!!!
Wow, you mean there are enemies that can kill you ? Just like dark souls !!"
Dark souls is one of my favorite game and is both innovating and inspired by former games. But it managed to create something so unique by mixing differents mecanism and adjusting all of them together so well.
but right now, people compare everything to it for no reason just because it has something in common with dark souls: very mysterious story without any clear backside story but the clues in the world, Great interconnected level design, epic music or huge boss fight, even HP potions.
But hey, dark souls hasn't invented any of these. It just used it so well to create strong feelings and game sensations.
There is no such things as a Dark souls genre. Even DKS 3 was close to a DKS 1 clone but it stilled managed to distinguished itself to be an excellent game.
According to me, Dark souls hasn't invented things like zelda invented 3d mechanics gameplay or "Pong" invented pvp. It perfected already existing mechanics and put them together to make a coherent whole. So you can't create a complete new genre based on Dark Souls.
it doesnt matter if clones for me if you make games like dark souls,sekiro.others are awesome for me too,like i said on my other comment ,darksiders 2-3,castlevania lords of shadows 2,hellblade senuas sacrifice,jedi fallen order,code vein,ghost of tsushima.all of them have roll,lock on,different plots and stuff.try them ,i see you like dark souls i think you will like those too,so i dont mind cloning or similarities as long as there good...
I think you said it really well. Especially the last para, stating some of the differences that dark souls has to the likes of Zelda or pong.
You summed up my problem with people hating on soulslike games.
Yea the original resident evil had back tracking interconnected level design that really made short cuts a value. It also progressed the story by way of in game items.
This channel is basically Skillshare game design but on RUclips
What they all miss in my opinion is that Dark Souls wasn't just about the combat. It was also about the ominous atmosphere, the not-in-your-face story telling, the realistic (and beautiful) armour sets and weapons, the highly unique dark fantasy setting, the unique level design, the multiple linear pathways (not quite open world) that give very specific and grueling challenges in between save points, and last but not least: the incredible and original role playing system of covenants and multiplayer.
While the combat is brilliant, there is so much more that makes a "souls" game.
No, what they are missing IS the combat.
Name me ONE OTHER GAME that has different swing heights/lengths and hitboxes so accurate you dodge something by crouching as you're doing a low attack. PLEASE I would like to know.
Chivalry
Most modern fighting games
F4c2a are you actually trying to say that dark souls has accurate hitboxes? are you kidding me?
Sam Lowry The sound design in most Souls clones is also really mediocre. Sound plays a massive, underappreciated,role in the immersion factor of the world as well as the visceral feedback of the combat. Things like subtle ambient noises from the environment, the effect you hear when your weapon impacts a target, the growls and roars of the enemies, the rewarding and satisfying sound from parrying/riposting someone - they all contribute to what makes the Souls experience so damn outstanding, and yet the developers that are supposedly "inspired" by FromSoft's formula rarely consider or acknowledge it
Things to take from Dark Souls:
1) Subtle storytelling with a sense of grounded facts. From characters, sceneries, and items.
2) World building, how everything ropes together, making the world believable.
3) Engaging multiplayer communication, leaving long-term discussion going on *outside* the game.
4) Level design that awards keen-eyed observation, and ease in traverse.
A lot of the general takes on 'soulslike' these days are something on the surface level. Dark Souls is not just about 'Z-targeting' combat or how hard and brutal it is, yet we very often see newcomers market their games like "hard and challenging like Dark Souls". That's a marketing buzzword at this point. Every games can be difficult in their own ways, not the Dark Souls way. Every game can do the points above their own ways, not just 'Z-targeting' way~
I for one have had my fill of the subtle storytelling and the nonstop "Everything is depressing and is fuck." atmosphere.
But can't get enough of the z-targeting challenging combat, and minimum hand holding. But so far most Soulslikes bring that "fucked" atmosphere into their clone. Fuck me I mind as well go play Dark Souls if you're going to pull that shit.
Oreally , yea I totally agree with being over the bleak depressing atmosphere but addicted to that style of combat which is something my friends can't seem to comprehend when I try explaining it. I can't wait for more games that take aspects of this game (namely the combat) and put it into worlds that I long to inhabbit (like a Breath of the wild almost)
I agree with you, but it needs to be said, when talking about the game world coming together in Dark Souls.
Lava lake on top of a windmill.
Hahahaha you see, that is why I insist using the name Dark Souls, without the word 'series'. I love Dark Souls, I like Dark Souls 2. Still, wanna give props to the DLC levels of the sequel. Lava is a tricky one, put them into a different space!
For sure, man, haha. Looking at individual games, and putting rose-tinted glasses aside, I can't *really* fault Dark Souls 1's world, and there only the one issue I have with Dark Souls 2. And to be fair, I think all the DLCs across all the SoulsBorne games have come through easily, being put into completely new areas. Ultimately a good choice, in my mind - makes the world still feel cohesive.
10:16 small something i would like to add. Once there is a formula the marketing team will use that too predict sales. In other words games that do not follow the formula will be regarded as dangerous investment.
The interesting thing about Dark Souls specifically is that it captures a lot of the exploratory essence of Metroidvanias with its interconnected world, bosses and items. For a while I actually thought of Dark Souls as the first proper 3D Castlevania game.
Great video! Thanks for the tasty food for thought.
Crurzor I was going to say the same thing, I completely agree.
It even has that element of planning and strategy for different scenarios!
+Belphegor666Iam Initially Souls games can feel aggressive like that, but you soon realize in these games that Souls are ephemeral and you can always get more. Suicide runs to certain items are a common strategy in subsequent playthroughs of Souls games, which is a major benefit to the high-level DLCs of Bloodborne and DS3 being accessible very early in the game, because you can just run past enemies and pick up the weapons you know where they are. Also, you learn to recognize ambushes and how to approach areas cautiously. While exploring may not be easy in Souls games, it's very much rewarded, because it's how you find shortcuts and unique weapons and other useful items, and sometimes even lore or important characters.
Would you say it's a 3D Metroidvania, or 3D Classic Castlevania? (the NES trilogy & super) Cuz while you're right in that it does all the things from the Metroidvania's, I say it's also a modern equivalent of the classic games.
The old Castlevania games where designed in a way so that players who tried to rush through levels would inevitably die quickly due to the clunky movement and slow attacks, forcing the player to approach every situation with careful calculation and caution.
Likewise in Dark Souls, the fact that you die easily from grunts, the frequent uses of ambushes and your long startup attacks, also force you to play defensively and safer with precise planning and calculation.
Short answer: Yes.
Dark Souls is everything I love about both types of Castlevania games, while also brining it's own "flavour" to the table.
Though, sadly, later DS games streamlined the world design in a way that removed it a bit to far from the SotN-style for my taste.
