This is a followup to @SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.
I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
Borderlands. It’s just peak Reddit brain writing tacked onto a looter shooter (yay, thousands of completely identical guns with varying amounts of + 5% crit dmg) and bullet sponge enemies.
I think it really was a product of the times. The looter shooter was fairly novel and you can see how that affect of banter w/e you wanna call it really aged badly in bl2 and 3
I agree that pairing Diablo with fps was novel, I just don’t think it was well executed. Honestly, the first one was fine especially in light of being a new combination of game elements.
I think I was letting my distaste for the cringe Reddit humor of the second one override actually kinda enjoying the first one when it was new.
I stand by the jab at the minuscule and meaningless differences they use to pad out the “loot variation” numbers though.
