So I need to disagree with some of your placements. I can't see how Plants vs Zombies has any real exploration elements. I could see how someone might consider the zombies to be "surviving the environment" but is that really exploration or is it simply just conflict?
PvZ should be even more to the left of the chart!
You're seldom actively in conflict with the zombies, mostly you're focusing on placing the plants, battling with lack of space, fog, barren terrain and the *type* of zombies, but rarely single zombies. They're mostly stacked up on each other and you don't pay much attention to them, except if it's a giant and you have to place bombs to kill him, that would be a direct conflict part.
Nojh said:
Also I contest your placement of Diablo 2. We call it an action-RPG because back in the day, it was one of the first RPGs to let you walk around and hit things in real time but if you analyze the gameplay, It is mostly all your stats. You move and you click a lot, occasionally hitting other buttons to fire off different more complicated abilities. In otherwirds you have a mostly indirect influence on what is happening on the screen. Diablo is also all about looking around enviroments and finding loot. Classic exploration. Conflict is where things are a little iffy in my opinion. For the most part all the creatures you find in diablo aren't really in anyway similar to you. They're all "trash" mobs that are pretty much apart of the background and environment. Only a few of the bosses, Diablo in particular, stand out as something that you go toe to toe against, which is why I say it straddles the SE/SCE line. Which would ironically place it more as Adventure or RPG than the ususal "Action-RPG" we call it.
Not having enough real conflict is what most of the Diablo2 clones do wrong.
In D2, you can escape the trajectory of missiles, so can the enemies. Position is imperative. Flash-like reflexes are also.
Trash mobs... Have you been in hell? Hardcore + hell?
Of course when you're 99 and all geared up, most mobs are trash, but on the way to there, there are enough things which can easily kill you in a second or two if you're not paying attention.
Btw, since when do enemies need to be as strong as you? Then you wouldn't be able to kill hordes of them, now where's the fun in that =)
Bosses being toe-to-toe with you? Wtf? They are insanely imba (Duriel) or can 2 hit you (Mephisto, Diablo) if you're not careful and cheese them.
Don't take it personal if it's not true, but you sound like you haven't played much of D2.
Do you know what an Adventure is? Monkey Island. That's an Adventure. Not D2.
Hmm. Fair enough. I think when I wrote this, I wasn't working off how they defined exploration in the article but the more literal definition of exploration, where you explore, rather than being the opposite of direct conflict. I suppose massive clicking to kill enemies is direct conflict, even if it is a simple control, and the difficulty of surviving what is attacking you shouldn't have any bearing on if it is or isn't direct conflict. So environment is actually anything you can't actually "deal with" by directly conflicting with it.
So are traps that you can disable direct conflict, or environment?
Thats really clever, hope it becomes accepted as default here on the escapist if not wider spread.
It got me thinking, where would you place action RTS? (or whatever the accepted name for the genre is) games like DotA, HoN, LoL and demigod. They incorporate elements of RTS (beeing based on RTS mods) but instead of controlling the army and base buiilding, you controll only one hero, RPG style where you level up, buy gear and while small compared to real RPGs you still have a skill tree. While you only controll a single unit, it's still highly strategic, and youhave to work as a team.
Exploration/conflict is easy to determine, theres just about as little exlporation as you can get, and you have 2 teams with an equal number highly balanced (hopefully) heroes competing on a symetrical map with even bases and creeps, it's almost pure conflict.
As for teh action/strategy part, it requires split second decisions nd good reaction in order to play well, but at the same time, you the team need to have a plan from the start, many games are more or less won before the actual game starts based on heroes picked by the teams, and how they chose to lane them. IMO it takes a spot between action and strategy.
I just had to ask because i got currious as to where on the chart you'd put it.
I think copycatalyst has a good point, and his five point maps do a better descriptive job for gameplay genres.
They also account better for Grand Strategy (and to a lesser extent RTS and TBS, as they tend to have smaller environments), which I don't think you've placed very well. GS games tend to have a significant exploratory component, because they tend to be games of imperfect information (games of imperfect information are ones where any individual player doesn't know everything about the game at once. Poker, for instance, is imperfect information, you know what you have in your hand, you don't know what your opponents have in theirs. Chess is a game of perfect information by contrast, both players can see all of the pieces all of the time.)
Because the player has imperfect information, they need to explore the gameworld in order to fill the gaps in the information they possess, and that's generally an ongoing process because you're exploring a fundamentally dynamic world (your opponents are moving as well as you).
Grand Strategy, and to a lesser extent RTS and TBS have much greater exploratory content than your wheel indicates. And I'd suggest that fighting games have a lot less. They're almost the most "pure" expressions of conflict in a videogame, they're games of perfect information, with nothing left to explore.
1) Yep, that's the "character-based strategy" element I'm thinking about. You're planning out and executing something according to a sequentially-oriented set of options, most often along a branching chain. It's just that the "something" is a character/party instead of a city or base full of dudes.
2) Isn't this one really just the logical extension of #1--I mean, you've got all these fancy stats, so it only makes sense that combat would be based around the manipulation of those stats. (You could also argue it works in the opposite direction, and that the stats are based on the type of combat rules you plan to have. Either way, I think these two can be collapsed into a single concept.)