(Demons Souls exists in a bit of a grey area, as although the world is separated by stages, all the stages are design with exploration in mind. Perhaps it can be likened to the different sectors in Metoid Fusion?)
really appreciate the re-done visuals and graphics in this. your content was always been impeccable and lately your editing style and obsessive details in videos have been outstanding. loved these dynamic transitions you keep introducing with that mirrors edge 1 to 2 roll transition, and this episodes thief torch fade to black transition. so i really welcome these new coloured backgrounds and bold serif typo. so nice seeing content that is both equally worth-wile to understand as it is to watch. keep up the good work mark.
This video is very relevant again after Sekiro's release and GOTY award. That game removes a lot of what is a staple of the series, like stamina management, stats and other RPG elements, to the point where some fans of the series even hated it. Most importantly, dodge is not very useful on it as it is on the Souls games. The influence of Souls can still be felt on it, but can every hard game with checkpoints and healing items be called a Soulslike?
I've never played sekiro so how did it cover the same feel as the dark souls game since the dodge isn't as good anymore
@@adityaanuragi6916 Are you implying that the "feel" of Dark Souls is entirely based around dodging? Sekiro has plenty of elements in common with Dark Souls: environmental storytelling, branching paths, deliberate combat, a lonely and isolating atmosphere, limited healing uses that reset upon rest, challenging boss encounters, currency punishment upon death, etc.
But it also has plenty of differences that set it apart from Dark Souls (and even Demon's Souls or Bloodborne): there's no corpse run mechanic, combat is much faster paced, there is less of an emphasis on dodging, blocking is discouraged in favour of parrying, level design is much more open and vertical, there are no classes or character customisation, no armor or weapon builds, there is a more set plot and character to follow. I think Sekiro is a great balance of a game that is clearly taking a lot of influence from Dark Souls but pushing it in a fresh and different direction.
Yea turns out the essence of the genre is turn based real time and no one’s gonna admit it
I personally think that the Monster Hunter series is an interesting take on some aspects of this "genre". (though they are actually older)
Respect towards the enemy is a central aspect of those games. They can take you down just as easily as you take them down. You can only win, if you think about what you're doing.
If I were to define the core of this new genre, this would certainly be a part of it.
THANK YOU!!! thats the phrase i have been looking for ^^ "respect towards the enemy"
its an aspect i realy miss in so many other RPGs... just rinning into a group of enemys and hacking them to bits is just... not the same.
That's definitely one aspect of Dark Souls. And also one of other games like Kingdom Hearts 2 FM Critical Mode (even though you can feel very powerful in it). It's when an expert who knows what he's doing can run circles around things for days but one mistake will kill you.
It's essentially just a proper skill curve, and ends up giving you a similar satisfaction of accomplishment akin to learning to play a song on an instrument or getting really good at something else.
I feel beating a difficult track on osu! - a rhythm game - is more similar to beating a Dark Souls boss than playing something like Dynasty Warriors. Even though the theme is much closer in the latter, it's not about precisely timed inputs and a great risk of failure.
That's absolutely right. When it comes to the three things Brown said might "define" the genre of souls-related games (action warm-ups, animation priority, stamina management), Monster Hunter pioneered all three of them, and I'm fairly certain From Soft has directly said they took inspiration from the series. Dark Souls could easily be considered a Monster Hunter-like, but with added RPG elements like a leveling system.
I think the most useful concept in this video is breaking down genres into several different pieces, which can be mixed an matched for interesting games. The closer a game adheres to the list of genre conventions, the easier it is to classify, but it probably would feel less innovative. On the other hand, games with very few genre requirements can have a wide variety of different games in them, but that just means the terminology itself becomes less useful. Perhaps instead of basing FPS's on just two or three tropes, or defining "Soulslikes" with a huge list of ~15, we should focus on creating genre definitions with a number that's more manageable and useful, like... I dunno, five-ish? I loved Nioh, but that's just because I like DS, and I like the aesthetic. It's still a clone, because it adheres extra-strongly to the conventions laid out by DS, much more so than games that just happen to be in the same genre. But placing Monster Hunter in the same genre as DS and Nioh feels a bit weird, am I right? Even if the combat is similar, the overall differences in broad sections of gameplay are overwhelming.
I dunno, I think I started rambling there.
respect towards the enemy is not a defining characteristic of Kingdom Hearts, especially if you have to point out a specific mode for it to be so. I never really felt like I had to respect the enemy in a *regular* playthrough of a KH game unless I was fighting some superboss at which point a lot of games demand you to respect the enemy.
"Action warm ups, animation priority, and stamina management."
So Monster Hunter? :O
You see: it means something different to everyone. :)
(also: necroing)
I only have played world, but they have a similar feeling, specially with DS3 or Bloodborne. When I am in a high difficulty quests it is practically a Dark Souls with a new graphics with all the one shots I get when I make a mistake and because I play with bow and it is all about stamina management.
@@mariot8732 yeah but monster hunter is way older than dark souls and monster hunter world literally being the easiest in the franchise is odd to be compared to dark souls
Monster hunter has elements that the Souls game borrow but I wouldn’t classify it like a souls games otherwise horizon zero dawn would be a souls game too
Those are two entirely different games
Glad to see some love shown for Thief's contribution to the development of the Immersive Sim. It's not often mentioned in connection with this design philosophy, probably because it came before the seminal Deus Ex (a game which codified the style in many people's minds), but it's a great example of how this type of design can be applied in a different way than the typical "lethal or non lethal, stealth or combat, rpg character building" dynamic.
I call them Bonfire games.
MogwaiInjustice I like that, best suggestion so far! Because it helps define what makes it different then say Monster Hunter
Bonfire Simulator 2k18
Ehh...I get the appeal of the name, but a LOT of games use checkpoint systems for progress. It's not exactly a helpful descriptor.
Slow burn combat games seems to describe them well.
You shouldn't , because there is "Bonfire Studios". Formed by Rob Pardo and other devs that left Blizzard and the diablo Team. Stuff would get really confusing ^^
hey Mark, you're not a bad person
Thanks, I try
You make easily the most illustrative and insightful videos I have ever found on RUclips. Every few months, I come back to one of your videos and am yet again astonished at all you are able to communicate so sharply, and without the confused noise I hear in most other discussion. You seem to always find what really matters; thank you for sharing it with us.
This is literally the first time I've heard the term "immersive sim" or that Thief is treated like a some failed prototype. I am so confused.
God, I feel old... I remember in the 80s when we stopped calling them "Pac-Man Clones" and started calling them "Maze Games." Jeez...
really guys, Zelda Ocarina of time, lock on, dodge rolls, and collision based damage with pre-set animations for attacks.
