5 Game Genres in Need of some CPR! STAT!

[Ruhsey]

Developers are so worried about making money, yet they leave droves of gamers hungry for genres that they claim are dead... are they really though?

Game Genres that Need CPR:

1) City Builder: The first game genre in a critical state, has attempted to wake from the deary comma many times, but not without any major headaches in the last ten years. That is to say the city builder. Honestly, one series carries the torch right now, and that is Tropico 4. It has survived the DRM coughing of EA's SimCity, the sometimes wakefully but usually babbling Anno, and the more sophisticated in-roads from the likes of extreme Indie titles such as Dwarf Fortress (excellent game, if you have nothing but time to spare). And yet, I think we can all admit, that while Tropico 4 is polished, clean, and deserving, it is still plagued by lack of innovation. In fact, Tropico 3 was almost the same game. Where is the innovation, the Theme Hospitals, the Strongholds, or the blending with other genres? This is a genre desperate for competition. Indie or AAA developers, take note. Because this genre also has a strong fan-base, curiously (after-all, SimCity drew quite a crowd before it became a shit-storm).

2) Comic/Action Racer: I remember games like Mario Kart, Carmageddon, Lego Racer, and Star Wars: Pod Racer offering a fair bit of enjoyment during my post-diaper years, and mind you that still includes today. Last year, I played the best racing game I've played in the last ten years. It wasn't the GT series, it wasn't Dirt, it wasn't WRC, it wasn't Forza, it wasn't a realistic racer at all. It was Driver: San Francisco, yep! Because of this game, I remembered what racing games have lost, something Driver had in spades, it knew how to have fun. Why so serious modern racers? Does a game built around competition not know how to lighten up? Besides, these so-called modern racing games are usually awfully full of themselves, following the worst characters imaginable (here's looking at you Need For Speed games), with unbalanced mechanics, and attracting only a smallish douchey market sector. Rather more immature, then their loony counterparts, oddly. So why not get a little more whacky? Unleash some anarchy into the system.

3) Arena FPS: AKA what happened to Unreal Tournament? Was it really that bad Epic Games? Do you really like making Gears of War, in astronomically boring shades of gray, following a strange race of refrigerator sized steroid popping humanoids? Yeah so maybe the whole E-sports thing we tried didn't really work out as well as you thought, but does that mean you have to abandon your glorious PC gaming flagship? Unreal Tournament 3 wasn't a flop because people stopped playing area shooters, it was a flop because you made it way less arena-ish and way less awesome than UT: 2004. Imagine the hype you'd cause if you could release a UT:4 with today's technology! No story, just guns! And to any other developer, people need a new Arena go-to; something to match the epicness of UT in a more modern climate.

4) RTS: While modern no-resource imaginings of this genre have a place, and can be quite good (think: Wargame: Airland Battle, and Company of Heroes), players still have a thirst for classic base-building RTS games of 90s and early 2000s. Blizzard still taps into this vein with StarCraft II, and they are laughing their way to the bank. Their only competition has just cleaned out too: so long Command & Conquer. Are you really going to let the Act-Blizzard juggernaut eat all the money in this genre? StarCraft II isn't even that innovative, it barely scratches the surface of player's desires from the genre. Where is the modern equivalent of Homeworld, Total Annihilation, or Warcraft III RPG blends? A gold mine untapped, as I see it.

5) Giant Robot Sim Games: You want to know why everyone is creaming their pants over some silly casual game like Titian Fall (just kidding you pre-Titan Fall fanboys), because Giant Mechs you pilot are freaking awesome and we haven't seen this in gaming for a long long time. MechWarrior Online is becoming a pile of garbage, and the battlefield is pretty bare here. I miss the days of MechWarrior II, and EarthSiege, and I'm far from the only one. Their is a massive underground fan-base, so many in fact they build their own Mech mods out of various different game engines. Is this not giving developers a clue? Someone made a mistake a long time ago and assumed the Giant Robot Sim Games where dead, because they had a few bad releases. It has since been one of the largest pieces of false gaming industry wisdom.

