Caleco said:
So I've been chatting with a few people about video games and we started talking about generic video games. We mainly focused on the newest Wolfenstein and we were saying how it was an ok game but SO GENERIC! Don't get me wrong I have nothing against cover based shooting in a brown and grey environment (Yahtzee fan here) but we couldn't come to a conclusion. I thought that just because a game is generic it's not bad, it's just been done already. But does that mean it should not be played?
It's okay to be generic - I would say that we need generic games to create a shared game language, so to speak. They are the archetypes of games that we can immediately identify and understand. "Real Time Strategy Game", "First Person Shooter", "Puzzle Game", "Simulator", "Role Playing Game", etc.
What isn't okay is to be lazy, or to be formulaic for the sake of being formulaic. That's where the term "generic" becomes an insult; the game is lazy. It's a cover-based shooter with a convenient set of locations where there is more cover than is logically acceptable (oh look, we've run from street to street, and every street has these same cement barriers and burnt out cars to hide behind. And look! We've flown from New York to Paris, and they use the same cement barriers and they have the same kind of cars here!) that gets annoying. Or having a puzzle game where you have to match up three of the same kind in a row to get points, and Game 1 has a bunch of jewels, then Game 2 has a bunch of slightly different jewels, and Game 3 has a bunch of slightly different jewels, and Game 4 has the same jewels as Game 2... wait, that is Game 2 but someone went into the options to change the backgrounds and then resold it under a new name, my bad.
If a game is generic, but follows the genre in smart and consistent manners as well as bringing the genre into the game itself (It's a cover based shooter with lots of cover in the world because of a massive world war going on. Oh, and yes you can hide behind the cars, but if the cars take too many hits they'll explode. Some places have cement barriers to hide behind, some have park benches, sometimes there are store windows that have been shot out and you can jump behind them, sometimes there are tree's, etc.) that say "Yes, we understand the needs of this genre. But instead of simply saying "It's a cover based shooter.", we are saying "The world is at war. The streets have become battle grounds, where survival is paramount; when the war is won, it will be cleaned up, but for now the streets are so littered with debris, and there are enemies all around, that the safest way to get from Point A to Point B is to walk and duck behind cover when you can. Even riding a bicycle is dangerous... and we can't spare an armoured truck that could be destroyed by the RPG's that some of your enemy has."
In this example, it's a generic cover-based shooter that:
-explains why you're on foot (too many enemies, too slow to get off of a vehicle and duck behind cover)
-explains why there is so much cover to hide behind (war zone, too dangerous to remove damaged cars or repair shop windows while there are bullets flying)
-implies why it is easy to find weapons and ammo (enemies all around, war zone, people get injured or killed and drop a bit. too dangerous to grab everything, so some could be left behind on occasion)
-implies why it is dull and drab (war zone, too dangerous to repaint the walls, replant the tree's, etc.)
