Hey @admadmanga, nice post yah got here. Resteem’d. Anyways, instead of answering what’s a unique game to me, I’ll just answer the same q you spent answering here in this post.

Well if we’re completely honest: we need to look at all essential components like story, gameplay-gamedesign and gravitas in the gaming landscape. Gameplay-gamedesign was already covered here by this lovely post. Story, I say, is-as essential to gameplay-gamedesign - my wild statement is this one: yes Doom had a story, we just filled in the gaps by playing it - a personal ludonarrative if we must, which hyprocritically can be found in the original Half-Life as well in exploration and small talk with NPCs. (If you couldn’t take what you saw on the screen and subjectivize it to make sense of it and justify such, then Doom would’ve been dropped on the first kill since you wouldn’t understand why people find satisfaction in killing Dæmons other than their death sprite and death noise.) Which leaves me, in this anti-dissertation, to finally talk about gravitas: the influence/gravity a game has on the gaming World, regardless of any popularity it may have at any given point of time. This category matters a lot since it’s essentially the excess of the two previous categories working together while still having an independent aspect to help develop or make new trends in gaming. (Without gravitas, a trend dies out or gives way to other subtrends that’ll carry the game industry forward.)

Which leads me to speak this statement without issue: if a game is lacking or fails to develop one of these essentials, then it fails to be unique, but it doesn’t mean the game is exceptional. I could go on with a Wolfenstein3D-Doom-DukeNukem-Quake-Daikatana diatribe here, but lemme just restate what I already said in another way but in parts. Gameplay should be obvious here, but lemme add one complexity to this: the prospect of clones to and upgrades to an existing trend-defining game. Duke Nukem 3D, which was a clone of Doom which that was an upgrade and clone to Wolfenstein 3D, would in my eyes get a pass because it shows that Doom-styled games can have real 3D unlike Carmack’s psuedo-3D (which for all intent’s and purposes might as well count to be the only 3D game without 3D support) and still screw around with sprites. Moving onto story - Doom gets a pass on its story and still be unique for a variety of reasons, but two core components ring up: playfulness with ludonarrative and environment (which Doom succeeds in both, just like Half-Life which has a semi-established story in that game alone). But if games have no story (Doom has a nugget of story - we’ll avenge you DoomGuy’s rabbit!), or frankly bad ones, and makes no effort to allow a ludonarrative to happen unconsciously, then it fails to be unique. Finally leading to gravitas, for which the actual reason I think I still invoke that Doom and Duke Nukem 3D are unique games since they both affirm the shooting genre while being trend-definers for the gaming industry and their company as well. For which it allows me to say Fortnite is unique in a genre of clones similar to Duke Nukem being unique in a genre of Doom-clones, it knows how to make these two essentials work together well that its excess, gravitas, was radiating across the gaming landscape that it absolutely made game companies wish they made clones of battle royales now.

And now leaves me to this: whenever someone talks about a game that appears not unique but they invoke that it has unique elements yet untapped by the gaming industry, they really mean to talk about that aspect and care not for other aspects. For they desire to make that unique aspect have gravitas which will make new trends or define existing ones. The Timesplitters series had some unique gameplay and a unique story, but its gravitas was either lacking or overshadowed by Goldeneye so much that it could be a game that gave Goldeneye-esque games a loud bang when they died for the time being. Yet what I really would care about Timesplitters isn’t really it but the components of it that I wish to see thrive in the gaming landscape - Sgt. Cortez I know you’ll be able to fight again someday if they ever finish Timesplitters Rewind!