City Builders Breaking the Mold
Vložit
- čas přidán 18. 04. 2023
- Use code EXTRACREDITS50 to get 50% off your first Factor box at bit.ly/3kHfe03 !
Do mechanics limit our understanding of genre? Or can we re-invigorate and reinvent genres without harming the core of what players expect?
* Watch us ad-free & get 24-hour early access at: go.nebula.tv/extracredits * OR
* Get exclusive content & 24-hour early access here: bit.ly/EHPatreon * OR
* Show off your fandom with our merch here: extracredits.store/
Extra History: / extrahistory
Twitter: bit.ly/ECTweet
Facebook: bit.ly/ECFBPage
Instagram: bit.ly/ECisonInstagram
Twitch: bit.ly/ECtwitch
Tiktok: bit.ly/ECtiktokz
Website: extracredits.site/
*Thanks for participating in this week's discussion!
Check out our community guidelines so we can have MORE high-quality conversations: www.extracredits.site/extra-c...
Interested in sponsoring an episode? Email us: extracredits@standard.tv
♪ Intro Music: "Penguin Cap" by CarboHydroM - bit.ly/1eIHTDS
♪ Outro Music: "Extra Extra Life" by Tiffany Roman
Artist: David Hueso I Writer: James Portnow I Voice: Matthew Krol
#ExtraCredits #Gaming #GameDesign - Hry
Looking for a way to eat healthy while playing games? Then why not try our sponsor Factor? By Using code EXTRACREDITS50 you can get get 50% off AND help support the show in the process. Just click the link to get started bit.ly/3kHfe03 !
Thanks for watching!
Have you played "planet crafters"? If you enjoyed those two you'll enjoy this one.
I'm shocked that Extra Credits doesn't have a review of the pride and madness that is Dwarf Fortress.
♫ I am a dwarf and I'm digging a hole ♫
♫ Diggy Diggy Hole ♫
♫ Diggy Diggy Hole ♫
Frost punk. Very good game. It has child labor! It’s also very cold. In all seriousness it has a very good story! You guys should play it!
I felt as if Frost Punk was almost flipped on the expectations. I expected to be playing an RPG as a city leader, and essentially got a really hard city builder. It has been one of my favorite gaming experiences to date.
It's not a city-builder. It's a puzzle game. It's too hard to allow free expression but lacks any RNG elements so you're stuck to discovering or puzzling out the ideal path (and there is one). It's a puzzle game designed to look like a city-builder but it doesn't really play like one. I consider it worse than This War of Mine, which was their freshman outing.
Ixion is pretty much Frost Punk in a different dress.
I wish there was a city builder with the concentric circle shtick of Frost Punk without being so dire and full of ticking clocks. That element of the gameplay is what makes my brain light up.
Yep. Frostpunk absolutely belongs in this category as well, especially with the later scenarios and even more so on hard mode. Most normal mode players may not know this, but if your city morale stays low enough for long enough you get exiled in the snow and die. The push into the faith and authority civics trees become necessary because conditions get so bad everyone dies without a bit of authoritarianism. The game is very bleak, and downright brutal to play.
Honestly I went in the reverse lol! i thought it was just going to be a city builder but instead i got an insane story full of peril and the amazing feeling of overrcoming problems (and seriosuly testing my ethics)
A lot of people mentioned Frost Punk as a great example of City Builder which is not chill. I wanted to add Mini Motorways as a good example of a game which almost switches as you play it starting as cozy and chill logistics game, but as the game progresses it starts getting out of control as you try to feverishly adapt to new building which ultimately leads to your demise as you fail to meet the growing need of transportation. And also Darkest Dungeon is a good example of RPG where you can easily lose your high-level heroes - a concept which is rare to see in party-based RPG games, and generally such a thriller gameplay is rarely associated with RPG genre.
You'd think something called *Frost* Punk would be *chill*
@@guaymaster it's freezing
Frostpunk’s endless mode is absolutely where that problem is. It takes a slightly longer time than a standard campaign to get boring.
