GloatingSwine said:
Niccolo said:
It seems that we are comparing them in two different manners. You are comparing Diablo and Borderlands in their manner of continuation - or drive to proceed, as you so succinctly put it.
I'm comparing the games from the perspective of their most central concept. It's really something that people should do more when they assess what a game is doing.
What is the reason that the player continues to play this game?. Really, if you don't
start with an assessment of that core concept then any analysis of a game you will make is all but bound to miss the point. As you have gone on to do:
I compare them differently - mainly, in the method of murder. It still boils down that Borderlands is a desert-land shooter while Diablo is a little-of-everywhere point-and-clicker - which is, for me, the key difference between the games and what separates one from the other for me. Because of that difference, I see them as similar but still different games.
You are comparing mechanical interaction, which really isn't a useful method of assessing a videogame unless you think that people
really like the difference between how their mouse hand moves in game A vs. game B. If people really played games simply for the mechanical interaction, we would never have progressed beyond Quake, but we did, because the real reasons people play games, and the real reasons why game A is different from or similar to game B have
nothing to do with the mechanical interaction.
You're not entirely getting my point, either. My point is that Borderlands is an FPS, a gameplay style which is fundamentally different to the gameplay style of a point-and-clicker. They have the core similarity that both heavily involve the equipment hunt.
And yes, people
really like how their mouse/reticle/cursor/hand moves in one game versus another. That's
why there are FPSes versus hack-and-slashers versus turn-based games.
This visual interface (ignore the mechanical for now, since we've resolved that PC games all involve clicking in one form or another) is what sets games apart. Borderlands as an isometric game would not have worked at all; Diablo as a first-person might have worked (Elder Scrolls did it and it wasn't so bad) but it wouldn't have had the same appeal to the same people that it does. And, back in its time, it probably would have fallen flat.
The drive to continue for a game keeps people playing, but it is the method of murder that starts them.
The thing is, you are comparing games using just one factor. That is just as flawed as comparing it by any one other factor. Everything has to be taken into account, or it's not a fair comparison at all.
If someone admits that he likes both apples and oranges, his main reason being that he likes the taste of them, one cannot then say that therefore apples and oranges are similar enough that they can be called the same thing. Apples have five seeds, oranges have variable. Oranges are orange, apples are not. There are a whole host of (sometimes utterly vestigial) differences between apples and oranges that you cannot possibly call them the same fruit - or even that similar.
The same thing applies to two games that have one or two aspects in common. Even if it is the main aspect that the two games have in common, there are still a double handful of other aspects to be considered. If any one of these aspects changed, so too would the crowd who would continue to play the game.
For instance: Diablo is a mid-to-high fantasy game with the opportunity to get a +1 sword of asskicking randomly. It has a story about killing demons and you go for a romp through all sorts of places, culminating in Hell (or beyond if you expand).
Thus, the main crowd it will draw will be looters who love fantasy. Looters who love the finickitiness of building superpowered characters and killing each other with them. These looters will also get a thrill from killing demons (honestly, who doesn't?) and some of them will love the challenge of Nightmare and Hell difficulty.
But, say we removed the chance to choose a difficulty, making it hell-only. Suddenly the crowd will be halved - only those who enjoy a serious challenge would play.
Or, say we set it four thousand years in the future. Suddenly it's not high fantasy with goblins and demons, it's soft or hardcore sci-fi with nary a spell in sight. Fantasy looters will not look twice at the game unless they like sci-fi as well, or they're really not that picky about it being fantasy, sci-fi, political or whatever.
My point, to cut the wall of text short, is this: Just because a part of a game is minor doesn't mean it should be thrown out of consideration. You have to look no further than the fanbase of CoD. CoD 4 fans who think the Nazi-killing is overrated, CoD 5 fans who pretend the modern warfare games don't exist. Both games have
exactly the same drive to proceed; getting to the end of the game, following the story, killing the ashole in charge. But they are two very different games, appealing to two different groups of people; those bored with murdering Germans with silly moustaches and those who aren't.
We're not going to resolve this easily, are we?
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