E6: your character(s) can manipulate and change the game world appropriate to the game's setting (-> e.g. pull levers, push buttons, open chests, hack computers …)
E7: the gameworld can affect your character(s) conditions or circumstances(-> e.g. weather, traps, closed doors, poisoned areas, …) in a way that you have to learn and adapt to overcome these challenges.
maybe:
E5: you can choose a path (-> there is at least some branching or backtracking)
What do you think?
First two sound fine, but in regard to E5 I'm not sure about backtracking if its use in a game is relatively limited. If you feel like you are on rails most of the time and may wander off only rarely, we usually call CRPGs like that linear (Zloth mentioned "basically linear" J-RPGs) — lots of story and character development, but very limited exploration:
So I'd say we try to leave backtracking and pseudo-branching out of E5. Maybe we could add something like "it doesn't mostly feel like you are on rails" instead? The point is that linear CRPGs should fall out of the SH exploration category.
That said, it's important to remember that one shouldn't go out of their way to prove one of the points true. I'm sure in really abstract ways Pac Man or even Pong, in which you can role-play a ping pong paddle, could be made to fit. A little bit of common sense and gut feeling may help with remedying that.
edit: We should add "Linear" to our Genre tags. Would this suffice as a description?
Linear: Exploration options are very limited. It feels like you are on rails most of the time.
edit2: in your graphic you listed "Sim game". Perhaps we should add that as a tag too. Do you have a description?
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