Frust Punk may not be chill, but it's certainly chilly
Thinking about what defines "genre" and "genre expectations," I've fallen back to using two terms instead of just one. In literature, there's "genre" but there's also "form." Poetry, for an example, has genres like romances, pastorals, allegories, etc. but it also has forms like sonnets, free verse, ballads, etc. The genre defines expectations of setting, theme, content. The form defines expectations of structure, mechanics, and craft. The reading experience is shaped by both, of course. I think this holds true for games, but it's common to lump both together into the one term "genre" instead of preserving the two as distinct concepts. If we think of city builders as a "genre," then that would suggest games that feature cities, urban systems, economics and demographics, etc. in their *content.* But if we think of city builders as a "form," then that would suggest certain mechanical features such as low risk, long strategy, creative freedom, even maybe more specific than that, such as interacting with a map, placing or designating buildings, etc. I think games like Ixion or Against the Storm are using the genre of city builder but their forms are something very different. Bringing formal expectations to a game, especially where difficulty (arguably the greatest factor in splitting an audience) is wrapped up into a form, because that game wears a certain genre seems to me to reveal why conflating the two concepts makes it harder to pitch game experiences to people.
Have you seen their video on Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics? It talks a lot about the same ideas of how mechanics can serve different emotions.
I honestly really like this idea! It makes sense that the interactive nature of video games can have a sort of system of genres that is more complex than other art forms, and this seems to be a reasonable way of going about it. The only question is how these are defined? Maybe we can take all of our current genres/sub-genres and have a definition for it as both a genre and a form, but i feel like there would be a better - more efficient - way of going about this. That's probably a question for a smarter person, or maybe persons, though ... idk
@@chillmadude I guess I'd think these get defined naturally by repetitive usage by designers. In other media, genres and forms develop over time as patterns of what content and what structures the authors/artists/etc. choose most frequently to use when communicating with their target audience. Or maybe more now by what markets well/is salable to a target audience.
Following your idea, I'd say city builders are "creative RTS".
They look similar to RTS games (planning down buildings, perspective) to some degree.
It's kinda like the base building part of an RTS stretched into a whole game, with the haste and direct control over units removed...
Hmm... Would "classic" metroidvanias be better described as "exploration performers"? They have basically all the mechanics of a platformer.
Interesting. I love your metaphore (I bet I am using that word wrong now) with poetry and the difference between Genre and Form. However I compeletely disagree on your application of this philosophy.
To me Genre is defining how you should feel playing the game.
Form is more about mechanics of the game. What will you do in the game.
So I would argue, that Ixion and Against the Storm are not City-builders as a Genre, however they use City-building as their Form....
...actually to be entirely honest I have played Against the Storm and I would say it's still City-builder, even as the Genre. It just adds the mechanics of roguelike/roguelite.
Given how you specifically mentioned high stakes and the consequences of early actions coming back to hit you in the end I am shocked you didn't talk about Frostpunk at all. The game focusses on people in crisis, with the player having to ensure the survival, lack of discontent and hope for the people. Every building has to be manned, people will tell the player about things and it makes it more emotional and it gives the player options that might be very effective but morally and ethically questionable at best.
SPORE goes pretty crazy with how the genres change as you progress through the game. Going from a single cell organism that is just trying to eat and grow. To an interstellar race creating trade routes and alliances with other life forms in the galaxy.
I really hope that something like Spore comes around again. I'd love an interesting and deeper evolution simulator with as much care put into it as Spore had.
Agreed. The issue was they spread themselves too wide without depth
I left one of the positive reviews on Steam for Ixion. Yes, it *looks* like a city builder, but what I call it is a "Crisis Management Simulator." You have a constantly changing situation presenting you challenges that you constantly have to respond to. And, as you said, it is possible to make a choice early on that comes back to haunt you hours later. Frostpunk is another good example.
I think this conundrum better demonstrates how weird video game genre categorization is. When I personally think of "city builder" I think of something like Cities; Skylines or Workers and Resources; Soviet Republic. Games where building infrastructure and connecting districts for efficient land use/resource distribution are the main goals. I think the games mentioned here are more like survival games where you play a community rather than a survivor. Like "This War of Mine" for example.
It is the case with almost any human concept. You learn a word by encountering examples but each of those examples are not quite identical. Still once you feel like you understand it is because you can imagine an example. You hear the word and have expectations, if you expect the right thing it helps you do the right thing, if your expectations (i.e. assumptions) are wrong, you will do the wrong thing. In a game it can be very frustrating, though I'm sure you can imagine situations with more serious consequences.
I think "This War of Mine" "Frostpunk" and "Ixion" are all the same company; so "survival games where you play a community" is clearly their preferred genre.
I'm shocked that you did an entire video about city builders with added consequences, and never once mentioned Frostpunk.
Seeing as how the video is nearly 10 minutes long, perhaps length was a concern due to how a longer video risks reducing viewership too much in their case.
Still I also agree, the two games they mention are rather recent but there have been a plethora of games in the same vein that have been released over the recent years, so I am leaning towards disagreeing with the point that this is some new/recent thing when in fact it has been going on for years, and anyone who has played any of those games would have noticed it by now.