Dark souls took its combat from many early RPG's on ps1 and n64
Combat is different than zelda so much so that whatever comparison there is might be to small yo notice
@James Chris "you shoot you reload you aim down sights" so that makes every fps the same
...anyone remember kings field? it was a dark fantasy action rpg dungeon crawler with stamina management based combat made by fromsoft... before oot. the whole souls thing is nothing new. also rpgs existed on game consoles since the 70s so I'd hardly call 90s rpgs early
@@nasirbarbee5940 ... and FPS *is* a genre. I'm certainly not saying Dark Souls is derivative but I don't think it deserves to codify a new genre. If we got a sudden rush of Super Mario Odyssey clones, they'd still just be 3D platformers. That doesn't mean Super Mario Odyssey suddenly needs its own genre.
@@Robert399 okay if thats the case then why not just call metroid and castlevania reguler platformers ? Because those people who are looking for those types of games need to specify what it is they are looking for. Thats why metroidvania exist.
Mario odyssey and crash bandicoot both 3d platformers. But both are different. Darksouls deserves its own genre because it has spawned a bunch of games made specifically for a type of player. You dont get the same thing from zelda twilight princess as you get from. Surge 2 or nioh the fact that we are even having this debate is foolish in my opinion.
Suggesting a new name for the genre would have great impact because of your influence. Great video. Well-developed points, and very informative
This video also doesn't take into account people making "clones" to try grab onto a title's popularity to make a little more profit. I guess that's why we can look down on these game trends quickly sprouting up and have a negative backlash to them, calling them all "clones" or "(game title)like", no matter if their intentions are sincere or not. It is interesting that a genre is a group of works that have a similar principles, designs, or goals, yet games can focus on really complex, hyperspecific "sub-genere" where we have metriodvania or rogue like. Some times we can even use these words without knowing where they came from or why, but to describe an idea. I learned today about the origin of "rogue". Yet i used it to describe games that focuses on reparability through randomly generated factors.
On a completely different note, I can't help but think of the time Totalbisucit was so made and irratated on the term "rogue like" he made an one hour video talking about and dissecting it. That was a while ago.... I might need to go back and watch that.
This comment is everywhere. Congrats to you for reading... if you find it among the 2,413+ other comments :)
"Immersive sim, which while it's not baked into the name is inspired by Deus Ex"
*BUT DEUS EX GOT ITS IDEAS FROM SYSTEM SHOCK*
It's a chicken-or-egg question though; Was "systemic games" named after System Shock, or was the game named as such because it's systemic?
Which got ITS ideas from Ultima Underworld.
Yeah, and with FPS Doom Clones were inspired by doom which is a refined and easier to play version of Wolfenstein 3D
The thing about these "souls-like" games is that they are wholly uninspired. They saw Dark Souls and said "what if we did that but pretended it was our idea". At its core Monster Hunter and Dark Souls has similar combat. Scope the enemy out, understand it's move set, and beat the shit out of it until it dies. But they are completely different games. That's because they're each their own franchise. It doesn't matter who did it first. What matters is the game itself. Souls of the Fallen and Fallen 2: Sci Fi Boogaloo look intensely slow and boring. They also seem to be designed with difficulty in mind. Like the devs looked at DS and thought: "the fans like hard games, so let's make it really hard". DS is not a difficult game, it's meant to be challenging. Because it has its own set of mechanics and does its own thing. If you think DS and Bloodborne is hard, look at the people who can beat those games at SL1. Challenging =|= difficult.
Dark Souls is like a big fish in an ocean of games, whereas the uninspired souls-likes are lampreys pretending to be a big fish. Salt and Sanctuary is its own game, Monster Hunter is its own game, even Bloodborne is its own game within the scope of Miyazaki's work. Games like the Fallen twins are not. They're devs ticking boxes.
On the flip side, Monster Hunter annoyed the shit out of me because it kept tricking my mind into thinking I was playing Dark Souls.
I got these dual wielding blades, but I can't change the direction of each swing.
Enemy is about to blast my location with a fireball, better sprint out of there... why is my character standing still and throwing their arms into the air to embrace death? Why did they make the move fast button out of combat into the hold still button in combat?!
Why do I have over 100 kills on this fucking Pink Rathian and not a single Ruby? The rarest item in Dark Souls can be obtained by sane people.
Is it marketed towards kids? It's definitely kid friendly, but nothing about it says "Kid Audiance" to me.
Fucking thank you for this.
For me, as a more casual gamer, DS is a frickin' hard game and really frustrating at times, because it demands nothing less than perfection, since you do not have any space to make mistakes. I for example never came past the capra demon. I definetly know how to kill it, but I am just not able to, since I have to pull out the same tactic more than just a couple of times perfectly, whereas it just need one hit, or maybe two to kill me (and don't forget it's utterly annoying sidekick monsterdogs).
As someone who played Demon's Souls first and loved it, I wish more people could experience it as its own thing like I got to. It's got a strange sense of humor to it.
I rewatch this video every couple of months because it is absolute gold. It's about video game genres specifically, but this is literally how ALL media works. Music, books, movies, EVERYTHING. It's constantly growing and changing the more people get inspired to create, which then inspires others. This is how culture evolves and grows. Humanity is fucking amazing.
I would take this a step further outside "media" and say it's a useful framework to think about how all categorization of creativity works, even ones where we don't typically use the term "genre". There's a constant tension between using what works and expanding beyond it, and what we consider "beyond it" depends on how you frame what it as (a sort of Sapir-Whorfian effect). Take for example, food. How we think about a dish or a cuisine, focusing on keeping it true to some romanticized original, or abstracting the core elements of what makes it enjoyable, to be creative and explore new boundaries.
Like people getting into arguments about what is or isn't pizza. By trying to compare something like Deep dish pizza(clone) to Neopolitan "pizza", you're canonizing one type of pizza as somehow perfect, rather than a few abstract elements that people like(tomato sauce, cheese, flatbread). To an extent, I've seen attempts to broaden it, often with the use of the term "flatbreads" to refer to pizza-like dishes that are toppings with a bread based that can be eaten as finger food.
With food, the two main things that tend to be tweaked are flavor and form factor. So pizza made into a casserole, as deep dish is sometimes called, is tweaking the form factor but keeping the tomato/cheese/bread flavor, while tweaking the flavor like white pizzas or dessert pizzas but keeping the sliced finger food on a crispy flatbread keeps the same form factor and is a different approach.
Maybe more successfully in the US, the idea of "tapas" has been broadened from typical Spanish bar food, to a category sometimes called "small plates".
The boundary of what's a dish and what's a category of dishes is fuzzier than people realize. Eggs Benedict can be thought of as a dish, but there's plenty of clones, using smoked salmon, crab cakes, etc. At some point, you could consider Eggs Benedict a genre/category of dishes involving english muffins, hollandaise, meat and poached egg. Or you could take it further with all sorts of variation, from replacements of the English mufffin with biscuits, bagel, waffles, etc, the egg could be scrambled, the sauce is anything thick and gooey like melted cheese, at which point, you may think of the Eggs Benedict genre as just an open faced breakfast sandwich genre.