Edit: After reading some of the posts, I've come to conclude that the genre listed as number 5, should include fighting sim games in general. This includes Space Sim, Flight Sim, and the like. Games like Mechwarrior 2, Interstate 76, Star Wars: Tie Fighter, and Wing Commander, struck a precise and popular balance between letting the player customize and tinker, (which altered how they played) but at the same time did not bog the player down in a mess of details. Allowing for an experience which felt "sim" like, but in a more fantastic and action packed way. Perhaps this touches on a greater symptom of the games industry these days: publishers are usually unable to find or put-out this blissful balance of good gameplay, meaningful feedback, and intriguing customization options, without making it feel forced or unnecessarily tiered/progressive like CoD games (with a few notable exceptions, of course).

 

[Grach]

5) Giant Robot Sim Games: You want to know why everyone is creaming their pants over some silly casual game like Titian Fall (just kidding you pre-Titan Fall fanboys), because Giant Mechs you pilot are freaking awesome and we haven't seen this in gaming for a long long time. MechWarrior Online is becoming a pile of garbage, and the battlefield is pretty bare here. I miss the days of MechWarrior II, and EarthSiege, and I'm far from the only one. Their is a massive underground fan-base, so many in fact they build their own Mech mods out of various different game engines. Is this not giving developers a clue? Someone made a mistake a long time ago and assumed the Giant Robot Sim Games where dead, because they had a few bad releases. It has since been one of the largest pieces of false gaming industry wisdom.

You do know that Hawken exists, right?

I agree with all the other stuff though.

 

[Ruhsey]

5) Giant Robot Sim Games: You want to know why everyone is creaming their pants over some silly casual game like Titian Fall (just kidding you pre-Titan Fall fanboys), because Giant Mechs you pilot are freaking awesome and we haven't seen this in gaming for a long long time. MechWarrior Online is becoming a pile of garbage, and the battlefield is pretty bare here. I miss the days of MechWarrior II, and EarthSiege, and I'm far from the only one. Their is a massive underground fan-base, so many in fact they build their own Mech mods out of various different game engines. Is this not giving developers a clue? Someone made a mistake a long time ago and assumed the Giant Robot Sim Games where dead, because they had a few bad releases. It has since been one of the largest pieces of false gaming industry wisdom.

You do know that Hawken exists, right?

I agree with all the other stuff though.

Oh I do, I just want a game outside of the FTP model or something more than being a multiplayer CoD progression kind of thing. That may just be my personal opinion. And I kind of want a campaign and story too. Sorry, forgot to mention Hawken though.

 

[SilkySkyKitten]

2) Comic/Action Racer: I remember games like Mario Kart, Carmageddon, Lego Racer, and Star Wars: Pod Racer offering a fair bit of enjoyment during my post-diaper years, and mind you that still includes today. Last year, I played the best racing game I've played in the last ten years. It wasn't the GT series, it wasn't Dirt, it wasn't WRC, it wasn't Forza, it wasn't a realistic racer at all. It was Driver: San Francisco, yep! Because of this game, I remembered what racing games have lost, something Driver had in spades, it knew how to have fun. Why so serious modern racers? Does a game built around competition not know how to lighten up? Besides, these so-called modern racing games are usually awfully full of themselves, following the worst characters imaginable (here's looking at you Need For Speed games), with unbalanced mechanics, and attracting only a smallish douchey market sector. Rather more immature, then their loony counterparts, oddly. So why not get a little more whacky? Unleash some anarchy into the system.

Just to play devil's advocate (and since I enjoy a lot of "serious" racers too, so I don't always understand this statement): Why can't serious racers be fun? You mock games like GT and Forza and Dirt and anything remotely realistic and act like they can't be fun, but why not? I find a lot of fun and thrill in them. The fun of trying to push yourself harder to get a better lap time. Making a daring pass via breaking later than you should which might screw you over but it's the last lap and you need to make a move NOW or never. Or the amazing satisfaction of making it through a tricky section of the track as fast as you can without botching up your racing line. Or the fun in experimenting with different cars and tuning setups to find what you enjoy the best/what works the best/handles the best/is the fastest/etc. Just because something isn't cartoony or silly or over the top or unrealistic doesn't mean it can't be fun.