A bit surprised you didn't mention Dwarf Fortress here. It's basically a city builder that does focus on the citizens, with deep simulation to make that work.
Rimworld is another great example of that type of game.
I've taken to calling those games colony sims rather than city builders. You don't do any actual building yourself; you manage your colonists and *they* do the building.
My favorite part of this video was the ineffective garrote. The rest of it was very entertaining too, but also informative and made me think more about the concept of genre.
Reminds me of Berzerk's "invincible bowtie", which does function as if the player character's head is just floating above their torso.
A Hitman/Berzerk game would be interesting, but that's just Wolfenstein (pre-3D) with a timer, innit?
Frostpunk is a great example as well, a city-builder with a hard time limit, scaling difficulty and some critical yet very finite resources. That game made me feel so morbid. Also it's sound design and soundtrack slaps.
It also has a flexible enough system where there are some unique scenarios you can play that fundamentally change the way you must approach the problem.
The fact that a weather event has boss music in that game is amazing, and that boss music slaps.
@@ASpaceOstrich Very true
Frost punk just falls flat about 2 hours in when you figure the game out and can't lose anymore. It only works when you as a player are within a very narrow range of skill, because they took the exponential growth curve most city builders have and just ran with it without questioning it, when the difficulty curve should've actually been the exact opposite of what it is (more people should be harder to keep alive, not easier)
@@majorfallacy5926 It does lack depth in that regard. But the first few attempts at each scenario while you're still figuring it out is pretty great. I'm hoping with the sequel they'll address the longer term challenge aspect. Right now late game you can achieve post scarcity utopia if you're in an infinite scenario, but that could definitely be altered for the sequel.
@@ASpaceOstrich first *few* attempts? I finished my first attempt with one hospital bed for every single citizen and so many resources that I didn't have any more space to build storage. After that the scenarios I tried were interesting for maybe half an hour. And adjusting the difficulty doesn't help, because it pretty much just affects that first half hour.
Once you figure out that you can research 24/7 with 2 workshops and survived the early game you are pretty much settled for the rest of the scenario.
If you're looking for games that challenge the typical idea of their genre I'd recommend looking into outer wilds. I believe steam classifies it as a space exploration simulator. But it feels almost like a metroidvania (wherein as you progress through the game you unlock abilities that allow you to explore more of the map) however instead of a new ability you will be learning new information as you progress through, teaching you how to get to areas previously unexplorable. Truly a one of a kind experience that doesn't feel like anything else in the genre.
RimWorld isn't exactly a city builder - the genre name I've seen brandied about is colony sim - but it does similar things to IXION. And instead of playing as a god mayor building out of a tool box, you optimize the individual colonists, who execute your will to build, grow, and fight for the colony. And depending on the difficulty level, you mostly just watch them die. Definitely one worth looking at if your team hasn't played it already.
Seconded. Rimworld is a fantastic game. It's got a lot of the same elements that make Dwarf Fortress great but is much more approachable.
Still got a pretty steep learning curve, though.
Against the Storm solves what I see as two problems with the city builder genre: first it provides you with direction, basically from the start, beyond just feeding and housing your people.
Second, when you've stabilized and the game starts to get boring it says "Great, you won. On to the next one."
I think THEY ARE BILLIONS is also an good example for high risk City Builder. Only one zombie in your base and it is Game Over.
Which to me made it immensely unsatisfying. Having absolutely zero room for mistakes means no room for experimentation.
@@Cross31415 there is plenty of room for experimentation.
It just isn't forgiving is all
You know, this is actually something that happens every time we add a 'genre' or a '-like'
Metroid-vania is a platformer-shmup with exploration and RPG elements
'Rouge-like' is a descriptor for when RPG elements are hidden behind RNG
A decade from now we are likely to see Ixion-like as a descriptor for "City-builder but dangerous" or something similar.
Remember kiddies: If one game steals your game's mechanics, it's a ripoff, if 100 do, it's a genre.
I guess this is why I enjoy Kingdoms & Castles so much. It's laid back for the most part, but also has dragons or vikings & ogres attacking you. Which forces you to build and design well thought out defenses.
Please PLEASE give us more episodes of "games that break the mold of X genre"
AGAINST THE STORM! My current obsession. Nearly perfect!
You have 2 days to quell this ghost before he kills everyone in your settlement with a 'V' in their name
Against the Storm makes me want a 4X version of the formula so bad. The beginning is the strongest part of both of these genres, and the ability to go further once you've met your objectives to see how your build holds up is great too.
