Yeah but in those you have some mechanics to use. Telltalle took the adventure game formula, which is mostly exploration and puzzles, and dumbed it down until you were left with linear exploration and kindergarten puzzles. I stopped looking at their titles ages ago because while I grew up with adventure games, the Telltale titles ain't that any more.

Edit: also, games made after a movie license (or a game license, Minecraft Story, wtf?) tend to be crap. Especially when they're story based so basically you're replaying the movie that you've already seen.

They're much closer to the Visual Novel genre then the Adventure Games formula. But even than, most really good VNs that come out of Japan have branching stories. It's dependency on Anime Harem tropes and fanservice notwithstanding, many of the stories (Steins;Gate, Fate/Stay Night comes to mind) branch significantly and well beyond the "600 dead end bad endings and 1 good ending". They're well written and (again, once you get past the fact that you have to rummage through a sex scene you're totally not interested in ever seeing to get to a particular ending) engaging.

Telltale had a chance to take the Visual Novel, clean it up some for more Western sensibilities, and really create a market here for the genre.

Instead you just got a badly rendered machina. It was unfortunate.

That said, I've heard great things about the writing for Minecraft Story from adults. So, you know. If your expectations are appropriate, there's room to be impressed.

Visual Novel is an apt description, though I'll disagree with you on one thing: most Japanese visual novels back when I last checked them, which was in the 90s/early 00s, were terrible. And I mean, really, embarrassingly terrible, and not just for their random and bizarre sex scenes, but overall badly written and cliched. Some of it could be chalked up to poor English translations, but most of it was mind-numbing cliches and nonsensical situations you'd laugh at if found in a book or movie, and which you had to repetitively click through.

That said, yes, I think The Walking Dead Season could accurately be described as a Visual Novel with very little branching, more than a full-fledged point-and-click adventure. I think it succeeds at this; Lee's story is certainly more interesting than whatever happens with Rick & crew in the tremendously repetitive TV show. I can see how Telltale's formula gets repetitive for subsequent games, since it's essentially a one trick pony, but still... I was entertained for one season :)

Fate Stay Night doesn't really branch. It just makes you play it 3 times for 3 different versions of the story. There's very little interactivity, it's more like an author wrote 3 drafts of the same novel where different things happen in each draft than a work of interactive fiction.

Telltale's games since The Walking Dead became narrative focused, essentially the interactive version of a "choose-your-own-adventure" book. Personally I loved the format since I hated the cartoon logic behind a lot of adventure game puzzles, but Telltale never evolved it. Supermassive Games (Until Dawn) and Dontnod (Life is Strange) both showed that you can expand on the concept and tell interesting stories.

I also liked that TWD was narratively focused and more about dialogue and moral dilemmas than puzzles; puzzles in adventure games almost always feel artificial to me. I just wish TWD's dilemmas had resulted in more varied consequences, and of course more plot branching.

> Especially when they're story based so basically you're replaying the movie that you've already seen.

Weren't most of Telltale's stories original? I didn't play any of the others, but I know the Borderlands and Batman ones were.

Maybe, if you mean as original as they can be within the restrictions of the franchise.

Personally, I played Borderlands but I never stopped and thought "oh gee, it would be nice to find out more about their background story". I just looked for the next thing to shoot. As for Batman... saturation anyone?

Are you saying that Batman games in general don't sell well?

I'm talking for myself. I stopped at like 3 movies and one game (Arkham Asylum was nice, but I didn't want more of the same), then lost interest completely.

Battle royale games were done better decades ago? I can't even think of a battle royale game from the 90s.

unreal tournament and counter strike for sure. Unreal tournament had an option to limit the number of life, not that is was common to use.

Unreal and Fortnight are made by the same company by the way. It's really a reskin with adjusted gameplay settings.

quake, unreal tournament, tribes, battlefield, planetside.. Deathmatch with many players. Same thing pretty much, but with more action.

BR is a very different type of game and especially Fortnight has VERY different game play. It plays nothing like quake or ut. It's much closer to counter strike but with a higher level of tension.

