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FPS. Next question.
Because it is a good video by a channel that makes quality game related content.
Its not the fault of a channel that google made an atrocious sorting algorithm.
It’s an interesting and entertaining video. That was the reason for me at least
I had to look up Bettridge’s law, which was more effort than I took with the original post. Excellent work! I have to agree now and change my answer.
This video is made by Ahoy (quality content). And it’s a fairly short video (around 10min) with an interesting conclusion. I highly suggest you watch it.
I see the dismissiveness as a reaction to the title clickbait/burying the lede. I get that this is how you have to do video titles on YouTube to get views, but a sentence or two about what the video’s actual premise is in the post body would have gone a long way to interest people who are, understandably IMO, a bit apathetic towards headlines like this.
Then let’s transcribe part of the opening:
I know what you’re thinking – it’s a stupid question, it’s an FPS. It’s the definitive FPS. And it’s a fair point. DOOM ticks all the boxes required for a reasonable definition of a first person shooter. It’s presented from a first-person perspective, and shooting the bad guys is a key part of it. But the FPS genre didn’t exist when DOOM was released. The term “first person shooter” wasn’t common until a few years later.
So what genre was DOOM? How was it originally described?
Edit I’ve now understood that quoting most of the video’s opening salvo has unfortunately misrepresented the video’s contents to the people who are still trying to leave comments without actually watching it. It’s a video about what DOOM’s genre is and what DOOM’s genre was, not only the latter. The title looks clickbait-y but is honestly pretty accurate regarding the subject of the video.
That was really good. It’s something I hadn’t given any thought to , but the fact that First Person Shooter didn’t exist as a term when Doom released, it was interesting seeing the progression. I remember as a kid referring to Heretic and Hexen as Doom-clones, but wasn’t really cognizant of the term as it fell out of use in favour of other descriptions.
I paused midway through to think about it, and settled on “action 3D dungeon crawler.” But for some reason “RPG” sounds completely fucking wrong, even though… that’s arguably what dungeon crawlers are… right?
The problem is that “RPG” was a very early term that’s stuck around, and it’s been smeared across a wide variety of influential games. So no, Doom is very obviously not an RPG in the sense of even decade-prior games like Ultima. But the first-person kill-em-all presentation is hard to separate from Akalabeth… an obviously seminal RPG, and the origin of proper dungeon crawlers. And the immediate predecessor to Ultima. It’s like we never separated “shooter” from “shoot-em-up.”
That’s an interesting idea. Maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment or perhaps I just have a poor conception of genres, but, IMO, one of the defining features of dungeon crawlers which seperates them from rpgs is that they’re, for the most part, randomly generated. It pains me to say it because it seems rather absurd, but I feel like RPG is actually closer.
Edit: I just finished watching the video. xD
Yes, if you simplify things down to just combat, then yes, I kind of agree. But the thing that generally separates “RPG” from the rest is whether the player feels like they’re playing a role or just playing a game.
Akalabeth gives the player interactive choices (which weapon? Climb the ladder?). The limitations are a mixture of the platform at the time and the skill of the game dev (was built by a teen). But it’s obvious that player choice and interaction with the character was a major component here, and the goal is to get the player to the end.
Doom just presents enemies to kill. Yeah, you can change weapons, but it’s less in a “character choice” way and more of a “best tool for the job” way. Yeah, it has a character portrait, but I took that to be an indicator of how injured player is, not a RP mechanic. At no point do I consider the character, I just want you press forward to find the next area of monsters (monsters being the goal, not the end or whatever).
If we ignore “shooter” as a category, I think “first person action dungeon crawler” is a good description for Doom, and “first person dungeon crawler RPG” is better for Akalabeth.
(monsters being the goal, not the end or whatever)
This is the only part I disagree with. Doom is about maps. The monsters are pleasant friction.
… at least in id maps. Slaughter maps and combat puzzles are a different story.
Right, but why do you want to get to the end of the map? To see the next one, which hopefully has new monsters to shoot.
The story fits with this. Basically, you’re a marine (no name) dropped on a Martian moon to secure a facility. His team is wiped out, so he goes in alone. The facility is apparently working on teleportation, so he battles demons through the facility and into hell. After that, a portal to Earth opens and he enters to fight more demons.
Some notes here:
- the Marine is never given a name, and you are never asked to provide one
- the goal is to get revenge, not to grow as a person or defeat some evil (though you end up doing that)
- there are no character classes, only weapons you find along the way
The character itself is completely forgettable, and there’s certainly no progression (you even lose all your weapons at one point). The game seems to go out of its way to distance itself from other games.
In an RPG, the character matters more than pretty much anything else. In Doom, I’m not given any reason to care about the character. Why am I doing all this? Because there’s baddies to shoot! That’s really all there is to it.
If it were an RPG, it would have some kind of persistent progression (levels, abilities, customized equipment, etc), as probably some kind of internal motivation for the main character (aside from simple revenge).
What genre is Rogue? 🤔