Terraformers is a turn-based 3x version of the formula. There's no warfare, but there's exploration, expansion, and exploitation somewhat like Civ. It's got the same sort of "timer" mechanic as AtS, where you have to keep from running out of support by working quickly and doing things that increase support. It plays a lot like a Euro-style board game, and depending on what type of game you pick, I've found a typical run lasts somewhere between 1-2 hours (or more if you're prone to analysis paralysis) though you can continue terraforming after winning a game if you want to.
Ixion is fantastic! Amazing soundtrack too. I'd argue that games like it & Frostpunk are instead giving us a new-ish hybrid genre, namely the survival city builder. They're definitely borrowing from other genres, but the ones I've played have all been great so far.
I feel like Frostpunk did this for me really well, its not terribly difficult but its no zen city builder.
Since everyone has mentioned Frostpunk already, I'll suggest another; Timberborn! A city builder set after humanity, with beaverfolk as the new dominant species; in addition to the usual housing/food/supply chain/leisure stuff of typical city builders, you also have wet and dry seasons. Preparing for these increasingly harsh droughts is important to your town's continued survival, with dams, reservoirs, spillways, hydro power, and the like.
>Do mechanics limit our understanding of genre?
~ Laughs in TTRPG … until the laughter turns to crying. ~
That's actually a really good example to show that the answer is yes. If you've ever played with new players (like, their first time playing any TTRPGS) after you've gathered some experience and gotten to know the system you're playing, you'll see the more experienced players thinking kind of inside a box. It's a toolbox maybe, but a box nonetheless.
I've tried several digital card games that end up feeling a lot more like tower defense games. They're basically tower defense games that have a random element to what units and resources you get. I guess they just present it as a card game because that is randomized format that a lot of people are familiar with.
I think one of the best examples of a genre mix in gaming would be the Spellforce franchise. It combines RPG elements, managing a small squad of heroes and exploring the world in squad with pitched RTS battles, and anything in between.
The problem with genres in videogames is that we try to address characteristics in various layers simultaneously with a single category. In other media, like literature and film, 'genre' us used to describe the work mostly based on semantic content. But with games we also include the mechanics as part, and sometimes as the basis, of a genre. We should start splitting the categories of content, differently from the categories of mechanics or format.
something I think the New Wolfenstein games do pretty fantastically is take a classic FPS, even opening as a sort of alt-history WW2 fps, then pivoting hard into a stealth game, while still retaining mostly FPS controls and interfaces, which drives home very hard the sense of Blasko as an ex-soldier fighting against long odds.
I find it interesting that many of the games I've looked at in the Visual Novel Database (VNDB) have core gameplay loops that are very firmly other genres but happen to use VN-like UIs for character dialog / dialog options. It's not even really a mechanic thing-you could do the exact same thing using an RPG games' UI and not have someone add you to the database-but players who actually view _UI_ as defining what belongs in the genre compendium.
Islanders is my favorite city building game! It combines the love of growth and optimization with a stage system, where you have to get enough points out of your buildings to progress, meaning there is definitely a win or lose without a constant pressure necessarily. It's points system is so elegant, I think it's really more of a puzzle game that makes a city by accident, but it's designed so well that when you do well, what you create ends up looking really beautiful
I also enjoy this solid little title!
6:38 this picture is just too good.
The Trauma Centre series is one of the most engaging rail shooters I've played. :D
One of the first games I ever played was a city builder called Caesar III. It is probably best known nowadays for the fan mods for it called Julius, and Augustus respectively. Unlike most city builders these days it's best known for its campaign as opposed to a sandbox mode. I don't even think it had a sandbox mode in its original form. Furthermore, on many of the maps you had to fend off invasions on a semi-regular basis. Furthermore, if you displeased Caesar enough he would send a seemingly unending army to raze your city. It is technically possible to fend off Caesar's army until the game effectively gives up on spawning enemy legions. I've seen it done precisely once, by my father no less.
A game I played on steam years ago, Banished, it's a city builder survival type game, I think either Markiplier or jacksepticeye played it. Your a group of exiles and your goal is to not starve to death
I'm shocked you didn't talk about Frostpunk. It's the strongest example of what you talk about in gaming.
I live genre mashups. Pyre (from Supergiant, the folks behind Hades) is the best Fantasy/Visual Novel/RPG/3v3 Basketball game you will ever play. Valkyria Chronicles is an Anime/Visual Novel/Turn-Based-Strategy/Third-Person-Shooter. Heck, Xcom 1 and 2 are kind of a city-builder mixed with a turn-based tactics game. Portal, as you mentioned, is an FPS/Puzzle. Good stuff.
