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.
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