Those two things doesn't have to be extensions of each other.
In typical (i know by now you hate the term, but bear with me) RPGs you have both, but it's quite possible to have 1 without having 2, while i can't come up with any good examples of existing games (maybe robot arena?), i'll try to explain it as best as i can.
Imagine a fighter game, tekken street figther whatever. Only, you, or more accurately, your character, get experience points and levels up. Theres tons of stuff that could be tweaked to build your own personal ass-kicking avatar, heres a few examples of some things that could be done
You could unlock more moves
Character movement (back and forth) speed increase
Attack speed (the tiem it takes from you pressing the appropriate buttons, till the character lands teh hit)
Attack damage
Attack recovery (the time from the impact on your attack till your character "regains balance" and allows you to do new moves)
Hit recovery (like above, but when you're the one who got hit)
Attack range
Characters HP
effectiveness of a block move (say when you block you still take a little damage, this would determien how much)
If it's a game like soul calibour, you could use different weapons etc wchich would prolly encompass most of the above.
Many of these stats could easily be seperate for each different move, you could have stats that traded advantages for disadvantages (stronger, but slower attacks for insatnce)
All this could potentially work in as deep a level of stat based character advancement as in typical RPG's, yet the combat isn't any more rule-based than teh fighters we know today, it's still twitchy actiony combat, focusing on a players split second deccisions, and proper execution of combos, usually by a correctly timed sequence of button pressing.
I'm using fighters as an example because they're one of the genres furthes away from rules-oriented combat, you could prolly do mre or less teh same thing for a brawler (Dantes inferno does it to a lesser extend with its relic slots and skill-trees for insatnce)
Shooters can also enter this argument, Borderlands for instance have skill trees and weapon stats, but combat is still determined by how good you (the player not the character) shoots, your level and stuff are tools, which you can put to use through your own skills.
It would still be possible for a player of greater skill to beat a player with a higher level character, in many fighters you can set handicap which afefcts the health of teh characters, when i play tekken VS a friend of mine he can often beat me even if i set my health up significantly and he sets his down, so even though i have the stronger character (assuming the characters are balanced, the player who sets his health higher than his opponents has the stronger character, especially if we picked the same one)
This is unlike lots of RPG's, where the combat is more or less decided before it even starts, just by comparing character lvls (stat/rules-based combat), WoW is very guilty of this for instance, good luck standing a chance against a character 20 levels above your own, regasrdless of whether or not you're the better player by miles, unless ofc he's so retarded he runs into lava snd stays there till he's dead.
If you wanted depth of stat based character progression, i'd pitch the idea of ditching the character screen typically seen in fighter games, where you choose your fighter, you just make one yourself, where you can costumize his looks and give him a name,just like in an RPG.
Then in the best RPG style, you choose a "class" or in this case fighting style, depending on the way you present the gameplay, this could be from real martial arts in an MMA style game, to a more fantasy/sci-fi oriented game where you could include magic/tec moves (think Jack5 in tekken with his gogo-gadget rocket-boot legs, street-fighters hadoukens) or weapons or whatever.
The style would work as a sort of skill-tree, where you could purchase new moves with experience points, or upgrade obtained ones, like mentioned earlier in the post.
You could also buy acces to new skill trees, or just start with all skill trees open, allowing you to choose whether to progress deeply into one skill tree, or spread it out over more skill trees. Do you want tons of moves to choose from in combat, or do you want to pump all the XP into making your round house kick as powerfull as possible and call your character Chuck?
Sure it would prolly be even mroe of a balancing hell than a regular fighter game is, but i'm talking purely about how it could be if done proberbly, not how hard it is to do it.
The number of moves you could have would only be limited to how many different moves you can fit onto a controller, and remain easy to access.
Gameplay would work just like figthers do already, only with the added element of out-of-combat deep character costumization (stat wise, not just choosing hair colour)
Sorry for the length of the post, i got a bit carried away.
Also I contest your placement of Diablo 2. We call it an action-RPG because back in the day, it was one of the first RPGs to let you walk around and hit things in real time but if you analyze the gameplay, It is mostly all your stats. You move and you click a lot, occasionally hitting other buttons to fire off different more complicated abilities. In otherwirds you have a mostly indirect influence on what is happening on the screen. Diablo is also all about looking around enviroments and finding loot. Classic exploration. Conflict is where things are a little iffy in my opinion. For the most part all the creatures you find in diablo aren't really in anyway similar to you. They're all "trash" mobs that are pretty much apart of the background and environment. Only a few of the bosses, Diablo in particular, stand out as something that you go toe to toe against, which is why I say it straddles the SE/SCE line. Which would ironically place it more as Adventure or RPG than the ususal "Action-RPG" we call it.
Not having enough real conflict is what most of the Diablo2 clones do wrong.
In D2, you can escape the trajectory of missiles, so can the enemies. Position is imperative. Flash-like reflexes are also.
Trash mobs... Have you been in hell? Hardcore + hell?
Of course when you're 99 and all geared up, most mobs are trash, but on the way to there, there are enough things which can easily kill you in a second or two if you're not paying attention.