The bit about genre classifications for roguelites would be a good point if it wasn't the developers for those games coming up with the different names themselves so as not to be put into the roguelike genre they didn't want their games classified as.
It wasn't the players who wanted to move away from the roguelike classifications. Even Rogue Legacy, despite having rogue in its name, attempted to move out of the genre's name by coining itself as a Roguelite. It's the same for a lot of the games within the more modern push of rogue mechanics.
So no, it's not bitter players upset a genre got wider. It's developers wanting to move on from the comparison you're sticking them back under. Especially because the more traditional sense of the genre is also still alive, moving forward with new games under its classification. They're two different entities at this point, and there is crossover between the playerbases even if it's not a complete overlap.
If i remember correctly, the developer for Rogue legacy is one of the first to use the "rogue lite" term
He is, yes. To move away from the typical judgements and audiences you get from the term "roguelike." Most people who really get into the platformers, and shooters, and more modern games tend to be more okay with the name "roguelite." It's stuck since.
Interestingly enough, traditional roguelike games have moved forward in design a lot too. With Rogue and Nethack originally being just dungeon crawlers, and most of the more recent games having open world and sandbox elements to them. Though they graphically still underrepresent what is going on, mechanically, they've come a long way. Even the original Diablo was originally an offshoot of Roguelike game design, which the developer talks about during his GDC post-mortem.
I went into this video with the thought "Yes, because there's a market" But when I really saw what you were saying, I was surprised to be confronted with how narrow minded my initial thought was. I was simplifying the argument that you were actually making in my own head. It amazes me now to look back at the games you mentioned that I have played and realize just how uninspired they actually felt playing them, never able to connect as to why this was. Thanks for this video, it's got my mind's gears turning now as to what this argument and topic is really all about.
I would suggest that the naming of a genre after its parent game might be less responsible for cookie-cutter remakes than the simple success of the game. When some title is on all the gaming news headlines and they start selling merch for it at Target, many companies try to clamber into that space to have a taste of that success. Like with battle royale games somewhat recently.
The problem with this reasoning is that if, for example, we apply the genre concept of "Immersive sims" to Zelda or Hitman, it starts to bend and blurry the line that separates different genres. Is it Zelda that is really an immersive sim or is it Thief that is actually an action-adventure game that focus a lot on stealth? Hell, how do you even define where each one of those catchy genre names apply and where they don't?
Seriously, how do we do this process? Of course, you could say that "everybody" knows what an RPG is, or what a text adventure or a FPS is. But how do everybody knows? Of course, comparing a bunch of games and noticing similarities, and then giving a random name. The games that stand out usually are the most referenced and the ones that guide the invention of the genre. But that definition is always limited. If I play Dungeons of Dredmor on non-permadeath mode it stops being a roguelike? Really?
Either those definitions are too strict or too broad. Even if they're not based on only one game, they are ALWAYS indicating standards that serve more like formulas than guidelines. And what determines if a game can really be unique is not if a "genre" is too narrow or not. It is HOW it puts together its ideas. A very genre-defying game, like Bwyond Good an Evil, can be memorable. But a game that respects all 123948 rules of the Berlin interpretation - Ultima Ratio Regum, for example - can also be extremely unique.
TLDR: what makes a game blend like most soulslikes, minecraft clones or newer immersive sims is not if their supposed "genre" is open enough, but HOW they use (or dont use) the genre guidelines.
Dude, just discovered your channel. I love a few channels for their reviews and analysis, but you standout for truly taking mechanics or trends of the game market and analyzing them. All that to say great videos man!
"Kingsfield-like"
Man, Demon's Souls is still so underrated. Most people haven't played it because it's only on PS3. We need a PS4 remaster!
OR just release it for PC so it doesn't become obsolete when the next console gen without backwards compatibility comes along. Then for bonus points keep it mod friendly, so dedicated fans can keep brushing up the graphics and have it stay palatable.
Hate it when a game is held hostage to force people into buying hardware. Especially annoying when the game is then basically erased once said hardware becomes unobtainable. Certainly don't want encourage this scam of selling you the same game over and over for full price, just for the privilege of keeping it.
It's likely getting a ps5 remake, at least that's the rumor.
@@danielschroedinger2090 You mean the people who made a game don't have the right to do with it what they want? HOW DARE THEY.
Keep port begging I guess.
@@IskandarTheWack Who said anything about rights? You can acknowledge peoples right to something while also disagreeing with it. Also why wouldn't the devs want their game on as many plattforms as possible? This is not about what the people who made the game want to do, but about what the people, who own the publishing rights want.
@@IskandarTheWack Also no need to beg for a port. At this point you can just emulate it.
Speaking of games that turned into genres in more recent history, perhaps the best example of the cycle you mentioned is DotA. Initially other games in the genre were called DotA clones and while Heroes of Newerth is quite literally an exact DotA clone just changing character names and a few abilities here and there, League of Legends took the ideas of DotA and made them more accessible by removing mechanics like denial, controlling multiple units(from skills of certain characters and items), etc and eventually added others including new maps and more recently new map objectives and turret plates. Smite iterated on the formula by being 3d instead of 2d with a completely different movement and aiming scheme, using the keyboard instead of point and click with the mouse. The core elements of a base with towers protecting it and minion waves marching onwards from each base to attack the other team remain consistent, as do the fact that the player choosing and playing as a single character, which makes for a rather rigid structure. However within that structure there is still room to innovate and other games have while DotA 2 stuck to its original formula, merely modernizing and streamlining it, and is still the most successful game in the genre. Speaking of the Souls-like genre, oddly enough it took id software themselves to iterate upon their own genre with Sekiro, staying inside Dark Souls' rigid structure but greatly innovating inside it. I think it was easier for id software to do it than for anyone else as they were the original creators thus fans are more accepting of changes made by them than by anyone else.
While a huge part of DS1 success was its combat mechanics and importance of DYING lol
I feel like some Devs think if they nail that type of combat mechanics etc then it is a souls like...DS1 was a game changer partly because of that along with the LORE and the exploration.
Surge is not a souls like. Neither are honestly all the others.
The combat is close and everything else is either badly done or missed completely.
Too many downplay the importance of those other factors and the reason DS1 still has and will pretty much always have a dedicated playerbase.
You can play through the game ten times and without a doubt %100 there will still be secrets and tidbits that you have never seen before.
I ran it the other day and there was more then enough players online for invasions and summoning.
7 years later.
Action warm ups, animation priority, and stamina management are all present in monster hunter. I would be fine calling monster hunter a soulslike game in terms of combat, but the game is very unique in other aspects...