That's the best description of Valkyria Chronicles I've ever heard. Well done!
Now to get back to figuring out how there could be *fish* at this latitude.
They're in an interesting place, because they are classed as City Builders despite their risk profiles being closer to Base Builders like Rimworld or granddaddy Dwarf Fortress.
I'm reminded of something that happened to my Steam recommended list. It suddenly became filled with tons of those traditional dating sim visual novels. It took me a bit to realize why. It's because they're both tags on Persona 3 Portable. Which I guess isn't strictly wrong, but it really doesn't match why I play the game.
Oddly, this didn't happen with Persona 4 Golden on steam, because despite sharing near identical gameplay, it didn't recieve the Visual Novel tag.
The MMORPG genre is exactly like this. But people get way to caught up in the acronym and don't realize there are implied elements that were there from the beginning which made the genre.
I LOVE to see the art of David Hueso. The composition, the style, simply fantastic!!
In high school, I talked with my best friend about a first-person shooter rhythm game. He scoffed at the idea and said no one would play such a thing.
Later, in my 30's, there were at least 3 different games that hit those criteria.
My game design teacher point out this flaw in how we define genres in games through mechanics. While mechanics are helpful they don't tell the whole story of what a game's experience is.
The alternative he showed was from a book where game genres were instead defined by the feeling the experience aimed to evoke in the player. It used very fancy academic terms that would never work in the broad zeitgeist but the proposed genres behind those terms were pretty good. Things like chill games with low stakes you just relax in, power fantasy games that are all about empowerment and agency and creative games about customisation, expression and putting a player's unique mark on the game world.
Perhaps what's needed is a marriage of the styles of genres.
K, so, Ooblets. The game is not only a farm sim, but also a monster collection game AND a TCG, all in one package that is presented to the players in the goofiest way possible. I love it so much!
The first genre breaking game I ever owned is still one of my favorites, Thief: The Dark Project and Thief 2: The Metal Age. The game looks and functions like a first person shooter. But it was the first game to be all about sneaking and avoiding combat while progressing toward the goal. In Thief 2 on hardest difficulty, you aren't allowed to kill anything other than zombies and animals; no dead people or the level would end suddenly with a fail screen.
City builders have completely split into two sects: city builders and city survival. One focuses on what you have mentioned as growth, and the other focuses on efficiency. I can play city skylines and not give a damn about my industry routes but i cannot play Frostpunk without care for my people’s needs to not DIE.
You could have also mentioned a lot of other strange city builders that i felt disappointment that were not mentioned like They Are Billions, a city defense of literal thousands upon thousands of ai zombies that strives for a balance of growing the city and walling it in
One game that's always made me do a double take are the pokemon snap games. They are a first person shooter, but Through the eyes of a photographer instead of a gunner.
Fun fact: There is a camera in Fallout New Vegas that works like a weapon, basically firing an invisible projectile that does no damage but counts things that are part of its quest as photographed when they get hit. However, shooting a person with it still counts as an attack.
Islanders feels similar to a roguelike City Builder. It does have a lose state, but you only have certain buildings available each time you request for more, so optimization is key
Genre mixing is the easiest way to make fun and quirky Indie / Unity games.
The short development time and play time allows for massive experimentation.
Can yall do another games you might not have tried? I miss that series.
Dredge, while playing a lot like a much more casual and approachable Sunless Sea, is a very fascinating combination of fishing and horror game. Where escaping horrors or finding ways around them occasionally features in gameplay which is otherwise just chill and working your career as a fisherman.
Adding to the chorus of people shouting Frost Punk as a difficult stressful City Builder.
One current genre discussion I find fascinating is people trying to come to a consensus on what to call the genre of games inspired by VAMPIRE SURVIVORS. The game is very much its own new thing and doesn't neatly fall into easy categorization, while at the same time spawning dozens of imitators/homages.
I've heard it called a roguelike shoot 'em up, a reverse bullet hell, a "bullet heaven" since you're the one creating the bullets for the most part, and games that are like VS are often referred to as "survivors-like".
I also find it interesting when the name of an existing game becomes a genre -- like Rogue inspiring the Roguelike genre, Metroid and Castlevania SOTN inspiring the Metroidvania genre, and souls-like being shorthand for anything with gameplay and/or difficulty similar to Dark Souls. Might be a whole discussion in itself right there.
It occurs to me that there's an implied question there of "How many people need to rip-off a popular game before it becomes a new genre?"