I mean, otherwise I do agree. We need more arcade/action racing games (especially arcadey racing games that AREN'T Burnout. More San Francisco Rush 2049/MotorHead/Daytona USA/pre-Underground NFS-ish games would be incredibly welcome). But don't go around acting like realistic games can't be fun, please. You can dislike them because they aren't what you personally like, but don't act like they can't be fun at all.

3) Arena FPS: AKA what happened to Unreal Tournament? Was it really that bad Epic Games? Do you really like making Gears of War, in astronomically boring shades of gray, following a strange race of refrigerator sized steroid popping humanoids? Yeah so maybe the whole E-sports thing we tried didn't really work out as well as you thought, but does that mean you have to abandon your glorious PC gaming flagship? Unreal Tournament 3 wasn't a flop because people stopped playing area shooters, it was a flop because you made it way less arena-ish and way less awesome than UT: 2004. Imagine the hype you'd cause if you could release a UT:4 with today's technology! No story, just guns! And to any other developer, people need a new Arena go-to; something to match the epicness of UT in a more modern climate.

This is why I wish Nexuiz didn't completely flop like it did and become a massive disappointment for me as a result. I played it during a free weekend on Steam and it basically was Quake 3/Unreal Tournament in the Cry-Engine. And it was amazingly fun. So I bought it believing I had found a great and fun old school-ish FPS to sink my teeth into for ages to come.

... barely two weeks later, the servers were totally dead. Nobody stuck around at all, and while there were bots they just weren't as fun to play against as actual people. And to add insult to injury: once THQ went bankrupt, the game has been rendered unplayable since all the servers were taken down, including the one the game needs to connect to for authentication and such.

I mean, I like CoD and I don't despise modern shooters like 95% of people on this forum, but a modern UT-ish game would be amazing. And that's why, like I said, Nexuiz has been one of the biggest disappointments for me in recent years.

 

[Eve Charm]

2. You did have modnation racer and little big planet karting which was basically make your own track/racer play on line mario kart type of thing, and they sold ok, but I doubt they are dead at least LBP Karting.

3. I think Team fortress 2 is the best your gonna get and it's pretty hard for someone else to come out with something kinda like it to compete with something thats free

 

[The Madman]

You do know that Hawken exists, right?

I agree with all the other stuff though.

Sadly, Hawken is more akin to Call of Duty 2 than Mechwarrior 2, despite having stompy mechs in it.

Unlike OP however I do have some optimism when it comes to Mechwarrior Online. True the developers have made some annoying decisions, but the foundation for a fantastic game is there and even with its faults it's still a fun game to play from time to time.

I do wish there was something singleplayer though. I can't keep replaying Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries forever.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

2) Comic/Action Racer: I remember games like Mario Kart, Carmageddon, Lego Racer, and Star Wars: Pod Racer offering a fair bit of enjoyment during my post-diaper years, and mind you that still includes today. Last year, I played the best racing game I've played in the last ten years. It wasn't the GT series, it wasn't Dirt, it wasn't WRC, it wasn't Forza, it wasn't a realistic racer at all. It was Driver: San Francisco, yep! Because of this game, I remembered what racing games have lost, something Driver had in spades, it knew how to have fun. Why so serious modern racers? Does a game built around competition not know how to lighten up? Besides, these so-called modern racing games are usually awfully full of themselves, following the worst characters imaginable (here's looking at you Need For Speed games), with unbalanced mechanics, and attracting only a smallish douchey market sector. Rather more immature, then their loony counterparts, oddly. So why not get a little more whacky? Unleash some anarchy into the system.

