Weekly Poll: What is your favourite genre on our site? Finished!
 

Which one of our game genres do you find yourself browsing the most? Which one has your favourite games in? Tell us now!

I chose Adventure games because they're the best way to tell an interesting story. It was a close call between Adventure, Action and RPG, with Strategy and Racing closely behind.

I would say strategies for the first place, either round based or rts. But I get so frustrated with the tough ones (sadly) like Panzer General. In that case I used editors to create an easier scenario. Second place goes to Simulation and RPG. Both

Well, my favourite genre must be Adventure - about a year ago I would had to choose between this and Interactive Fiction, but since they are in the same category on site now, this is no problem to me. I like immersive stories, especially if they are told through painting quality pixel art graphics and beautiful music scores. Westwood, Sierra, LucasArts for the win!

Voted for Action genre, because thats what it was all about back then. :old:
Strategy would be no.2 and Adventure no.3.

There is no way to outwin RPG. :) As it combine every other genre. :) Well, if take definition of RPG slightly loose, it is. :) (For example, Elite is strategy and action, but it's always RPG for me).

Tough one. I'm torn between adventures, RPG's, strategy and sims. Landed on sims though. TIE Fighter did it!

I voted rpg, but im a also a fan of the adventure games present on the site.

Chalk me up for adventure too, although RPG comes in at a close second.

Now where are the board and sports game fans hiding, I know you're out there somewhere :)

Strategy all the way, as usual.

I also like about every other category except adventure... Never been able to like that genre. If I wish to read a story, I'll get a good book. :)

RPGs and Adventure games (I chose RPG in the poll though).

Which is why Quest for Glory is probably my favourite adventure game!

I prefer RPG games as RPG games can also include strategy (check "realms of arkania" turn based battle sequences), action (check "Keys to Maramon"), adventure (check "Quest for Glory". Not much of adventuring in mosty of them but it is there) and puzzle (most have some). Adventure as a genre comes right after RPG, as i have my faves like monkey island, police quest, sanitarium etc.

I'd say platform games but there are not in the poll, why? I chose action but i play all genres except adventure games. Of course i have played The Secret of Monkey Island which is amazing!

I'm quite disappointed to see how small the votes for Strategy is. I'm sure that a few years ago it would have been at least the double, maybe even triple.

Adventure fans always been important on this site in the past too however. No surprise there. The amount of votes however still surprise me.

The real surprise here is RPG. I have nothing more to say than: huh, what? I could not even name you more than one or two classic RPG games that we have on site by heart... :unsure:

Eagle, good RPG is like good Adventure, but bigger. :) Genie's Curse, Betrayal in Krondor, Heimdall, Realms of Arkania or Starflight, for example, are much more than dungeon romps like Eye of the Beholder or Dungeon Master. RPGs are... shapeshifters. They could be anything from dating sim to hardcore strategy. Other genres have a problems with it, if they tried to be something else without RPG. :)

Strategies wasn't super-popular all 2000s (when I can watch it), and I can guess that it was the same state before too. It need too much attention and have too many restrictions. And when scope widens (like in 4x games), game immediately stumbles in bad AI issues. I seen it many times. For example, famous Alpha Centauri practically unplayable on settings bigger than "big" maps. I can push margins much more, but in result computer lose track of all this land and miserably failed. Ugh.

And in last years there wasn't any exceptional and wide-known turn-based strategy at all. Most of it either too casual (as Civilizations or HoMM), or too obscure (as most Paradox games). And RTS actually not "strategies" at all in core. It's more like "tactical management simulator". So no wonder that people do not like strategies too much - they rarely sees _good_ strategies. :)

I completely agree with you Smiling Spectre. The quality of games in general consistently dropped in the 2000's and it really take a high quality game to make a good strategy game. No wonder nothing good got out of it. Also no wonder why I think very badly of the gaming industry right now, considering strategy will always be my preferred genre.

I browsed the RPG list on Abandonia and I have to say that many games seem to be quite badly listed. It has probably a lot to do with what you just said: from what I understand of your opinion, you seem to think that any game with a sliver of RPG element is a RPG game. I certainly don't. As a base rule, I expect a game which boast itself in a specific genre to at least have about 25% of the game based on the genre in question... Many games which are boasted as classic RPGs don't fall in this category at all (and any of our members who are old enough know what I think about Diablo II in that regard).

I really wish there were good strategy games nowaday.

There were just as many old bad games as there are new bad games. Not to mention some of the best games ever made came out long after 2000. RPG is a weak genre, it needs to be put onto another genres play style to make it work. Otherwise all you have is a whole bunch of character sheets and a dark screen and are playing Pencil and Paper D&D.

