No idea what that means, but I do know the devs of this game also made War for The Overworld and they did a fantastic job of making and maintaining it.
I’d highly recommend their studio… and if this is the type of game you’re interested in, you should definitely check it out!
I don’t know, I never saw it as a meme but rather just shorthand in cases where no other term existed that efficiently communicated the genre or style of a game.
Do you have a replacement term available for Souls-like that sums up what you can expect of a game within that genre using two words or less?
I saw another article describing something, perhaps this game, as a “Theme Hospital-like”. Theme Hospital-like is not a genre.
Souls-like is likely in a similar situation as Rogue-like or perhaps “Doom Clone” from back in the day, where a new genre is emerging and there isn’t yet an agreed-upon term for it. Rogue-like stuck around probably because it was such a niche game/genre for so long and people had been calling it that for maybe decades before the term went mainstream. Doom Clone died out because the genre branched out so much.
I wouldn’t necessarily want to reduce “Souls-like” to another genre, because it may very well be its own genre. It may end up “growing” a new name like First-Person Shooters did, or it may end up sticking around because “X-like” may be the new thing to do.
I’m just getting annoyed by seeing things like “Stardew Valley-like”, “Dragon Quest-like”, “Theme Hospital-like”…those tell you nothing if you don’t know the game they’re talking about, and if you DO know the game they’re talking about, you might get the wrong idea what the game is about because the author is making a bad comparison.
I do take your point and it’s a fair criticism. It can almost feel like a marketing ploy to piggyback off of the popularity of another game, such as Stardew Valley-like, considering a lot of the time those games have since developed a genre, like for FPS instead of Doom-like.
I would also add, though, that using Doom-like/Doom-lite would still be appropriate to define games that are closer to a Doom type game than your CoD or Counter Strike. You could make a similar argument for the style of play Stardew Valley offers compared to literally Farming Simulator 20XX.
But you could also argue it gives the reader/consumer a quicker understanding of what to expect from the game. Especially in the case of this article where there isn’t a way to clearly define/ label what to excpet from the game.
My dislike of it stems from the marketing ploy aspect. It feels like clickbait; authors trying to get hits from people looking up (or “interested in”) a certain game even if it may not be an accurate description.
I think the Doom-like FPS’s are getting called “Boomer Shooters” now, lol…but we’re ironically in a situation where we need a new term again. Or we would be if that genre were popular in the mainstream.
I think describing the game in the article as a “Management Sim inspired by Theme Hospital/Bullfrog” would get across the same concept, for example. I don’t think it’s difficult. I think it’s just becoming a popular thing for gaming journalists to do
I can see where you’re coming from and I agree at times it feels like it’s being used for the marketing since it’s easier to say, using the article as an example, “Bullfrog-like”. They could have taken an extra moment to be a bit more descriptive, such as with your example, and say “Management Sim inspired by Theme Hospital/Bullfrog”, for people who may not be familiar with “Theme Hospital” or a Bullfrog game.
Just to circle back to your initial comment, “I got to the word “Bullfroglike” and stopped reading”, I can definitely see where you are coming from, but I did disagree with your approach.
I also just wanted to add that I hope this isn’t taken as an attack upon yourself.
I do like the alliteration for “Boomer Shooter” but I don’t think it’s the right demographic xD. I think it’s still somewhat common, but I also don’t think it’s as mainstream as say your Battlefield or CoD.
We call them first-person shooters now. And I think they were usually called Doom-clones. But it makes sense that they’d use a word like that when a word for the genre hadn’t really been codified by that point.
Yeah, Rogue-like is a notable exception. The difference is that it’s an established term for a genre, whereas a single journalist saying something like “Theme Hospital-like” is not a genre.
whereas a single journalist saying something like “Theme Hospital-like” is not a genre.
Exactly. Which is why your comments here do not make any sense at all; they’re not saying it’s a genre. They’re saying these games are like the games of a long gone company of the past. There’s no established way of saying that other than “Bullfrog-like.”
But that’s their thing, they made war for the overworld because they were huge fans of bullfrog’s dungeon keeper and wanted a spiritual successor to it, now galacticare might be like bullfrog’s theme hospital
TF2 is almost 20 fucking years old and has been F2P for 13 of those years, why should Valve care to do anything about it? Frankly, the official servers even still being online at all is more than most other games(besides subscription based games like WoW) of that era can say.
Like, what were you guys expecting? For Valve to support the game the rest of your lives?