You guys need to check out The Pale Beyond. It’s ostensibly a resource management game, but there’s a lot of cool narrative stuff that takes it in a different direction.
I was so thinking: Hey, that sounds a lot like Against the Storm.
Though I'm not really invested in the individual, more that there's enough of each specialization.
If they added character progression for each citizen !!! then we'd be there.
I have found that genre limits mechanics. Some of the best games I’ve ever played defy genres. Developing my own game, my team never considered genre in the beginning stages and had to basically figure out what we were for marketing (since Steam wants you to put tags)
>first city-builder in the video
>it's ixiom
Isn't that more of an RTS game?
>hardcore city-builders
>anno
What? Anno is just long, not hard.
>second city-builder
>it's against the storm
That's a straight-up RTS game.
Dungeon Keeper 2!!!! Takes "city building" and adds FPS action and it's just awesome!! Also, exactly what genre is Btutal Legend?
Against the storm is really built around the struggle to get everything working. Once the town is running smoothly, its over and you win. In short you have to hit a surplus early, then expand out into a danger. Use the surplus the over come the danger. Utilize the resources there are start planning to deal with the next expansion trial.
I think a better question is what genre *doesn't* mean something more than what it says on the surface
Haha! Been playing Against the Storm and it is nice to see it get some love! The new Fox race are my besties!
The RTS genre is a prime example of this. In almost every RTS, you play a match based game where you start with builders, build up a base and attack an enemy in a cutthroat battle to the death. This creates a very competitive sport like environment where the player is encouraged to improve things like "APM" to become more efficient and build bigger, better armies faster. But what if we re-examined some of the assumptions that that genre has? What if the game didn't have to focus on being a PVP death match? What if we had a game that didn't have "matches" at all, but open persistent maps that you could join or leave at any point? What if a game was more focused on giving each player separate objectives that prevented them from fully trusting each other and encouraged sudden reversals in alliances? What if there were games that gave defeated players ways to rejoin and attempt to regain territory? Etc, etc.
I LOVED Ixion. Reminded me of games like Theme Park World but with narrative choices and chapters with challenges that acted like thresholds to break through with my smarts.
I really liked Ixion, my main complaint was that there's very little replayability. Once you've figured out the basic mechanics and beaten it once there's no real incentive to play it again.
I thought Ixxion was bad not because it was hard, but because it follows in the Frostpunk school of "city building" where it's not a city-builder at all. It has like Frostpunk (at the time of release) no random elements. City-builders come on a sliding scale of two things: Either it has no random and is sandbox and design oriented or it has random elements and you're trying to best play the board. These were puzzle games with one ideal solution. It wasn't what I wanted to play, and might be fine on its own, but yeah... not any kind of city-builder or survival game.
There is already whole genre of survival city builders, and has been for quite some time.
Not a city builder, but Brutal Legend was pretty awesome and broke the mold. First-Person hack-n-slash adventure and RTS. It was such a weird combination of ideas that defied being placed in a traditional game genre, and honestly worked for me!
A major title that broke the mold of the time was Mass Effect, making an RPG shooter, but since it came from Bioware, expectations of what it was were already set
Here's a genre people make wrong assumptions about and buck the trend with various aspects: RPGs.
A lot of people are talking about games that utilize RPG elements(level progression, character interaction, etc.) and there are RPGs that utilize aspects of other genres. For example, the Fallout series is an RPG that utilizes FPS mechanics.
Halfway the story I was expecting you to mention Frostpunk too :)
I've been a bit cold *heh* to city builders, but Frostpunk really got me and it's nice to hear a great explanation for these kinds of things.
I can't recall the game right now, but the other day I played a game that I really struggled to pin down a genre on, and eventually realized it was using fps mechanics, but was a competly different genre. I really liked it, but it clued me in that we should probably separate mechanics groupings, aesthetic groupings and vibe/feel groupings.
I feel like games like Frostpunk, Ixion, Banished, Dawn of Man, Surviving the Aftermath, Farthest Frontier etc are a subgenre that combines city-building & survival into city-survival
Timberborn is a pretty good survival city builder. You are fighting progressively worse and worse droughts and have to figure out how to keep your colony alive.
Gonna have to point out here that the drought's the only challenge of the game, and is ridiculously easy to solve. Once you figured that one out, the only way your colony can mess up is if you overpopulate it.
I dunno if it's that hard to keep the colony going. Just expand the colony at the rate at which the population grows, and you'll be fine. Though, I have only recently come back to play the game, and the badwater mechanic could pose an issue. If a dam or leeve causes badwater to overflow, it could flood pure water rivers, choking the water supply, and in turn the beavers.