If were comparing combat then it would be more accurate to say that soulslike games have monster hunter like combat, since it came out first.
Marvo Langeberg doesn’t really matter what came out first, it’s what popularized the genre. They didn’t call them Wolfenstein Clones, they called them Doom Clones.
So if MH was the one that popularized them it would be "MH-like"? that doesn't sound right, I think the "Hunter Genre" should be there.. but then again that would be more of a simulator. :/
@@SuperSecretAgentNein MH did actually popularise those elements and had a lot of rivals which released in Japan and the West prior to Souls. It isn't like MH World is the first million selling game with those parts: www.capcom.co.jp/ir/english/finance/million.html
100% agree
I actually struggle to play souls games because I'm so used to MH combat I keep defaulting to MH controls haha
why would i want genres to be broadly defined? thats not helpful for me when im looking for a specific experience. perfect examples are "first person shooter" or "rpg" which dont mean anything nowadays
None of the base-level genres mean much in gaming today. I find the Steam tag system to be a little more defining, but ultimately a game usually needs a paragraph, or a Let's Play, to fully understand the style and mechanics.
Not to mention even in well established mediums such as novels and films they still have genres to help define what type of experience you'll get, much to the chagrin of others who desperately try to defy said genres and ironically go into the "try too hard to not be genre fiction."
+Wimpleton Duck
Go to a music forum
Ask what genres are real and not gimmicks
Watch the ensuing shoutfest
Wimpleton Duck It's funny you specifically called out metal, because for pretty much every music genre, there is a subgenre of metal that uses the same kind of structure 'specific' to that genre.
EG Trash Metal and Jazz have the same form structure, despite sounding wildly different.
Ah good that we have Ishkur as the world authority on naming at least electronic music genres. But then again, new subgenres occur daily, and he's always 10 years behind.
the weird thing about genres named after games (to me, at least) has always been "what do we rename them?"
what should a "roguelike" be called if we renamed it? When I hear the word, i think of perma death and procedural generation which sometimes have a story. I didn't even know they were named after rogue until a few years after i got into the genre.
Single-shot procedural generation? SSPG, shotproc?
Perma-death dungeons? Permaduns? Procedural death labyrinths came up in the video.
Randomized levels?
Probably off-topic, but why do I get the feeling that THIS will be the theme for true upcoming Game Jam?
Some obscure genre to think around would be cool, but i'd rather be more surprised.
probably because you're just learning about the genre now.
There's a few directions this could go, but I STRONGLY got that sense too.
I'd hope he would do an older video instead of one that went up after the announcement, personally.
Contenterful Either this or downwell
One thing to consider though is that roguelike is not really its own genre; rather, it is a specific subgenre of dungeon crawlers. I don't think it's really fair to say that naming a genre "roguelike" stifles the development of the genre when it is already used to refer to a specific type of dungeon crawlers.
Also, games like Rogue Legacy aren't truly Roguelikes, they are not like Rogue. Those games take some mechanics from Rogue, like permadeath and random generation. That isn't enough for Roguelike to be a useful descriptor, if we include those games
I love all the talk of mechanics defining a genre, followed by saying that's not everything it's about atmosphere and storytelling, sets up the video to restate this wordlessly by finishing on the game's first massive oh my god moment where the raven grabs you off the cliff. Excellent video direction.
I would say that the ''Action-warm ups'' ''animation priority'' and ''stamina managment'' as a staple of Monster hunter more than dark souls.
Dark Souls is Hunter-like.
"Renamed versions of 'estus flask'" **shows a health potion**
Is it just me, or as this video changed since I last saw it ?
Anyway, amazing work Mark, definitely a video I'll be rewatching, it's just so full of interesting stuff :) !
You’re one of my favorite creators!
The only real staple a soulslike game needs to have is the plunging attack, the most reliable move in the game. Doesn't count if it doesn't.
Great video! I’m rewatching it because I found out that Dead Cells describes itself as a Rogue-lite Metroidvania inspired action-platformer with Souls-lite combat
Damn, you _really_ like Spelunky, don't you?
Top 10 games of all time baby
It is really good tho
@@quackquack8775 when will it come to switch
@@gasternecross I'm not sure, but there is a Spelunky 2 coming out supposedly in 2020-21 so I'm hyped as hell. Should come to ps, Xbox, Pc and switch
I don't know how, it's such a horrible game lol
I think you can also argue that some genres can *stop* being genres and become even more broad. Like, nowadays if you just say of a game “it’s an FPS” that doesn’t really give that much information, because there are SO many different ways developers have used first person shooter mechanics. Like yeah Doom Eternal is kind of a “true” FPS, but something like Overwatch is also an FPS. In that way, FPS is almost more of a medium than a genre.
Well in other arts genre can also define an extremely loose thing qnd things like sub genre exist, like Rock just means that it has a guitar or abstract art refers to everything that is not photorealistic wich is most paintings ans sculptures at this point
This is a 14 minute video that literally disses every single video game that has ever been made, and is 100% right.
I wouldnt worry too much about the canonisation thing, at least in rogues case. I would be willing to bet that upwards of 80 or 90% of gamers have never heard of Rouge and just take the name at face value.
As GMTK already mentioned(in another episode), Dark Souls is essentially one of em “Zelda-Likes” with different priorities.
Didn't Dark Souls just copy Monster Hunter's combat and alter the death mechanic? They didn't "invent" a genre, they just further popularized it. So let's say we make this genre defined as you say, and prioritize "Action warmups", "Animation Priority", and "Stamina management". We still have Monster Hunter, which predated Dark Souls by 7.5 years, and Demon's Souls by 5. And yet no one seems to care for the similarity. Fans of the Souls series even scoff at the idea that their game wasn't the first to do what it does. Monster Hunter's focus on boss fights cannot be enough to prevent these series from being in similar genres, otherwise we run too narrow of a conception of the genre.
Also "never progressing past step 2" is what the Metroidvania subgenre is when regarding platformers. All you have to do is interconnect the map on a platformer, add in some ridiculously hidden secrets, and encourage the player to backtrack while fighting respawning enemies. Hollow Knight is a true Metroidvania. Dark Souls could even be argued to be a 3D Metroidvania.
Mostly I'm tired of everyone comparing things to Dark Souls. Difficulty is not a brand, and everything in Dark Souls, from the abstract lore, to the combat, to the pride it is known for eliciting when you overcome a difficult boss, has all been done before.
MasterofLaziness Dark souls is a natural sucessor of demon souls and demon souls is a natural successor of kingsfield. A series that existed before Monster Hunter.
MasterofLaziness Monster hunter copied the souls-borne series
@@greatshinobi-owl3120 no.
