This video is made by Ahoy (quality content). And it's a fairly short video (around 10min) with an interesting conclusion. I highly suggest you watch it.
I see the dismissiveness as a reaction to the title clickbait/burying the lede. I get that this is how you have to do video titles on YouTube to get views, but a sentence or two about what the video's actual premise is in the post body would have gone a long way to interest people who are, understandably IMO, a bit apathetic towards headlines like this.
That was really good. It's something I hadn't given any thought to , but the fact that First Person Shooter didn't exist as a term when Doom released, it was interesting seeing the progression. I remember as a kid referring to Heretic and Hexen as Doom-clones, but wasn't really cognizant of the term as it fell out of use in favour of other descriptions.
I paused midway through to think about it, and settled on "action 3D dungeon crawler." But for some reason "RPG" sounds completely fucking wrong, even though... that's arguably what dungeon crawlers are... right?
The problem is that "RPG" was a very early term that's stuck around, and it's been smeared across a wide variety of influential games. So no, Doom is very obviously not an RPG in the sense of even decade-prior games like Ultima. But the first-person kill-em-all presentation is hard to separate from Akalabeth... an obviously seminal RPG, and the origin of proper dungeon crawlers. And the immediate predecessor to Ultima. It's like we never separated "shooter" from "shoot-em-up."
Yes, if you simplify things down to just combat, then yes, I kind of agree. But the thing that generally separates "RPG" from the rest is whether the player feels like they're playing a role or just playing a game.
Akalabeth gives the player interactive choices (which weapon? Climb the ladder?). The limitations are a mixture of the platform at the time and the skill of the game dev (was built by a teen). But it's obvious that player choice and interaction with the character was a major component here, and the goal is to get the player to the end.
Doom just presents enemies to kill. Yeah, you can change weapons, but it's less in a "character choice" way and more of a "best tool for the job" way. Yeah, it has a character portrait, but I took that to be an indicator of how injured player is, not a RP mechanic. At no point do I consider the character, I just want you press forward to find the next area of monsters (monsters being the goal, not the end or whatever).
If we ignore "shooter" as a category, I think "first person action dungeon crawler" is a good description for Doom, and "first person dungeon crawler RPG" is better for Akalabeth.
That's an interesting idea. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment or perhaps I just have a poor conception of genres, but, IMO, one of the defining features of dungeon crawlers which seperates them from rpgs is that they're, for the most part, randomly generated. It pains me to say it because it seems rather absurd, but I feel like RPG is actually closer.
Honestly, when I first heard the term "boomer shooter" I thought the games were called that because of the amount of explosions they have. Ion Fury in particular is full of them. It a was a while after I realised that by "boomer" they basically mean "old".
I think "retro shooter" is the much better term, though "classic" also works.
Yeah, a boomer shooter is like the original Asteroids, but that's also a stretch because it didn't come out until 1979, which is around the tail end of the Boomer generation.
When I was a teenager in the 90s I played doom with both friends of my age and of my parents generation. They would have been in their 40s but not really "old".
Looking at the maths boomers would have been between 30 and 48 when doom became widely available in '94.