Geist is a Puzzle Game Shooter; You play as a scientist on a military extraction team. You have a gun, there are enemies blah blah. But starting on the second stage you are caught by your foes, subjected to an experiment and turned into a Psedo ghost, a real ghost sees it and busts you out and you are now haunting the facility of your foes trying to get out and stop them. You can possess often used inanimate objects and afraid people, so setting up a host is vital to passing each stage, and you are playing a shooter game from a new perspective, the perspective of the puzzle game.
At a certain point I realized I was an untouchable observer trying to set up puzzle objects while my enemies were a bunch of meat-heads just playing a shooter game. Maybe I’ll spoke and possess one of them later to mess with them after I finish setting up this light puzzle using these statues holding the reflective disks.
Sprinkling in good and bad sides to events can make the genre exciting.
A sudden windfall results in corruption.
A natural calamity comes with foreign aid.
"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same"
I think citybuilders with risk is already a thing, it is just really niche.
Inscryption is a game that has a hard time fitting into one genre
I was waiting for you to mention against the storm. That game has taken up so many hours of my life.
I definitely feel like City Builders, and maybe even more generally 4X games, are on the cusp of a major innovation, or are about to inspire one at least. I realized the other day while playing Terra Nil that its gameplay was resonant of that of the Anno games, in that most of the game has the same sort of optimizing building placement gameplay, and I wouldn't have initially clocked those as being similar.
Want to throw in my two cents when it comes to Frostpunk: I think my disappointment with the game's "Endless" mode shows that I like Frostpunk exactly because it's not a typical City Builder. All of my favorite parts in the game come from its constant time pressure. When you run out of tech to research and laws to pass, the game can't present any new challenges since its primary challenges, discontent/hope and temperature, are global conditions that you can't out-produce or out-optimize. However, when you can't research everything, that's when you have important decisions to make. Your most valuable resource is time, as laws and tech take time to unlock, and the Scenarios give only so much time before they throw the next challenge at you.
i'd like to mention Banished. a city builder that adds survival into the mix. maybe not as harsh as some others but it revolves around building a village that can survive. also it's funny that if everyone in the village dies, you can actually watch nature retake the territory of your village if you wait long enough
Great watch! I think there's some definite power in bending genres, and the potential benefits of adding new systems - provided we, as players, can avoid the dis-junction of incorrect expectations.
To continue with the "city builders and risk" idea, another game that fits that mold (albeit in more of a mid-point between traditional city builders and the ones in the videos) is Farthest Frontier. It's a city builder with combat. Yes, there's an optional pacifist mode, but that only removes the human threat - not, e.g., wolves preying on your far-flung resource sites.
The way it works in that game is that settlement size + settlement wealth = higher likelihood- and higher size bracket of- raids. Initially, it may be three poorly armed bandits raiding your warehouse. Later in the game, it might be a fully-equipped mercenary army with siege equipment demanding X gold in Y time, lest they raze your city to the ground.
It's a dynamic approach to difficulty that increases it as you succeed more, and decreases it after you're thrashed. While this reduces the likelihood of reaching an unstoppable failure point (though god knows animal attacks, disease, and hypothermia have reduced me to a sole survivor at least once), it does add pressure. This decreases your ability to optimize and (as noted in the video) the *pressure* to optimize. Yes, the game lets you move most buildings for free, but they still take time to move- and can you afford to lose access to that building, or the labourers moving it- when raiders are breaching your walls? After all, this game lets you directly issue movement and attack commands for everyone - and maybe your soldiers would benefit from back-up via the unarmed masses.
Streets of Rogue! It's a beautiful mash-up of the rouguelike and immersive sim genres. It slams the immersive world with interlocking gameplay systems that let you achieve objectives in a truly staggering amount of ways with a quick and snappy top-down rouguelike brawler to create the most viscerally enjoyable immersive sim I've played. After 6 years I'm still finding new ways to play a game that can be easily beat in an hour and a half. I say all this because the second game will be going in early access this year and it's far more ambitious with its scope. It deserves far more eyes on it and I think it's one of those games that could shake up the indie scene given the opportunity.
My favorite city builder game is Kittens [Survival] Game, which markets itself as "a Dark Souls of incrimental gaming" (their words, not mine) and is almost as much a survival game as it is a city builder. If you fail to build your city right, the buildings won't be destroyed, but you will lose workers even up to potentially get stuck with zero of them since no one is making food, and since the people in the game that can die are all kittens with kitten names it can feel like exceptionally high stakes to potentially lose any of them
Watching hitman attempt to choke someone with no neck made me laugh harder than I thought I would!