People have been pointing out they like Strategy games and the genre, they just prefer another one more. Just because it isn't someone's number one genre doesn't mean they aren't fully in love with the Strategy genre as well, they just like another one that bit more.

Well... Considering that the percentage of what I consider "new bad games" rise up around 85%... No, there certainly wasn't as many bad games before in my book. ;)

I'm curious to know, which game got out in the 2000's which was that good? If you tell me Fable I'll stop replying. ;)

Fable, just to make you stop replying. But lets see from just my Steam list games that came out after 2000.

Borderlands, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dead Island, Dungeons of Dredmor, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Killing Floor, Left 4 Dead, Minecraft, Overlord 1 and 2, Recettear: An Item Shop Tale, Saints Row 3, Terraria, The Witcher.

And that is just games I have on Steam, or I use Steam to launch not even all the games I have on my PC at the moment. If I had to list every game that has come out in 11 years over PC and consoles that is good...well that would take forever.

And that doesn't include MMOs like WoW and SW:ToR.

Well, too bad the vast majority of this list suffers from the YASFPS syndrome... And also, I thought we were talking about RPGs. I think Recettear is a classic one and I stopped looking at the next ones for lack of time...

The only game which look remotely interesting is Dungeon of Dredmor... And it's a graphical Roguelike. I would actually need to pay to play a Roguelike? Even worse, on Steam? A program I'll never run on my computer? Right.

If that's the best you can link to me then I think it prove my point. I never said there was no good games ever made during the 2000s... But the ratio of good games in the 2000s versus the '90s is like between one to five and one to ten.

And that's a shame.

Sod of EoF read what I wrote. I told you I was merely picking the best games off my Steam list, not all of Steam, the ones I owned and not even all the games I have on my PC from that time frame. Not to mention I went on to point out that listing every good game would take for ever. And you might want to pay attention to the games I listed, nearly every one has RPG elements of some level or other.

Not to mention at no point did I say I was only talking about RPGs, rather countering your claim that all gaming slid into a decline from 2000 onwards. Either you didn't really read what I posted, or ignored it to continue with your point.

Drakensang and Drakensang: River of Time. Both after 2000, both superb games. Anyone that says otherwise is spreading lies. And they are pure bred RPG, with a pretty complex ruleset behind it. Or Morrowind. *shrug*

Hmm. I think, you switched ratios, because right now it looks like "1 of 5 games is good for 2000s, and 1:10 - for 90s". :) NVM, but I can argue with it.

1. 90s have a HUGE UGLY HEAP of bad games. I browsed lot of lists in many places - it's always 1:20 for me in best circumstance for best years. Check (totally incomplete) Mobygames lists, and you'll see.

2. 2000s have exactly the same heaps - but it became thousand time bigger! And for every (good) game we have hundreds of (maybe same good) clones. Look on any shareware site - it have myriads of almost-indistingushable match-3, hidden objects, platformers, tower defences, etc. Every one of it have quite good quality, much better than similar 90s game, but if you seen one of it - you seen at least half of it all.

The same goes to "big" games. We have too many similar ones. They are different, but will not attract anyone except devoted fans. It's not about "good/bad", but rather "new/the same" issue.

3. Games now much more "visible" than it was fifteen years ago. In 90s Russia, Finland or Brazilia have no any chance to get it's games published outside of country - except very slim amount of "international" teams. And vise versa: I am, in Russia, had almost zero chance to see something off-border in Russia, except "big hits". Now, with global Internet, I can see game in days after release - even one-man games, betas and poor quality releases. It "pollutes" pool of games.

Overall: I don't think that games of 2000s is much worse than 90s was. I even don't think that it worse at all. :) But I think that process of finding good game now became much more complicated than it was before.

BTW, my favorite 4x strategy was released in 2000s. Dominions 3 it is.

RPG, just because of Ultima Underworld. :smile2:

Dominion 3 is one of the worse strategy games I ever played. :unsure:
In fact, it is more a wargame than strategy game...

Simply doing a quick post to say that I of course meant there was more good games in the 90's than the 2000s. I don't know if what I said made it sound like otherwise but anyways.

I think you hit the nail on several key factors. I consider clones to be utter crap. Repetition of same games to be utter crap. Originality have a lot to do in ranking a game... And if you have 30 games which offer you the exact same gameplay then it's not original at all and thus boring.

Thank you! Now could you take your cynicism somewhere else for a change? It's really getting, y'know. "repetitive and utter crap."

I thought everyone knew that the 2000s are the Golden Age of Strategy Games. Guess not.

Who is criticizing? All I said was that I was surprised by the poll results and it turned into a discussion.

As always, when you're not part of the "big guns" idea of how the world work, you get shot down for no particular reasons...