What gaming genre could use a renaming?
Why? (What makes its current name a bad/imprecise/clumsy one?)

Also, an optional follow-up:
What would you propose as a better name for the genre?
Why? (What makes it better?)

I'm currently researching the 4x Alpha Centauri, and I'm wondering what, in your mind, sets it apart from other 4x, or what makes it better.
Thanks for providing some rationale and not just dumping on other 4x

I realized that some games I play fall into specific categories that could be their own sub-genre, but are either too specific, haven't been around long enough, or there's a "good enough" combination of genres that could be used to describe them that makes it impossible to find more in that genre.

I'm interested if anyone else has any of these weird little sub-genres that they enjoy and wanted to share.

Feel free to add any games that you think fit into sub-genres other people describe

I've tried hundreds of searches (variations of this) on google and either I have no idea what to search for, or it doesn't exist.

I'll keep it short, the best way to explain is that I'm looking for a game in the style of the Total War franchise, but focused (mostly) on the top down battle view:

Example 1

Example 2

I'm not that interested in manually managing tens of regions, I don't want to 3d my way through a battle front while the soldiers gore eachother, I just want to focus on being a general that wins battles through tactics. Where I can apply strategies like Oblique Formation and False Gap to outmaneuver my enemies.

Do you have any recommendations for me? Is there any game that even comes close to this? (apart from the Total War franchise - which I love by the way, but the games tend to last too long, and they're getting bigger and bigger with each release)

I'll go first: turn-based combat.

While not as common as they once were, there are still a lot of games, AAA and indie alike, that get massively popular and are known for their supposedly excellent turn-based combat. Games that are probably what a lot of people who don't care for turn-based combat make an exception for, for one reason or another. Say they really enjoy how Undertale is "the RPG where you don't need to kill anything", or how Persona 5 is "so stylish". Also, there's the classic JRPGs of old, such as the older Final Fantasy games, or these more military grid based kind of games like Fire Emblem.

I just don't "get" any of it. I've never beaten a game featuring turn-based combat from start to finish. Yes, that includes Pokemon games. I don't know what it is specifically. I've beaten games of basically every other genre, but when I start any turn-based game because of some friend recommendation or good reviews, I try it, am genuinely invested for a couple hours, then my interest in the game just dies all of a sudden. I don't think it's any one issue really, probably a lot of different things.

Anyone else never really got into these kinds of games? Or do you have some other game genre that everyone else swears by that you just don't care for?

The System Shock remake thread got me thinking about it. I've played the crap out of the Dishonored series, and Prey, along with some Deathloop, and I really enjoy all of them. It's crazy how much fun it can be to just really get into it, I drop the lights and everything, sit 8 inches from my 4k monitor (ghetto VR basically), and just 'enter' the game. This is especially fun when a little THC is involved!

Any games I may have overlooked? I do prefer the First Person type games, the visuals are part of the immersion for me personally.

It’s often argued that open-world, zombie survival, and the likes have been overdeveloped and variety needs to be introduced to help stimulate an otherwise stale market. What do you wish upcoming games had that the others do not? Were there any titles that just fell shy of your expectations?

What are your thoughts on romance in RPGs? I'm using the word "romance" here because it's usually what the topic is called. But I think it's too specific and has unwanted connotations with cheeziness. I would prefer the term "attraction", which can also refer to more challenging relationships that might not include sex or even happy endings.

The recent news that Starfield will only feature 4 romance options has fans debating, and before Starfield it was Cyberpunk, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Skyrim, etc. Each of these games took a slightly different approach to romance and each had their fans and critics. On the one hand, the Witcher 3 had a defined player-character and very few romance options, but the writing was excellent and the romances fairly believable. And then there was Skyrim, where you created your own character and had lots of romance options, but all you needed to do was a fetch quest for your belle/beau and then give them a necklace before living a happily married life of fighting bandits, adopting children and saying the same things to each other ad nauseam every day for eternity. But even Skyrim's romance had a certain charm to it. At least you got to live with your partner, build a house, have a family and go hunting together...

I fully understand the viewpoint that gamers would rather have fewer options if they are deep than more numerous janky options. We're yet to see what Starfield's execution will be like, but even if they have done a good job with it, I can't help feeling a little disappointed that there are so few options in such a massive game. I fully understand how difficult it would be to have more options and still make the romances compelling, but I think this should be strived for, rather than just given up as too hard.