You sir, are bumping my creativity lots and LOTS and LOTS. Most helpful yt channel I´ve found on 2020
I recall playing Dark Souls for the first time and saying to myself, "This is a lot like a Survival Horror game" and me and my friends dubbed it as Namco/Bandai's response to "Resident Evil".
x-like is a terrible way to name a genre.
We should use x-esque instead, it's fancier
Doom Clone
@divide two nah, "-spirit" is too edgy. "Souls-spirit"
Nah, if that were our other option, "-like" is waaaaayyyyy better. No need for fancy explanations, a game that is like X.
TheWickedWeenie
So I assume you have a problem with the term “Metroidvania” too?
Sometimes that’s the only way it can work. Luckily for Doom the genre it popularized could be defined easily and quickly. First person, and shooter.
How do you quickly explain a game like rogue? How do you quickly explain a game like Dark Souls? DS isn’t JUST an action rpg, when someone says X game is an action rpg it’s a real crapshoot on if it will be anything like Souls.
Alternately, we could break down what makes a Souls game, a combat focused action rpg with minimal overt storytelling and a...I don’t even know how to succinctly explain the leave your currency/experience at the place where you died and then have to retrieve it or lose it system. Hey how bout we just call it a soulslike?
It’s inelegant but it gets the point across and that’s really the whole point of genre isn’t it?
I don't think Dark Souls' combat aspect you've mentioned should be genre's definition (Action Warm-up / Animation Priority / Stamina Management) because those are not inspired specifically by Dark Souls but more by Monster Hunter series, which is older, and inspired Souls series' combat. Soulslike should be defined by 1 gameplay characteristic: progressing between save points through pre-designed levels.
Doesn’t that describe almost every game?
god of war is a soulslike
>Mark Brown mentions Matthewmatosis.
>Mind explodes
I have to disagree. I think people want more of the same and don't want a formula shaken up, especially with niche genres/IPs. There is a danger that an entire design philosophy of games can disappear if the formula is shaken up too much. Even in niche genres like 2D fighting games an expert can tell you that SNK, Capcom, and Arc System Works have different approaches to the genre. Problem is if Capcom changes stuff too much for Street Fighter 6, the fans can't just jump into King of Fighters or Guilty Gear.
I feel bad for the people still stuck on old games because no company is willing or interested in making a game that captures the formula they really like. I think of the Mario fans who have wanted a sequel to 64 for ages who were dissatisfied with Sunshine and didn't care for Galaxy and just now they are getting Odyssey. Now don't get me wrong Nintendo can and should make different types of 3D Mario games, but they should've provided something for the Super Mario 64 crowd besides a remake.
important aspects of Dark Souls:
1. deliberate, timing based combat
2. deliberate checkpoint system
3. XP is also currency
4. XP/currency lost upon death
5. lost XP/currency can be recovered if the player can avoid dying again
6. volatile resource management (stamina, estus, magic)
7. certain resources refreshed after dying/ activating a checkpoint
8. checkpoints are a CLEAN SLATE, health, refreshing resources and enemies are all restored
9. oh, and it has to be an RPG
i think the most important aspects would be the checkpoint system, loss and reclamation of currency and/or XP upon death, and the checkpoints as a clean slate system, with volatile resource management being more optional. the checkpoint and checkpoint refresh systems i think are the most important, but don't really describe the genre very well
I like how similar metroidvanias are, honestly. It's a set of mechanics I really like, and sometimes I just want to play something similar with different aethetics or slightly different mechanics
The thing about Rogue-lite, is unlike Rogue-like, it's NOT a genre. It's applied to other genres in the same way that any sort of game can have rpg elements. Similarly, boiling "Souls-like" down to methodically managing your stamina would be applicable to other genres, and no longer be a genre by itself.
"Souls-like" also imply difficulty.
This would suggest that something cannot be part of multiple genres at once. For example Portal is both a puzzle game, and an FPS. Both "rogue-lite" and "rogue-like" are being used as genres. It is really just all around a debate of what "rogue-like" should entail.
Hew91 Portal is not an FPS.
so does "fighting" and "rts"
In school, we were tasked with naming different "genres" of games, the instructor wrote down all our responses. for example, he then asked, ok in first person games what kind of weapons do you have. we rattled everything we could think of and again he wrote em down. when we had the entire board covered with everything we could thing of he said, Alright now for your guys game designs you cant have anything we wrote up on the board. It really made you realize how creating games based on a genre traps you into conventions already explored. This video reminded me of that same lesson. when you try to make a game that adhere's to an assumed genre you stifle a lot of creativity right out the gate.
And every new Hero or Arena Shooter is "Overwatch-Like". Even if they play and feel different.
It looks that dark souls and overwatch were the only games wich were played by those people. So that's why everything must be like them
XSlim you misspelled "Quake"
XSlim tf2
Quake isnt based on classes though. The game that added classes to the shooting was the first team fortress. If anything, hero arena shooters are TF2 clones.
team fortress was originally a quake mod
The essence of the Souls-like gameplay experience is this - Every action requires thought, and since the pace doesn't require twitchy play, you get just enough time to think about every action. The end result is that you get the feeling of a turn based RPG, but executed in real time.
I think I remember it being referred to as "intentional combat" which only covers the combat, so not a good name for a genre. Hmm..Intentional deathloop adventure genre? Deathloop meaning dying isn't a reset of anything other than position, as enemies, loot and everything else stays as it was.
Many other games required thinking as well heck they even need you to think deeper lmfao
I need a Soulslike genre so I instantly know which games are just out to waste my time with esoteric difficulty, corpse runs and respawning everything, and not bother with them.
Another genre which has been named from a game, yet this fact is not as often acknowledged, is the adventure game genre. People tend to forget that it was named for the 1976 Colossal Cave Adventure(also known as simply "Adventure").
wow TIL
Valuable game trivia
To be fair though adventure is a PRETTY vague word that could mean anything and I don't htink most people even know that's why the genre has its name. With something like rouge or souls they don't really say as much about their genres just by their names so people are more likely to look up and know the origins of these words out of curiosity. WIth adventure games people automatically hear "adventure" and assume they are games with long winding narratives that go to many different places and are meant to be, well, and adventure of some kind. Things like rouge likes both have "like" in their name which implies they're similar to something and rouge doesn't really reflect the ideas of perma death and such like how adventure does with wind and fantastical narratives.
"We judge new games by their ability to emulate the original", that's very true.
That happened too with mighty N9 and Yooka laylee,I find both them pretty mediocre ,but people love it because "it's like (insert game here)".
Same with dark souls and lords of fallen. The main difference between them is that the first is a good game and other is boring and too frustrating.
Manzanito :3 No one likes mighty no. 9
Big Joe Sure?
pretty sure some people LIKED mighty number 9, but i don't think anyone LOVED it, you know?
