I’ve been writing for over half of my entire life, and about videogames in a professional capacity for over three years now—so I mean it when I say that there is nothing I resent more about the English language than the need to define something. It’s a bloody headache, especially when it comes to something so ephemeral as genre.
It’s still important, mind—the difference between a Strategy game and an RPG is still useful—but the headaches I get when arguing over whether something like Deadlock is more of a MOBA than a hero shooter (psst, it’s a MOBA) are almost not worth the effort.
These kinds of problems turn out to be internal at some games studios, too. Take Dune: Awakening director Joel Bylos, who has finally settled—for now, temporarily—on the fact that Awakening is not, in fact, an MMO, per this interview with FRVR.
“I don’t think it’s an MMO. I’ve worked on multiple MMOs for sure, but I think there was a weird space where we were trying to do slightly more. We have this big, connected world, we have this big deep desert with lots of players being able to go in there. So it was a hard game to describe, and I always find that people kind of have a very set notion of what a genre is. So it’s hard to describe something that does something slightly new.”
Bylos is, at least, an authority on what constitutes an MMO to a degree. He’s worked on MMOs The Secret World, as well as Conan: Exiles, another survival-MMO hybrid (see what I mean? Definitions are insufferable).
“It’s not an MMO, is my strong feeling right now. It’s definitely not.” says Bylos, citing the fact that most endgame progression in Dune: Awakening is done via crafting rather than chasing after item levels on a treadmill.
Still, that’s not always up for developers themselves to decide—take Crimson Desert. During my preview event, developer Pearl Abyss was adamant it’s not an RPG. Yet look at PC Gamer’s own staff, and you’ll have people (such as our own Fraser Brown) swearing up-and-down that it is, or others arguing that it’s a weird hybrid.
Personally I’m on team “it’s at least an action RPG” because no pure action game has stronghold management, but that’s exactly the point. Definitions are a nightmare, and we should all collectively give up the written word in exchange for panicked screaming. I’d be out of a job, but I wouldn’t have to think about the difference between roguelike and roguelite ever again.
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