Of all the big entertainment media (movies, TV, books, etc.), games are understandably way behind when it comes to romance. It's either rarely implemented or implemented poorly because technically it is very difficult. Yet it's often a major part of storytelling and virtually omnipresent in other media. Sometimes it's the main story; other times it's a side story within the main one. But it's quite rare for it never to feature at all in mass entertainment media. Of course, it's often shoehorned in because it's what the viewers/readers want and expect, but you can also argue that attraction to someone else is just a fundamental human emotion and maybe even unavoidable, especially in an epic or heroic scenario like an RPG. I'm sure someone with professional experience in this field could probably speak more to this point, but I'm thinking here of those intense emotional feelings you get from stressful situations, which could lead to crushes and attraction for those in the same situation, or to rescuers and caregivers (Nightingale syndrome), or even to abductors (Stockholm syndrome) and the opposite (Lima syndrome).

And the fact that it's a fundamental human trait that plays such a major role in our lives (for better or worse) is why I think gaming companies should not ignore romance and should strive to create truly compelling attraction stories. It's an area ripe for innovation and could really make a game stand out from the rest. It's time to move on from the stereotype that gaming is for teenage boys and all they want is to shoot things and maybe have sex with big-titted avatars. Gaming is now for everyone, for all ages and for all sexualities (including asexuals), and I'm sure there's a market for mature stories to reflect what drives many people's decisions and behaviours.

The RPG genre in particular seems to be the best fit for romance (outside of dating sims, which I know nothing about). The beauty of role-playing is that you get to be who you want to be, which includes exploring attraction and your sexuality. It's incredibly challenging and maybe even impossible to create a game that would please everyone, but I certainly don't think the idea of compelling attraction gameplay should be given up because previous attempts have felt so inauthentic.

Going back to Starfield, I'm really excited to go out exploring the stars, fighting space pirates, upgrading my ship, and acquiring cool abilities. I love all these things about RPGs. But I'm also a sucker for a great story and experiencing a genuine human journey. For me, this includes relationships, both platonic and sexual, because it would be unavoidable when spending so much time with people on my ship, and exploring the galaxy. The importance of attraction in games will vary between gamers, but as other mass entertainment media has shown us, it's massively popular when done well, probably because it speaks to something so fundamental within us as humans.

These are just some of my musings and ramblings. What are your thoughts?

• Is it a waste of dev time and resources because it's too hard to do well?
• Is it an aspect you particularly enjoy or hate in RPGs?
• Which game did it best?
• What would you like to see in RPGs of the future with AI possibly being used?

Hey all,

I will admit, one thing I will miss about the other site is having the strong simracing community. Have any other sim racers made the jump?

I told myself I wouldn’t buy another F1 game (hell, I partially got a PC to keep F1 22 alive with mods), but F1 23 looks like it’s a huge step better. Maybe that will be my last F1 game, lol.

Otherwise, I find myself really only playing Assetto Corsa. I know other games are better at one thing or another, but AC just seems to have the best all-around. I play single player almost exclusively, so I want a decent AI and also be able to race everywhere they do IRL. For example, I hear the indycars are better in Automobilista 2, but AC has all the track mods, and I’m honestly having fun using AI apps to fix any kind of AI dumbness that occurs. Same with WEC- AC probably isn’t the best physics, but I have all the cars and the tracks.

Any other sim racers here?

I used to like Command & Conquer and similar games, but these days I find it stressful and too fast paced.

I want some recommendations of turn based games that does not have a steep learning curve like Hearts of Iron but it's not too simple like Advanced Wars.

It needs to be for PC and run on a Ryzen 3200G laptop.

Hello everyone,

I have been craving a sort of game genre, but I'm not quite sure what it is or if it really exists as a genre at all.
It is a game with a lot of existential twists to it. I could call it Mystery though I feel it falls short.
The main story tends to be a complete upheaval of what we thought was the basic premise. Think of it like paradigm shift: the game.
They also tend to be games that you can really only play once. Lucky for me my memory is horrible.

So far I came up with these games:

• Outer Wilds
• Enderal (which is a "total conversion mod for Skyrim", but an amazing game)
• The Forgotten City
• Paradise Killer

Most of these have some kind of cycle involved in them, but I'm not sure if that's coincidental. All of them have you learn how the world works and it's never really what you first expected.
They tend to be light in battle, which is probably a skill issue bias on my part.

Honorary mention to:

• Strange Horticulture
• Horizon Zero Dawn, but the sequel less so (although still a very good game)
• The Zero Escape series, although I haven't played the first one yet
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (as it really breaks away expectations you got from earlier games too, and the existential dread is dripping off it)
• Nier Automata
• Doki Doki Literature Club

Do you know any others? Or do you know a good match to this list?
What do you think kind of links all this? Feel like playing one of these games?

I am mostly a TTRPG player, but lately I have been becoming a bit curious on wargaming.

I usually play TTRPGs because it allows a lot more freedom when compared to video games. However, I can't really see that much in wargaming that you can't get in video games. Is the appeal primarily a social one?

I am not bashing wargaming or saying that it's a bad hobby. I am just curious as to what the main draw is.
Thank you for any answers :)

This type of game seems to be the new hotness right now, and there are now enough that I feel like they’ll need their own genre identifier.

