I'd like to start out by apologizing for the pompous title, I blame it on watching too much the Big Bang theory and the pseudo-scientific naming of their shows. Anyhow.
I've recently been playing a lot of Asphalt 9 on Switch. It's a F2P arcade racer with high production values, snazzy visual effects, flashy menu's and even flashier flashing buttons and cooldown timers inviting you to try out all of it's mentization mechanics. But I'm willing to forgive (and ingore) the efforts of these developers to actually earn 92 cents form me for all the hard work they're obviously putting in because the gameplay is something I really enjoy. At it's base it's an arcade racer with real world, licensed supercars that you drive through fictuous tracks located in the warmth and familiartiy of stereotipical depictions of actual locations. You race along these tracks, sometimes for multiple laps, sometimes just from A to B, drifting around long winding curvy tracks, filling your boost meter as you go for an extra jolt of nitro fueled speed as you overtake the pack. As you would in any self respecting arcade racer. You can also crash your competition by pushing them against the sides of the track, colliding with them while boosting, or, and here it comes: performing a 360° spin attack on them. The suspension of disbelief goes further, as the track is littered with pickups that will fill your boost meter, and 2 kinds of ramps. The ones that just have you cross a gap in the track, and the kind that does so while letting you perform barrel rolls. Barrel rolls!
Personally I'm all a-ok with the above. I do enjoy racing around in real cars, but have never cared much for sim elements, even less so for physics that would keep me from doing a barrel roll during a jump with my BMW Z4. But then something happened. I was tasked with a race in a snowy Tibetian setting. Reach from A to B in an exhilerating downhill race. And it all dawned on me. Asphalt 9 is not a racing game. Not in the sense that it purports to be. Asphalt 9 is in fact an extreme snowboarding game in the vein of SSX.
It may feature cars, and most of it's tracks aren't set on a slope, but honnestly what else is a slop other than a flat plain in which you are propelled forward by the force of gravity, it's force applied in an angle to the surface resulting in a forward momentum? What is drifting, if not the asphalt relative to carving out a perfect turn? As for the barrel rolls and the 360° 's, snowboarding (or at least skiing or the similar skateboarding) is where those things came to be.
So there you have it. Asphalt 9 might feature cars, prominently so, but at it heart it takes more cues from another criminally ignored genre. This got me thinking if I could come up with more games that mislead gamers as to what type of game they are actually playing. One could argue for Portal, a game that seemingly gives you a gun to wield in first person perspective, but turns out to be a spatial puzzler. Perhaps someone here could come up with better examples?
This description makes Asphalt 9 sound much more interesting. There are always a few arcade racing games floating around (off the top of my head at the moment: Forza Horizon 4, NFS Heat, Mario Kart, Sonic, Dirt 4, Onrush, and may as well throw GT Sport in there, too
), but hardly any, if any, snowboarding games at all.
Surely everyone just took Portal to be a puzzle game?
I don't think you can go past Metroid Prime as being the greatest example of this, if only because the third game in the series was, much to its detriment, merely a first person shooter.
Personally, I think describing Shadow of the Colossus as a boss rush game, while technically true, is not nearly as descriptive as calling it a puzzle-platformer; as puzzle-solving platforming is what each boss "battle" actually consists of.
Related to platforming, but the term "traversal" is little more than a euphemism to refer to basic, uninteresting platforming design in today's adventure games so that they aren't held to the standards that we would normally expect from platforming mechanics and level design.
It's true that there are more arcade racers out there, but I'm not counting Mario Kart or Sonic as they don't take place in a pseudo realistic environment. Never dabbled with NFS, too scared of the hard core image rally games come with, and I own Forza Horizon 3 or 4 (the one set in Australia), but it never gripped me. Onrush I do like the look of, but haven't gotten around to playing.
As for the games you put forward, I suppose Metroid Prime would be the best example, as it is clearly a FPS game, yet clearly not one at the same time. Just as with Portal, I doubt anyone really thought of SotC as a boss rush game.
Not sure how the bit about traversal is on-topic, but I'm not one to let such a thing stand in the way of a potentially interesting discussion. I think traversal as such came to the fore when games drifted away from challenge and more towards experiences. It's hard to set a mood and build up to something through dramatic vista's when the player is distracted from it all because he's actually invested in intense gameplay as he tries to overcome good, challenging level design. It also allow for luls in the game's tension arc. Back in the days, games were all about tension, challenging you from start to finish. Now, with the length of games being much longer than in the early days, and story and pacing being much more of a concern, that isn't a viable option any more. Of course one could argue that a relatively calm platforming section would provide a similar lul.
Another I forgot about that just got a new addition to the series, Grid.
That is indeed what traversal does. I'm arguing that traversal already is calm platforming sections, and the term traversal is used just to make it sound cooler. That's definitely what the traversal is in the new Tomb Raiders. I suppose Uncharted has a lot of climbing in it, but so do a lot of platformers.
What is the difference between the two? The traversal in Uncharted is different to the platforming in Prince of Persia only in that there is less of it and it's usually a bit simpler. In Uncharted 3, a lot of it is actually as complex as Prince of Persia. Tomb Raider's traversal is really just Spyro with the addition of Prince of Persia climbing and ziplines instead of flying.
I don't see how it's illuminating to invent a marketing term to describe how platforming is used. It's also not entirely true that old platformers were all about tension. Spyro, for instance, was and is a pretty relaxing experience.
Is the "press X to succeed" cliff movement in Uncharted or God of War platforming? No. Platforming requires timing and choice.
I think of platforming as timed jumps and creative use of speed (both slow and fast) to navigate a "stage".
Platformers feature that sort of thing too. But even with that in mind, Uncharted and the like feature platforming sections as you describe them, and people refer to them as being part of traversal.