Now I remember Azura Dreams, a Playstation game. Was a rpg where every time you entered the tower you started at level 1 and had to work your way up as far as you could, with level layouts ever changing with each new entry,random enemy placement, you starting at level one as well each time, only keeping your monsters/pets and equipment. And even your equipment could erode and be destroyed. But nobody - really nobody called that a rogue-like. We all understood well what a rpg is.
It's crazy how to see just how much the genre has started to expand post Elden Ring
And I'm all for it lol
shadow tower abysslike
Dead Cells: "What if we combined Dark Souls with Spelunky"
And so the Roguevaniasoulslike was born
Dark souls has nothing to do with Dead Cells....
@@KappaJones you die and it resets, therefore is Dark Souls
Love this video but I have one small quibble. When you talked about immersive sims you mentioned how theif was considered a failure and is often forgotten. I don't think this is entirely true since it was primarily a stealth game/ sandbox that had a large impact on the stealth genre on its own.
*_"It's just like Dark Souls!"_*
This has really got me thinking, thank you!!
laughingman123 patreon supporter
Yamin4-Studios PATREON SUPPORTER BTW
Thank you for actually including links to the videos you mentioned, many channels claim "Links in the description" and then there's nothing... LoL! Anyway, interesting video. New subscriber here. Keep it up!
11:05 If those elements are the basis of the genre, does that make Punch-Out the first Souls-like? Or is Dark Souls a Punch-Out-like?
No, because those elements encompass just a single aspect of Souls games. Otherwise any run 'n gun that came before Metroid would be definable as metroidvania.
Skeletroy Exactly that's why his ideas are so stupid. He has the same philosophy the people who made nioh and the surge had. The combat and game mechanics aren't what made dark souls special.
Luckee Strikee But that single aspect is the focus of the potential genre...like how (in my opinion) the core aspect of Metroidvania games isn't running and gunning, but backtracking to previously inaccessible areas to fill out that map. I'd argue that you could make a Metroidvania style game that doesn't have any platforming, as long as the exploration factor is there. Maybe Dark Souls, with its expanded ideas and mechanics, would then be considered a Punch-Out-light?
Souls are Punch-Out-like as much as they are Diablo-like, or Metroidvania, or ICO-like even (as admitted by Miyazaki himself). They clearly brought various elements from past titles, but they reinterpreted them uniquely and elegantly enough to be be seen as, well, something new. Even taking combat alone, for example: Punch Out doesn't contemplate spacial awareness, but it's one of the key aspects to Souls games combat.
It's the case where where Civilization can be considered a roguelike due to it sharing a few major mechanics with Rogue. However, Civ isn't a dungeon crawler, you don't play as one character, turns aren't based on time units, etc. It's more so how the mechanics come operate, are utilized, and presented rather than just being there.
Just to highlight the problem with using games to define genre: I disagree with the definition of "Castlevania that plays like Metroid" for "Metroidvania".
For me, the genre name mashes the titles together because they are both necessary to define the genre. They share common elements (specifically an interconnected world where access is limited by ability set), but Castlevania diverts far enough that it cannot be confused with Metroid. In fact, Castlevania's added RPG elements pushes different strategies on the player (while Samus generally just improves on her core shooter abilities).
Defining genre in video games is interesting, though. I think we use game titles as shorthand for genre because we don't quite have the language to define game mechanics, and that means that we can't as easily define the specific mechanics that make up a genre.
Understand Metroidvania came to categorize Castlevania itself within its own genre (Such as ClassicVania / MetroidVanias)
Hence why most Metroidvanias often lack anything resembling SoTN, because most are aping Super Metroid by design, the Vania moniker seems to only exist because it sounds alot better than "Metroid-like", and because Castlevania is popular enough for people to recognize when used in conjunction with Metroid.
Well said.
You talking about how a very original and influential game can spawn many similar games until a genre forms reminds me of how games with a passing resemblance to other games can be confused for the same genre when they're actually quite different. For example, it's a major pet peeve of mine whenever people refer to the Metroid Prime trilogy as First Person Shooter. It is not, it is a first person adventure that just happens to feature shooting as its primary mode of attack. The distinction is that First Person Shooters are normally all about how many things you can kill and what best weapon to do said killing with, often with ammo management. Metroid Prime isn't that at all, most rooms you can walk through without needing to kill anything. Nor is it about the weapons, the weapon upgrades are more to help you access previous inaccessible areas i.e. exploration than they are for killing things more efficiently. First person shooters generally have little variation in where you can'are supposed to go and it's just about killing everything between your starting point and the end goal to win, whereas Metroid is about exploration, where you're supposed to go is deliberately non-obvious, there are many branching paths that in some way are all valid to an extent. It is a first person adventure that just happens to feature shooting, as its primary attack mode- it could just as easily be melee combat and the game would largely be pretty similar; if you call it a first person shooter you may as well call Minecraft a first person shooter just because it happens to have some projectile attacks.
Dark Souls itself is already a combination of many video game genres so can you really call soulslike a "new" genre. It's more about devs that are ripping off the formula of dark souls like back in the CoD4 days with call of duty and military shooters.
COD 4 is a good example of a game where there were loads of copies but it never actually led to a new genre.
Well I think the impact of Dark Souls is similar to that of CoD4. It's a game that borrows many elements from previous genres/games and iterates on them rather than revolutionize them. When Doom released it did something that no game ever did before with that first person perspective. Of course there were plenty of game which tried and first person perspective before Doom but none of them nailed it in quite the way Doom did with its stellar graphics and smooth gameplay, the fps perspective was not viable before Doom. Dark Souls borrows most of the gameplay from other games, the combat is a more advanced Z-targetting system from Ocarina of time, the world is designed in a MetroidVania like way with its interconnectedness, and leveling up and stuff is a core element from any RPG. I love me some Dark Souls but a new genre it ain't, the only thing it really added rather than iterate on was the unique storytelling.
PS: Great video, I love your content.
+Thatssomegoodpie Animations
Souls has a lot of very innovative and new aspects that have not been seen before. It's just that its clones are not taking inspiration from them, instead they are ripping off (as you said) the things that Souls itself has borrowed from older games.
sometimes a new genre can be made by merging other genres, like RPG and ARPG or CRPG
Then it is more a Sub-genre rather than a full new genre.
As someone who can't help but classify things, gaming genres leave me lacking. I've been toiling away at defining (and redefining) the existing genres, and this really got me thinking about how to approach the topic again. I loved this video, and I would love to see more on what the classifications of each genre are to you.
Imho, you forget the most important aspect. For a game to spawn a new genre it needs to be unique enough that it doesn't fit in the existing genres, or mashes up existing genres in new and interesting combinations, where it's no longer appropriate to use the old names.
This is also why new genres initially tend to get names based on the godfathers of the genre like Doom-clones, rogue-likes or Metroidvanias. Initially there simply isn't a better way to describe them. And this is also why say "zelda-like" or "mario-like" has never really become a thing. Because while they are definitly genre-defining games,they never were so different from the already existing games that we had to invent a new one to talk about them.