Is there a broadly accepted one? If so, is it good?

And, if not, what do you think games of that type should be called?

I’ve see a few suggestions here and there, but none of them have felt right to me. I’m interested in almost theorycrafting the optimal genre identifier (in the vein of “procedural death labyrinth”). What are the unifying traits of games of these types, how do we best identify them without simply stringing together other genres (e.g. “reverse bullet hell idle action roguelike”), and what can we use that has “stickiness” as a term?

There were a few years when RTS was a popular genre with games like Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, and Starcraft being very popular examples.

But these games have mostly died out, and I was wondering if maybe I'm just not aware of modern RTS variants, or if there are good reasons why these games died off.

Like, are Tower Defence games a form of RTS?

Are there any RTS games where teams play against each other, so 2v2 rather than 1v1?

(Inspired by this conversation thread)

Any and all thoughts on visual novels are welcome. Some potential questions for jumping off points:

What are your thoughts on the VN genre/format?

What are some of the best VNs you’ve played/read?

What would you recommend to someone who’s new to VNs and wants to try one out?

How do you think VNs compare to games, literature, and other interactive fiction?

A cursory search found only comedic, light-hearted, fantastical options.

I want something set in the late Pleistocene or early Holocene, roughly 50,000-8,000 years BCE. At least somewhat (pre-)historically accurate (no dinosaurs or wizards, only 2001-esque aliens, at most), incorporating at least the basics of what we now know of that era.

Either a single character or a small group (I'm envisioning something like Skyrim, or a Baldur's Gate style, or some kind of community-planner, like RimWorld or Dwarf Fortress).

Alternately, if anyone still remembers the The Clan of the Cave Bear (novel or movie), I want that, in game form.

Bonus points if it runs on Linux w/o Wine.

Does anything like this exist, or should I just sit down and make it? Danke

I was wondering if anybody had any tips for muscling through a game. I've got a few games I want to play or go back to, such as Stardew Valley (I completed it before the 1.3 update, wanna play 1.4), and Factorio (I bought in a fit of passion, haven't gotten an hour in). There are others, but these are the two I find myself going "I'm going to play this!" and I just never get to, and it's not for time.

I like the concepts of these games, and I've got something like 135 hours on Stardew Valley, but seem to get bored after I've restarted it (I lost some key items and bugs caused me to never get them back, plus the mine completion bug fixed in 1.3). I started Slime Rancher after playing through it in early access, but can't seem to get back into it after it went gold a couple years ago.

I realize I'm sort of asking for a way to force myself to play games, but has anybody done this? I'm thinking for a given game I can set smaller goals to strive for, and work on doing that, but was wondering if anybody has any ideas.

A recent discussion got me thinking about how a lot of the standard genre descriptions for games are either opaque to the unfamiliar or seemingly incongruous with what they are describing. Almost any game can be described as a "role playing" game because you "play" the "role" of a given character. Adventure games often aren't very "adventurous" and often just mean that characters talk to each other instead of shoot each other. In survival games you survive; in racing games you race; in casual games you... well, usually match 3 but not always? Also why are we so focused on camera for some games (e.g. first-person shooter) but not for others (e.g. third-person sports)?

So, let's throw away everything we know about genres and start fresh. No baggage from gaming history; no widely understood conventions; no games that reference other games (e.g. "Souls-like"). Your goal is to make gaming genres as clear and accurate as possible, at the expense of convenience, tradition, and, in some cases, good taste.

Turn "roguelike" into "procedural death labyrinth". Turn "battle royale" into "shrinking-zone dead-is-dead killfest". Feel free to propose not just genre redefinitions but whole a whole taxonomy if you feel it's warranted. After all, some genres need a hierarchy of identifiers.

Be as formal or loose as you want, and the main purpose of this is to have fun, though if some great new terms happen to fall out of it you won't hear me complaining.

I'm not necessarily asking for the scariest one you've played but for your personal favorite/best, based on whatever criteria you choose. Games that are more horror-lite/spooky still count as well, so feel free to consider and include those.

With regards to your pick: what made it so good? In what ways did its use of horror add to your experience?

Given that a lot of horror relies on surprise, subverting expectations, or the unknown, please give spoiler warnings if you plan to discuss important aspects/plot points that might ruin the game for others.

Hello all, hope you're doing well. It's the weekend again, and that means that a lot of us have some free time on our hands. And some of my favorite things to do with my ever-shrinking free time is dive into a large game world and just explore. With that in mind, I thought we could start a little conversation about free-roaming video games, and open-world games in general.

Some thoughts to ponder:

• What are some of your favorite free-roaming titles?

• What keeps a free-roaming or open-world title from getting boring?

• What are some of the more unique ways to populate a large game world?

• *Is Just Cause 2 the best free-roaming game ever? The answer may surprise you!