Just to play devil's advocate (and since I enjoy a lot of "serious" racers too, so I don't always understand this statement): Why can't serious racers be fun? You mock games like GT and Forza and Dirt and anything remotely realistic and act like they can't be fun, but why not? I find a lot of fun and thrill in them. The fun of trying to push yourself harder to get a better lap time. Making a daring pass via breaking later than you should which might screw you over but it's the last lap and you need to make a move NOW or never. Or the amazing satisfaction of making it through a tricky section of the track as fast as you can without botching up your racing line. Or the fun in experimenting with different cars and tuning setups to find what you enjoy the best/what works the best/handles the best/is the fastest/etc. Just because something isn't cartoony or silly or over the top or unrealistic doesn't mean it can't be fun.

I mean, otherwise I do agree. We need more arcade/action racing games (especially arcadey racing games that AREN'T Burnout. More San Francisco Rush 2049/MotorHead/Daytona USA/pre-Underground NFS-ish games would be incredibly welcome). But don't go around acting like realistic games can't be fun, please. You can dislike them because they aren't what you personally like, but don't act like they can't be fun at all.

3) Arena FPS: AKA what happened to Unreal Tournament? Was it really that bad Epic Games? Do you really like making Gears of War, in astronomically boring shades of gray, following a strange race of refrigerator sized steroid popping humanoids? Yeah so maybe the whole E-sports thing we tried didn't really work out as well as you thought, but does that mean you have to abandon your glorious PC gaming flagship? Unreal Tournament 3 wasn't a flop because people stopped playing area shooters, it was a flop because you made it way less arena-ish and way less awesome than UT: 2004. Imagine the hype you'd cause if you could release a UT:4 with today's technology! No story, just guns! And to any other developer, people need a new Arena go-to; something to match the epicness of UT in a more modern climate.

This is why I wish Nexuiz didn't completely flop like it did and become a massive disappointment for me as a result. I played it during a free weekend on Steam and it basically was Quake 3/Unreal Tournament in the Cry-Engine. And it was amazingly fun. So I bought it believing I had found a great and fun old school-ish FPS to sink my teeth into for ages to come.

... barely two weeks later, the servers were totally dead. Nobody stuck around at all, and while there were bots they just weren't as fun to play against as actual people. And to add insult to injury: once THQ went bankrupt, the game has been rendered unplayable since all the servers were taken down, including the one the game needs to connect to for authentication and such.

I mean, I like CoD and I don't despise modern shooters like 95% of people on this forum, but a modern UT-ish game would be amazing. And that's why, like I said, Nexuiz has been one of the biggest disappointments for me in recent years.

Nexuiz deserved to flop, thanks to the story behind its creation. Originally it was an open source arena shooter built on the (heavily modified) source code of Quake 1. But a few years ago one of the original team members, who hadn't actually worked on the project in years, sold the name to the company that made the commercial game -- from scratch on a completely different, and less arena shooter friendly, engine. He did this with no permission or input from the rest of the team, on some dinky legal technicality that the name had been his idea in the first place, and oh yeah -- he had money now, they didn't, so they couldn't afford to sue him over it.

The original game lives on in a new project called Xonotic, and Nexuiz was the flop it deserved to be.

OT: I mostly agree with the OP's list, although I'd change the Giant Robot sims thing to combat sims in general -- how long has it been since we got a major new space combat sim? How long has it been since we got a flight sim, period that wasn't either more arcade game than sim or so realistic that you have to be a real pilot to wrap your brain around it? Games like the old Mechwarrior and X-Wing games were in the perfect sweet spot between complexity and playability, and it's been a rare game in the last decade that has even approached it. Another old but good sim I have fond memories of is Silent Thunder: A-10 Tank Killer 2. It hit pretty much that same sweet spot, so it's not just simulations of fictional vehicles that did it. I actually remember a time where sims of that rough level of complexity were pretty danged popular, which is hard to fathom today.