There's no game that I know of that is explicitely about exploration. Exploration is often a mean to an end. Yet it's my favorite part of very different games. Xenoblade Chronicles X was more revolutionary to me than even BotW just because it adresses the idea of scale in open world, and it does it really well. It's an RPG where you can sneak where you want from the get go, even reaching end game places by accident, and it changes everything. Enemies are not HP sacks anymore, you observe them, learn their pattern like in a sneaking game when they are 50 levels above you. It makes the world feel alive and just reaching the next place a reward.
Disco Elysium got a lot of negative reviews on Steam accusing it of being a Walking Simulator or Point and Click Adventure game, because it lacks the turn based or real time combat so expected from isometric CRPG genre. Something ZA/UM were explicitly set out to do and that informed majority of their design decisions and choices as seen through the thought cabinet.
A good example of a game with risk is a game called Songs of Syx a fantasy city builder where you have to worry about feeding and dealing with your people dealing with crime propping up your economy by importing/exporting goods refining and making luxury’s dealing with religion and ensuring you have a army to defend your home or invade someone else’s
to be honest there are two game ideas i keep wanting to see someone make work. One is a Multiplayer city builder in which players can either compete or cooperate to construct a city and grow their renown.
The other game is a tycoon game set just prior and into the second world war. A game where you have to decide whether or not to stay the course and make toasters and saucepans with progressively more and more of the materials you need rationed off causing you to either become Part of the military industrial complex to get access to the materials, or innovate and diversify both your product line as well as other materials to supplement the supply chain
God this slots in something for me i've been struggling with. I've been ranting to my friends I'm super sick of combat games and have been craving what is basically a Space RTS with EVE online style controls, but you're admiral of a mining fleet. Instead of trying to fight and macchinate your way through EVE online's MMORTS (and yes it is ABSOLUTELY an MMORTS not RPG, the point of the game is the social aspects, marshalling of resources (including other players as units), and deploying them to best effect).
Rant aside the idea that what I'm looking for is a City Builder as far as low risk Zen optimization gameplay but with the controls and moment to moment gameplay of an RTS made something click in my head.
I'd really be interested in a game like that too, actually. Hopefully someone can suggest one 😋
How do you feel about constructing additional pylons?
It seems to me you're talking about Homeworld, an all-time classic. The remastered version is pretty good. And the sequels are ok too.
One genre that really needs a set of definitions is "roguelike". For me, "roguelike" specifically means a dungeon-based, turn-based game; based on my growing up on Larn, Angband, and ToME. I call other games that most people call "roguelike" "Procedural run-based"; because that is to me what they have in common: procedurally generated, based on making runs through the game - and while that includes roguelikes, it also includes games like Against the Storm (sorted for me as a "run-based" "builder"), Transcendence ("Run-based" "Space"), and Conquest of Elysium ("Run-based" "strategy").
As someone who grew up playing actual Rogue, hard agree.
Procedural run-based just doesn't roll of the tongue the same way as roguelike tho and in a way it is a ode to rogue. quake started competitive fps but it will not be remembered as such by the wider audience
There is some push to call those games rougelite. But it had a hard time to be adapted (and to be fair it's also a terrible name).
One problem is that most people don't even know what rouge is. Everybody would protest if I called Call of Duty a DooM Clone.
@@RFTL It is my understanding that "RogueliTe" games are ones in which there is some degree of meta-progress: games like Rogue Legacy or Against the Storm where you build up over time - often with some meta-story that you are working on. This contrasts with "RogueliKe"; which are strictly run-based, with little or nothing carried between runs.
I feel like Manor Lords is going to redefine the genre of city builders when it releases. Being such a radical merging of so many mechanics on a beautiful platform makes the game enthralling as a development.
"It's hard. Dark Souls Hard."
Eh, more like Rimworld Hard. Failure to plan can lead to your death, but also the game can just sometimes say "Alright, you lose now".
Rune factory 5 has alot of issues but its a dungeon crawling/farm simulator rpg with light crafting and I found it to be worth a play through. The npc personalities follow the tropes but were surprisingly fun none the less.
factorio subverts genre expectations by making your big stompy mech scarier than any enemy you will ever face
Against the Storm is the stargate atlantis sim i always wanted
Long term fan, just wanted to say that extra credits gaming content is what originally brought me to the channel, and it’s still great
The Witcher 3: the adventure RPG that becomes the story of a travelling, Gwent playing gigolo who, every once in a while, slays monsters! :D
Frostpunk and Banished are my favorites of this genre, now I know why I like them!