As for Dark souls spawning a new genre, it completly fails in this sense. It still easily fits in existing genres as it's simply an action-rpg with a penchant for obtuse mechanics & storytelling. It honestly isn't all that unique. At best you might be able to argue it spawned a specific niche subgenre of action-rpg's, but even that is a stretch...
It isn't a stretch to say it's at least a subgenre considering how closely games emulate dark souls gameplay even after so many years, there's been so little innovation yet so many games I'd say it's undeniable it's big enough to warrant it's own "niche" also very subjective but as many others have I'd argue things like the bonfire mechanic already differentiate it enough that it isn't really just an arpg anymore, it's simultaneously more straightforward in some of it's mechanics while infinitely more focused in making the player master a simple set of moves, something almost completely opposite to most arpgs with a more varied moveset and way more button mashy gameplay loop
@@T-------- How is the bonfire mechanic something different? Its simply a checkpoint system. That's not exactly unique.
As for others emulating it. Its (currently) a leader in its genre, and it got lucky enough to become a populair meme.
As for the differences with other arpgs. You have two flavours of arpgs. The first is the spammy click all the skills and turn the screen into a discoparty. The second is the more controlled, learn the patterns of the bossfight kind of thing. Souls falls in the second catagory, and is definitly a genre leader, but it didn't create that genre.
@@kakalukio it's simplifying it way to much to say it's only a checkpoint, just that mechanic alone and having to fight all enemies again every time you use it make it stand out from very similar games in combat like monster hunter, and idk it's more than a stand out in it's genre, it's the game every dev takes notes from when wanting to make a slow action 3d game, if the games had started differing from ds we could argue if there's any point in the term soulslike, but as it stands there are dozens and dozens of games doing the exact same thing over and over, it's really gotta be it's own thing by that point the way i see it
@@T-------- its literally Just a checkpoint though. And respawning enemies isnt exactly unique either. What makes it different from other checkpoint systems that would make it noteworthy?
As for other games copying it. Sure, its an industry leader, with a large présence in current pop culture. So of course others try to emulate it. But that doesn't make it a new genre. Otherwise any industry leading game wouldve spawned a new genre.
@@kakalukio the biggest games have though? Pubg/Fortnite with battle royales, dota and lol with mobas or civilization with 4x strategies, they also have in common not being the first ones to do all of their mechanics, but be the first to present them in a different way than previously seen before, and coupled with immense success and number of devs trying to copy them you end up getting new genres. About the bonfires agree to disagree ig but in games like ds1 it forces you to explore and survive through areas you're not familiar with, trying to make as much progress in a new zone before getting killed and having to do it again, it changes entirely the gameplay loop as it forces you to look for new paths and shortcuts, get familiar with enemy spawns and manage what to do with your souls before you lose them, the mechanic itself isn't new, but it being used with the other mechanics like in combat or exploration changes the way you think of the gameplay significantly enough that it merits a new term to define it
A lot of people seem to think that the most important Thing about a souls game is the difficulty. Thats not the case. Dark Souls offers a lot more than that. A game is not a "souls-like" (as much as i hate the term) because its considered hard.
While I agree, I do think the difficulty is important in how it pressures gamers into engaging with the mechanics in a certain way. The hallmarks of Souls-likes experiences, the risk-reward of potentially loosing Souls or gaining more and deciding when and how to use Estus and other items, are only possible when the game is hard enough to make those risks actually risky.
I mean i feel like people who play dark souls just want more dark souls in their life. because its so fucking good
Fantastic video!
And you know what surprised me when I learned it was a Metroidvania kinda? Kirby & the Amazing Mirror. Lots of branching paths and backtracking
I think there's value in iteration as well as innovation. Actually I think innovation is incredibly over valued but whatever. I really like Nioh and it's because, to me, it feels more like Dark Souls 3 than Dark Souls 3. There are many improvements to the formula like the combat mechanics and control scheme that Miyazaki hasn't figured out in all the time he's been making these games. And the level design is *chef hand kiss motion*. I think this applies to Prey as well. The devs never intended to innovate within the immersive sim genre. Their stated design goal was to make a spiritual successor to System Shock and Bioshock and I think they did a pretty good job. They certainly handled moral choice better than Bioshock does.
flesh sock I have to disagree. Miyazaki has perfected the combat. simple, but deep and complex. nioh was fun, but the combat felt more like wait for the enemy to stop, then attack. in soulsborne games, you have the added I frames in rolling, so that you can be in and around the action. dodging and rolling between hits instead of just standing off to the side waiting your turn. It's also great for PvP. nioh would not be PvP friendly. especially with all the game breaking magic. nioh tried to spice up the combat by adding more mechanics, but ended up with a much shallower finished product.
69mickswagg "Simple but deep and complex" two of those words mean opposite things buddy. Nioh has I-frames so I don't know why you brought that up and with stance changing and ki pulsing Nioh encourages you to play much more aggressively than even bloodborne. If you just waited for the enemy to stop to attack that's your fault not the games.
flesh sock No, you just don't understand what I'm saying. It's simple as in there aren't a ton of mechanics, but what you can do with those mechanics are where the depth comes in. it's almost limitless the ways you can use what they give you to fight in interesting ways. nioh has more mechanics, but it always boils down to, wait until the bad guy is finished, then you attack them. Also, the enemy mechanics in soulsborne games and the enemy variety puts nioh to shame. But, this is just my opinion. I accept that you like Nioh better. And that's fine. there are literally tens of you out there. And I know you don't have to wait for them to attack first. But if they do get an attack out, it's almost always better to use your roll to just escape their area and wait for them to finish. In soulsborne games, you can dance around them as long as you have the skill to time your rolls, and do things like back stabs and parry.
69mickswagg It would be cool if you knew how to read. I said 2 of the words. Simple and conplex mean opposite things. I never denied that souls combat has depth. I also never said I like Nioh more. I think Nioh is iterating and improving on the souls formula when the actual souls games aren't. That doesn't stop Dark Souls being one of my favourite games. The cognitive dissonance required to hold the opinion you have is prettt impressive though. You can dance around enemies in Nioh. You can parry in Nioh and you can back stab. And the safest strategy to not die in Dark Souls is to wait for the enemies to stop attacking and attack them. I can agree with the enemy variety point, although saying it puts Nioh to shame is a bit over the top.
Yeah, exactly. I like to think of roguelikes and metroidvanias as videogames equivalent to sonnets or haikus - a very strict form which allows a broad range of possible expressions. Many videos are dedicated to the problem of stangation and design cliches, few to the pressure to innovate. So many ideas are left underdeveloped because they had already been done in a basic way by another game.