Also, add a giant map and an exploration/preparation period where most players are searching for weapons before fighting anyone.

> Same thing pretty much, but with more action.

That's exactly why we play BR games.

These days I play mostly PUBG. Before that, Day of Infamy. Before that, Insurgency. Notice a trend? Each one of those games has a lot at stake (relatively speaking) when you get into an engagement. If you die, you sit out for a while. They're about communication and coordination between players on the same team.

PUBG (and Fortnite, though that's not my preference) take it to a whole other level. It's not uncommon for me to play a game of PUBG where the first 10-15 minutes is spent either not encountering anyone or spotting them before they spot me and purposefully avoiding them. It's about tactics - either coordination with your squad, or maneuvering into a better position for the next phase of the game, or waiting until someone you're stalking has engaged someone else before engaging them.

Because the preparation is longer, there's more at risk when you actually engage, and the anticipation builds to a crescendo. So, yeah - there may only be seconds of "action" in a PUBG match, but that's the whole point.

Battlefield usually annoyed me when I would spend minutes traveling back to the scene of the action. In Fortnite I would spend minutes just trying to find anyone on the map at all sometimes. It feels like I'm doing a lot, lot more of the unfun stuff (traveling) than the fun stuff (shooting and outmaneuvering the opponents). I just can't get into it myself.

I'll just keep playing Quake (actually I'm mainly playing puzzles and graphic novels right now) until people get tired of Battle Royale modes and need a break from them.

Ok then, thats been done many times ages ago in the likes of ARMA, rainbow 6, Operation flashpoint.. etc.

Here, watch this:

https://youtu.be/ffryiLmQb1U

This is Fortnite build battling. BR as a whole just refers to a game ruleset that forces and encourages a last-man-standing situation. That part has been done before there was a video game. But the details of what's being communicated are different. They're different even between Rust and PUBG, despite both of them being military styled. Fortnite is in a class of its own since it's cartoonish and the building and mobility options present a lot of unique options. Even comparisons to Minecraft don't fit since the build system is different.

Performing jadedness about the games being "done before" is basically like saying new movies are just collections of old cliches. Even when they are, they end up saying something different.

Those are squad-based tactical military shooters focused on realism, yet another genre completely different from battle royales!

The fundamental difference between all of those games and what I would consider a battle royale game is you only get 1 life.

As an aside, I loved Tribes 2 construction mod.

Last I recall from playing unreal 2004, there is a slider to select how many life players have when starting a death match.

Battle royale was available, long before battle royale was cool.

There were also a lot of other gameplay available on top of death match, all built in: team death match, assault, onslaught, capture the flags, domination, etc...

No, you need the blue circle, looting and big maps as well. Just having one life is not enough.

There is looting. Weapons, ammo and equipment appear in defined locations at various times.

If you look at good players who win their games, it's a lot about being at the right place at the right time. Get the best stuff and locations for yourself and don't let opponents have anything.

It's not the same kind of looting. In Battle Royale you need to search through houses, locations and move over the map to gather loot and when you kill someone you take their gear. Loot doesn't spawn after start and it's definitely not in defined locations.

Sorry, but you're talking about something completely different.

I think this is more of a current iteration of BR. I would say BR is a little more generic than this. My idea of it, which might not be exactly right I will admit, is just this: A battle royale game is last-man-standing or winner-take-all. The looting, houses, starting gear -- this all seems like variation more than essential.

It seems like what you're describing is definitely the mainstream take on the genre right now, but I think you could make another variant that isn't like the popular ones today but is still a BR.

Fair enough, I guess it's subjective what the actual minimum requirement is but I kind of agree with the Wikipedia article personally: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_royale_game

Reasonable.

Networked DOOM would like a word.

I dont know but I'd bet theres an old quake mod that makes that small change.

it's not a small change, it completely changes the style and feel of the game play.

Just stop. You clearly have no idea what a Battle Royale game is.