Edit: Also, I agree that realistic racers can be fun, but they take a significant investment of time and energy to start having fun. I picked up Gran Turismo 3 at a thrift shop recently and, well, lets just say I'm glad I only paid thrift shop price for it. I'm sure it's a great game, but the physics are so realistic I have a hard time understanding how anyone can get good at it without being able to feel the G-forces like you do when driving a car in real life. It's an extreme example of why people aren't crazy about the sub-genre, but a good one. On the other hand I got Wipeout Fusion for about the same price from one of the disc only bins Gamestop had a while back, and I'd have gladly paid several times the asking price. Absolutely fantastic racer, not totally realistic, possible to wrap your brain around it fairly quickly. Reminds me a lot of Star Wars: Episode I Racer on the N64, actually, and that's my favorite racer of all time.

 

[Bad Jim]

Just to play devil's advocate (and since I enjoy a lot of "serious" racers too, so I don't always understand this statement): Why can't serious racers be fun?

Serious racers inevitably have a significant skill hurdle you have to get over before they become fun. This is because if you try to corner too fast, the realistic consequence is that your car gets written off. It takes quite a while before you can do better than finishing last or not at all. Arcade racers are always more forgiving, typically making your car indestructible or immediately resurrecting your car should it crash.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

But there already is CPR for some of those genres on Kickstarter, both 2 and 4 have Carmageddon Reincarnation and Planetary Annihilation which were both successfully funded and I'm sure there are projects for the others.

Remember, its the AAA publishers claiming these genres are dead. With the likes of Star Citizen floating about they couldn't be any more wrong.

 

[krazykidd]

So cpr, is for reanimating someone who isn't dead right? Just on the brink of dying?

So:

Survival horror . Surviving against all odds , with limited resources and little combat capabilities.

Wrpgs: Fuck you Tolkien ,you created and ruined an entire genre.

Jrpgs: Let go of the power of cheese Friendship . I like color and fanservice as much as the next guy, but we need darker more mature jrpgs.

Fps: not exactly dying , but i think we need more variety . Anyone remember the first Turok game? Shooting dinos with all sorts of awsome weapons? Bring that back!

Strategy Jrpgs : disgaea and fire emblem are the only ones doing anything now a days. We cannot sustain a genre with just two game series.

 

[shrekfan246]

So cpr, is for reanimating someone who isn't dead right? Just on the brink of dying?

So:

Survival horror . Surviving against all odds , with limited resources and little combat capabilities.

Outlast? Amnesia? Don't Starve (to an extent)? The plethora of other indie titles?

Wrpgs: Fuck you Tolkien ,you created and ruined an entire genre.

Er... I take your point but I don't think you can blame one man for what a million imitators did.

It would be nice to see something like Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura or Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines again though.

Jrpgs: Let go of the power of cheese Friendship . I like color and fanservice as much as the next guy, but we need darker more mature jrpgs.

I think it's more that they need more unique methods of storytelling or more distinct defining moments. JRPGs don't avoid broaching serious topics, but they tend to approach them with very little depth or, at least, no subtlety.

But they can do serious storylines without using grimdark color palettes.

Fps: not exactly dying , but i think we need more variety . Anyone remember the first Turok game? Shooting dinos with all sorts of awsome weapons? Bring that back!

There's a ton of variety. The problem is that people tend to never look beyond Call of Duty and Battlefield, and the prevalence of those two titles ends up making other developers think they need multi-player in their games as well. One problem is that weapon variety has been done so much by all of the different shooters of the past that there's very little new ground to uncover. I mean, there's only so many ways one can shoot somebody in the face, you know?

But between Dishonored, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Bulletstorm, Sanctum/Sanctum 2, Shadow Warrior, Bioshock, Far Cry 3, Payday 2, Metro 2033/Metro: Last Light, Portal (at a stretch), Mirror's Edge (even if the combat is one of the weakest parts), The Darkness II, and some free-to-play games like Blacklight: Retribution or Planetside 2, there's plenty of variety in the first-person shooter space. Unless you're specifically talking about the DOOM-style of zooming around like a madman on a super-charged scooter, but personally I don't really miss those titles.

