Undead Game Genres

Around the time I was pushing 18-20 years old, adventure games died. RIP adventure games. Gone forever, never to come back except in Germany, etc, etc.

I wasn’t particularly upset by this at the time, because iD software had let off an atomic bomb on PC gaming, and I was too busy being excited by 3D graphics and fast-paced action gameplay of a sort I had never even imagined before to actually recognise that I was not really that into playing what we now call first-person shooters.

New technology in video game graphics was exciting then in a way that it hasn’t been for probably a good two decades.

Dead Genres?

By the time I truly realised that I was missing adventure games, they had sprung back into existence anyway, first with the Kickstarter revolution which lasted all of about 5 nanoseconds, and then with the ongoing success of Wadjet Eye Games and the numerous other talented creators & teams that had sprung up by around the early 2010s.

At the time, the idea that a genre could ‘die’ and be ‘reborn’ was exciting to me. In a way, that was indeed what began to happen, except instead of the cycle of death and rebirth I was expecting back then, what seems to have happened is that genres live forever.

For the past ten years, almost every niche subgenre of game has not only come back, but often with several games competing in the same space made by small teams.

Did you love Theme Hospital? Good news, there’s not only the spectacular Two Point Hospital to play, but also the more literalist quasi-remake Project Hospital.

Miss SimTower? Well, Project Highrise should scratch that itch.

And of course there’s a million new games released almost monthly in the incredibly poorly-named ‘genre’ of ‘boomer-shooters’ (FFS it was mostly Gen-X folk who made them!). From the Quake-like Dusk to the upcoming and brilliant Duke-like The Last Exterminator and a million more besides.

In fact there’s only a small handful of games from the ’90s that I can’t think of at least one modern spiritual successor to, and I suspect that in some cases it’s merely that I haven’t looked on itch and Steam hard enough.

The problem is, the one genre I truly love… looks like it may actually be dead.

Grand Theft Genre

My personal favourite genre is what I guess you could call a GTA-like. Games where you move around at least a semi-modern city, completing missions, doing some systemic stuff (perhaps owning businesses or doing odd jobs for weird side-characters) and getting experience at least the vibes of another place and/or another time that’s still relatable to those of us who live in major cities.

GTA style games, and even single open-world games more generally hit their peak a few years either side of 2010. At this point we had the prime GTA competitor, Saint’s Row, still desperately trying to compete with the 18-ton gorilla, Rockstar Games, who had such an absurd amount of money that their games were polished and slick to a level that’s positively eye-watering to someone who makes games for a living.

Ubisoft did their spin on it by asking the question “What if a cool GTA game had hacking, and also the driving was awful?”, though Watch Dogs only ever really nailed both those things once, with their second title.

Rockstar’s owner Take Two Interactive also shepherded the Mafia series, which (hot take) peaked in 2016 with Mafia III, which had the most to say and gave you the most to do - even if the systemic aspects of it weren’t for everyone.

But unlike most every other genre that’s existing in some form since 2000 or before, the open-world action-car crime genre (we really need a proper name for this) seems to be… well, genuinely quite dead.

Sure, Grand Theft Auto VI is due to be released in 2025 2026… well, whenever Rockstar is done with it, but the recent Saint’s Row reboot bombed pretty dramatically, Watch Dogs seems to be dead after the poorly conceived and poorly received third game, and even Mafia has gone from open world sort-of-GTA-like back to more and more linear games. (I haven’t even played The Old Country, probably as much because I’ve no interest in Sicily as a setting as the lack of any open-world non-linear material in the game.)

And, let’s face it - this isn’t a huge shock.

I don’t think people ever entirely stopped liking Grand Theft Video Games, but the genre certainly ossified a bit. On the one hand you have Rockstar, which essentially has the ability to print money with the juggernaut that is Grand Theft Auto Online. It does let them spend 5 or 8 years working on a single polished single player game such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and now GTA VI, sure, but it also means that along with the single player experience has to come a hugely expensive attempt to re-capture that lightning in a bottle, even when the idea of people buying new horses every week in Red Dead Online seems as absurd as it ended up being.

But of course the main reason for its death is that to make an open-world action game set in a modern city means a lot of things:

• On-foot action and shooting that is at least in the ballpark of what’s expected from a modern shooter.
• A driving engine that, hopefully, doesn’t feel like absolute arse, and should at least compete with tolerable arcade racing games.
• A game engine that can handle chunking in extremely large worlds seamlessly.
• A sprawling city that seems alive, with pedestrians, scripted events and of course the missions that make up the backbone of whatever story you’re trying to tell.

The sheer level of technology and the amount of developer-hours required to make even a relatively small GTA-like game is simply outside the reach of most companies. So while it’s possible for a small team to eke out a living for themselves appeasing a tiny group of fans who are into niche sub-genres like “High Fantasy Tavern Management Simulator”, the idea of attempting to do Modern City Crime Action Game seems absurd.

There’s been at least one attempt to go back to the genre’s basics and using the top-down perspective of GTA 1, 2 and Chinatown Wars to make it doable, but the first or third person perspective is clearly a key part of the appeal for many people.

I’m not convinced that a small team couldn’t set their sights a little higher and do a sort of stylised GTA III like game, but with more modern game systems in lieu of expensive cut scenes and linear missions, but that’s a game design document for another time. (At least, it can be shelved until such time as someone throws me a few million USD to assemble a crack team to make Project Action Crime City.)

But what about…

I’m sure a bunch of people reading this are presently thinking “but what about [insert open world game here]”.

Yes, it’s true, I could accept a lack of cars and a more fantastical setting to get a similar experience. There’s Cyberpunk 2077 (the closest we’ve gotten to a high budget GTA-like game in years, despite its RPG trappings), and then there’s all the other RPGs. Skyrim, Fallout, The Witcher, etc.

Without making this an itemised checklist of Shit Elissa Likes In Games, in short:

It’s about an immersive experience for me. The more health bars above peoples heads, the more screens full of stats and level-up choices, the more I am pulled out of a video game. It’s not the absurd level of polish and stunning graphics that draw me to GTA V, Red Dead II and Mafia III so much, it’s the way they are geared through their design choices to let me forget I’m playing a video game so much of the time.

Can this be done in a low-budget game? Absolutely.

Does it just add to the cost of producing a game in an already-expensive genre? Absofuckinglutely.

A simple screen full of stats and buttons is always going to be cheaper than the design and art efforts required to make a diegetic, minimalist game interface truly work.

Even trying to do it cheaply, using stylised minimalist graphics and moving away from fully animated cut-scene based mission gameplay won’t stop it being an expensive and time-consuming genre to tackle.

So, for now, I just need to accept that I’ll be re-playing Watch Dogs 2, Mafia III, GTA IV & V and the Reds Dead for years and years to come.

Which, honestly, is far from a terrible thing.