I bet “grognard” is only used by grognards now
For the uninitiated, a grognard is a person who likes older style wargaming. The usage suggests a person who is older, set in their ways, and somewhat curmudgeonly. Often preferring how things used to be in the systems they grew up playing.
Generally speaking, they prefer a crunchy game with high mortality and grit, as opposed to a looser system with a narrative or character-driven focus.
For a term in more active use, I submit “crunchy” since I just used it. A game’s crunchiness describes how complex the rules are - essentially how much number-crunching players have to do in order to play.
Credit where it’s due, around the time Dying Light 1 came out, Roger Craig Smith was lending his voice to Chris Redfield, one of the more iconic zombie guys from Resident Evil.
My favorite Redfield moment was when, without a shred of irony, he talks smack about the villain acting like a comic book villain. Then in the same breath, he punches a six-ton boulder into submission.
Dying Light also really kinda shook up the zombie slaying dynamic with parkour. It seems like a fairly minor thing now, but that freedom of movement was a pretty big deal at the time, even if it was pretty janky.
Narratively, I agree that Crane isn’t a very strong character. He’s a dime-a-dozen government goon turned idealist. I don’t even remember how the story ends, or even most of the major beats except for a couple of major characters.
But at the time, to kick zombie butt while scooting around the rooftops and listening to Chris Redfield quip one-liners: those were special times even if it was a decade ago. They’re probably trying to recapture that magic, but I don’t know. It was lightning in a bottle and you can’t always get that back