I agree. When GOG does update their tags, please make genre classifications definitive and transparent. It'd avoid a lot of needless inflammatory debates about genre and game classifications on the forums.

Take the JRPG community for example. If anyone wants to watch a dumpster fire, innocently ask whether JRPGs can be only games made in Japan (or by Japanese-descent gamedevs) or if it's a game design style that can be replicated by non-Japanese gamedevs and then walk away. Everyone will die on a hill to defend their definition. It's absolutely bonkers how passionate some people can get over such a trivial detail.

hehe thats what toxic communities deserve

I think the "problem" is that almost every game these days has tacked on ~RPG elements~ to provide more of a sense of progression.. Even the new Dooms could be called RPGs. But yeah a "pure RPG" tag would be nice.

Genre tags are so vague and misapplied that half the time I've stopped using them to describe gameplay and prefer to compare it with known titles, eg:-

- "Portal-like" = Expect a First-Person physics puzzler
- "Doom-like" = Expect an arcadey-shooter that places fast-paced fun over realism often with pseudo-linear maze-like maps

This conveys a lot more useful information of what to expect in just two words that over-simplified "Puzzle", "FPS" or "RPG" does not (CRPG, ARPG or JRPG? Does it play like Morrowind or Baldur's Gate? Is the RPG-ness something solid or another "Obvious FPS with a wafer-thin skill-tree tacked on to fake depth"), ("Does this 'puzzle' game play like Lemmings, Tetris, Myst or The Talos Principle"), etc. I don't even think it's possible to describe a game in just one word vs having a group of primary + secondary tags or "Games similar to" list.

This sort of thing is why I don't classify action games like the Ys games as RPGs. I save the RPG classification for games that are (at least approximately) turn based, and where the success or failure of an action is dependent on the character rather than the player.

Of course, looking for games with the "RPG" tag but not the "Action" tag works when games are properly classified, but sometimes there are games that are misclassified by GOG. Elminage Gothic, for example, is in no way an action game (it's a turn-based RPG similar to the earlier Wizardry series, but with far more content), yet GOG gives it the Action tag.

This doesn't always work.

For example, I've used the term "SaGa-like", but all you can really deduce from that is that the game is an RPG that doesn't use XP-based leveling (and even then, SaGa 3 original uses XP, though I actually don't consider that game a SaGa-like because of that). It doesn't tell you whether the game is like a typical linear JRPG structually (SaGa 1 and 2 are like this), or if it's a nonlinear open-world game filled with side quests (like Romancing SaGa).

By the way, I consider the term "CRPG" to refer to all computer/video game RPGs, whether they're JRPGs or WRPGs; I typically use that term when it's important to distinguish it from non-computer RPGs, like Dungeons & Dragons. Meanwhile, I use WRPG and JRPG to refer to the style of game, rather than where it was actually developed, so Romancing SaGa would be a WRPG, and a game like Ikenfell would be a JRPG.

For Adventure versus Puzzle, my personal definition is something like this: In an Adventure game, puzzles are scripted; there are no standard rules that the puzzles in those games use. (So, such games might play like Myst.) In a Puzzle game, there are specific rules that the puzzles follow, and typically it's a small set of rules that are easy to understand, so a game like Tetris (and perhaps Lemmings?) would fall here, as would Bejeweled. There's a category of games that could be called "Action Puzzle" games, where the game runs in real-time, but the mechanics are otherwise more iike a puzzle game; I would put Tetris in this category.

Also, sometimes games have modes that are in a different genre. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has a Classic Mode that turns the game into a Classicvania (the normal mode is a Metroidvania) while the roguelike Shiren the Wanderer has 50 puzzles, in which the game plays more like a puzzle game (you are given hand-crafted levels to play through, and they're balanced so that you have to treat them like puzzles).

This would require all people to have played all games though. So it doesn't really help either.

Let's see, Avernum 2: The Crystal Souls is marked as: Role-playing - Turn-based - Fantasy. While that indeed does match the flavor profile of the game, it is such a barest idea as to be almost insulting.

I would call the Avernum series an Underground Fantasy Roleplaying adventure; but note that I didn't capitalize adventure.

It's an adventure in that it's quite open ended. You aren't shunted into a critical path.

My suggestion, as has been my suggestion of many websites, is to ditch the vague tagging system and implement a community tagging system a la Safebooru* or something. [url=https://safebooru.donmai.us/wiki_pages/help:tags]https://safebooru.donmai.us/wiki_pages/help:tags[/url] Seen here.

So verified owners and others could come along and for example, give the following tags to Avernum 2: The Crystal Souls:
Fantasy, 2015, Jeff Vogel, Underground, Magitech, Turn Based Combat, Overworld, Party System, Deathless, and maybe a few thematic tags like War, Crystals, and Grimlight.

(Sidenote: *Here be dragons; Safebooru is indeed a "safe" version mirror of danbooru, but "Safe" means "No explicit nudity or sexual acts." Your boss still won't appreciate it if you stray off that text only page.)

Edit: As always, I'd like to give my sincerest sarcastic thanks to GOG's URL parser.

I would consider the game's underground setting to not be important enough for it to be a genre; if you had the exact same game, except that the overworld was above ground, I would consider it to be in the same genre.

What's more important are things like:
* The game is turn-based.
* Combat is tactical (in other words, positioning is a factor during combat).
* Game is structurally non-linear (except that, from what I understand, in the early game you're limited to one part of the map, and a critical path needs to be followed to open up the rest of the world). Then again, there's the problem with structure being a genre-defining property (comsider non-linear JRPGs and linear WRPGs).

Fair enough, but I could also flip it around to mean underground like the music scene. :p

and there should not be more than 3-4 tags for a game
tags should be easy to understand and notice
this is why my list is the best system, everybody instantly knows what the game is all about :P

fe underground is pointless to put it there

This thread is best proof why it's stupid idea. As many persons as many definitions, more tags would only add more contradictions.

Of course it also had evolve into old as gaming discussion about what is RPG and what isn't.

Indie is not a useful genre tag, because Indie is not a genre. Indie is a type of developer, and indeed there are indie games of all genres.

for me it is

The tags definitely need to be cleaned up, with more precise definitions. King of Fighters and Metal Slug are both tagged as "Fighting" even their though gameplay is completely different. What's more baffling is there is another tag called "Combat".