TF2 is no longer making a lot money for valve. Veteran players have all theirs special hats/cosmetics and no new player wants to invest time and money in a game so riddled with cheating bots. They could easily handle the situation. Detecting obvious cheating bots isn’t hard but valve doesn’t even try. Yes, there are community servers, like Uncle Danes, that are good at handling bots, but it’s also a big burden for them to constantly ban/remove cheating bots.
Valve is testing server side AI cheat detection in CS2. Let’s hope that they will bring that to TF2 valve servers. Maybe don’t VAC ban players being detected (AI is buggy), just remove them when detected and maybe disallow them from joining valve servers for a week.
Compared to other companies, Valve let the community use alternative community servers. Even if Valve does not care about the game anymore (sigh, one of may all time favorites), it’s possible to maintain community servers. This is something any other game wish to had, without hacking the system; it’s just part of the game. And people can even use modded communities and there exist some really cool stuff (admittedly I never tried them, I would play the game if it didn’t have the bot problem).
The last major update was in 2017, bots started plaguing casual mode around 2018/19, and ever since the game has seen anastonishingly tiny amount of updates outside ofhthe usual summer, Halloween and Christmas updates (which just shove community made content from the Workshop into special gamemodes and crates); apart from the recent 64-bit version and the VScript addition a while back, nothing of interest has happened in the last handful of years. F2P lost their ability to call medic and the bot crisis is completely unsolved.
It’s sad. But as another user pointed out, at least we have e community servers (and good ones).
Yeah! My current favorite is Uncletopia, which was created by the popular UncleDane TF2 youtuber but is now run by a community of dedicated people (but I think Dane still pays the bills). It has non-vanilla tweaks, such as no random crits, no random bullet spread, voting for maps and team scrambling, etc. The skill ceiling is also a tad higher than regular casual, which I like since it pushes me to improve further. I love the tweaks, the community and have never seen any bots, so it’s great!
Skial is another major network that has been around forever and is still rocking like a champ. I don’t play as much there, but I always find it a nice place as well :)
It was fun! Reminded me why I got so hooked on it in the first place. Quite rusty though, first time launching in a few years and even that time was a return after a long absence.
I still don’t understand what job “game journalist” entails.
Say a politician takes bribes. A journalist can investigate public record documents and paper trails, and visit state houses, to interview workers to uncover what’s going on there.
Game studio is working on a new sequel, but hasn’t announced it. But this is a private company that’s not required to report to anyone. They’re not consuming taxpayer money. What, legally, should a game journalist be doing to reveal this info?
They’re basically just there to echo press releases and provide scheduled interviews, all of which must be basically at the publisher’s approval, since there are far more journalists than interesting studios.
Without journalism (or just a third-party in general) providing perspectives and communication in some way, you are relying primarily on the information coming directly from the companies themselves.
In this case we see that Sony was willing to fabricate quotes about an interview.
It’s an unpopular opinion in most forums, but I love most gaming journalists. I prefer their podcasts and their articles and their opinions way more than any YouTuber/streamer. I just get more insightful and less bias information from them.
People should just stop thinking about gaming journalism as a monolith, and start thinking of it as any other job. Some people are capable of doing it and they show it, others are completely incapable of writing a decent article without resorting to snarky comments or biased opinions.
A local website in my language employs a YTuber as a reviewer for reviews on games that he is a sponsor of on his channel, and those articles are laughable to say the least (I’m not going to name the games nor the person). But I’ve also read good articles on the same website, written by people who actually care about their job and have the skills to do it well.
But for some reason, gamers keep parroting this awful opinion of gaming journalists being incapable of playing games or having opinions on things. No, it’s just that certain journalists are better than others. (And for god’s sake, people should stop using the Cuphead video as a talking point. It was not a true review, it was a joke video, ffs)
There’s a reason for the early rise in popularity of independent gaming reviewers and it isn’t the hard-hitting, honest quality of mainstream entertainment journalism at the time. With the advent of influencers though, it feels like everyone is just regurgitating the same pre-approved, publisher-friendly nonsense. I’m sure there are exceptions, but it feels more difficult today to find an honest review when every random internet personality is signing sponsorship contracts that require them to praise the game every 20 minutes.
It’s also possible that he did say all of those things and they’re only changing the story due to the negative reception. It’s a Sony site/interview after all.
Technically it’s possible, but the article includes the transcript that Druckmann himself posted, so that would mean he is faking a transcript to call out Sony’s edits to what he said.
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