I would like to make a suggestion for a additional Genra that can be researched around the N64 era, as well as a topic that I think is a bit understated irl.
The Genra is Survival, and would work well with the Horror, Post Apocalyptic, Sci-fi, Medevil, and a few other topics.
The Topic I would like to suggest would be Steampunk which would work well in Action, Adventure, RPG, Strategy, and Survival Genras.
I’d also like to suggest Adventure working for Horror since when I think of Action Horror, I don’t think of it as being proper scary like some Horror games with no combat do.
I don’t really like horror shooters so much, a survival horror wouldn’t necessarily include shooting so much as planning out environmental kills to protect yourself
Survival in general could involve much less combat than Action does, and it wouldn’t really empower the player into thinking they are a superhuman war machine like Action does. It would be more scary for Horror.
The current Genres are loosely defined, so you can pretty much shoehorn any game idea into some kind of combination. Having a Survival genre just for the sake of isn’t really beneficial to me, especially since many of the topics wouldn’t fit as well into such a specific genre as Survival.
Survival is only specific in that it involves the player needing to survive in it, and Horror is more broad than just being Action games anyway. So there could be like a Action Survival game like Dead Space, or an Adventure Survival game where you need to conserve your food and energy while exploring. Survival can’t really be shoehorned into any one other Genra. I also just don’t like that Horror can only get 10’s from Action, since I’d rather have more scary type Horror things and I just don’t feel like Action fits that at all.
Also, Amnesia, one of the scariest games of the Horror genra irl, is not a Action game at all.
Also, with the Strategy thing I think more along the lines of a Tower Defense game or a RTS, not a Survival game
There are many survival games where the goal of the game is to evade action so I think it makes sense to have it’s own genre. In fact, I actually intuitively felt that it should be in the game and actually looked for it as the game progressed.
Sandbox. That’s quite literally what it is (or was, if you are fed up with things being added to make the single player side of things more Survival than Sandbox, driving you more and more to Creative/Creative+ mode if you want to build constructs without worrying about Creepers blowing it half to hell all the time).
Well actually Minecraft is a pretty limited survival/building game, as you are really limited with specific game design. It just looks like sandbox
Then again, there can’t be a fully liberal sandbox game anyway, so I would go with “Sandbox” as a Genre and perhaps “Survival” as a topic instead?
GTA would be a Topic: Crime (I’m not sure if it exists in game, though it should) Genre: Sandbox/Action for example. I think both sandbox and survival should be added. Perhaps Survival can be a “sub-genre” as it really is, which would be a nice addition to the game instead of simply making dual-genre games
I didn’t see Stempunk listed in the wiki, that’s why I suggested it, I won’t be able to play beyond the end of year 4 till the 8th or so when my paypal transfer clears so IDK if there’s mores stuff than what’s on the wiki.
And yea, I know open world is a game design element.
and yes, if SteamPunk is not in the game, it definitely should be