Btw, since when do enemies need to be as strong as you? Then you wouldn't be able to kill hordes of them, now where's the fun in that =)
Bosses being toe-to-toe with you? Wtf? They are insanely imba (Duriel) or can 2 hit you (Mephisto, Diablo) if you're not careful and cheese them.
Don't take it personal if it's not true, but you sound like you haven't played much of D2.
Do you know what an Adventure is? Monkey Island. That's an Adventure. Not D2.
Hmm. Fair enough. I think when I wrote this, I wasn't working off how they defined exploration in the article but the more literal definition of exploration, where you explore, rather than being the opposite of direct conflict. I suppose massive clicking to kill enemies is direct conflict, even if it is a simple control, and the difficulty of surviving what is attacking you shouldn't have any bearing on if it is or isn't direct conflict. So environment is actually anything you can't actually "deal with" by directly conflicting with it.
So are traps that you can disable direct conflict, or environment?
First of all, sorry for double post, but seem better to quote different posts in different posts.
I'd say that diablo has lots of conflict AND exploration.
The combat is obviously conflict IMO, but the loot is where the exploraiton shines through.
How many meph-runs (or whatever runs where used for loot when you played) have you done, not because killing mephisto for the 900'th time is a challenge, but because you where "exploring" or searching for the loot.
When you play through wanting to beat the game, you're focusing on the conflict part, and the loot is there to make you strong enough to do so, therefore loot is a mean to the end which is conflict.
But when i played i (and countless other people) continued after beating Baal on hell, we kept making runs and trades to find and obtain new loot, even though you didn't really need it to win the conflict, and this way, the conflict became means to the end which was loot.
As far as i understand the article, exploration is in no way limited to exploring areas, even though the word might imply that. try looking at diablos heavy loot based gameplay as an exploration element, where you constantly discover new items, new sets, new runewords etc.
And as explained above, exploration and conflict can in the case of D2 both be either the means to an end or the end itself.
TLR (or just really simply explained)
Kill monsters to obtain new loot = exploration
Obtain new loot to kill monsters = conflict.
Hmm. Fair enough. I think when I wrote this, I wasn't working off how they defined exploration in the article but the more literal definition of exploration, where you explore, rather than being the opposite of direct conflict. I suppose massive clicking to kill enemies is direct conflict, even if it is a simple control, and the difficulty of surviving what is attacking you shouldn't have any bearing on if it is or isn't direct conflict. So environment is actually anything you can't actually "deal with" by directly conflicting with it.
So are traps that you can disable direct conflict, or environment?
That's a good question. I'd say disabling traps is indirect conflict, since they don't pursue you.
Indirect conflict is moving crates around to traverse a chasm and I don't see much difference to disarming a trap.
Serious Sam/ Painkiller is mostly direct conflict, whereas Half-Life 1+2 have a big portion of indirect conflict.
I'd say the big difference is reaction vs. thinking.
When you're playing Unreal Tournament Instagib/ Quake 3, you're better off if you can shut down your thinking and just react, whereas in Prey / Dark Messiah of Might and Magic you have to stop and think about how you have to interact with your static environment (recursive motion is deemed static for the matter of this conversation) in order to proceed.
In Panumbra / Amnesia, that's all you do since there is no direct conflict.
I think post number 93 has a better "chart" in this thread. As someone else said, if it takes this much text to explain the thing, than it isn't really all that practical.
Adventure = Strategy/Exploration you say... Hmmmmmmmm... Excuse me, but I fail to acknowledge ANY strategy in adventure games. Where's strategy in any of Sam & Max, or Secret of Monkey Island episode ?
I can't say wether this can accurately define likes and dislikes, since I for, example, like fighting games and brawlers, but hate shooters. Even weirder is, that majority of my games are shades of blue.
It's not exactly mindblowing to make a chart with two axis. I understand the intention, but the whole thing is so simple, so wide and unfocused that it doesn't really mean much of anything. Yes, some games are more focused on exploration, others on conflicts. I can accept that. But where does that eave us? I really don't think the whole "if you like action-combats games you will also like Madden" thing really means anything, and a few genres seem to have been shoehorned into the wheel even if their core gameplay is something else entirely.
There seems to still be a little confusion about the CE axis. To answer this question about conflict, it is defined primary as direct competition with other agents similar to your own. So other football players, space marines, world leaders, or tycoons who are playing by the same rules as you, often in a zero-sum situation (i.e. The more I win, the more you lose) are considered forms of conflict.
Exploration is a catch-all term for when the challenge of the game doesn't come from other agents similar to your own. So Tetris blocks, Boeing 747s, and mystery stories represent an indirect challenge to the player.
I will definitely hold onto this chart, however I kind of wonder if the chart can really tell the difference between things that are almost too similar. For instance, vehicle simulation sounds unique enough, but to me there's not enough difference between Grand Turismo and Need for Speed to really consider either one to be simulation vs driving . . . they're both BOTH. But according to the chart they are far from each other.
Very interesting read. I really like how you break it down, basically all of my favorite genres all tend to fall into the Action Axes, and I have a particular fondness for the AE segment of the graph.
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