Strategy Jrpgs : disgaea and fire emblem are the only ones doing anything now a days. We cannot sustain a genre with just two game series.

Not just JRPGs. We could do with more tactical RPG-esque games just in general. The only non-JRPG one we've had in the last few years has been the new XCOM. Or at least that's the only one that's gotten any sort of recognition.

As for my own contribution, space-based games like Freelancer. Disregarding all of the crap on Steam, the only significant space combat/trading games still around are the X series or EVE Online, which both have roughly the same learning curve. Sure, Star Citizen is supposedly in the works, but that's just one game as well. To not disregard the crap on Steam, a great number of the indie stuff that's been released have been either buggy, unplayable messes, uninspired tripe almost indistinguishable from the two or three other space games beside it, or completely generic and boring combat games that do nothing better than Wing Commander did decades ago.

I did enjoy Star Trek Online, but the ground-based combat is generic third-person shooting and there wasn't nearly enough variety with things like diplomacy when I last played, which you'd kind of expect to be in a Star Trek game.

 

[GabeZhul]

Jrpgs: Let go of the power of cheese Friendship . I like color and fanservice as much as the next guy, but we need darker more mature jrpgs.

JRPGs need no CPR, it's a flourishing genre with hundreds of new, often experimental and serious titles coming out each year... but 99.9% of them never gets translated to English because they are made by small studios that cannot afford international distribution and the hefty cost of proper, professional translations.

As for the genre that needs reviving, I second (or third, I'm not counting...) space combat sims. In particular, just making Freespace 3 or a new Wing Commander game would probably have millions of fans throwing their money at the screen to make it happen...

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

5) Giant Robot Sim Games: You want to know why everyone is creaming their pants over some silly casual game like Titian Fall (just kidding you pre-Titan Fall fanboys), because Giant Mechs you pilot are freaking awesome and we haven't seen this in gaming for a long long time. MechWarrior Online is becoming a pile of garbage, and the battlefield is pretty bare here. I miss the days of MechWarrior II, and EarthSiege, and I'm far from the only one. Their is a massive underground fan-base, so many in fact they build their own Mech mods out of various different game engines. Is this not giving developers a clue? Someone made a mistake a long time ago and assumed the Giant Robot Sim Games where dead, because they had a few bad releases. It has since been one of the largest pieces of false gaming industry wisdom.

You do know that Hawken exists, right?

I agree with all the other stuff though.

With all due respect, Hawken is a mech-themed FPS, and nothing like MechWarrior or Chromehounds or any of those. Personally I cite Armored Core as the forefront of mech gaming at the moment. There are a lot of improvements I'd make if I could, and it could use a much more active publisher, but it's pretty good.

 

[Nazulu]

There is far more than that. RTS is definitely in need of more though. I'm not interested in the current RTS games so don't bring them up please.

We need heaps more games like Lylat Wars and Raiden 2. Actually, just more arcade type games in general, really.

 

[unindexedsearchengine]

new Wing Commander game

They are. It's called Star Citizen, AKA "Chris Robert's personal Fuck You to the AAA industry".
It's success (it ain't even out yet, but taking one look at the funding will tell you all you need to know) will inevitably spawn a few more forays into the genre after it's release.

As for the genre I think needs revival : Top down Shooters a-la alien breed. Most are very arcade-y, which is the source of their fun. Sure, team 17 put out the alien breed remakes, but we all know how that turned out.

 

[BleedingPride]

I'd say the God Game needs to be revived sometime soon, or at least I hope it will be. I grew up on Black and White and I'd love to see something new in that realm come up soon.

 

[windlenot]

I'm a bit hesitant to say the music/rhythm game genre. My favorite game is Rock Band 3, due to the insane amount of time and money I put into it. It's wonderful and I don't know where they'd go from there, but I still play that and a bunch of Guitar Heroes. I hate how saturated it's become with the obnoxious amount of unnecessary Guitar Hero games, but still. I play em.